AntGalvin’s Blog

Remember the Gemini Man?
He used his digital watch to make himself  invisible after a diving accident in the seventies. (I swear, just watch below).

Now I can do the same thanks to Gmail.

Gmail makes me invisible.

Cool. Now I am off to sneak into someone’s office and go through their filing cabinets. (This being the main use for invisibility in the 70’s).

Following a good conversation led by Haydn Shaughnessy at the recent Bar Camp Cork. Also following a great conversation at last weeks Open Coffee Club Cork, led mainly by John Prendergast.

What the hell is Web 2.0/Social media/All that Jazz good for?

and more importantly for most of us.

What the hell is it anyway?

Well, I learned a lot from the following presentation. Next time someone asks me, I’ll know where to send them.

Thanks to Catherine for the pointer.

Despite my tardiness, I have made it on to the Session list at the BarCamp Cork website. (Second from the bottom – So not the tardiest!).

Whats it about?

People with ideas for businesses have a tendency to keep them for themselves so that they alone can profit from them.

Why this is wrong?

Very rarely can one person bring an idea from concept to profit.

Why can’t one person turn an idea into a business?

Well, its not that they can’t, its that they shouldn’t.

• Starting a business is a huge energy drain. Share the burden.
• 2, 3 or n heads are better than 1. The more* perspectives that feed into a product/business/decision – The better the outcome. (*Within reason obviously).
• Contacts. Can’t have enough contacts.

and most importantly

• Business is multi-disciplined. How many good engineers are good marketers that have a handle on Balance sheets?

Why bring this up at BarCamp?

Good question, all of the above is fairly common sensical anyway.

The reason why BarCamp Cork is such a good place to address this issue is that it will be attended by business people, technologists, artists, designers, students, young people, old people, Cork, Dub and Belfast people and lots of others.

With them they will bring:

1. Time.
2. Perspectives.
3. Energy.
4. Skills.
5. Contacts.
6. Money.

They are the sort of people, opportunists, entrepreneurs, who if they come across something that has potential are not the sort of people to walk away.

So what?

In this session – I am opening it to the floor in the hopes that others might talk about their own ideas – Give them away in the hopes that something can be made of them.

Speak about your idea – And its potential, and invite others to talk to you about it. Who knows what will come of these discussions?

I will even put my own idea out there, to be shot down if necessary.

Photo owned by La Tangerina (cc)

To start I must apologise for my quietness for the last 5 days – Unexpected and unavoidable.

Now with two days to go, I am actually feeling quiet good about the potential to do a Web Business idea brainstorm. One of the main reasons I am hopeful is the positive example set by the people at contrast.ie and the “Value of Ideas” post. Its well worth a read to get the history behind the Taskfive.com web app.

I tried to describe a sharing approach to business ideas a few months back with my post on the Wikubator : A community for the evaluating, improving and exploiting business ideas.

The point is that unlike other business assets such as finance, people or materials – keeping it to yourself makes sense. But Ideas don’t work like that.

Ideas thrive in the open.

Photo owned by AliceNWondrlnd (cc)

Here is another example of a genius idea just chucked out there in the hope that someone else will make something of it.

If you are anything like me, you will have had a couple of ideas in your life where you thought “I am a genius”. Why not be a rich genius, put your idea out there, when you know the best collection of minds in Irish Business are all in one spot. See what happens!

I am still yawning, didn’t get home til after 1 last night following two packed days at The Future of Web Apps, London 2008.

I’m shagged cos there was a load to take in there. My personal highlight was Ben Huh, the man behind Lolcats and more specifically icanhascheezburger.com. Not in terms of content…

more animals

Meeehhhhh, Its ok. Ben knows that, he’s fairly so-so about it himself. But that doesn’t matter. He has tens of thousands of site visitors who are OBSESSED.

This is low brow stuff, but this guy spoke with more intelligence than anyone else I heard. I am going to dig out my notes and have a specific post on his stuff – He deserves it.

Web apps or Social media or whatever you want to call it is why we were there. Its my humble opinion that all of these W2.0 advances are Database driven. These databases store the connections between people whether they be Friends or Followers or whatever. We are talking about the addition of a two column table to a database that up to then may have been a dead flat Photo storing site. Now all of a sudden you have social connections and a much more compelling reason for a user to check out the content.

So here’s my gripe… There were the guts of 2000 Web Wannabes there. 1998 of them are going nowhere. Me and some other random guy are going to crack it and we are going be huge. The majority do not need to worry about scaling and enterprise level development tools. We definitely do not need to worry about distributed development when our teams top 20. We most certainly do not need to worry about woo-ing venture capitalists.

The Future of Web Apps is Ideas.

Ben spoke about the exploitation of an idea. Kathy Sierra spoke about the generation and exploitation of these ideas.

Most of the rest of the expo was aimed at problems that the 1998 wannabes won’t have to face until they are wearing ties and back working for multinationals. Maybe they can host the non-critical CRM modules on a Cloud infrastructure.

It should never have got that boring.

THANK CEILIN CAT 4 BEN.

I first heard about Twittad on Techcrunch today. What is Twittad? Its brief tag line says “Let your ad meet tweets”. The tagline may be brief but it doesn’t mean anything to me.

What Twittad does at the moment is allow you, a twitter user, to sign up and sell the background of your homepage. In my case that would be the page located at http://twitter.com/antgalvin. When you sign up, you set a period (a Tenure) and the price you wish to sell your background for.

If an advertiser decides that based upon your number of followers, you look like good bang for the buck, they can sign your background up. Here is an example. @miketempleton signed up $5 for 1 month.

Example of a Twittad

So the background of this user’s twitter page is suddenly converted into real advertising space. Bear in mind that the backgrounds on Twitter homepages are images – There is no click through to another web page. Advertisers must bear in mind that they are buying a fixed static space for a fixed time, click through isn’t relevant.

Its early days for twittad. According to their blog they have been in operation just a week. However going by the information on their front page, I could only find the ad above which was for a venture the twitterer is involved in personally, and for filmfitti.com which is another product of Gray Zone technologies – The company behind Twittad. Like I said, early days – It is hard to say whether Advertisers will be genuinely interested in this take on advertising.

One major problem that I can see for advertisers is in estimating the value of placing an ad on any one twitter profile. One might rush to the view that the more followers a Tweeter has, then the more likely that the user’s profile will be viewed.

In fact, (and as pointed out by techcrunch), users of twitter rarely have any reason to visit a fellow twitter user’s profile. For me, usually the only time I will check out another profile, and so see the background image is when that user starts to follow me. I will receive an email from Twitter informing me, with a link to the profile.

So Advertisers should in fact look for “growth in number of followers” as a more likely indicator of the potential success of a Twittad. The Value an advertiser places on this may only be judged over time and I think it would be in Twittad’s favour were they to start publishing more developed metrics then are currently available on their homepage.

To finish, I don’t think this is the future for advertising on Twitter. The lack of accountability on the Background images is a retrograde step in online advertising. However, Twittad are to be commended on making a good start.

• The Twittad URL.
• The gathering of Twitter users’ credentials.
• The press garnered in this last week.

All of these will help twittad’s first mover advantage. But do they have the imagination to make full use of this advantage?

(On a very picky note, Something made me doubt the professionalism of the Twittad website. The Favicon (i.e the tiny logo that appears in the address bar beside a website’s URL) for Twittad appears to be that of the Plesk server management software. Looks like someone forgot to change that on Go live).

Twittad Favicon