I’ve attended hundreds of sales pitches and client meetings, nearly always as a supplier to a larger organisation. On a few occasions in my early career I recall being faintly berated by colleagues for my behaviour. Not for doing anything aggressive, derogatory or suggestive, but for humorous remarks that were deemed inappropriate – just...
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Whenever a new term enters the Internet lexicon, arguments inevitably follow about it’s meaning and scope. Engineers argued about what was or wasn’t technically ‘Ajax’ technology or ‘Web 2.0’ design, and content strategists are facing a similar problem pinning down the scope of their relatively new industry. Most recently, the concept of a Minimum...
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One of the early chapters in my book (A Practical Guide to Web App Success) discusses the factors that influence the success of an app, such as the idea, the quality and speed of execution, and the wider context in which it’s situated: the competitive landscape, the levels of technology adoption, the financial climate...
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The image below shows, from top left to bottom right, how the idea for the logo progressed over time (I’m not a particularly great paper and pencil sketcher, and often find it quicker to mock-up vector logo ideas with a tool like Fireworks).
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Yesterday we launched Mingle, our awesome free iPhone app for New York and San Francisco. The app does a lot of cool stuff with geo-social data aggregation (from Foursquare, Flickr, Instagram and Twitter) and visualisation, and I thought that I’d put some stats together from the data and share it with you. A quick...
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Back in March I told you about a couple of projects I’d written in two days over Christmas, and have done nothing with since. I just happened to be checking our AdSense account for the first time in a while, and noticed that one of the projects – stereotype – was now generating £2.50 a...
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I made a decision at the start of this year to blog and tweet less. Talk less, do more. Up until now it’s been fairly easy, but I’ve had to interrupt my writing of the last few chapters of the book to write this post. A couple of days ago Seth Godin wrote about...
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The title says it all, really. I’m currently running two almost-identical scripts that pull data from the Twitter API every half an hour. The first version of the script runs at :00 and :30 minutes past every hour, and the second version at :05 and :35 minutes past every hour. The on-the-hour/half-hour script fails...
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I try not to write too much personal stuff on this blog, as I can’t think of more than about three people in the world who actually want to know what I’m doing. Even so, this is going to be one of those posts, albeit a short one. We’re so hectic at the moment...
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We’ve just moved in to an apartment in Chiang Mai for one month. The work desk is a little narrow, so after unsuccessfully scouring the local stores for a laptop stand, I improvised. I’ll let the photos speak for themselves (but in case you can’t make it out, it’s three rolls of toilet paper).
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