Are New York Twitter Users More Sophisticated Or Shrewd?

February 23, 2010
Are New York Twitter Users More Sophisticated Or Shrewd?

It’s been exactly a year since I launched a number of automated Twitter accounts that search-for and re-tweet information about free giveaways in various cities: @freelondon, @freenewyork, @freesanfran, @torontofree and @freecardiff (note that I won’t be including @freecardiff information in this post due to a lack of data). These accounts were created at the...
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Bathcamp, March 10: Design Critical

February 22, 2010
Bathcamp, March 10: Design Critical

On the evening of March 10th, 2010, I’m curating an evening of talks in Bath about design, which I’ve dubbed “Design Critical”. Here’s the blurb I wrote for it: For most of our recent history, technology has been focused on the mechanics: does something solve the problem or not? Over the last few decades...
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Should Seed Funds / VCs Insist On Prototypes?

February 21, 2010

If you have a great idea for a web app, one of your options is to apply for Seed funding, to get it up and running. Understandably, given the amount of money exchanged, many funds ask to see a demonstration or prototype as part of the application. For example, NYCSeed says: What if I...
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An Affiliate Experiment: Buy Kindle in the UK

February 19, 2010

UPDATE: As of 14th March 2010, due to copyright infringement, I’ve changed the original uk-kindle domain name in this article to a new domain: cheap-find.com/kindle-uk/ I’m increasingly coming across stories about people who make a full-time living through affiliate schemes; I’m sure we’ve all read a similar story. These people set up dedicated websites...
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A Couple of Tiny Twitter Experiments

February 15, 2010

I recently created a couple of quick experimental pages that use the Twitter API to find out what people are talking about. I’m fascinated by the possibilities of being able to query the real-time ‘voice/opinion of millions’, especially as it’s non-intrusive, and less susceptible to bias than explicit surveys. Some businesses are going to make a...
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The Increasing Annoyance of Advertising

February 10, 2010

I use Spotify almost every day. Even so, I’m one of the few people who still enjoys buying and owning CDs, so I refuse to pay for the premium version: I use it for discovery, and buy the physical formats of the bands I like. If I listen to it for an hour, I’ll...
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Who I Don’t Follow On Twitter

February 8, 2010

I was going to call this Who I Follow On Twitter, but given my fairly liberal following requirements, I decided on what you see above. Basically, I follow any real people who follow me. There are exceptions, of course: anyone who isn’t really ‘using’ twitter, and is trying to scam or spam. The (very...
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The Biggest Problem of the Web

February 7, 2010
The Biggest Problem of the Web

Let me briefly describe what I think is the biggest problem that is holding back the full potential of the web. The majority of web applications (the useful websites that actually ‘do’ something) are conceived and created by developers: And yet the make-up of the global population is very different (the following graph is...
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On Fractal Quality and Startups

February 6, 2010

Some recent interesting blog posts have talked about the fractal nature of quality: quality items (software, restaurants, whatever) will exhibit the self-same high-quality at every level. A great restaurant will not only have great decoration and great food, but a well-serviced coat-check and high quality napkins. No detail is left to chance. Companies like Apple...
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The Forensics of Twitter Bullying

February 5, 2010

Due to the sensitivity of this issue, I’ve decided to remove this post. Hope you understand.
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