Spotify Labs release Spotify on Blackberry

Spotify Labs have released an early version of Spotify for Blackberry, more info here.

Exciting - I was missing listening to music on the move ever since I got a Blackberry three months ago.

On my Blackberry 8900 I’m getting the following error though… :(

This application requires the following modules, which are not installed:
net_rim_media_actions
 net_rim_bb_browser_field2_api

Makes me miss my iPhone… no Spotify on the go yet.

p.s. apparently you need min OS 5 on Blackberry to run it, the 8900 comes with 4.

Image credit: tecca.com

BoxPark next to Shoreditch High Street station

BoxPark is the World’s first pop-up mall, based next to Shoreditch High Street station, just a a minutes walk from our office at The Cube in Spitalfields. It’s opposite Pizza East/Shoreditch House.

It’s a novel idea that looks unique, with an impressive list of brands too, some established and some fresh/innovative organisations like Art Against Knives.

Perhaps there will be more of these in future, I’m unsure how long it will be there or what will be done with the space afterwards.

ABUZE / AMNESTY SHOP / ART AGAINST KNIVES / BOXFRESH / BOXPARK / BUKOWSKI / CALVIN KLEIN / CHOP’D / CRUSSH / CYBER CANDY / DAVID MAYAR NAMAN / DC SHOES / DOCKERS / ETNIES / EVISU / FARAH VINTAGE / FIFTY FIVE DSL / FOXCROFT & GINGER / FRAE FROZEN YOGHURT / GOLA / HOP-NAMO / IRREGULAR CHOICE / KANGOL / LACOSTE L!VE / LEVI’S / LUKE / MARIMEKKO / MEXWAY / NEW ERA / NIKE / OAKLEY / ONE TRUE SAXON / ONEPIECE / ORIGINAL PENGUIN / PALLADIUM / PHAIDON / PIEMINISTER / PLAYFUL PROMISES / PUMA / ROUTE ONE / SMILEY / THE NORTH FACE / URBANEARS / VANS

Top Down Failures - The Importance of Involving the End User

Not a lot has changed clearly.

Any IT project, from large multi-million pounds government systems to small web apps, all are dependant on the commitment and involvement of the end users in order to accurately steer the project towards a usable end product that completes the initial business objectives whilst keeping users happy.

This should underpin any good requirements process.

Carry Me Cargo Bikes

I went to a bike festival on Mabley Green the other day, where I met Alix of Carry Me Cargo Bikes.

Carry Me Cargo Bikes is a new social enterprise in Hackney working to promote cargo bikes and the carrying of people and loads by bike.

They’re just getting started and have received a grant from the Community Cycling Fund for London to run family bike rides where people can try out cargo bikes for themselves.

As well as selling cargo bikes, child seats, trailers, and accessories they run other projects with a social benefit to help people access cargo bikes: bike sharing schemes, working with schools & parents, advice & help to tradespeople for carrying stuff by bike, delivery services by bike.

As well as selling cargo bikes, child seats, trailers, and accessories they are setting up to run other projects with a social benefit to help people access cargo bikes: bike sharing schemes, working with schools & parents, advice & help to tradespeople for carrying stuff by bike, delivery services by bike. You can find out more by following @CarryMeCargoB on Twitter, or you can contact alix@carryme.org.uk, their website is launching soon too.

Bikeworks East

Bikeworks have just opened a new shop in Bethnal Green on Cambridge Heath Rd.

They offer reused and new bikes, affordable repairs, smiley staff, free coffee and much more, there are details on their website.

100% of their profits go to supporting community cycling initiatives from getting homeless people jobs in the cycling industry to enabling disabled people to access cycling.

Recently Bikeworks won Best Social Enterprise at the London Business Awards. This success follows on from an award for best environmental business in the 2009 Awards.

We wish Bikeworks the best of luck with the new shop and future initiatives.

The address of the new shop:
138 -140 Cambridge Heath Rd
E1 5QJ
http://www.bikeworks.org.uk/contact-us-map.php

Happy riding.

Unintended Consequences of Silicon Roundabout Intervention

I don’t know if I’m talking sense at all but here are some quick thoughts I jotted down the other week about the likely impact of government initiatives with large corporations in the ‘Silicon Roundabout’ area.

Unintended Outcome #1: Bleeding of creative community to elsewhere in London

London isn’t like the valley, it doesn’t have the same incubator eco-system and non-US startups can’t rely on funding so much. What startups in London do want is cheap rent. Cheap rent and a bohemian atmosphere that encourages creativity, with easy access to the finance and retail centres in the City and West End.

What happens when Google, Cisco and Facebook are invited to set up shop in the East End? Rent prices go up and with that good startups leave, or choose to start up elsewhere, somewhere like Deptford or Peckham. An influx of artists and musicians are the first signs of a new creative hotspot and these two areas already show that. How long before the savviest tech startups join them south of the river?

