Past articles by Kim Gilmour

Inside Ocado

Online supermarket Ocado thinks it can use the Web to change the way people shop for food. We visit its state-of-the-art warehouse to find out how it plans to win the grocery revolution. By Kim Gilmour

Being at Ocado's Hatfield warehouse is like being a kid in a slightly cold, neon-green sweet factory.

It's hard not to be mesmerised by the vast quantities of potatoes, Coco Pops, Pot Noodles, eggs and onions. Ten thousand different kinds of fresh and pre-packed groceries fill the aisles, waiting to be delivered to potentially millions of UK homes.

Forklifts scuttle round, conveyor belts crunch, robots replenish shelves and monorails ferry grocery orders to packing stations around a giant network of tracks and lifts. Dozens of people pick and pack groceries into green crates, called totes.

Ocado is unusual in the post-dotcom era in that it's an online supermarket which, unlike the Web operations of Tesco, Sainsbury's and Asda, doesn't have any stores in the real world. But it does have some distinguished retail parentage--Ocado is run by the John Lewis Partnership, which owns around 40 per cent of the company and sells its Waitrose-branded products through the warehouse.

Ocado launched at the beginning of 2002, and analysts were sceptical of the massive investment and running costs required to sustain its operation. Investment currently stands at 240 million [pounds sterling] and, although Ocado has yet to make a profit, annual sales have jumped from 25 million [pounds sterling] to 70 million [pounds sterling] in the last year.

The week we visited, Ocado had fulfilled a record 12,000 orders from its 1.2 million square foot warehouse. Only 10 per cent of this space (which is spread over four floors) is currently used, but it's vital Ocado has plenty of room to grow. Now the company's challenge is to maintain its focus on customer service while growing business by five per cent a week.

The matrix loaded

Paul Stewart, Ocado's operations controller, is on hand to show us around the vast matrix--but not before we don some trendy safety jackets and hair nets.
At the 'inbound' area, goods from Waitrose arrive in metal cages. Other fast-moving items arrive direct from suppliers wrapped to wooden pallets.
"This is superstar Anne," says Stewart, as we join a woman busy grouping incoming goods. She's at the decant station, scanning in bottles of newly-arrived Robinson's fruit juice and placing them into trackable totes.

The system knows where the usual pick point is for each product, and the tote travels along a conveyor belt until it reaches an imposing 14 metre crane which suddenly kicks into life over a spectacular grid of totes, automatically slotting the newly filled tote into any one of more than 5,000 pick points, or to a nearby reserve location.

Take your pick
We skip off to Level D, which houses Ocado's 'core chill range'. Here we find shelves of milk and bags of Waitrose salad, all held in the now-familiar green totes. More popular products are housed on levels B and C, while the ground floor is used for slowe-moving, manually-handled products. The plan is to automate this level as Ocado's business grows.

Ocado's warehouse management software, from Descartes Systems, sorts customers' orders according to the levels on which their goods are stored. It then generates pick lists for each level, which are transmitted to radio frequency wrist mounts worn by the pickers as they push blue trolleys along the aisles. Each trolley holds six empty totes--until the pickers fill them up.

The wrist devices tell the pickers what and how much to pick, which trolley tote it goes in, and how long the pick assignment should take. Each trolley tote holds part of a batch of orders for up to eight different customers. So with six trolley totes filled, the trolley can hold orders for up to 48 customers.

Stewart points to a tote sitting on a trolley. "That tote will go down to a packing station downstairs and be married up with all the other totes from the other aisles and floors [for the same customers]."

Finger-attached scanners let the pickers scan the products they've picked from the totes on the shelves. Once a shelf tote is empty, the picker tells the system so, puts the tote on the floor and--voila!--behind the shelf a full tote is ready to be pulled forward. Ocado's cranes will then automatically find the next tote in the matrix to replenish it with.

While all this is going on, overhead monorail cars are travelling around the warehouse in 'waves' lasting two and a half hours. As we're shown around, wave 20, the last wave of the day, is in progress.

The monorail's job is to collect the orders that have been picked from each floor into containers--the trolley totes are loaded into specific pigeon-hole like slots. Each person's order will now sit in one container, although still split across separate totes with other customers' orders at this stage.

After the containers are offloaded from the monorail cars, a lift takes them downstairs to the packing area and the totes are taken to packing stations where the components of each customer's order can be matched up.

Packing up
The goods are packed in colour-coded bags, depending on whether the goods that have been ordered are frozen, chilled or 'ambient'.

Stewart points out a woman in a purple jacket. "As Karen scans the items from each container's totes, she's told which customer it belongs to and loads it into the correct bag." Karen then groups the bags into a new set of multi-coloured totes. This helps the delivery person locate an order before delivering the shopping to a customer's home.

The totes are loaded onto 'frames', the front halves of which hold chilled products, with the back halves holding ambient products. The frames are then rolled onto 'pods', which are in turn fork-lifted onto little Mercedes vans for direct delivery--or onto larger lorries, which hold several pods at a time, for delivery to one of Ocado's outlying 'spokes'.

