puush

For those of you in the industry, Blyk won an award for it’s offering to advertisers - hardly suprising considering the level of innovation offered in comparison to other ‘major players’ in the mobile advertising space.

 Geoff is the one with the youthful looks and black blazer on the far left, I (Alistair) am just to the right of Geoff, perched on the arm of the chair in the pinstripe suit and Tom is pointing at the award and puckering his lips (irresistable!).

 It was a night of much merriment and we were all thrilled and suprised to be called on stage. A special thanks to all the judges, especially Claire Valoti of Mindshare for believing.

 AC

There are far too many people starting meaningless blogs which they then populate with utter rubbish and take great delight in declaring where they are writing the article from (just like Norbert, above) just so they can say that they are part of Web 2.0 - whatever that is meant to mean.

Blogs populated with poor content which is not specific to any particular discipline will fail to attract a loyal readership and the few lost souls that do stumble across the blog in their search for relevant information will be so disorientated that they’ll find themselves hitting the back button before they finish reading their first sentence.

With this in mind, I would like to lay down a challenge to any of you who would like answers from any of the resident bloggers using their skill sets and experience from their respective proffessions. Please feel free to suggest topics or questions for future blog posts and Tom, Geoff and I will do our best to answer them - Think anything on advertising, new media, creative, profiling, interaction, engagement, youth media and errr…… poker!

We’ll do out best to answer as quickly and accurately as possible.

AC

I have to say this is the first time in all my years I’ve ever had a video call. Note: Tom is NOT going to be happy : )

I have just finished making a presentation to the McCann World Group in Milan to raise awareness of the capabilities of Blyk and also to prepare the relevant heads of agencies in each country for the international expansion of the network.

Blyk was most fortunate to get the opportunity to participate as the only other external presentations came from Google and Facebook, it is encouraging to see that Blyk is already carrying such gravitas among the key decision makers.

Over 30 top digital media leaders were present, representing 18 different countries and specializing in numerous marketing disciplines – It was certainly a lively forum to connect with!Reactions were most positive and I have no doubt that the added attention will only contribute to the ongoing in-flux of brands using Blyk as the latest tool in their digital armory.

Thanks to Tom and the unquestionably awesome creative team at Blyk – Once again, your work left an entire audience smiling and generated a huge amount of constructive questioning.

Off to mingle over dinner and drinks with the lovely people from McCann Group – Check back for an update soon!

Before I get started I’d like to throw my hands up and say I don’t really know much about finance options available to startups from banks, I know about VC’s, Angel Investment, seed rounds etc but nothing about bank financing and to be honest, it scares the hell out of me. I remember when I had an idea a few years back, I managed to pull together enough courage to walk into Barclays Business department (I had an appointment, and a business plan) but lost all enthusiasm when the small business manager said “You will need to sign personally for the borrowed money”, essentially making the point of being a LTD significantly smaller (which also meant that in turn I needed to find someone crazy enough to be my guarantor as I was much, much to young to sign for it myself!).*

A relatively new company on the block (and based in the UK too!) Skimbit, has sought a different type of funding, and as the opening paragraph gave away, from the bank. Read the post over on the CEO, Alicia Navarro’s blog birthofastartup.com. After thinking that this may have been slightly odd I did have a quick read up and came across this page from Business Link and a reference to bank funding on Guy Kawasaki’s blog (point 5 specfically).

*Note: Something I had to write, but isn’t necessarily relevant to the point/post. I remember sitting down with the Barclays Small Business manager gal, she was lovely, quite pretty if I remember rightly and I was about 13/14 at the time. I had came up with the idea for a swapping engine that allowed people to go online and swap specifically Games and DVD’s, it was inspired by a few different sites that had cropped up and basically removed the need for you to find somebody that wanted what you were willing to swap. You sold your item for credits, and purchased something else with your credits.

