A Bright Idea with A Bright Future

I just wanted to take a moment to tell you about Bright One, an intiative that I've been spearheading over the last few months and that launched last week.

Bright One is a communications agency aimed at charities, non-profits and social enterprises, run by volunteers from the industry who want to broaden their communication’s experience and use their expertise for social good. It aims to deliver high quality communications for charities, non-profit organisations and social enterprises, and in turn help them to reach those they are trying to help. You can find out more about Bright One's aims by going to the website here.

Bright One launched officially on Thursday 25 September with an appearance in PR Week, which you can read by clicking on the photo below.


I hope you agree that this is a great idea - everyone we've spoken to has said so and we know there are plenty of people out there who need our help, which is why an idea has become a working organisation.

You can follow us in Twitter, join our Facebook page, flag useful things to us using Delicious, and find out about the other social entrepreneurs we are working with over at Unltd World.

To get a better idea of what I'm up to over at Bright One, read the introduction post here.

Thoughts on the first ever Twestival

Wow.

For something that started from a conversation in the pub just two short months ago to an event that captured the interest of tweeple around the world, Twestival was a bigger success than any of us could have imagined.

The original idea for Twestival came about when Tom Malcolm (@tommalcolm), Tim Hoang (@timhoang) and I sat down over a few beers and decided that we wanted to organise a tweetup that raises money for a good cause at the same time.

But Twestival wouldn't have been anywhere near what it was without the amazing work from Amanda Rose (@amandita) and Renate Nyborg (@renatenyborg and Madhouse Collective), who gave up a lot of time to organise the event and really pushed to make Twestival so much bigger and better than originally planned. Amanda and Renate – if I haven't said it enough already, thank you so much.

Some of the reasons for the event's success that people have suggested are that it wasn't just a tech and early adopter event – tweeple from all walks of life came down to Doon to share a common love for Twitter. There was also a fairly even split of guys and gals, which we thought was a nice change from the normal sausage fests that tech events tend to be.

The charity aspect also appealed to a lot of people and charity that we donated all the profits to - The Connection – were so appreciative of all the donations they received, whether it was in money of food. The charity aspect will always be part of whatever we do next with Twestival.

I also managed to talk about a project I've launched. It's called Bright One - a communications agency aimed at charities, non-profits and social enterprises, run by volunteers from the industry who want to broaden their communication’s experience and use their expertise for social good. If you've got a moment please take a look at the site and get in touch with me if you want to find out more.

Of course you could say that the best part about the night was the nature of the tweeple. Every time I meet a fellow twitterer in real life they have always been the friendliest of people. Those I got to meet at Twestival and the friends I caught up are too many to name (and I'm sure I'll forget plenty), but it was a pleasure to see everyone who I follow on Twitter and meet those who I didn't follow (but now do!)

Lots of people have written their own thoughts on Twestival. Here are the blog posts that I've come across so far:

• TechCrunch UK
• Current TV
• Diffusion PR
• Huddle
• Londonist
• Sizemore
• Benjamin Ellis
• Social PRobiotic
• One Size Fits One
• Jazamatazz
• Richard
• This Is Now
• Fake Plastic Noodles
• The A to E
• Toodlepip
• Girl About Web
  

I'm sure there are a few more so let me know in the comments if I've missed any out and I'll update the list.

There's also a whole load of photos on Flickr, for which we'll start a group and collate everything, but in the meantime please tag any photos with #twestival so everyone can find them easily.

But my favourite part of the Twestival buzz comes from Twitter itself. Not only did Twitter blog about Twestival as a 'hot trend', but I've spent a good few hours looking over the vast amount of tweets that people have written about Twestival. Simply type 'Twestival' into Twitter Search and you'll see what I mean.

Thanks also need to go to the sponsors of Twestival – UnLtd World, Huddle, Diffusion PR, Tactile CRM, Winston & Strawn LLP, and Just Giving. Also a big shout out to the various people who donated prizes towards the raffle – Firebox.com, Wubud, Harper Collins, ITV, Forbidden Planet, Moo, WineLibrary.tv, Raffle.it, Reuters, Six Degrees PR and a small company called Twitter.

The organisers of this first ever Twestival are meeting up in the near future to discuss where we take it from here. With so much positive feedback and an obvious desire to do it again, we've got a few ideas of how we can make Twestival bigger and better.