These spokes are pick-up depots for vans delivering to areas outside central London, such as Weybridge and Rugby. All the vans are equipped with satellite navigation to make it easier for their drivers to deliver the bags of groceries to the right locations.

Special delivery
Ocado isn't the cheapest online grocer around--that crown belongs to Walmart-owned Asda. An average Ocado order costs 100 [pounds sterling], and the store appeals to young, tech-savvy families who need to buy an endless supply of nappies.

For next-day delivery, orders must be placed by 4pm. Occasionally the computer gremlins strike and an item a customer has ordered (which is supposedly in stock) won't be available. Ocado has a substitution average of around two per cent of orders--but claims its competitors' hovers at around 15-20 per cent.

When my own Ocado order arrived (a skin of the teeth seven minutes before my hour-long slot expired) all my goods were there, with no substitutions. Amazing.

I tell the driver I'm writing an article about his company. "Make sure you mention Super Mario," he says, pointing at himself.

He does look a little like Mario, but I think the green uniform he's wearing is a bit more Luigi.

OCADO--THE BUSINESS

Jason Gissing is the Willy Wonka of grocers. He co-founded Ocado's whopping warehouse with fellow ex-Goldman Sachs directors Tim Steiner and Jonathan Faiman, and is now its chief financial officer. Gissing is convinced his baby can turn a profit within 12 months.

"There is nothing you have seen today which is revolutionary in the sense that it's been created from scratch," Gissing says later as we chat to him in Ocado's cafeteria. "Nearly everything you saw in there comes from another industry, and works in that industry--whether it's car manufacturing, food processing or just regular industrial businesses that move goods around."

The enthusiasm of the Ocado team is infectious. "Look, we're not perfect," Gissing admits. "You can't have this type of growth and not have problems occasionally. We've had days where we've had to reschedule deliveries. We've had complaints from customers. And statistically, we do get nutters. We get people calling up saying, 'you've poisoned me', 'I've found moths in my salad' or 'I found gerbils in my cereal'."

Ocado was created with financial help from the John Lewis Partnership (which owns Waitrose) as well as investment bank UBC and other private stakeholders. By mid-2003, the current round of investment valued Ocado at 240 [pounds sterling] million. If its own figures of 5 per cent growth per week are to be believed, how on Earth will it cope with its own success?

Gissing says Ocado is always reacting to dynamic growth. The advantage of being a startup, he says, is that you can quickly implement things from the ground up--without having to waste a lot of time justifying changes, as you may need to with established businesses. "So we are flexible, although it makes for a somewhat stressful work environment for some of the people around us!"

Ocado currently delivers to around 4.6 million homes around Greater London, Hertfordshire and the Midlands. There are no plans to build another big warehouse until the current one works perfectly. Neither is there any intention to diversify and sell things like books, electronics or CDs--although Gissing doesn't rule this out for the future.

So, what's with the name Ocado? Well, apparently, it has no meaning, but simply calling the company Waitrose Online (it has its own online store anyway) would make it seem like "just another supermarket" offering.

If Gissing's dream comes true, the swirly Ocado logo will one day be as familiar as Nike's 'swoosh'. "I am confident that we're going to have our vehicles, and even our own label food at some point, that just has our emblem on it--and people will still know exactly what it is."

Copyright Internet Magazine/Emap/Kim Gilmour 2004

The offshore data haven

In August 2002, I took a day trip from London to visit the offshore "principality" of Sealand, a disused gun platform off the coast of Harwich to interview Ryan Lackey, the founder of Sealand's offshore hosting company HavenCo (it has now closed). The company claims to be able to host contentious content simply because it's "outside" the UK. But is it really its own sovereignty?

Anyway, it was a very surreal place. You get winched up by a crane to get there! Ryan has since left Sealand to pursue other dreams. I took loads of photographs which I've had on my other website for a while, but you can see some more of my Sealand photographs, and a copy of the whole article. By the way, HavenCo is now closed due to an acrimonious split between founder Ryan Lackey and Prince Michael. amid security fears. It's an interesting story. But read on for mine...

Wish You Were Here? First published in Internet Magazine, December 2002

It's a beautiful day on the Essex coast and for the past two hours I've been sitting outside a sleepy cafe, in Harwich Town Quay with Steve Hill, Internet Magazine's now former news & features editor.

We're waiting to take a £300 speedboat ride to the principality of Sealand, but our pilot, 'Prince' Michael Bates, is late.

Although it might sound like an amusement park, Sealand is actually an old World War II gun fortress about 10km off the east coast. This rusty, dilapidated platform plonked on top of two hollow concrete pillars in the North Sea claims to be its own sovereign state. It also claims to be a truly secure data haven--which is what we're off to look at.

