Internet commentary

Citation

Ellis, B. (2001), "Internet commentary", Circuit World, Vol. 27 No. 3. https://doi.org/10.1108/cw.2001.21727cag.001

Internet commentary

Keywords: Internet, Virses

... more that of an honest broker who really wants to press the business forward(Prince Otto von Bismarck, Speech to the Reichstag,19 February 1878, in Ludwig Hahn (Ed.) FürtBismarck. Sein politisches Leben und Wirken, Vol. 3(1881) p. 9)

Yet one more worm has hit the Internet. This time, it bears the name Navidad. This kind of worm is very much like Melissa and Love-letter, in that it is propagated only through the use of Microsoft Outlook and Outlook Express. Will we never learn?

At the moment that I write this, the Internet companies are very much out of favour on the Nasdaq stock exchange. Quite frankly, this does not surprise me as I have always felt that they were a bubble ready to burst. I also feel that we have not reached the end of the road in this respect. Why? Simply because many of the companies involved in the Internet have made a spectacular entry with fairly limited means at a time when investors were willing to take the risk. They overreached themselves and, now that the investors are wanting something back for their money, they have no means of giving it. The speed of progress in Internet business to consumer operations has been good but not good enough to support the myriad companies wanting a slice of the cake. More noticeable, business-to-business operations have not taken off to the extent that was forecast. This is not surprising: it is one thing for a company to look at another company's Web site to see what they're doing; it is another thing to actually do business that way. OK, a company may order, over the Internet, a few reels of resistors which they urgently need, but are they likely to conclude a contract with an unknown printed circuit manufacturer for the supply of 5,000 multilayer boards? I feel the answer can only be negative because a supplier of hi-tech material must be qualified before such an important order can be placed. After he has been qualified, it is certainly simple to send him some Gerber files as an e-mail attachment. This is probably the nearest that large Internet business, at least in industry, is likely to occur.

Over the last couple of years, a number of companies or organisations have appeared offering a brokerage service for the supply of printed circuits. Sometimes, these offer a form of Dutch auction, in order to obtain the lowest prices. I feel that this can only lead to a lowering of quality. Of course, the purchaser can choose which companies will actually manufacture the circuits, but the temptation to go for the cheapest must be very great for the purchasing manager, particularly if the quantities are important. Some of these brokers will take care that the quality supplied matches the quality required. The more serious of these companies even audit the different manufacturers before offering their products on their Web site. To a certain extent, this will provide an insurance policy for the purchaser, if one can be sure that the broker is serious. The real problem is sorting out the sheep from the goats. To what extent can one rely on what a company puts on a Web site? This problem becomes even more acute if the distance between the purchasing company and the broker is large, precluding the personal contact. The question about brokerage fees should be clearly understood. In most cases, these are levied from the printed circuit supplier and the purchaser pays only what is quoted. Nevertheless, this should be made clear. In other words, with this form of business-to-business Web site, the expression caveat emptor takes on a special value, requiring diligence to ensure that perfect satisfaction is achieved. That having been said, it is very probable that many purchasers use this kind of service very successfully.

The question must be asked whether these brokers are really viable concerns. The serious ones with a full audit service of manufacturers throughout the world must have very high overheads. This means that their customer base must be very wide for the company to be profitable. To date, I think that very few companies of this nature do have such a base. I fear that the rest of them may very well fall by the wayside. The heavy initial investment will never be recovered. This has been typical of what has been happening to many of the "dot-com" companies in other sectors. As for all the less serious brokers, they can probably be considered as "fly-by-night" companies, while the quality of their services will condemn their future activities to death. Unfortunately, this will give their more serious counterparts a bad reputation.

To a large extent, the preceding paragraphs rely on speculation, because the business has not been around sufficiently long for the dust to settle. I would like to conclude, however, by saying that it would appear that the dust is already beginning to settle and that one or two of these companies have already put their cyber-key under their cyber-doormat or would appear to be about to do so.

