next Startup Meetup – thu 21st May

Posted by luke on Apr 30, 2009 in blog | 0 comments

Next startup-meetup in Bournemouth town is thu 21st May 10-12 @goodfoodcafe #supmup – business and technology builders come on down!

What do people think on the competition idea?

http://www.socialtech.biz/blog/a-startup-contest

Luke

me2everyone again

Posted by luke on Apr 28, 2009 in blog | 0 comments

I’m still getting quite a lot of traffic on my me2everyone post, I was curious to see where it appeared in google (top of 2nd page) when I spotted this interesting piece – read comment #12

“…say you have earned yourself a million of these £0.001-valued shares, and a week later me2everyone goes into debt. As the shares are not paid up, you will be asked to pay for the shares you are holding (it’s one of the first things debtors will go for to reclaim their losses)…”

Hmmm.

But its ok, a quote from me2everyone (#21) says:

“…When the shares are made available to you, they will be fully paid up. If me2everyone PLC creates any debt, you are not responsible for that debt. me2everyone PLC (when formed) will be run by honest business people with decades of experience and a desire to build a fantastic business for all concerned…”

Decades of experience, thats ok then… had it been years, well forget it…

Jury is still out for me, I’d still advise people avoid it.

“If it sounds too good to be true…”

Personally, when I want to share things for free with the world, I just donate to charity. (Speaking of which, I’m jumping out of an aeroplane soon – more to follow!)

UPDATE: Following a comment, I checked and can still login. I did notice this worrying item in the news:

Ripple members may remember that in February our payment processor PayPal pulled the plug on me2everyone as the volume of transactions went beyond the level they were comfortable with. For six weeks we provided them with all the information they requested in respect of the business, but unfortunately they decided that they did not want to be involved in me2everyone.

Paypal will no longer work with me2everyone, interesting…

a startup contest?

Posted by luke on Apr 20, 2009 in blog | 1 comment

Last weeks startup meetup was very interesting,we discussed the idea of having some form of startup contest – see Mark Ng’s write up on the contest idea here

In a rough summary:

Incubator idea – full time commitment / funded / fixed end date to contest (3 months?) / launch day where ideas/teams are founded

part time contest – part time teams / sponsored / fixed end date / launch day where teams can find missing members

or some combo of the two, perhaps a launch day where teams could pitch to be in the incubator and then a free for all for any other p/t teams who wanted to compete for the main prize… whatever that was.

Personally, I’m split on the idea… I totally see the commitment side that Mark argues for.. I also think a p/t contest has merits.

qwitter is not so great

Posted by luke on Apr 14, 2009 in blog | 0 comments

Qwitter sends you an email when someone stops following you and says what the last message was that you sent.

Aside from the fact I’m not 100% sure that services like this are a good idea – I’ll save that debate for Sean Bonners post which covers some of what I’d of said – twitter is best when not used like a social network, if i stop following you, its not because we’re not “friends” any more, it could be for any number of reasons, I frequently follow and un-follow people, although I’m increasingly using tweetdeck’s grouping feature to just follow everyone – more on that another day.

I was interested to trial Qwitter as a means of seeing why followers go up and down, I had some theories I wanted to test.

The first major thing i found is that the emails you get from Qwitter come in groups, now either I keep tweeting things that make people stop following me in groups… or its grouping the qwitters  together. Judging by the tweets that people stopped following me on, its almost certainly the latter.

The second was that some user accounts were adding and removing me more than once, the majority of these were spam-like accounts, I guess hoping for an auto-follow.

There were a couple of non-spam-like accounts doing it, this was curious, the only explanation i can have is that it keeps them near the top of my followers list – meaning new users who thought “ah, I wonder who else of interest I might find on Luke’s followers list” would more likely see them.

Its vaguely useful to know who has stopped following you, as long as you remember that its not personal and that the qwitter alerts most likely aren’t on the right tweet.

BarCamp Bournemouth

Posted by luke on Apr 8, 2009 in blog | 0 comments

Last weekend, I went to my first BarCamp – BarCamp Bournemouth – a “self organising un-conference”.

If you’ve never been to one, you should go. I wasn’t exactly sure what to expect, I new the history of how they’d started and I had a rough idea what went on… I’m pleased to report it exceeded my expectations.

For those of you who too lazy to click on the wikipedia entry above, in essence its an event where anyone (and everyone is encouraged to do so) can give a talk about pretty much anything. There’s a white board with slots on it for people to write in what talk they’d like to give/discussion they’d like to host.

from Flickr stream (Andy Trickett)

Some of the highlights for me:

Two Guys a smart car and a bagel – which can only be described by “the hodge” himself, go read it.

The crowdsourced haircut – donate £5 to The Dyslexia Research Trust and take a snip at his hair. Erm… ok.

DigitalDeath – this one was a real though provoker, what happens to accounts after people die, does their content get deleted, should it be kept? Do you have a digital will? We also touched on whats happens when people go “off-grid”.

Other talks I attended (some lightning talks) were on Geocaching, how to make a pulse jet engine, “developer vs designers, why can’t we all get along” (by @adrianh) – from the downright geeky (life defined in two lines of APL  code) to the philosophical (A proof that there is only one true fact).

I really loved the talk about the ridiculous diagrams people have developed for Social Media (@socialmediatwat) – it’s so true.

It was really good to hear a developer rip into “social media practitioners” using their own worst examples – I’m always concious that what I do doesn’t get drowned in marketing drivel and buzzwords – so it was really good to get some reinforcement that what’s important is true engagement, it IS sad that some marketeers and agencies need telling that its just conversations online – I think what he missed though is that some people NEED to be shown this stuff, they’re not native to the internet and what they’ve seen before is push push push perhaps.

Where possible, I check content avoids the LGA banned word list – I’d suggest you read this list.

Next time you see a BarCamp near you, go.