Sealand's wafer-thin claim to sovereignty began in 1967 when Michael's father, Roy Bates, declared the site his own and crowned himself king of Sealand. After a few legal skirmishes, Sealand received a limited degree of de facto recognition--until 1987 is was outside British territorial waters, so the UK wanted nothing to do with it. The main reason it still operates as a micro-country today is because no one has taken any major legal actions against it.

Sovereign status doesn't necessarily mean earning potential, and Sealand had no real source of income until 1999, when 23 year old American Internet geek and cypherpunk pioneer Ryan Lackey set up a colocation style Web hosting business there. Called HavenCo (www.havenco.com), the business was financed by a few angel investors, including Avi Freedman, a Net expert who's now number two at Akamai.

HavenCo's proposition appealed to those who appreciated the notion of a free Internet. A physically secure fortress in the middle of nowhere manned by armed guards, it offered encrypted data, anonymous network traffic, tax avoidance and, most of all, immunity against draconian information laws such as the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and the UK's Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIP). It essentially offers the political freedom to post almost anything you like online, without fear of legal ramifications.

As HavenCo states on its website: "Sealand currently has no regulations regarding copyright, patents, libel, restrictions on political speech, nondisclosure agreements, cryptography, restrictions on maintaining customer records, tax or mandatory licensing, DMCA, music sharing services, or other issues."

The strategy worked. HavenCo has been profitable since the summer of 2001, thanks to low capital investment, low expenses, a focus on business users and a steady revenue stream. Customers can do whatever they want once they buy a box at Sealand, as long as it's not related to spamming, child pornography, terrorism and there's no hacking originating directly from HavenCo's servers. Anything else goes.

Across the sea

Prince Michael finally arrives, dressed more like a playboy than a prince. "Sorry I'm late," he says, leading us towards his speedboat. "I was at a 56th birthday party and I've got a hangover!" He grabs a couple of harnesses--"these might have come straight out of a fetish shop!"--and gives us a couple of flimsy red life-jackets. Then we're off, guided towards Sealand by the small GPS system on board.

Also in the speedboat is a large fridge that Ryan has requested, four oscillating fans, and three other people, all in their late 50s. One of them, a white-haired man, was apparently the birthday boy, and the couple sitting in the back, Angie and Michael NumberTwo, are his friends. Like us, it's their first trip to Sealand.

The voyage is meant to take around 20 minutes, but we're too preoccupied to keep track of time. The trip is a real roller coaster ride--Michael takes great pleasure scaring us by tilting the speeding boat from side to side, laughing maniacally at the fear in our faces. Angie is screaming and there's froth everywhere.

As we approach the tiny fortress Michael accelerates towards it at full throttle. Just as it seems we're about to crash into the one of the two concrete towers, he whizzes between them.

When he finally slows down, we get our first look at Sealand. It's small--smaller than I had expected. The platform is about the size of a tennis-court, and I can see four or five people beside a yellow crane peering over its edge.

I tell myself to have more faith in my flimsy harness as I'm hooked to the crane and lifted up. Within 30 seconds, my feet reach the platform and I'm slowly lowered onto the rusty deck by amiable-looking guards in green overalls and orange hard hats.

Ryan is also there, a pale, shaven-headed, bespectacled figure, quietly spoken and intelligent, and dressed from head to toe in black.

Security clearance--taking place in the kitchen--is informal. Before stamping our passports, the security guard tests the stamp on the vinyl tablecloth to make sure it's facing upright, then wipes the ink off with his sleeve.

"Have any refugees sought asylum here?" asks Steve.

"No," he says.

Into the depths

Sealand reportedly has a big stock of firearms that it uses to defend itself, but we don't see any. They've got rid of the rusty old gun that had been sitting on the platform for decades--Sealand's very remoteness makes it secure territory and HavenCo is a real, serious business.

Ryan disappears down one of the steep narrow ladders into the windowless, humid Network Operations Centre located in one of Sealand's columns. We're not allowed to see customers' server boxes for security and privacy reasons. But we do discover that pure nitrogen was never pumped into the rooms to stave off rust, exploding another Sealand myth--there's no rust beyond the platform and helipad because the pillars are made of concrete.

We begin the interview in Sealand's living room, which is under the helipad.

The room Looks like a student bedroom, full of mismatched third-hand furniture. But it's airy and bright, unlike the spooky, black depths of Sealand's columns, There's a disused jail in one, just below the dimly lit gym and Ryan's sparse bedroom.

Not sued

So, who on earth uses HavenCo? Is Sealand home to dodgy money-laundering schemes, defamatory content and vast amounts of online pornography?

"Fifty per cent are online gambling customers," Ryan reveals. "Maybe 20 per cent are Internet payment systems customers. The rest are miscellaneous, such as security infrastructure companies, or they're sold through resellers."

Because gambling is mostly illegal in the US, betting entrepreneurs have flocked to HavenCo. They choose it above other offshore havens, such as those in the Caribbean, to avoid costly licensing fees.

So why hasn't the US government taken any action against HavenCo's American customers, who are so blatantly avoiding tax?