Before I start on the actual reviews for this issue, I should just like to mention that I have spent a considerable time revamping my own Web site. It is not perfect, by any means, but I do think that it is a considerable improvement over the old one. I have tried to apply all the precepts which I have promoted, over the years, in these columns. The total page length of the Home Page, including applets, is about 15 kilobytes; it has a full set of meta keywords and description; it gives a brief sketch of what each of the company divisions does; it gives the company address, telephone and fax numbers and the possibility to e-mail us. In addition, I am told that it looks quite good, in its simplicity! This is a demonstration that it can be done without all the fancy bells and whistles. Each one of the Divisional Home Pages is also small and simple, although slightly larger with minimal graphics. I have no intention of using this space to promote my company, so please excuse me if I refrain from giving you the URL.

I recently read in a press release the following extract, "Scottish startup Sigtronics launched its Quickboard PCB equipment at the European PCB convention in Maastricht, The Netherlands. The equipment is capable of manufacturing a six-layer board in less than four hours from the receipt of conventional CAD data ...". This inspired me to look at their Web site and what I saw has instigated me to break with my usual tradition and to give a very detailed review of it. I have often stressed the importance of small and medium enterprises having a good Web site. This company, Sigtronics, is an SME, a very young one, with a Web site which has both good and bad points. In particular, I shall review the site, bearing in mind this press release, from a technical point of view, as well as my more usual general one.

http://www.sigtronics.co.uk

The title of the Home Page is "Sigtronics – The Future of PCB Prototyping". This is in graphics, white on a black background. I have said before that I do not like dark backgrounds for two very good reasons: it is easier to read black on white than it is white on black and you cannot print out white text on a black background from many browsers. However, the Home Page, shown in Figure 1, is fast to download, which is a very positive point. It also contains the full name and address of the company, another positive point, although there is no hyperlink to an e-mail address. The brief text within the Home Page is to the point. So, other than the appearance, with the dark background, can I find any other negative points on a good try? Unfortunately, yes! I put the words printed circuit prototype equipment into Google, the universal search engine, to see whether the site would be selected. Certainly, it was not in the first 100 choices, although many other companies in similar lines of business were. There are two reasons why this should be: it may be that the company has not announced its Web site to the various search engines, but it is sure that, even if it had, it would probably not get to the top rating or anywhere near it. The HTML Home Page header reads

<head><meta http-equiv="Content-Type"content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1"><meta name="Author" content="DominiqueJacquel"><meta name="GENERATOR" content="MicrosoftFrontPage 4.0"><title>– SIGTRONICS Limited -</title></head>

You will note there are no meta keywords nor even description in this header. This is fatal for a small company, especially one that is starting up. There is no way that the search engines can find a company from its activities unless you tell them, and the only sure way of doing that is with a good description and keyword list.

Figure 1 Sigtronics' Homepage: this is simple but with a few quirks (see text)

Another minor point is that the author did not use the generator's means of adding the symbol™ after the equipment's baptismal name. Instead, he (or she: the author's name being one of those which are not gender-specific) used the character entity reference "&trade;". This is not specifically an error, because both Microsoft and Netscape have pledged to include the full entity references of HTML 4 in the future. It appears correctly in MS Internet Explorer 5.0 but not in earlier versions or in Netscape 4.7 or earlier (this can be seen in Figure 1). This shows the importance of checking the appearance of a generated site in as many browsers as possible, certainly from version 3 of either of the main makes onwards. However, the generator that the author used does contain an automatic version checker, but I am not sure whether it screens for character entity references; I rather fancy not.

To navigate from the Home Page, there is a simple menu with five items: the one marked Site Map – at the time of writing – does not work, even though the generator software has an automatic way of writing such a feature. Starting at the top, the one entitled Company Background gives a brief description of its history from its foundation by Godwin Osigwe in 1995. This is in exactly the same style as the Home Page. There are two sub-pages, one giving the Key Personnel and the other, the Board of Directors. The former gives the names of eight persons, each with a personal e-mail address and their function. The Board of Directors has six members, of whom three are non-executive.

