Lifes a Pitch – quite a good book.

Prompted by an article on the excellent blog Found and Read I thought I’d mention the most recent good book I’ve read. I’m not a huge reader and certainly not of many business or life-coach-esque titles; but occasionally I discover something or am recommended something particularly good which I am willing to invest my time in.

Lifes a Pitch is a title of a book which certainly falls into this category.
The book contains invaluable and priceless info (especially in the first half) about how to pitch; both write, prepare, its structure and delivery and how to achieve good delivery. Its relevant to giving a presentation to sell, to win a contract, to get investment or simply as an inter-department presentation to colleagues or a boss.

It’s down to earth and REAL – written by someone who knows from the front how to really fight the war; not by some consultant who has never actually tasted and chewed on the grit of giving presentations to win business or win people over.

The rest of the book is pretty good too; talking about general business issues and one’s own personal approach to the challenged of trying to achieve something in one’s life. Split into two books, its laid out in an easy to read way, amusingly illustrated and unusually structured, split into two books – each one written by one of the two authors.

If you read it, let me know what you think – it would be great to have others opinions.

Spamming on WAYN

Social Networks continue to get hit this week – hours after I got spammed/fished on Hi5, I had the same treatment on WAYN; although they sent me to a different site. The usual process occured, summaries below:

1. email friend invite

2. goto profile – clearly dodgy (although where does the sheep fit into this??)

3. sent to stupid other site (in this case some personals site)

It’s going to be tough for us getting our first million users on Rummble (atleast, one assumes ! but there simply no way I’m resorting to these types of tactics. MySpace was built from and by a company that had a Database of 50million emails and were themselves an email marketing company. Mark Z at Facebook, downloaded his Universities student lists from the servers and kick started it that way. Some point, on the early curve of Facebook apps, managed to get 100’s of 1000’s of signups in a few days/hours. So, where does that leave us? Building a genuine hard-grafted, blow by blow database of users I guess… Watch this space.

The Decline of MySpace Begins

Annual MySpace’s page views fell 7 % from December of 2006 to the same month in 2007, according to comScore. MySpace saw a 9 % decline in page views from November to December as well. Facebook’s year-over-year growth came in at 43 %, despite a 12 % decline from the prior month.

The graph below makes for interesting reading:

Thanks to SocialNetworkingWatch and Gigacom with full story on Myspace Decline for the headsup.

World Entreprenuers Summit 2008

LONDON Thursday 10th Jan 2008 – A somewhat belated post (it got left in my WordPress drafts folder!) on WES08 in London earlier this month. The event was interesting and as always at the events where there are a mix of disciplines I met some interesting people. However, my main criticism would be that the event actually tried to spread its net too far.

The main thrust of the event seemed to be regarding social entrepreneurship, but the panel debates didn’t necessarily reflect this. The content or quality of a conference panel is, more often than not, a direct consequence of how good or bad the moderator is. I’m frequently suprised how many moderators quite simply dont moderate. The topic drifts or the answers from panelists are long winded. While it can be good to let the room guide the debate, ultimately the people attended that conference track because they were interested in the subject of that specific panel; the moderator should keep it focused on that subject.

So in this respect, the panels were interesting – because we discussed UK/US funding differences, growing teams, what drives growth, allocation of equity to motivate staff and numerous things around these topics. They were a few steps away from the titles of the sessions; and little to do with, specifically, social entrepreneurship.

I was confused as to the overall direction of the conference, as were some of the entrepreneurs and VCs who attended. One drunk -unnamed- VC described it as “a waste of f***ing time” over the dinner table. Not that I was wholly surprised; social entrepreneurship would seem the least compatible in culture with the morals of Venture Capital .

That said, of Karan Bilimoria’s, founder of Cobra beers, gave a fantastic Keynote -really cant recommend him enough- at the end of the first day and John Bird (Big Issue founder) gave a rousing and typically lively speech after Dinner, the summary of which was that after we have all finished looking “outside the box” we should not forget to take that knowledge and “get back in the box” to help everyone else who doesn’t lead such a dynamic life.

Spam alive and well on Social Networks

Its been a while since Ive been spammed on a social network; infact since I last got junk from MySpace, but it appears spamming is alive and well. Today I received an invite from “Erica”. I meet alot of people around the world so I wasn’t sure if I knew her or not. A quick look at her profile gave the game away – some people I know are very popular, but 28,000+ friends? I think not.