"It's very complicated to tell where an Internet business is based," says Ryan, "but where the server is based is an easy way to check. People can also know where your staff is based, but that can be virtual. And a lot of online bank accounts like PayPal are pretty virtual. You're not going to be able to get away without having an Internet server for your business. You may be able to distribute them but then you'll be a victim of all the laws, rather than a single one."

Escaping the law

Ryan is a passionate advocate of free speech online. Business has improved as a result of increased surveillance following September 11. Many people feel new laws are threatening their civil liberties and have scrambled to HavenCo to preserve them. "It's been good for us because a lot of people are afraid of the very draconian laws being passed in the US, and they want to get out in advance of those," Ryan says. HavenCo claims it will destroy a customer's box if it's ever forced to hand over customer data to the authorities. Presumably it'll burn and dump them in the North Sea.

Physical security was also an issue. "Customers were worried that [their servers] could be damaged in an attack," Ryan says. "But we're pretty secure. We're not going to become collateral damage."

There is, of course, a limit to what HavenCo can host. "If we had Osama bin Laden hosting here, we wouldn't even be a smoking pile of ash--we'd be vanished completely."

Ryan believes that if oppressive laws such as RIP start being enforced heavily, people will have more incentive to move offshore. But he doesn't want to spend the rest of his days on the fortress hosting sites that would be banned elsewhere. "If we go back to the US and the UK and they're wretched places to live, well, that's sort of annoying because I don't want to be on Sealand for the rest of my life."

On average, customers pay around $1,500 (around £960) for a box, $750 (around £480) for setup costs, and another $750 a month for colocation and 128k of bandwidth.

This means you won't usually see everyday folk posting dubious or copyright-protected content on HavenCo's servers. But companies hosted at HavenCo are beginning to resell shared hosting services. Ryan also has several side projects that test jurisdictional issues, such as the online publication of the controversial DeCSS source code--the computer code that reads decrypted DVDs. In addition, he's developed a voice encryption system using Bluetooth and an iPAQ PDA, an offshore stock market, a tamper-resistant, anonymous payment service, and he's working on a system to allow GSM text messaging from satellites.

He's also made an anonymous remailer available, which is used extensively on Usenet. He says the 10 complaints or so he's had about it in the last year were "silly".

In fact, Ryan doesn't get many complaints at all. "Anything that's likely to be a problem is either too high profile or too high bandwidth to host here. And if you're going to run a secret server where you don't need to get the benefit of jurisdiction, you might as well take a stolen credit card number and go buy a server at a company with thousands of servers. They're never going to look at yours, so as long as no one reports it, your server will continue operating. People who are going to do a kiddie porn ring are going to find other ways. Once you're willing to break the law there area lot of options for you."

Are HavenCo's customers law-abiding citizens, then? Ryan has a well-prepared answer. "Our customers don't want to break the law, they want a different set of laws they can comply with. It's similar to the way people avoid taxes rather than evade them, by moving assets offshore. These businesses comply with regulations, but accomplish the same purpose as not paying your taxes."

Porn to be wired

But where's the porn? Actually, nowhere--yet. Although HavenCo's prime source of revenue is currently online gambling, Ryan has big plans to host lots of pornography at Sealand in the future. "Hosting porn is something we're working on," he says. "We have porn payment systems, but not porn itself, as we don't have the bandwidth."

Infinite bandwidth will arrive on Sealand within the next 18 months. "At that point, I want to host a 40 gigabit per second porn server with payment systems integrated. It'll provide money and a huge amount of network traffic. And the more network traffic we push through, the easier it is to hide other customers' network traffic in that."

And this would make Ryan's hosting services even more attractive to his mysterious customers. "It also makes it cheaper for us to buy transit because of economies of scale. So porn, well, it's sort oficky, but it's a good industry for us to be in."

But buying transit from carriers is not a problem. HavenCo runs its own local Internet registry and pays its bills on time. Although Ryan won't get into specifics, it's clear HavenCo uses several suppliers and adopts what he calls "miscellaneous network connection" methods. A satellite dish is in plain view on Sealand, but there are other links, "Satellite is one component of our network, but you can't use that as your primary thing because there's latency and the gambling providers are all concerned about that," he says.

As for who the customers are exactly, Ryan is tight-lipped. In the past he's hosted Tibet Online, the website of the exiled Tibetan government. Some systems have also put their index servers there, but not their main conduit services.

Ryan clearly supports particular causes. "There's a certain religion that's really unpopular with Internet users--Scientology," he comments. "A customer should be online in a couple of months with all their secret documents. It'll be very interesting."

Plain brown wrapping

Customers usually choose to pay HavenCo discreetly. "Most pay by wire transfer, or some sort of Internet payment system like e-gold," he says. E-gold (www.e-gold.com) uses realgold to guarantee the value of its payment systems. The real gold stays in a vault, while the ownership changes hands.

The Internet payment systems HavenCo hosts provide similar types of services. "They're more privacy-oriented. They don't reveal information about their payments."

