At a recent event I ran into Michelle Dewberry, winner of The Apprentice TV show last year. I managed to chase her away within about five minutes by asking too many questions about the aftermath of the show: the fiasco with the XenonGreen.com registration and her decision to part company with Sir Alan Sugar’s company. No doubt she's entirely fed up with nosy journalists raking over the past.

She's actually extremely convincing when talking about her new venture, MDL, which offers outsourcing consulting. I think I understand better now why she won. She has a lot more gravitas in person than came across on the small screen.

But I still think Xenon Green could have been better handled. Her account of why the XenonGreen.com domain went to someone else was a little skewwhiff. She told me a member of the TV audience broke a confidentiality agreement - but the domain was registered by someone with no connection with the show, on the day the BBC put out a press release mentioning the new brand. The inelegant truth is clearly that Amstrad just cocked up, neglecting to register the name while it was still a secret (perhaps it’s telling that her new MDL venture doesn’t seem to have a web site at all). And after the best Xenon Green domains were gone, Amstrad did nothing to get them back, grabbing lame alternatives like XenGreen.com instead.

Dewberry confirmed that she simply ignored emails from Andrew Potts of Beckbury Technology, owner of the then freshly registered XenonGreen.com and .co.uk domains, whereas it seems to me that it would have been good business to at least open a dialogue.

Never mind. As it turns out, Amstrad’s Viglen subsidiary chose not to pursue the full Xenon Green business plan, which centred on charging companies to recycle their e-waste. Dewberry left to set up on her own after just four months, in September last year.

I asked Dewberry if the recycling idea had been shelved too soon, given the current upsurge in interest in all things green, and the legal requirement for firms to be WEEE-compliant from next month. Viglen itself is one of many firms now offering to responsibly dispose of kit for a small charge. She surprised me by taking an opposite stance. It's now too late to build a new business on rubbish, she said, adding that the big IT suppliers will swallow what little profit there is in the task. Given the PR value of eco-programmes such as Dell’s declaration that it wants to be “the greenest technology firm on Earth”, this is probably a reasonable assessment.

I wonder what the winner of this year’s Apprentice will be doing in 12 months’ time?

I spent yesterday helping my elderly, disabled mother with all the things that are quite tricky when a stroke has left you one-handed and partially sighted.

In between reattaching handles to cupboards and similar odd jobs, I spent 20 minutes on the phone to Virgin Media - the former NTL - trying to sort out why she was being billed £55 per month for a phone used almost exclusively off peak and for cable TV that is pretty much always on the same channel.

She’d been an NTL customer for years - since long before her stroke - and assured me she asked for the cheapest package available when she initially signed up. Knowing her as I do, I have every confidence that she did indeed ask for the cheapest package. I expect she emphasised the low-cost nature of her request about a hundred times.

As the call-centre operative readily admitted after I’d spent the regulation 10 minutes on hold, listening to the 5p per minute music, my mother was certainly not on the cheapest package any longer. In fact her cable TV bundle was the most expensive available - Size XL, in Virgin Media parlance - and the rate she was being charged for the 128 channels she doesn’t watch was higher even than that advertised on the Virgin web site. She was entitled to a discount due to being a phone and TV customer, but this discount had not been applied, for whatever reason. Presumably Virgin is happy to wait until the customer notices.

It’s hard to be certain how my mother came to be such a lucrative customer for Virgin Media, but it seems plain to me that the firm is not exactly going out of its way to ensure that vulnerable customers are given the assistance they need. We’re all used to firms that whistle rather than moving existing customers onto the same tempting terms as new recruits, but I think some exceptions should be made.

No doubt Virgin Media has a capable CRM system. It certainly has records of my mother’s date of birth, calling patterns and TV watching habits. If it has any corporate conscience, it ought not to be creaming fat profits out of her pension.

Yesterday I heard about a clever consumer service implemented by Bank of America that is exactly the kind of game-changing innovation that takes little more than a nimble IT department and some imaginative marketing to rake in huge profits.

Called Keep the Change, the service is elegant and simple. Once you’ve signed up to the scheme, every time you make a purchase using a debit card, the bank rounds up the amount to the nearest dollar and funnels the extra loose change into your savings account. So if you make a purchase for $12.99, say, just one cent is moved from your current to your savings account, but if you pay for a basket of groceries that comes to $28.13, an additional 87 cents will land in your virtual piggybank. Over time, it means a regular stream of saving that never feels painful.

The service emerged from work done by BoA with design consultancy Ideo. The aim was to create new ways to encourage customers to open savings accounts, and the research and brainstorming wound up focusing on people who lack the inclination or willpower to put money aside in the normal fashion.

The quality of the idea is demonstrated by the uptake: launched in October 2005, the scheme has so far gained 2.5 million customers. This meant “more than 700,000 new checking accounts and one million new savings accounts for Bank of America”, according to Ideo.

Given the obvious merits of the innovation, I wondered why no UK bank had copied the idea.

This morning, munching my cornflakes while watching Sky News, I noticed that I was wrong. An advert for Lloyds TSB promoting a service called Save the Change came on. It described a process that is an exact clone of the BoA scheme.

The UK scheme launched on 1 February this year and, funnily enough, I know I’d seen the Lloyds TSB ad before - I remembered its strange animated imagery of a train squeezing through a field of cows - but the message behind the commercial had entirely passed me by.

This demonstrates that it remains entirely possible to spend a lot of money on too-clever-by-half advertising to no effect. When I heard about the BoA scheme I felt that lightbulb-over-the-head feeling you get on first acquaintance with a great idea. When I first saw the Lloyds ad I felt mildly entertained but entirely uninformed. As a way to promote the service, it doesn’t work at all.

The advert was created by animation firm Studio AKA (which has done a fine job, it seems to me), commissioned and no doubt storyboarded by ad agency Rainey Kelly Campbell Roalfe/Y&R (which hasn’t done a fine job, it seems to me).

Never mind keep the change, if I were Lloyds TSB I’d be asking for my money back.