The funny part however is what follows: I started describing the idea to her, I was jotting down diagrams and talking about how games can be banded into certain values (Band A being the most expensive & Band Z being the least) and that person X might finish a game quickly, so still be able to swap it for something of similar value, therefore never really loosing money. I’d finished, I looked at her waiting for her to speak (or clap). I was really proud of myself, very well pitched indeed I thought. Then she looked at me blankly and said the most painful thing I’ve heard to date “So, you want to open a business account so you can swap games with your friends?”

I can’t even remember what happened after that, It all went blurry and I sorta fed her a few sentences to get the hell out of the room.

Its funny how things change, only a very small portion of now very rich people predicted what computing would be today, “The only way to predict the future is to invent it” has made the pioneers of the age very rich (Ref: Gates). I grew up with computers, so to be fair I don’t know what times were like before them, and quite frankly I’m glad, because it scares me! But the one thing I can say I have been witness to is how things have made a shift from desktop, to web.

I can vaguely recall a story my father once told me about a conference he once went too, it sounded like a pretty jazzy one too - if my memory serves me correctly I recall him saying that Ziggy Marley presented an award - anyhoo, it was a conference sponsored by Sun Microsystems. As you would expect a Sun Exec (at the time) conducted the keynote which was about one thing: Thin client. I remember when he told me I was like “WTF?” and he went through this old-school definition and I can remember looking at him and saying, as if he was mad, you mean Web 2.0 right? Again, another tangent, apparently this Exec categorically stated that in x years we will do NOTHING on our desktops, I think he may have even shown his desktop which was subsequently empty.

How right he turned out to be? Some things have caught on quicker than others, if only caused by common sense. For instance, it makes a hell of a lot more sense to have a team collaboration tool on the web than it does to have your word processor. Now I’m talking old school, we might look back now and go “Err no, word processing was web bound from day one” but having a web-based team collaboration tool was always going to happen, because its more accessible to each member.

Up until recently there was the good ol’ problem that if you used web applications you could never access any of the information whilst on the go. This, in fairness, isn’t as much of an issue nowadays as it was say 12-24 months ago as the operators (in the UK, not sure about US) have half-decent data plans which makes connecting the ‘puter up via bluetooth much more feasible than before and they are also starting to introduce broadband dongles which I must say, are pretty darn cool.

A few recent technologies have been thrown into the mix such as Adobe Air and Google Gears that allow you to, for instance, edit documents whilst on the go using a system-side version of a web-based application that seamlessly updates the web-side when you next go online. I remember the very first demo of Adobe Air (when it was then called Apollo) I saw was all to do with how you could manage your eBay listings whilst offline (and therefore potentially whilst on the go), add new ones, it’d even do all of the calculations and then when you next connected TADA! it would upload all of your latest items, update the bids on the current auctions and break you the bad news if you lost out on some jazzy socks you had bid on.

The offline end of the so called Web 2.0 phenomenon is regularly forgotten, its seen as more of a side note. I suspect its because its not something you make and try to immediately monetize, its more an addition to something you already make and monetize to further its reach and increase usage.

The online part of the Web 2.0 thin-client spectrum is obvious, its everywhere. I wonder how many people are oblivious to how many thin-client apps they use a day, I mean Hotmail is one, Delicious is one too, Flickr’s another. They’re everywhere.

I’ll write another post soon that will run through all of the web apps available, how best to use them and how to make them work together to make a healthier, more productive you.

Mr James Piccerillo (pictured above) has just recently left the Blyk team : ( Mind you, he’s already planning his 3rd leaving drinks. I mean, comon, cheeky git, I’m only going to buy you so many drinks!

Anyway, he’s off travelling the globe, South America, NZ, Sydney, HK, Fiji are on his hit list I think. I need to get his confirmed route. Suffice to say most of the team will be visiting him abroad whist he’s on the road (I’m meeting him in Italy). Perhaps I can convince him to give us a monthly post on something telecoms’y, or perhaps just a ‘Make you feel jealous’ post.

You will be missed JP, and I know I echo the voice of the team when I say: Sod off you lucky git, go enjoy the sun.