But what about money laundering? It's not an issue, Ryan claims. He's got it all worked out. "[Payment processing systems] are generally restricted to small transactions and maximum amounts. It's harder to launder money through them than in a suitcase. If you're laundering, you want it lobe under one per cent of the total volume of the system. Our customers doing payment processing have volumes of $ million a year, so you couldn't launder a worthwhile amount through the system.

"In theory, I have no problem with people anonymising their financial transactions. From a practical standpoint there's no way you can do that and still interface with existing banking systems."

Ryan's side projects and own personal interests suggest that he's moving away from his current hands-on role at HavenCo. A lot of his time is spent speaking at hacking and cryptography conferences, so he gets ample time away from the fortress, HavenCo may also set up data centres in other locations, although right now that would mean competing against itself.

His dream project is to raise $10 million so he can build a rocket launcher somewhere in a "nice remote location".

It's time to finish the interview as we have to get going to catch the day's only boat outta the place. This time I'm lucky enough to be able to sit in the vessel as it's lowered from the platform into the sea. Everyone else has to be winched down--with no harness--on a wooden swing. But we're old hands at this capernow. Our stomachs have settled enough for us enjoy the bumpy ride back to Harwich.

Reflecting on our little excursion, I decide that although HavenCo is a great idea and Ryan is really passionate about what it stands for, anyone who'd want to live on that place for more than a day must be crazy. Even if they are defending other people's precious content and defying the laws of other countries by creating their own jurisdiction, Sealand's a spartan place.

And the bottom line is, HavenCo is a business, not a non-profit organisation set up to let Web activists get their voices heard without fear of being taken offline. Ryan himself represents an exception to this, but if and when he leaves, who will go to Sealand to ensure HavenCo's philosophies remain? There may be people who would jump at the chance, but in reality it's not a very nice place to live, It'd have to be someone truly dedicated to the concept. (Post script: Ryan left HavenCo in mid 2003 to do other pursuits, putting HavenCo's future in doubt.)

Wanna work for HavenCo?

Ryan tries to spend half his time on Sealand. "I don't know how you'd describe the living conditions here," he says. "They'll be familiar to people who've squatted in buildings in Amsterdam, because of the industrial space. This room has been done up in the last two months, but the rest has been left over since WWII."

For this reason, HavenCo's finding it a bit hard to find interns and full-time staff. Around 5-10 employees do remote admin. "As you can see from the conditions here it's not quite five-star accommodation... or four-star... or even two-star."

Ryan suggests he's on the lookout for interns who might want to work on their own software projects while also doing technical work.

He gets a lot of interest, especially from recent college graduates and security experts. "We have hundreds of people send in resumes. But it's hard to get people to stay once they show up, because then they realise they're stuck here for a couple of weeks at a time. It's mostly the philosophy that attracts people here."

Ryan himself lives on the Internet, spending 18 hours a day online. Even if he's travelling, he still has to make sure there's a terminal nearby. "I'm always logged on," he says. Ryan spends his spare time on the Internet emailing, downloading MP3S and DivXs, playing computer games or using Internet Relay Chat.

COPYRIGHT Kim Gilmour and EMAP 2002.

Tales from the crypt

The BBC has enlisted two cult figures from Buffy the Vampire Slayer to script its new online drama Ghosts of Albion. Kim Gilmour meets them.
January 2003
"When I got involved I had no idea what a phenomenon Buffy was. Now I know." Amber Benson, who plays the young witch Tara Maclay in the television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer, is talking about her avid fans, who thoroughly dissect the show's storylines and enjoy forming 'warring factions' or online cliques. In the latest series, a stray bullet tragically kills Tara -- at least for now -- so message boards everywhere have been scrambled with conspiracy theories and speculations about her demise.

"I'm just in awe of it. I can't believe how people become so embroiled in something. It lives because people are so involved in it," Amber says. "It becomes something beyond what it started off being."

Tara may be floating in limbo somewhere, but Amber certainly is not. Apart from being an actress she's also scripted, directed and produced an independent film called Chance. More recently sties collaborated with thriller author Christopher Golden to script an online drama for BBCi called Ghosts of Albion. This isn't the first time the duo has teamed up. Both have previously co-written Buffy comics so Rob Francis, assistant producer of BBCi's Cult website (www.bbc.co.uk/cult), considered them ideal scriptwriters for its new online drama series.

Ghosts of Albion is described as a 'horror/adventure' story with dark, humourous undertones. It's a five part Flash animation with voiceovers from Anthony Daniels, best known for playing C-3PO in Star Wars, Leslie Phillips, known for his role in the Carry On films, and Roy Skelton, who did voices for Rainbow's Zippy and George, and the daleks in Dr Who.

The Beeb is being secretive about the exact storyline for Ghosts of Albion. The setting is 1830s England and the plot concerns a brother and sister who inherit the responsibility to protect the country from supernatural forces after the death of their grandfather, Ludlow, a famous stage magician. The siblings, who love to bicker, discover that not all of the old man's magic was performed on a stage.

