January 2012
1 post
How to present
I get really bored in most presentations. They’re too salesy, it’s some guy just droning on through a big slide of text, I’m reading the text and stop listening, I lose the point of what they’re telling me etc.
A friend of mine who’d never presented before asked me for some pointers on the fundamentals. I ended up writing quite a bit, so thought I’d re-post...
October 2011
1 post
September 2011
3 posts
The rise of social customer service
Back in 2007, when I saw my first Facebook app, I was struck by a strong feeling that these would be an important way for companies to interact with their customers. I went on to help start the Facebook Developer Garage London and co-founded iPlatform, the UK’s first official Preferred Facebook app development company.
In 2009, with fan pages and Twitter on the rise, the feeling struck...
Gay Marriage - Words Matter
The UK government just announced that it plans to consult on legalising gay marriage by 2015, on top of the civil partnerships that have been around for a while. Many religious and conservative commentators are angry at the move, claiming that marriage is defined as a union between man and woman, and that it is somehow anti-religious to allow gay couples to be married; and that anyway, civil...
Petition: Teach Our Kids To Code
The future of all industry is in software. Right now the fastest growing products are applications - on a phone, or a website - and are often applications that replace previously physical devices. In the near future, even physical items will be coded, and then simply printed at home using 3D printers. As Marc Andreesen says, Software Is Eating The World.
In the depths of the recession and stale...
August 2011
1 post
Shutting Down Social Media During Times of...
After David Cameron made a throwaway comment in parliament about the possibility of shutting down social media during a crisis, the internet has been ablaze with back and forth arguments about whether this is a good idea or not.
It’s not.
It’s a naive idea with the potential to cause much more damage than good.
Social media is a powerful communication channel between different...
July 2011
3 posts
Luke Johnson Doesn't Understand Tech
Luke Johnson, the well known restaurant entrepreneur and investor, wrote a piece in the Financial Times yesterday, ‘Zuckerberg wannabes squander careers’ (free registration needed), essentially saying that Facebook, Amazon and Google are huge exceptions and that no other tech company has grown fast and made profits, and are a complete waste of everyones time and money. What rubbish....
No one needs a scanner anymore
I just use a nifty little app on my iPhone, DocScanner. You take pictures of the doc through the app, it recognizes the edges of paper, scans it into high quality black and white or colour, and allows you then email the document as PDFs, JPEG etc. It’s much quicker and easier than using an external scanner, and doesn’t take up any space (other than a few MBs on your phone). Highly...
2 tags
Google+ isn't friend lists, Facebookers
Like most geeks, over the past few days I’ve been playing quite a bit with Google+. It’s been an interesting experience - for once, Google have actually built something social that is pretty good. That doesn’t mean it will really catch on, but unlike Buzz and Wave it’s actually been executed well and properly thought through.
I initially wanted to blast out a blog post in...
June 2011
3 posts
Twitter burns bridges with #devnest organisers →
It’s a shame to see Twitter acting like this. They’ve always had a slightly difficult relationship with their developers; primarily because they made a mistake early on of encouraging developers to build their own end-user clients, which really made no sense in the long run. This caused a very large percentage of Twitter developers to essentially end up in competition with Twitter, and...
Welcome to Tumblr...
I decided to move my blog across from Blogger to Tumblr. It’s prettier, and seems to do what I want more easily. The UI for blogger is old and a bit crappy, and I like the follower/re-posting ease of Tumblr, better connections with Twitter, simple Disqus integration etc. Main bummer was that the import was unofficial (there’s no official way of doing it) - I used this tool:
...
Emotions as pattern matching
I had an interesting discussion with a friend recently on whether robots will have emotions. He thought not - as why would we programme them in?
This got me thinking - what are emotions? What emotions really are programmed in? I asked some friends with babies… and the answers suggested that newborn babies have a very limited set of emotions, mainly based around survival needs (hungry,...
March 2011
2 posts
Speed reading on iPad.
A major element to fast reading is using a pointer (such as your finger or a pen) to track the text as you read. I don’t want to press a pen against my iPad; but sliding your finger along in most reading devices turns a page. I wish these apps (kindle etc) would allow me to select swipe vertical or swipe horizontal to read, so I could do this; similarly with Instapaper - if you swipe...
Why Asana will win
Over the weekend, Conversocial got access to the Asana beta, and I’ve been playing with it for the last few days. We’ve generally found that most project management / task management tools get used excitedly at first, then tend to tail off, or end up being half used along with multiple other systems. Asana is the first tool I’ve seen that has the chance to become our 100% tool....
January 2011
1 post
4 tags
Forecasts for 2011
At the beginning of this month, Jemima Kiss at the Guardian asked me what my forecasts were for 2011. My answers (below) were originally published on the PDA blog on the 1st of January here. What will 2010 be remembered for? “2010 is the year that tablet computing has really taken hold, from iPhone and Android to iPads and all the other upcoming tablets - along with the creation of a number...