[For those who cant see it on this graphic, it says Erica has 28,623 friends ... yea right. She's cute, but she's not 28,623 friends cute!]

It is, without doubt, difficult for sites (including our own at Rummble) to manage and avoid unscrupulous users using the site to spam unsuspecting users about their products or to drive traffic to porn sites, but there are obvious things one can do. Safeguards we employ includes:

• Simple “Abuse” reports for people sending fake invites
• Automatic highlighting of unusual activity in the system (excessive friend invites for example)
• Captcha technology which is randomized to prevent scripts hijacking invite functionality on the website

With Hi5’s size and funding, I’m surprised that these are either not in place or not being actioned. There really is no excuse.

Suffice to say I will not be purchasing from “Die Dada” mobile portal. I had hoped that this sort of spam selling was something of the past in the mobile industry; clearly that hope was premature. It does nothing to induce confidence in users and if they are willing to use spamming techniques to gain traffic and potential sales, then they are likely to unscrupulously charge your credit card for subscription downloads on mobile too! So avoid! …you have been warned.

Ad Exchange Panel oversubscribed at DLD

I’m sitting at DLD Conference in Munich; the Ad Exchange panel which includes Comscore CEO, Admob Founder and Doubleclick CEO is bar far the busiest panel thus far, with people on the floor, standing, and crowding in the door. Thank god I have a chair.  I think its interesting that this is thus far the best attending panel.

Twitter has major outage again…

Further to my post of 20th December 2006, Twitters continued downtime really does flabagasts me. Seven months post VC funding and they still cant get their ducks in a row, as Techcrunch reports, Twitter is still unreliable and crashes at major events:

Twitter Fails Macworld Keynote Test

Posted: 15 Jan 2008 01:46 PM CST

Many Twitter fans have become very much used to following big events via Twitter, its immediate nature and 140 character limit provides key points of what exactly is going on.

Unfortunately for Twitter users, Twitter completely failed during Steve Job’s keynote address at the Macworld Expo in San Francisco.

From the floor I thought it may have just been my internet connection, but for the brief time Twitter has been up since the keynote (it’s returning errors as I write this) the Twitterosphere is not very happy, particularly those who stayed up late (it was 4am on the East Coast of Australia when it started, and I know plenty of people who were up for it).

Mike Bogle sums it up well in a post he wrote during the keynote:

In that sense Twitter has really begun to play a central role in significant events these days – not just for information consumers, but for deliverers as well. It provides an opportunity for staff working on major events to follow consumer/public opinion as it’s being formulated in the minds of the public. As such it provides some amazing insight.

However as of right now however, Twitter is unresponsive and no – or minimal – tweets are getting through. This has effectively crippled one of the key real-time modes of information dissemination and discussion and left countless users in the lurch.

The fact that Twitter continues to crash during times like this arises from nothing short of poor planning on the part of the company. Load and capacity planning is a fundamental consideration for providers of enterprise level services and the fact Twitter is not doing that is not only cause for a tremendous amount of frustration from end-users, but also concern about the staying power and future of the company.

For those that did miss the event, you can see my live notes from the event here.

Twitter will probably just shrug their shoulders as they usually do during outages, and ultimately we’ll all keep using it, but if there’s one messge I’d like to get through to Twitter: keep messing with Twitter users and eventually users might flock elsewhere; sure there’s no reasonable alternative now (Pownce is on deadpool watch, Jaiku was killed by Google) but this won’t always be the case.

How right they are…Note: Rummble now integrates with Twitter (provided Twitter is working!) and updates your Rummble status to your Twitter account.

More bricks removed from the walled garden of Social Networks

In a nutshell, the major social networks have agreed, in principle, to try to agree about sharing user data and exporting one’s “social graph” (that poncey way to say a social network database).

What, when and how it will all happen, we will wait and see; but it is a major shift in approach which was inevitable, but nobody knew when.

The Data Portability workgroup is where it will all happen. As I’ve been saying for a long time, getting critical mass and using that as a reason why your business has logevity, will not be enough in the future. This only reinforces my beleif.