"We're using some historical characters," says Amber. "Lord Admiral Nelson is one of the 'ghosts' in the tale -- others will include Lord Byron and Queen Bodicea."

Although Ghosts of Albion has some similarities with Buffy, Christopher and Amber were keen to try something new. "I think we're ready to move on," Amber says. "The reason the BBC approached us was yes, we have the Buffy connection, but there's an irony to our writing. We try and infuse our writing with a bit of self-referential humour. We make the audience a part of our world. We wink at them and they wink back. Buffy uses humour to put forward thoughtful ideas about society. With Ghosts, we'd like to head in that direction as well."

Not many American television series display this irony and, naturally, those which do are popular in the UK. "A lot of US television isn't very good," admits Christopher. "Programs like Buffy, The Sopranos, The West Wing and The Simpsons do well here and are intelligent. I think that there is a certain sense of irony people here appreciate that a lot of Americans miss."

To move the focus away from the Buffy theme, the duo wanted to go beyond simple characterisation. "There's a great mythology in Buffy,, but loss [Whedon, Buffy's creator] has been loath to explore it," says Chris. "Our ambition is to do both-to go with the characters and investigate the mythology."

When the series and website launch in March there are plans to split the site into two parts: A non-fiction section will describe the project, while a second strand will treat Ghosts of Albion as though the story is all true.

"It's like what they did with The Blair Witch Project," Amber explains. "You have this mythology that's created - like, did that really happen or not? People aren't sure. Chris is really into mythology and using part of reality to create quasi-fiction, so I think the audience is really going to be unsure whether this is real or not. There are some aspects that are real, and it's kind of fun to tease people."

Who's going to watch Ghosts of Albion?" I think anyone who's a fan of science fiction is going to like this," Amber says. "We're doing a bit of the ghosty, scary stuff and we're also doing a bit about real characters and real situations that change over the course of each piece. That appeals to both women and men."

Mail bonding
The BBC team in the UK, Christopher in Massachusetts and Amber in California have used email to share ideas and develop Ghosts of Albion.

"We'd piecemeal the project," Amber says. "Each person would create a segment, then it would go back and forth and be argued out until it was something we were all happy with. It became this giant, collaborative effort. We'd be vomiting out this very intense story- we'd get comments from everybody and try and incorporate the ideas."

Chris says it wasn't much of a leap writing for the Web as both himself and Amber are used to script writing and writing for comics. The five-part series, which will end up being around an hour long, will be animated after the cast have completed the voiceovers, and was much like writing a screenplay. The 'leap' comes in the post-production stages.

The team had to consider two versions of Ghosts of Albion - a Flash version for broadband users, and an audio-only version for anyone with a slower connection. So for those just listening to the story, particular actions had to be modified and explained.

"There's a lot of action," says Amber, "so if you're recording for audio only, you want to make sure that if someone's picked something up and thrown it across the room that the audience gets the action. It's almost like creating two projects at once."

Online dramas haven't been as successful as the media predicted in the mid-1990s, and Ghosts of Albion is being launched at a time when the BBC is being harshly criticised by commercial companies for spending too much of its licence fee money on online offerings. In the last financial year the BBC spent [pounds sterling]100 million on the Internet-double the previous year's figure. By the time you read this, the government will have begun an investigation into the BBC's online services.

But that doesn't seem to be deterring Rob Francis and his colleagues, who, as a Buffy, fan himself, is keen to make Ghosts of Albion accessible to as many people as possible.

Consequently, you may end up seeing it on interactive TV or even hearing Ghosts on the radio. "The animation is going to be at such a level that it will be broadcastable the way it is, Amber says. "We're pushing the envelope, and from the tests it looks beautiful."

RELATED ARTICLE: The price of fame
If you've never watched Buffy The Vampire Slayer you've probably never heard of Amber Benson, or the character she plays, Tara. But look on the Internet and you'll see literally thousands of references to Amber and her character, as well as numerous fan sites devoted to her (www.amazingamber.co.uk. www.amberbenson.ws and www.amberbenson.net to name a few).

This is the first time Amber has written anything exclusively for the Internet. "The fans who are interested in what Chris and I do are primarily Internet-based, and their interactions are very Internet-oriented," she says. "I feel connected to them."

Amber doesn't read what people write about her online. "I don't want to read the nasty things because they'd make me cry, and I don't want to read the glowing things because I'd get a swollen head."

Christopher, meanwhile, is more curious. "I read my book reviews on Amazon. Sometimes they're good, sometimes they're awful, You become desensitised to the good ones when you run across the bad ones. I had one removed because it freaked me out. The reader was saying something like, how courageous I was, to have revealed 'what I knew to be true'. This person was a nutcase! But my favourite one was a person who said my book 'sucked donkeys...'"

In Buffy, Tara plays the lesbian lover of Willow, which means she has a huge cult gay following on the Internet and gets lots of fan mail.

"You can't respond to one person because then you'd have to respond to everybody. It then becomes a pick and choose situation and I'd rather not play that game."