Shoreditch and Hackney provide a bohemian platform of high-quality independent coffee shops, intelligent graffiti, varied parties and casually seditious young people, all element of an encouraging atmosphere for creatives. These people move to the area because of this atmosphere and low rent (for London anyway)

A variety of digital agencies, evolved from print shops of yesteryear, now inhabit the same ecosystem, along with a variety of fresh tech startups. These small tech companies don’t have all that much in common with Google and Facebook, which today have more in common with IBM or Procter & Gamble. The impact of these juggernauts entering the area will be an increase in the price of rent and other living expenses, as state-of-the-art offices and well-numerated employees plough cash in to the area.

The current eclectic community will be cast east to find cheaper rent if large tech firms move in to East London. Tech cities that lack creative talent are barren “high-tech ghettos”, only suitable for cash-rich businesses. Nothing to celebrate then unless you are already wealthy….

Unintended Outcome #2: Lots of already wealthy people become richer

With £200m ploughed in to new initiatives, you can be sure that money will be made somewhere. I imagine most of this will go to a) very large infrastructure business like BT, with the reasoning that faster broadband creates innovation and b) to established businesses bidding through CompeteFor or other government tendering sites which, in my experience, exclude any new business or businesses with less than £100k turnover. In other words, startups.

The type of dynamic that encourages an ecosystem of startups is bottom-up and therefore complex. It’s not coordinated and top-down and it’s therefore not possible to create with the type of initiatives I’ve read about. The best way that money could be spent to encourage an entrepreneurial and creative community is to subsidize rent for new business, reduce business rates and re-introduce support for live/work spaces (which would encourage the type of creative spaces that foster innovation).

Unintended Outcome #3: Starting a tech startup remains basically the same

What startups need is simple. Low rent in an area people enjoy hanging out in that is close to home and contains like-minded individuals. The Government’s most ambitious and practical actions related to Tech City concern fibre-optic broadband access and immigration rules, neither of which are big problems for startups.

In other words, starting a startup will remain pretty much the same.

However, I think we can be safe that the impact of the Tech City initiative will be defused once certain Olympic PR requirements have been met. The Tech City is an attempt to creative a cognitive association between East London tech success and Olympic legacy. Do you know how far Olympic City is from Old Street though? It’s a fair stretch.

For startups, Deptford and Peckham are closer in distance and ethos.

Image credit: Zimbio

There is no tech bubble...

Your Startup & Unfair Advantage

At the last HN London meetup I saw a talk by Evgeny Shadchnev of Forward. My understanding of Forward is that they are basically an internal incubator, with a big team of skilled developers ready to crank out business ideas to MVP stage, then continue building out the promising ones. This is part of a strategy that has seen them earn outstanding revenues, from £1m in 2004 to over £100m in 2010. Nuts!

Evgeny’s talk was engaging because he covered a lot of simple yet powerful points. It was quick too, he only had 5 minutes to speak.

The point I want to talk about is Unfair Advantage. This is a principle of the lean startup movement, which involves you considering what your single unfair advantage is.

Your unfair advantage needs to be:
1. Difficult to achieve.
2. Something you refuse to lose.

Some examples are:
1. An algorithm.
2. A rockstar team.
3. An existing client or set of clients.
4. Specialist knowledge of a particular industry.
3. Access to data that is typically difficult to obtain.

A lot of people approach me with business ideas and this is now the first thing I ask about. “What is your unfair advantage?” is a quick heuristic for figuring out how viable a business idea is.

The next step is to use a business canvas like Ash Maurya’s to sketch a representation of your business idea. There’s loads of stuff out there on how to use a canvas to record your business plans and if you’re in London the lean startup group is also a good place to get more info on this practice and to find others doing the same thing.

There were some other gems in Evgeny’s talk that I won’t cover here but hopefully there will be more speakers to this quality at the next HN meetup.

Guy Kawasaki's theory of project pre-mortems

Just wrote this quick post on my thoughts about Guy Kawasaki’s project pre-mortem idea, which aims to reduce the risk of project failure by getting as many possible problems listed at the start of the project as possible.

Design decisions for the new WeMakeWebsites.info...

Thought I’d write a quick post on some of the design decisions we made for the new site in the hope that it’ll be useful for anyone out there who’s currently re-working their own website.

The main changes are as follows:

• Social proof is the absolute most important thing on the site and is prominent in the form of testimonials on the front page and in our portfolio. We’ve also tried to show the brands we’ve worked with more clearly on the Our Work page but we’re going to make this clearer next week. These are the two most important things we’ve found people look for in our site.
• Concise Why Us page that stresses benefits over services offered or technical information.
• Showing our partner firms on the Services page, suggesting we can deliver related services also.
• Streamlined and more informative Contact page, to decrease time required per enquiry.
• Our lego men appear more often which is good for all sorts of reasons!

Thanks to Leigh at Inon for the Cube lunch he did on pricing last year, which prompted us to think of the three things we do best. There’s more on this here: http://wemakewebsites.info/blog/2011/mar/against-big-joke

“Marketing is about values […] we have to be really clear about on what we want [people] to know about us”

That’s Steve Jobs saying that: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vmG9jzCHtSQ

Remember this video is nearly 15 years old. Check out his shorts.

Signing off - hope you all have a good weekend.