The second menu item is the product for which the company was founded, the Quickboard™ Printer. In fact, other than a brief description, this page does not add much to the site. For that, we need to go to the two sub-pages. These are entitled the Quickboard Process and Technical Specification respectively, but it is better to go to the last-named first. This tells us that the equipment consists of three stations, namely, a routing station, a wapping station and a curing station. The process itself is not innovative, even though the way it is implemented is. A standard FR-4 laminate has the conductor pattern routed on it, then the routing is filled with a conductive ink and cured. That is what this printer does. Let's now go back to the page describing the process. This consists of two scales, the first one showing the conventional process, taking days, and a second one showing this process, taking hours. This is shown as:

1. 1.

   load substrate (up to 200 x 300 mm format);

2. 2.

   load data file (typically in Gerber format);

3. 3.

   preprocess data;

4. 4.

   route circuit data on substrate;

5. 5.

   turn board and repeat;

6. 6.

   load board in applicator station;

7. 7.

   deposit conductive material;

8. 8.

   load board in oven;

9. 9.

   cure;

10. 10.

    drill through holes.

This leaves me with a load of questions, such as how the through holes and vias are made conductive, how multilayers are made (remember the press release, above), the solderability of the conductor pads and so on. There is no clue anywhere on the site as to these very important details. There is a sub-page for each of items 1, 2, 4, 7 and 9 in the above list. These generally and simply show a photograph of the operation in question, but it is difficult to interpret it with any detail. One important feature that is mentioned is that the minimum conductor width may be as small as 150 micrometres.

There is another point about which I have some reservation. Because of its compact size, it is stated that it could be installed in a design bureau. I would have thought that routing, including the dust extraction, would be too noisy for such an installation. Perhaps this should be made clearer in a future edition of this Web site.

Judging from the photographs of the equipment, it is quite elegant and it is stated that it is about the size of a photocopier. There are no indications given as to the price for such a machine so that it is impossible to know whether one's throughput of prototype circuits would be sufficient to amortise it. Obviously, the throughput of the machine would be dependent on the size and complexity of the circuits being manufactured. Again, there is no indication as to whether or not the machine could cope with any given required production quantity. All these points leave one with more questions, which is negative for the company. I feel that it should give some real indications as to the possibilities of the machine and to go into the technical details more thoroughly.

Under Latest News, the next position in the menu, there are a number of press releases including one describing the official opening of the company's new premises by Robin Cook, the British Foreign and Commonwealth Secretary of State.

The last active item on the menu is Contact Us and this repeats the address, this time also with an e-mail address. From here, there is a sub-page describing how to reach the company by road from Edinburgh or Glasgow. There is also a further sub-page with a map (incidentally, with the route from Glasgow different from the description on its parent page). Another sub-page offers a one-field form for your e-mail address, in order to receive further news of the company.

Overall, the impression one receives from this company is that it is young, dynamic and innovative. Its success is undoubtedly due to a combination of the founder's savvy and the fact that he was able to convince the powers that be to allocate him some venture capital – not the easiest thing in the world! It is interesting that he was able to do this, as a foreigner (he is Nigerian), even though he is obviously well-integrated into his Scottish environment. In fact, in one photograph he is seen wearing a kilt!

This is just one example of what an SME can do. No Web site is perfect and this one is not the exception that proves the rule. On the other hand, it is a good start and, with a wee bitty more attention to detail, it could be very good. There is no reason in the world why every SME cannot have a Web site similar to this one. It is not necessarily expensive – I suspect that this one is even home made – nor need it necessarily require a great amount of time, provided you know how to go about it and whom to ask. In this particular case, there are some features which are excellent, such as the downloading time, and there are some other features which do require a little polishing up. I hope this critical analysis will help, not only Sigtronics, but also any other small company wishing to use the Internet as a means of making themselves known on an international scale.

Brian EllisMosfiloti, Cyprusb_ellis@protonique.com