Instead, Amber enjoys emailing and visiting sites such as Hats of Meat (www.hatsofmeat.com - now offline). "It's the most hysterical thing I've ever seen. It's hats.., made of meat! My.. sister found it in her computer class. Life doesn't seem so serious when people are making hats of meat. I can't help laughing when I look at it!"

Amazon warehouse

Amazon adventure: what strange sights lie at the heart of the operation known as Amazon.co.uk? We sent our intrepid reporter up the M1 to bring us back a full report. Internet Magazine, Sept, 2003, by Kim Gilmour

Five thousand metres of well-oiled conveyor belts roll constantly up and down at Amazon.co.uk's distribution centre.

At 46,450 square metres, the Marston Gate warehouse is the largest e-commerce distribution centre in Europe. Walk the length of it and you'll see masses of empty space for Amazon to take on even more product lines, or extra stock during frantic holiday periods.

This hotbed of picking, packing and dispatching, which lies just off junction 13 on the M1, handles thousands of items every hour.

But Amazon.co.uk's distribution centre is far from being a faceless, fully-automated operation. You won't see chrome-plated machines or space-age robots picking goods off the shelves.

And there are no funky twenty-somethings riding Segway scooters around the warehouse floor, as we discovered when we visited in June. People from every walk of life are working here. Skilful hands deftly stuff books into pigeon holes. Amiable grannies expertly wrap odd-shaped gifts. Young men stack books and CDs onto shelves and move kitchen appliances around the floor to a soundtrack of inoffensive pop music.

A huge banner above the workers' heads reads: 'Safety protects people. Quality protects customers'.

The odd forklift whizzes by, loaded with packing crates. Huge trolleys of air-filled packaging wait to be stuffed in boxes. Then the lunch whistle blows, and everyone flows out into the company cafeteria for a quick coffee and a chat.

"The idea is to keep a constant flow," says Mark Mastandrea, the distribution centre's manager, his voice competing against the strangely comforting chug-chug-chug of activity behind him. "We keep the cycle time as quick as possible from the moment deliveries come in through the door."

Amazon has hundreds of suppliers, so every day is different for its receivers. It's busy but not chaotic, and there's method behind this quasi-madness. Whatever comes in is sorted and placed into special orange 'totes' - plastic crates which travel by conveyor belt up to the four storey 'picking tower'. The candy-store action begins here.

At the tower, Amazon's 'putaway' staff are assigned to a group of aisles, where they allocate space to whatever they're shelving, Using portable scanners, staff scan the barcodes on the items and the labels assigned to each location. This lets Amazon's system recognise where items are physically located.

You won't find any kind of Dewey Decimal System at the tower. Without the aid of a computer printout, none of the pickers would find anything. It's a place that your old librarian from school would find absolutely exasperating.

So, if you'd ordered The Muppet Movie on VHS, Amazon's system would send a picker to the spot where it was shelved. A single item order is straightforward enough--the pickers actually use your invoice to select your item before it gets conveyed by tote to the packing area.

"The multi-item orders are a little more complicated," Mastandrea says. "If you were to order two, three or four items, they might be in different parts of the warehouse."

The sophistication of Amazon's system is such that it generates optimised pick lists for multi-item orders, finding the shortest possible route picking staff need to take to gather parts of people's orders. Items are then put on trollies before being sent to a 'pre-sort' stage.

Mastandrea points to one of the trollies. "There are items from many orders on this trolley, and they'll go through a sortation process to get your items into your box."

The trollies are filled with anonymous everyday people's orders--the only thing these items have in common is that they happen to be neighbours on the nearby shelf. There's Turtles and Tortoises for Dummies, a book on making wedding speeches, Victoria Beckham's autobiography, a tattoo pictorial, and Lonely Planet guides for Spain and Sydney.

The view from the picking tower seems somehow voyeuristic, as if we're taking a glimpse into the minds and habits of ordinary people. "At the same time, on all the different levels, there are many trolleys containing many, many items from these orders," Mastandrea says. "All these trolleys go to one place, and somebody will sort them all out."

During the pre-sort process--also located in the picking tower-- items are batched up into the orange totes. There'll be perhaps two or three orders to one tote, before they're sent to the sorting line.

Pallets of bulkier items, like kitchen appliances, are stored outside the picking tower. Popular items that don't fit onto the shelves are also put here. Predictably, Amazon's most popular item has been Harry Potter's latest instalment. In the UK alone, pre-order figures stood at 350,000 one month before the book went on sale.

Rather than hitching a ride in one of the orange totes--that would violate health and safety regulations--we walk across the warehouse and up a steel frame, which overlooks the sorting and packing operation.

The view is amazing. The totes containing the multi-item orders arrive from the picking tower. They're sorted into slots like pigeonholes, with each slot representing one order.

A woman places several copies of French for Beginners into one of the slots. Perhaps they were ordered by a teacher. "When she's done sorting the items for this set of orders, they get moved to the other side where the packers pack them up," Mastandrea explains.