July 2010
1 post
2 tags
We'll See
Just came across this great fable, courtesy of Derek Sivers: A farmer had only one horse. One day, his horse ran away.All the neighbors came by saying, “I’m so sorry. This is such bad news. You must be so upset.” The man just said, “We’ll see.”A few days later, his horse came back with twenty wild horses. The man and his son corraled all 21 horses.All the neighbors came by saying,...
May 2010
1 post
4 tags
Social is conversation.
This post was originally posted on iPlatform’s company blog, but it’s a project that I’m spending a lot of time on - and one that I believe is very important, which is why I’m also cross posting to my personal blog here. Over the past two years, we’ve worked with a huge range of companies to help them market themselves effectively inside Facebook. We’ve built...
April 2010
1 post
3 tags
Why I don't read articles about the election
There’s so much information out there in the world. What’s worth reading? Information translates into knowledge, and I give information a weight based on how valuable the knowledge will be to me. Knowledge can be built on other knowledge; so information which adds and builds up knowledge is more valuable to me than information which gives me a distinct bit of knowledge; especially if...
December 2009
1 post
4 tags
The Zuck on having a successful life
Alex Tew found a visible conversation thread on Facebook earlier about what it means to you to have a successful life, with a comment from Mark Zuckerberg (as well as several other Facebook luminaries). His comment is below, and sheds light on the decision not to sell Facebook, and also the mission they’re following. The constant desire, from the top of Facebook, to make an amazing product...
November 2009
1 post
1 tag
You can't train an entrepreneur
There’s was a lot of buzz last night around Sir Alan Sugar’s talk at the British Library, where one of his comments was “You can’t train entrepreneurs, you either have the spirit or you don’t.” (I wasn’t there, however this was tweeted by Techcrunch UK editor Mike Butcher who’s a reliable journalist). Almost all of the buzz is aghast at the comment, and...
September 2009
1 post
3 tags
What not to do in social media - Facebook Garage...
The Facebook Garage is back on Thursday 24th September (next Thursday!). There’s lots we’ll be catching up on, including the acquisition of friendfeed, the launch of Facebook lite, and all the latest changes to the application platform. The theme for the night is ‘what *not* to do in social media’; we’ll be taking a light-hearted look at some of the biggest *epic*...
August 2009
1 post
4 tags
Facebook Application Growth Rates
I received a question this morning asking what the growth rate of applications on Facebook are. I ended up writing quite a long response, which could be interesting for other people asking a similar question. Unfortunately, this is similar to asking ‘what’s the growth rate of a website?’ - an application is essentially a standard web app, that happens to exist on a social...
July 2009
2 posts
5 tags
You should read this blog post
Dustin Curtis has written a great article on the use of split testing and how he used it to find out what text at the bottom of each of his posts generated the biggest click through to his twitter page - starting with basic statements such as ‘I’m on Twitter’ through to strong commands, like ‘You should follow me on twitter’ all the way up to explicit call-outs:...
4 tags
Facebook release 'connection' targeting for...
Facebook have released a new feature in their advertising platform allowing you to targets users connected to your fan pages, applications, groups or events. This potentially could be powerful as a way of promoting new content to users, maintaining interest, and cross selling. Although we always recommend seeding content, applications and features directly to your fan pages and groups, it’s...
June 2009
2 posts
1 tag
Facebook Garage this Thursday, Social Gaming...
The June garage is soon upon us - this Thursday evening, at the usual venue of Sun Microsystems, 45 King William St. This week we’re focusing on social gaming dynamics - what makes great social games inside facebook, how do you make classic games that go on for years, and how do you apply gaming dynamics to non-gaming applications? On top of our already announced speakers, Karl Bunyan from...
3 tags
Facebook are destroying all competition in the UK
Hitwise have released some stats today showing that Facebook took over 43% of all UK visits to social networking sites over the weekend - compared to just 5.97% and 3.18% for Bebo and MySpace respectively. They were the second busiest website in the whole of the UK, only beaten by Google.What does this mean? By doggedly keeping to a pure platform play, keeping user experience at the fore, and...
April 2009
2 posts
6 tags
Doritos Dodgeball Hackathon Competition - win...
Come along to AMV on the 25th and 26th April to take part in the Doritos Dodgeball Hackathon Competition, which is being organised by the Facebook Developer Garage London (which I host). For the Dodgeball Challenge, people are going to be able to take control of real ball firing machines, and fire balls at real dodgeball teams and celebrities over the whole of May. The aim of the hackathon is to...
4 tags
Discussing the Facebook TOS changes on Sky News a...
March 2009
6 posts
7 tags
Facebook Public Profiles Now Have Viral Invite...
Facebook have been making a number of additions to their ‘public profiles’ recently (what used to be called fan pages); the latest of which is to add viral invites to pages, as All Facebook report. This means that a fan of a public profile can send direct invites to their friends, similar to applications. The effect of this won’t be dramatic, as if people really wanted to share...
4 tags
Facebook's re-design: the right way forward
There’s been a lot of furore over the recent Facebook homepage changes, when they changed from a newsfeed showing an algorithmically chosen selection of feed stories being generated from your friends, many of which were passive (reporting on activity they’d done around the site, but not necessarily actively chosen to share); to a ‘live stream’ of actively shared content,...