In the meantime, if you have any ideas/feedback/money to give us for the next Twestival, or even just to let us know if you enjoyed the night and give us some love, then please leave a comment below.

See you at the next Twestival!

May Those Who Help The Most Win

Google has launched a number of new sites as part of its 10-year anniversary celebrations and one of the websites that caught my eye (well, a site that a friend flagged to me) is Project 10^100, which has been described as "a call for ideas to change the world by helping as many people as possible."

Google explain more about their thinking behind the project:

"Never in history have so many people had so much information, so many tools at their disposal, so many ways of making good ideas come to life. Yet at the same time, so many people, of all walks of life, could use so much help, in both little ways and big. In the midst of this, new studies are reinforcing the simple wisdom that beyond a certain very basic level of material wealth, the only thing that increases individual happiness over time is helping other people. In other words, helping helps everybody, helper and helped alike."

The project is called Project 10^100 because 10100 is another way of expressing the number "googol," a one followed by one hundred zeroes. This expresses Google's goal of achieving great results through smart technology that starts small and scales dramatically over time to have a tremendous long-term impact. Project 10100 is a similar attempt to produce those kinds of scalable results by harnessing Google's users' insights and creativity.

It's a great idea as no one knows what ideas would help the most people. Google's project has the premise that maybe its hundreds of millions of users might. 

Google said that it would post a selection of the 100 best ideas and ask the public to choose 20 semi-finalists. Following this selection process an advisory board will select up to five final ideas.

I've got an idea that I'm thinking of submitting (more on this very soon), but in the meantime here is the official promo video:

Anyone who thinks they're too cool to use Twitter can leave

(Tip 'o the hat to Tim Masih!)

"Rapping" up the week

There's nothing I like better on a sunny Friday afternoon than a good old Search Engine Rap Battle:

"You're new system hasn't gotten many users,

They only use Vista because it came on their computers!"

The video below is of the battle between Google and MSN, but check out the official website for more!

Update!

It's always the way, isn't it?

You wait around for ages for a rap video viral to come along and then two appear at once!

This one is from Yell and after you've watched it you'll probably want a hip hop horse too:

And while we're here, what about an absolute classic from Flight of the Conchords, featuring the Hiphopopotamus and the Rhymenoceros:

Mobile Monday London - “Mobile Platforms”

After a summer break, MoMo London returned this week with a great event discussing the future of mobile platforms. Held at the usual venue,  CBI Conference Center in Centre Point Tower, the evening was sponsored by Yahoo! and facilitated by EMCC Software.

After the evening it was good to catch up with Andrew Grill - who showed me a cool mobile service that is sure to launch over here soon - and to meet Simon Maddox in the flesh after exchanging tweets.

Blog posts on the evening have already appeared from Simon Judge and Kai Hendry. Below are the notes I took on the evening, which I'm sure are far from comprehensive and may not make sense unless you were there, but I hope they prove useful in some shape or form:

Chair:

Annie Turner, TelecomsEurope.net

Panel Members:

Simon Rockman – Sony Ericsson

Nick Allot – CTO, OMTP

Msrko Balabanovc – LastMinute.com

Ben Last – EMCC

Ricardo Varela – Yahoo!

Platform fragmentation

• OMTP looking for consensus on key issues.
  

What do we mean by platforms?

• A cheap way to build an application
  
• OR What developers develops their applications for
  

Different platforms at both ends of the scale

• All pervasive, e.g. Text
  
• Other end of line – Symbian application, deeper user experience but not much penetration

In between user experience and market penetration is ideal, but doesn't give you a good return/monetisation

Web is fantastic for broad applications. For mobile applications, need access to things that classically present a security problem, e.g. access to contacts and location.

It's difficult to write apps for a sustainable business model. Only success story (apart from porn) is mobile ringtones.

How can we get consistency in what the web can gave to native mobile platforms so that it doesn't threaten security and viability of mobile applications/platforms?

Trying to find application environment that is ubiquitous, is quick to develop with, and quick to deploy to the end user.

It is the integration with the web that really adds to the richness of the user experience.

Computer games developers optimise for certain platforms, e.g. Brain Training for the Nintendo DS.

• Fragmentation of mobile platforms doesn't make this possible for mobile developers, unless you target a niche with a large audience, such as Blackberry users.
  
• Also made more complex by different languages and societies with different grades of mobile handsets around the world.

1 billion mobile phones sold around the world per year. 40% of those are Nokia handsets.