Packages then get conveyed to a whizz-bang postal sorting operation, where they're automatically weighed and franked. It's slick, clean and fun to watch the brown packages glide on by endlessly. Although Amazon doesn't release regular shipping figures, its busiest day was in Christmas 2002, when a whopping 200,000 orders went through the fulfilment centre in a day. More than 6.2 million items were ordered from 1 November 2002 to Christmas.

Various chutes shift the packages around and sort them out for the Royal Mail, which remains on site to handle the constant dispatches.

Then it's off to the gift-wrapping area. It's occupied by two middle-aged ladies working opposite each other. These two have wrapping targets to meet, of course, and appear to be wrapping at least 20 gifts an hour before sending them on to be labelled.

Extra staff are always employed to pack gifts at Christmas time, when even staff from Amazon's main office in Slough get involved. Amazon.co.uk's MD Robin Terrell says he quite enjoys being at the Marston Gate warehouse during Christmas, where he does picking or gift wrapping. "When we go up to help, we always joke about whether productivity increases or decreases!" he says. "You get a real feel for the product, and the sheer scale of the operation. Getting in there and doing it is all part of the fun."

Terrell knows people have preconceived ideas about what Amazon's warehouse must be like. I tell him I didn't realise so many people were involved. Apparently, that's a common reaction when people see the reality of the operation in action.

"There's a massive number of people involved. The facility we had in Slough was tiny in comparison," he says. "It was entirely manual, and you always saw a lot of people running around pushing trolleys of books and CDs. At Marston Gate, you don't see that so much. You go to the picking tower and see lots of people, but most of the product moves on conveyors. In a way, it looks less busy at the new warehouse."

But there's no room for tardiness or slacking off here. Amazon's system regularly monitors productivity by area as well as by individual. Most people tend to stick to their areas of expertise.

Our tour is over all too soon, but at least the drizzle outside has subsided. I'm left thinking about all the people who'll process my next order at Amazon. Who'll be picking my bulky copy of Martin Parr photographs (30 per cent off!) next week?

I peer through the window at the man sitting in the cafeteria drinking coffee, the group of ladies outside having a laugh, and the guy retrieving something from his locker.

Founder Jeff Bezos' motto is: 'work hard, have fun, make history'. After all, it's hard work, not bleeding edge technology, that will play the greatest role in ensuring that the biggest consumer e-commerce operation the world has ever seen continues to grow even bigger.

WHERE DOES AMAZON GROW FROM HERE?

Let's get Amazon's sales figures straight. The e-commerce behemoth generated more than $1 billion in net sales in the first quarter of 2003. International segment sales, which include the UK, German, French and Japanese sites, accounted for $379 million of this. But if you thought Amazon.co.uk was big enough already, think again.

"It sounds glib," says Amazon.co.uk MD Robin Terrell, "but we seriously want to be the place where you can go and buy anything online."

Although Amazon made a $10 million loss during this quarter, that's a vast improvement on the $23 million Amazon lost in the first quarter of 2002. A couple of years ago, Amazon's US headquarters set an ambitious goal -- for Amazon International to generate 50 per cent of total sales by 2005. "In the most recent quarter, it was 44 per cent," Terrell says. "The fact that International is still growing by 68 per cent year on years shows that while we can maintain that sort of growth. International will very quickly become as big, if not bigger, than the US... It's just a matter of time."

Most of Amazon's initiatives are still clearly driven from the US. Quite a few have yet to reach our stores -- there's a much higher level of personalisation on the US site, which offers a gold box feature to provide shoppers with cut-price goods for a limited time, for example. In-store pickup is also available stateside -- people can collect their goods from their local Borders, Circuit City of Office Depot stores. This boosts Amazon's revenue during the precious last-minute Christmas shopping period, when posted goods may not arrive in time. Ultimately, Amazon hopes to provide the same product lines and technological platforms across all its global sites.

Amazon's aggressiveness on pricing has paid off well. In the UK, many of its goods -- including books sell at 30 per cent off -- and its free delivery on orders over [pounds sterling]39 has been a huge success.

"We never pre-announce new services, but you'll see more of the same," Terrell says. "We'll continue to execute on our existing strategy of increasing selection and lowering prices."

Amazon's been in the news recently after speculation that it was in talks with Apple to licence its popular iTunes digital music store. Whether it teams up with Apple or not, digital music downloads are something Amazon's founder and CEO Jeff Bezos has been thinking about for years. Terrell says. "Inevitably, online retailers are going to be best placed when it comes to selling digital downloads of music. Until a year ago, I don't think anyone had really got it right."

Although Amazon argues that it's the most popular e-commerce site in the UK, recent figures from Nielsen//NetRatings suggest that eBay overtook Amazon.co.uk in the popularity stakes for the first time in March 2003, increasing its audience to 6.8 million compared to Amazon.co.uk's 6.1 million. But the difference is negligible, and Terrell isn't worried. "We're focused on expanding our selection," he says.