6 tags
I'm off to SXSWi tomorrow, followed by some...
Tomorrow morning I’m jumping on the plan to SXSW (due to arrive sometime on Friday morning US time) (I think). Should be an action packed long weekend with lots of fun, including an invite only Facebook party on Saturday night (will the great Zuck himself be there?), and of course all the UK party-mad favourites along with me for Digital Mission. As an experiment, I’m going along...
5 tags
Social networks beat email
According to a new Nielsen Online report, Facebook now has a 47% reach in the UK, the Guardian reports. Together, member communities (made up of blogs and social networks) are the fourth most popular web destination in the UK - ahead of personal email. They’ve grown over 10% in the last year. However, UK penetration is dwarfed by Brazil - the Google owned social network Orkut has a 70%...
4 tags
I'm really glad Facebook have unmoderated comments...
Check out the original blog post for more quality comments like these.
3 tags
Help Red Nose Day '09 - Donate Your Facebook...
This Friday it’s Red Nose day 2009, in support of Comic Relief, a charity campaign which, in over 20 years, has raised over £500m to support projects across the globe, from helping disadvantaged young people in the UK, to supporting those in dire poverty or suffering from HIV and AIDs in third world countries. They teamed up with iPlatform to allow Facebook users to donate their...
February 2009
5 posts
4 tags
Techfluff.tv - Michael Arrington is behind...
3 tags
Habbo Hotel's Oisin Lunny speaking at Garage...
Today we confirmed Oisin Lunny, the UK’s country manager for Habbo UK, to speak at the Facebook Developer Garage London tomorrow on the monetisation of virtual gifts and worlds. We’ll also be looking at the new Facebook APIs on status updates, posted links and video uploads, and what this means for application developers. Sign up to the event on Facebook here… And buy tickets...
9 tags
Techfluff.tv - WAYN founders, Twestival, and 2...
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Facebook Garage - Next Week! (11th Feb)
Tickets available now - http://februarygarage.eventbrite.com/ At this month’s Garage: ‘From Concept to Launch’ Mat Clayton from Wakari is back with his sucessful steps to make a viral app. Comic Relief are here to tell us all the details of their Facebook Developer Garage Hackathon, which is happening during the day on the 21st February. Devin Hunt, the co-founder of...
7 tags
Techfluff.tv episode 8 - ft a silent escalator...
January 2009
6 posts
4 tags
The value of engagement on social networks
Eric Ries has written a great post on the huge value a brand can get by engaging with customers on the social network platforms, especially concerning the real data available and the cheap CPI (Cost-per-Install). Read it here. His essential points are: 1. Huge social network advertising inventory means that the cost of driving users to applications is very cheap, and can be highly targeted 2....
4 tags
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We're looking for good people...
We’re looking for developers at the iPlatform! Interested in any of the jobs below? Email teamATtheiplatform.com. If you recommend someone who we subsequently hire, we’ll pay you £200 for being so nice. Freelance application developers Do you have experience building applications on Facebook and other social networks? Or have a solid web development background and an active interest...
7 tags
Techfluff.tv - episode 6, from Hawaii!
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Techfluff.tv - episode 5. Featuring Hermione...
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Huddle, Moshi and iPlatform at the Facebook...
After what feels like a long break, we’re back for the first Facebook Developer Garage of the New Year on 21st Jan. We’ve got a jam-packed garage, with reports on the latest happenings on the Facebook and MySpace application platforms, Andy McLoughlin from Huddle talking about how they got selected to be a LinkedIn platform launch partner and their experience with LinkedIn compared to...
December 2008
5 posts
7 tags
Techfluff.tv episode 4 - Xmas Special
We’re proud to announce that Techcrunch UK is now an official media partner of Techfluff.tv! Enjoy…
7 tags
Techfluff.tv episode 3 - Le Web special!
Last week, the team headed off to Le Web, where Hermione launches the show from a sauna with a load of half-naked Finnish guys, whilst I interviewed Simon Woodroffe (founder of Yo! Sushi) on his houseboat. Check it out below:
4 tags
BBC advertising new shows on Facebook
I noticed this when I logged on to Facebook this morning. The upside to the huge social network inventory and low CPC is that you can use it to perform highly targeted, cost effective, performance based marketing - and this shows that even a staid institution like the BBC are recognising the benefit. Of course, this would be even better if they had integrated the iPlayer fully with Facebook, so...
7 tags
Techfluff.tv episode 2 - featuring Mike Butcher
In this week’s episode we interviewed Mike Butcher, editor of Techcrunch UK, whilst he prepared us a chicken for lunch. We also had Alicia from Skimbit pitching her new product, Skimlinks, on Embankment escalator, and Robert Loch pouting at Peter Mandelson. Enjoy!
9 tags
iPlatform, Techfluff.tv and TwitorFit.com!
I’ve been pretty busy over the last month. We’ve started integrating the iPlatform with our first launch partners, and have been busy working on our go to market strategy, website, and bringing in new team members. In the New Year, we’ll be launching with all guns blazing! I’ll keep you posted. The social space in general has been very busy, with the actual launch of...