App stores could be tailored to who the consumer is, e.g. only present them with apps relevant to their handset.

Develop apps for Nokia Series 60 and Blackberry and you can capture the majority of the mobile app audience.

Apps that already exist on the web aren't interesting to mobile users. Those that are enhanced and unique to th mobile are a lot more interesting.

iPhone app store works because it is such a seamless experience. It is easy to connect to the internet, easy to connect to the app store, and easy to pay for items as it is billed to your iPhone account. If operators see this model working, they will replicate it and incorporate it into their own business model.

Writing apps for the web gives you 10s of millions of users, but for the mobile space only gives you a few million at most. The business model doesn't scale well.

Consumers who don't download apps are not averse to spending money, but disappointed with apps and games that they have downloaded. Web still gives a much richer user experience.

Lots of phones will not get more powerful, but they will get a lot cheaper. Phones will become to be priced 12-15 pounds. But for the next 2 billion people to enter the market by buying these phones this is still very expensive, e.g. a weeks wages.

Two ways of stopping fragmentation:

• 1 or 2 companies monopolise the market
  
• Operators and developers collaborate on a single platform

One of the biggest applications in India is having a torch on your phone – extremely useful to a large base of users, but no sustainable business model given their economic demographic

OMTP trying to construct a system which properly constructs trust in the system and completely removes the unneeded questions that users have to deal with. E.g. taking an application from one operator/mobile platform to another without having to re register of fill out more security certificates

Ben Whitaker: Users shouldn't ever have to deal with different languages for different phones or have to set up their own internet connections. The technology for a standardised WAP system is available but very few operators install it automatically.

Yahoo! Blueprint

• How are they going to make money out of this?
  
• The way they make money is to make their own applications. Yahoo's motivation behind releasing Yahoo Blueprint is to gain the audience and then monetise once the audience is there.
  
• Yahoo wants to get the reach so they only have one system for each different type of platform, e.g. Symbian, Java, etc

LastMinute.com aren't looking to see applications, but rather get people to buy stuff from LastMinute.com through using free applications on their phone.

• Using as a trial to see what the user uptake is in this space, e.g. what do users find useful?
  
• But only concentrated on Western European users and find mobile secondary to what users have on web at home or work.

Trying to resolve the fragmentation issue by bringing out your own solution will just result in ore fighting over the issue. The reason Firefox become so successful was that it started to do the same things as IE but make it better and with added features.

If a user doesn't have an internet connection on the phone, the app automatically detects this and completes the registration process through encrypted SMS texts.

Ladbrokes reported 250% uplift in users when they introduced full registration on mobile rather than on the web.

As with the web, we will see some standardisation at some point, but this has to come from something higher than a company or organisation. When this will happen is determined when it comes to the point when users say that this isn’t working

Customers didn't buy the Wii for the Wii, but they bought the Wii when they saw someone else playing Wii sports and bought the Wii so that they too could play Wii sports. It's a dot com phrase, but that 'killer app' which is easy to use, offers a rich experience and is easily shareable among users will make a lot of money even if it is on one platform.

Enabled By (Re)Design

Today Enabled by Design, a social enteprise that aims to make independent living more accessible through the use of clever modern design, announced the launch of their new logo and website.

The redesign has gone live on the same day that Social Innovation Camp (the event that gave rise to Enabled by Design back in April) launches its call for ideas for the second camp coming up this December. The redesigned website provides an opportunity for people to air their views, talk through ideas and hopefully find some answers.

Enabled by Design's premise is "Adaptation + Modern Design = Enabled by Design" and it is sure to be a winning formula given their success at Social Innovation Camp, bTWEEN 08 and being nominated for an award at the inaugral UK Catalyst Awards.

Denise Stephens and Dominic Campbell, the co-founders of Enabled by Design, said:

"We hope the new site is now much more of a space for people to come together and share loves, hates or just general views on assistive equipment and how we should be working together to improve it. We’re really looking forward to hearing what people want to talk about and being part of the conversation."

In honour of their redesign, I've changed my Twitter avatar to Enabled by Design's new logo, but you can also become a fan of Enabled by Design over at their Facebook page, follow what they're up to on Twitter and see photos of their innovative designs on their Flickr page.

Seven years ago today

Seven years ago today. Who can forget the images of tragedy?

• Nearly 3,000 people died in this mass murder
  
• Representing more than 90 different nationalities
  
• Over 6,200 were injured
  
• 24 people still officially missing
  

Never forget.

