Author Archive

Fluffy Links – Tuesday July 22nd 2014

Tuesday, July 22nd, 2014

Bullshit is the glue of our society. George Carlin. Comedian yes, philosopher yes.

I had hoped to go to the Dots conference but I have work in Cork that day. Boo. Go to it.

Building a successful internal network. Lessons from Telefonica.

Design guidelines from your favourite sites and apps.

The National Library on Flickr Commons. Copyright free photos. Grand Parade Cork.

How Simplifying a 3-Step Form Generated a 30% Conversion Lift

Got interviewed for a student project recently about brands working in regulated markets and whether that hindered them. 2007 interview with Ev Williams from Twitter about how their character restrictions make people creative.

BBC The Men Who Made us Spend. It’s a bit over the top. MehmehBUTAPPLEmehmeh.

This is Eye witness news in a way, Gordon Brown talk to LSE not recorded it seems but tweets from people that were there can give you context.

Moneyball for publishing

Managing in the decade of information overload.

Fluffy Links – Monday 14th of July 2014

Monday, July 14th, 2014

Each and Other is risen from the ashes of IQ Content. Very exciting to see what happens next. Reads like they’re on a design thinking/Ideo path.

New fashion blog. Based in Ireland.

Festival of Curiosity, Dublin, July 24th to 27th.

BBC shows you how to track a company on Twitter for news. Timeline flow is a biggy, pattern recognition again.

Money Ball the sequel? Buy LOTS of players and see how they perform. So data and then performance. Sounds like a startup

“Most of us do not even know how to ask a question. Most of us do not see the root of the word “question” is “quest”.”

Brazil versus Germany. Without Brazil.

The News section is hilarious.

The two Google founders giving a joint and candid interview. A very rare thing.

How to get young people to vote

You always say exactly what you shouldn’t be saying

Thursday, July 10th, 2014

From One Hundred Years of Solitude. Chapter 14. Lovely book.

Meme felt the weight of his hand on her knee and she knew that they were both arriving at the other side of abandonment at that instant. “What shocks me about you” she said, smiling, “is that you always say exactly what you shouldn’t be saying”. She lost her mind over him. She could not sleep and she lost her appetite and sank so deeply into solitude that even her father became an annoyance.

Culture Shock Notes

Monday, July 7th, 2014

Culture shock notes

I bought Will McInnes’ Culture Shock book a good while back and finally had enough time off to read it. As I said to Will, I dog eared the shit out of it and these are the notes from those dog eared pages. Makes sense to me, maybe not to you. I think a lot has happened and sadly a lot HAS NOT happened since it came out so the book is worth a read for anyone in a company/organisation that wants to make changes. Like all books in a new area it had to mix the cheerleading and bringing you over the line part with the “and here’s how to do it part”. I do think even in 2014 that this still needs to happen but for not as many people so one wonders could there be a sister book for the “doing” part and maybe with more exercises. So Will, another book please!

A word of warning: The book however in size looks like it’s going to be nice and easy but the work involved is going to take a lot to do but this will help you plan it all out. This book is a “put downable book” because you are dog earing or taking notes. A very personal feeling is a different shape to the book might have helped with some of the exercises/flows so they’re all on one page or spread over two matching pages. Bigger in terms of being wider. Slimmer but wider.

There’s probably a niche for another book in this area too for people like me, “lone wolf” business people. So Will, a third book!

So, some of my notes, copy, paste and Google, I might be unlazy and add links to these later.
Pg 9 “In ultra competitive business landscape, our organisations need a higher purpose. a story of meaning”

Pg 24 CTI – Coaches Training Institute
“what’s your purpose?” – Richard Jacobs
Check four audiobook too

Pg 47 HCL Technologies.
“employees first, customers second” – Vincent Nagar
Namasté Solar

Pg 57 Worldblu. List of most democratic companies. The Worldblu Scorecard.

Pg 58 Ready. Fire. Aim.

Pg 81 Namasté Solar – F.O.H. Frank Open Honest comms.

Pg 87 Gore.
Associates not employees. Sponsor not manager.
Max 200 in a unit/plant
CEO Terri Kelly – MIT Talk
Nixon McInnes – Church of Fail

Pg 105,106 Conscious Leadership
1. Leading Yourself
2. Style
3. Trust and Ethics
4. Transparency
5. Rewards
6. Comms – Realtime
7. support

Pg 108 – Questions to ask yourself

Pg 118 “Every soldier is a sensor. Every citizen is a contributor. Every resident a reporter.” – Brian Humphrey

Pg 137 Euan Semple “Banning social sites at work is for wimps, real managers have conversations with their time wasters about wasting time”

Pg 142 Crowdsourcing site “Innocentive” – Yury Bodrov

Pg 147 Hackdays – Social Innovation Camps

Pg 162 Andy Grove – “high tech runs three times faster than normal businesses. government runs three times slower than normal businesses”

Pg 173 Ben Fletcher, Karen Pine – Do something different programme

Pg 177 Train company PR guy – “We have twenty seconds before the world knows more about the crisis than we do”

Pg 179 OODA
Observe – What’s going on here?
Orient – What’s my place? Where am I in relation to this?
Decide – What will I do?
Act – Do it
Quick loops, moving and iterating
“The best decision right now”

Pg 240 Global Guerrilla blog – John Robb
Vinay Gupta writings
Are you financially resilient? How can you improve this.

Fluffy Links – Monday July 7th 2014

Monday, July 7th, 2014

Rapid response PR from Walmart. Use your blog to call bullshit on shoddy journalism. Nicely done.

In the food industry in Ireland? Want to be? Join the Foodworks programme.