More at the omnipresent Techrunch on Facebook, Google and Plaxo joining the Data Portability Workgroup

STOP PRESS: Good followup from Mike Butcher at TCUK here regards potential EU Legals…

Snailmail meets Email

This is an interesting company “Earth Class Mail” it is just a pity it operates in the U.S. only. They scan your post, then you can choose remotely which to have opened and scanned or sent to you or junked. Given how electronic my life is, I would probably use it. I’m almost disgusted at myself that I would consider doing so … if they can make it pay, its a great idea and one of the few industries to traverse that difficult old-world to new-world divide. Those of us who were in the middle of the dot com boom will remember the many failed local delivery services et al which attempted to combine the Net with traditional delivery services. This isn’t the same, but it does make a change to see the web being utilized in a new way to affect the way we live the more traditional elements of our lives.

What have I been doing all my life?

Inspired by this TED interview of Richard Branson (although I don’t propose for a moment to hoist myself alongside such an eminent business leader!) I thought I’d make a list of the companies I have founded, or help found.

Since the first consultancy job to equip my Secondary School’s I.T. department at age 16 (I spent $140,000 (£70,000) of the schools money on an ICT department; specified and installed it) I have worked for many companies both large and small, boring and bizarre.

The companies below are those that I started or was influential in shaping. They are what I would loosely describe as “entrepreurial endevours” rather than jobs or contracts. Usually unpaid, involving a disproportionate amount of effort and a good proportion of passion, a trail of successful, partially successful or completely unsuccessful companies is the calling card of a serial entrepreneur; a label these days I feel I have comfortably earnt!

Rummble – share you experiences

My current company.

playtxt – the mobile social network (2002-2006)

A forerunner to Rummble, we experimented with ideas and pioneered functionality in the mobile social software space. We learnt a lot. Years to early to market as the MNO’s strangled the progression of the mobile internet, playtxt sapped resource and time but ultimately made Rummble possible.

InTraining.net (2000 – 2002)

Intraining was intended as a personal fitness trainer online. We modelled the training techniques and logic of David Morgan, Commenwealth Games and Olympic athlete. Although we developed and refined a software engine that worked well, I had to make a decision between running playtxt and my consultancy, and InTraining. The bigger opportunity of the mobile sector one over.

Telephone Wizard (2003)

I started as consultant and quickly became Technical Director of this sales technology startup. The aim was to build a telephone marketing and hardware dialler system that was both easy to use for SMEs and didn’t abuse the targets of the sales calls. We developed and deployed some successful pilot systems, but ultimately the Managing Director/CEO of the company decided to pursue and invest in his other businesses; we agreed to wind operations down.

DinnerDateAuctions – mobile dating pioneer (2000 – 2002)

DDA was -to my knowledge- the first dating/matching service to integrate mobile services and functionality. We used two-way SMS to allow users to interact with the service, using intelligent interpretation of text commands. Alongside this we build a groundbreaking site using Flash based avatars that tracked users through a site, could be personalised and assisted the user; imagine the Microsoft Office Paperclip, but infinitely less annoying!

Cambridge Multimedia Group (2000 – 2002)

After CMG plc bought worldwidecity I worked with the existing board and management team to deliver some sizeable web projects in a variety of areas; one of the most succesful was the British Pathe online video archive – long before YouTube we transcoded 3500+ hours of film stock into multiple feed qualities and made them available for download online. It was UK Lottery funded and was a huge success garnering accolades in the industry and attracting BBC prime time TV national news coverage.

Worldwidecity – web development consultancy (1998 – 2000)

A web development company which served the businesses powering the dot com boom – and subsequent bust! We were busy, office space was madly expensive, developers were like hens teeth and it was a crazy time. Looking back I cant quite understand why we were not the ones running a dot com company; but this way atleast, we absorbed a vast array of experience working on the ordinary to the absurd. A fun time but busy and stressful time.

Virtual Cities (1997 – 1998)

My first real Internet business. The concept was simple, a localized portal offering local services and information for people, targeted at a specific geographic area. In this case, UK towns and cities. Sounds obvious? It might be now, it wasn’t then! Business people just didn’t get it. “Advertise on the internet, which is global, locally?” They were confused. It was too early. A fact that wasnt alien to some of my other startups either – as I have learnt, business success is as much about timing as anything else.

Although a success with user (traffic and site visits were good) we were too early and under capitalized in this sector. Nomuera bank showed interest but I was lacked experience to pull together a strong enough management team – being based in Cambridge, England didn’t help that process.

Ultimately, the hook of this advertising platform gave us a huge number of full web development leads; this made the business a success, even if it was for a very different reason to that which was intended … again, in business I’ve learnt that isnt unusual either!