(Thanks to Neville Hobson)

Scheduling Twitter messages with Twittertise

Twittertise could prove to be an extremely useful tool for all sorts of companies and organisations on Twitter, as it lets you schedule Twitter messages in advance to send automatically.

Whatever is written on Twitter is posted immediately into the main timeline, which is great for individual users who want to let people know what they're up to, but if a company wants to send out pre-written tweets - like news, announcements, or other promotional messages - they'd need someone to remember to manually send out the messages or setup an RSS feed, through a service such as Twitterfeed, to automatically do the job for you.

The problem of tweeting announcements this way is that  it normally results in 10 messages being sent at once - very annoying for those whose timeline is suddenly taken up by a torrent of news announcements:

That's where Twittertise comes in, allowing you to spread out the timing of tweets to appear less spamtastic. Twittertise is also simple to use: you log in with your Twitter username and password, type in tweets your tweets as normal and schedule them to send at a specific time.

Simple, but effective.

If you want to direct people to your homepage or a news item of interest,  Twittertise has an excellent feature that routes links through a URL shortening tool called Bit.ly, which lets you track how many people have clicked through your link - an indespensible feature for Public Relations practitioners (amongst others) who want to prove the audience reach of their Twitter activity.

I'm sure there's lots more uses for Twittertise - what do you see as potential uses of this service? What are the other advantages if using this service? Any disadvantages that users should be aware of?

My Big Twitter Update

I didn't want to give Google Chrome any more coverage than it's already got, but...

Did you know that Google Chrome lets you resize any text box? How do they even do that?

It seems quicker than Firefox as well, though I'm sure there are plenty of people who have already run speed tests pitting the browsers against each other in a brutal fight to the death.

And yes, the Google Chrome comic is very cool, but the mashups are even cooler.

Saying hi to 3W PR

Stephen Davies, (formerly) of Webit PR and prolific blogger at PR Blogger, has announced today that he we will be establishing his own PR agency.

3W PR is "a new communications agency designed to help organisations, brands and individuals navigate through the World Wide Web." Davies says that the agency has been introduced to meet the growing trends of how consumers are now informed and how organisations do.

Davies gives us an insight into his motivations for setting up the agency:

Setting up 3W PR just felt like the right thing to do. Not just because I think it’s going to be a success but because I see it as a challenge to me on both a personal and professional level. It’s a challenge that I’m really up for, though, and over the course of setting up 3W (as I affectionately call it for short) I’ve developed a vision of where I want it to be headed. And a vision really isn’t a vision if you only think small.

Spawned out of admiration for a number of individuals in the industry who have taken a similar move (Stuart, Daljit , Jonathan, Katy), 3W's first client will be the company that Davies is leaving, Webit PR. You can read the news release announcing the launch here, or for a more personal tone you can read the blog post here.

All that remains to say is best of luck to Stephen and we'll all be watching this space to see what he gets up to next!

HWH PR Named and Shamed

The Bad Pitch Blog writes a scathing post today, criticising the practises of PR agency HWH PR and their habit of turning client news releases into PR spam.

The Bad Pitch Blog even went so far as to 'honour' them with a Lifetime Achievement Award (pictured) - though I think that if it was a bad pitch then the ball should be falling out of the glove, not neatly caught in it.

This post may represent a change of tact in the battle against PR spam: creating public appeals to the brand owner rather than the PR agency itself. As the post says:

To Samsung, Westinghouse Digital and Dotster I ask if you want people like this representing your brand.

Blasting news releases to anyone with an email address and ignoring their replies is not practicing media relations – it’s spamming. They’ve done a bad enough job handling media relations on their clients' behalf that I’m forced to call these brands into question.

When the people that you are paying to represent your brand start to tarnish it, it poses a major risk to the reputation of your brand. Firstly from the intial spam that these people are sending, but secondly from the extended implications of this, namely that your brand has chosen these people to represent them and are still paying them despite a large amount of complaints from the journalist community.

It's becoming increasingly important for brands to not only listen to what is being said about them, but also to listen to what is being said about the people they outsource work to and who represent their company. If they don't and respond in the correct way to any negative feedback (e.g. when journalists consistently complain, find a new PR agency and ensure that they are representing the company in the right way), then they risk damaging their brand and losing trust from the communities, including journalists, that they are trying to reach.