Sign In from Homepage

I'm glad to inform you that you can now log into Skyrove directly from the home page, without first having to click on the 'My Account' link.

Simply go to http://www.skyrove.com and enter your username and password in the top right hand corner and click Sign In.

Many thanks to Axel, our super cyclist German intern, and Stelio, our hot Portuguese programmer for making it happen!

Intoducing the Skyrove Team

From left: Axel, Tino, Henk, Stelio, Allister.

Check out our profiles here!

Connectivity Troubleshooting Flowchart

Here's a basic troubleshooting flowchart in case you or users at your hotspot aren't able to connect. You can also view it on the Skyrove Wiki.

Skyrove at 27 Geek Dinner

See if you can spot the Skyrove team in the video below! (hint: Allister's the one making sure that he gets enough wine)

Suspension of Affiliate Campaign on Welcome Page

I've received some serious and very valid objections from some providers regarding the Travelstart campaign on our website. Some of our providers offer competitive services to Travelstart and as such this campaign may be bad for their business.

My apologies to anyone who was negatively affected. Our plan in the future is to offer Affiliate Marketing purely as an 'opt-in' service. Hotspot Providers will be able to choose in their account manager whether they would like to advertise 3rd party services and benefit from the revenues earned.

Before spending development time on this, we decided to run a test campaign.

Although the campaign ran only 2 days, I thought I'd post up the statistics:

1. Impressions : 227
This is how many times the Travelstart banner was displayed. Most people did not see the Travelstart banner when they logged in as they still had the old Welcome page cached in their browser.
2. Clicks : 6
This is how many people actually clicked the Submit button on the Travelstart banner and saw an offer for a flight.
3. Sales : 0
This is how many people actually bought a flight.

Of course this sample is too small to really make any estimations. Apparently, the average Clicks to Sales ratio is 0.5%, so over time we could have expected to make about 12 sales a month with Skyrove's current size and with everyone logging in seeing the Travelstart banner.

If you have any ideas for doing advertising through Skyrove hotspots, please let us know. We'd like to implement new features such as these provided that the benefits to Skyrove, Hotspot Providers and end-users outweigh the drawbacks.

Affiliate Links on Welcome Page

I mentioned last year, and more recently in a podcast on the Amplitude Show, that we've been looking at ways to implement advertising on our Welcome page.

The bad news is that we haven't really figured out how to do this properly, yet. The good news is that we realised that sometimes the best way to figure something out, is by doing it!

So without further adieu, we are introducing a pilot advertising campaign for Travelstart, a discount airfare booking site, on our Welcome page. We thought that this would be the best product to promote, seeing as most Skyrovers are visitors to South Africa, and may have the need to get around.

The point of this campaign is to first try and determine whether there's any value in having advertising on the Skyrove Welcome page, or whether this is merely an annoyance to customers, before we develop a more robust product in which Skyrove Providers can partake.

And, of course, to get feedback from Skyrover Providers!

Skyrove Support Number

I'm happy to announce that we've launched a Skyrove Support number! +27 (021) 4488843 We plan to progressively give more 1st line customer support to Skyrovers over the coming months.

Skyrove will start to directly support Skyrovers with forgotten passwords or who have account or purchasing queries who would normally have been referred to us only after speaking to the Hotspot Provider, thus causing extra inconvenience for the end-user.

In addition, Skyrove will also give telephone support to users who are having trouble connecting to the network due to any problems on their computers, such as Wi-Fi cards not being on and static IP addresses or proxies being set.

If we determine that the problem is with the hotspot itself, we will then contact tech support for that particular hotspot.

As always, we welcome your feedback!

Henk

Teleporting

Hi folks,

I'm taking some first steps to port the Skyrove blog to blogger, away from Wordpress. Just busy setting up at the moment!

Henk