The Apple iBand/iWatch as a payments and ID system. Disney already doing this and we know who has a LOT of stock in that company

Meanwhile. The Princest Diaries.

Via Justin Mason – A Repair Cafe. Lovely idea.

brings together people with things that need fixin’ with people who have the skills to fix them in a social cafe style environment

The 30 best albums of 2014 so far.

Someone up high protected Jimmy Savile. Tabloids were chasing him and still nothing even with the scale of abuse that is now known? It’s even mentioned in the original House of Cards.

If a movie doesn’t do a scene from inside fireworks or a volcano after all these done videos, I’ll be disappointed. Bullet time in the Matrix was original done in music videos.

The Moto watch actually looks good.

Hendrick’s Gin and DFS open vintage hair salon at Changi Airport. Odd but cool idea.

€2000 tender for an infographic by Houses of Oireachtas

Thursday, June 26th, 2014

Oireachtas Infographic

So the Houses of the Oireachtas want an infographic and one that does this:

provide a visual representation of the budget process from the perspective of the Houses of the Oireachtas that is visually engaging as well as being authoritative, accurate and objective.

and the max ex-VAT price you can quote:

The maximum budget for this project is €2,000

Yeah cos when you tell people the max you’ll pay, that means the quote will be Max minus a few quid.

This is all outlined in an 18 page document. (.Doc Attached)

But hang on, there are some conditions for this:

“it must be possible to print it (A3 and A4) as well as publishing it on the Library & Research Service WordPress website.”

Yeah infographics generally have that ability, you know cos they’re graphics.

But wait, there’s more:

It is expected that there will be at least one kick off meeting after the tender has been awarded to confirm approach and content, and at least one draft infographic delivered to the L&RS before delivery of the final approved infographic.

Think of the admin work that went into producing this tender and evaluating it. For an infrographc!

Last year it cost €105 million to run the Houses of the Oireachtas.

It’s all about execution. What is your “Brand”?

Tuesday, June 24th, 2014

Forbes interview with Matti Leshem. Some nice quotes worth sticking up here.

I thought Barry Diller hired me for my creativity where in fact he was interested in my ability to execute. Barry taught me everything I know about business and that your creativity is only as good as your ability to execute against it.

it’s causing people to pursue a career trying to work for themselves when they would be much happier just working for someone else.

The Protagonist credo is that brand is meaning. When you come in contact with a brand, an emotional shift takes place in the consumer and the person perceiving that brand immediately knows what it means to them. The brilliant thing about branding is it doesn’t have to mean the same thing to all people. When you see someone wearing a Nike logo or a Nike jacket, you immediately have an emotional and visceral connection of that brand because of the connection they have made on you over time. Building those connections with people is an incredibly difficult thing to do.

Fluffy Links – Monday June 23rd 2014

Monday, June 23rd, 2014

Just FDIY. Tinder profile consultancy business. Took 3 hours to get up and running and instantly made money. Reminds me of this and this. Tinder is huge, it’s mass market but also new. The first to move in this mass market space has a serious advantage. It won’t last but having tools or services available that people need and to start offering them before Tinder builds these tools themselves or a company with a bigger marketing budget offers them, means you can make money.

Handy tool for people wanting to book your time for mentoring or meeting up for a coffee.

The IEDR have an initiative to help web businesses up their game. A good few grand worth of work is on offering. Case studies from last year. (PDF)

Cool toaster. I’d like it in my kitchen for a whole 15 minutes.

Like IFTTT (web system to automate web tasks), there’s Zapier. And on that, some IFTT recipes for market intelligence.

Bullet HQ mileage app.

Building a safe space for failure.

Ensure that some of your heroes and role models are women. Practical steps for men to help feminism. Not sure housework as the first point was a string start to this article.

Certain people don’t know they’re passive aggressive.

$249 for a 3D printer. Mass. Market. Appeal.

“Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM.” Such a great line and one that probably cost their competitors billions over time. It was quoted in the new series Halt and Catch Fire. A show about the early PC industry clone wars. It’s much much better than the awful Silicon Valley show about brogrammers, a show loved by brogrammers who don’t self-identify at all.

Halt and Catch fire

The Old Mill Pond.

RTÉ tenders: Their ad system specs, Saorview goes all IP

Saturday, June 21st, 2014

Digital Ad System tender from RTÉ

From the tender doc:

RTE.ie … over 130 million monthly page impressions and 4.5 million monthly unique browsers … In 2013, RTE served over 2.5 billion display ad impressions

Each ad serving technology must allows us to create and target ads, and define inventory ad units, without the need to select between web or mobile platforms. The ad serving technology should automatically determine which creative to serve depending on the device that makes the ad call, and the targeting selected at an order line level.

1.2.3 Targeting options
Must include the following:
* Ad Units & Placements
* Custom(usingkey-values)
* Geo & GPS
* Devices
* Connection
* Frequency capping, Labels

Saorview Connected tender.

From the tender:

RTÉ is seeking to evolve the SAORVIEW platform to incorporate open internet IP connectivity, developing a DTT / open internet IP hybrid platform called SAORVIEW Connected. SAORVIEW Connected is a next generation of SAORVIEW and the intention is to offer SAORVIEW consumers with SAORVIEW Connected equipment access to online media players and linear services delivered over the top to complement the existing DTT services.

It is envisaged that SAORVIEW Connected will offer:
(i) A single user interface with a consistent design, look and feel providing access to the DTT and over the top delivered services
(ii) A backwards EPG providing easy click through access to catch-up content from media players

Every business is a failed business

Thursday, June 19th, 2014

(In which the author quotes his own tweets)

Every business is a failed business if it’s not started. If it only survives a second, a day or a year, it beat the odds, that’s not failure.

See: And? FDIY.