This post might become something of a regular thing from me, I never have the oompf to write a well formed, well written post. I wish I could just throw some nearly-knitted sentences together and call it a day, but thats just laziness.

I jetted off to Helsinki, Finland last week for some training days at our Helsinki HQ and became particularly fond of the sub-zero city. I met up will a friend who took me on a little tour of The Design District, which swiftly moved into Helsinki’s Drinking District. Irrelevant? No no no! We did, mid-way through the Design/Drinking transition, manage to stop off at Helsinki’s flag-ship Nokia store, you have too, its what they’re famous for!

The Nokia store is great! As you would expect they have all of Nokia’s latest handsets ready for you to play with - the coolest part however is when you pick up a handset, basically there is a screen that runs the length of the handset wall, by picking up the handset you activate a little demo on the screen of that specific handset, its features etc.

Shouldn’t have said the ‘coolest part’, because there is an even cooler part. The Vertu corner. Oh yes, they have a tiddy little room full of all the Vertu’s. I might have had a couple of beers by this time, so I glided towards the diamond lady first, stood gawping, wondered how much it costed, snapped it with the iPhone and looked for Aki (my Finnish friend) who was pointing gleefully at the special edition Nürburgring handset. We sort of looked at each-other, in turn we each said “I’d rather have my iPhone”, grinned and scooted right out of there. Photo to follow.

So, to summarize: Helsinki is really cold, but I like it - but most importantly, don’t get a Vertu.

Facebook have recently opened up their API. Its big, I promise. Heres a little explanation from the social-networking gurus @ Mashable:

Facebook integrated their platform with their API. What does this mean to you and me? It seems that your favorite applications could possibly start popping up on ordinary websites and blogs any day now.

Web apps will be able to use cookies to track the users when they are using the app in other places on the Internet. So, in theory, you could play a game on any site and your stats will still be tracked. The whole point of this seems to be to allow Facebook members to finally leave the site proper. Users could now go about the Web, doing your own thing, but still be connected to their Facebook profiles.

Interesting. One thing I have noticed over the last few years, since I fell for this Web 2.0 malarkey is that its not all about your consumer facing service anymore - thats irrelevant (in terms of long term success). The fact that Facebook is wonderful is all hunkey-dorey, for now, take a look at Myspace for instance.

The first social network I ever learned about, or used for that matter, was good ‘ol Myspace. It was great. I knew people that would allot a period of time in the evenings to go on Myspace, check updates, post updates and pursue random emo’s just to check out their ‘pics’ (note knew = not me!). But nowadays all that has changed, Facebook is the new kid on the block. In just 2 years they have arguably toppled the dictator that was Myspace.

Facebook are fighting harder than that, their flag is being dug so far into the ground it may never be removed, perhaps not even by the big-guns that are Google. What Facebook are doing is creating a dependency, not just on the consumer side but also on the trade side. They are letting developers access the information of users even when they are off of the Facebook site, using Facebook’s custom JS Library and API, genius.

That means that eventually there will be potentially thousands of websites, blogs and forums that rely on Facebook to make money and generate increased sign-ups.

Netvibes are at it too, take a look at their UWA section on their site (here). They are creating a Universal, cross-platform Widget API that will allow widgets to feed off of their learnings, their platform. Again, creating a dependency. They know that the startup page market is grossly over populated with players such as Microsoft Live, iGoogle, Pageflakes and traditional ISP pages. They know that in order to succeed they need to get developers on side, and what do developers like? Speed, efficiency and reach and boy thats what they’re offering.

Its Web 3.0 in the making ladies and gents.

I have been pestering Tom for a while so that he would let me start contributing to this great blog – I wanted to make my first article a short one, just to act as an update to show what we’ve been up to and what to expect in the near future.

Earlier this month Tom and I were invited to speak at Creative Capital, an open forum event held at The Hospital every month. We spoke on the topic of New media: Opportunities in Telco’s and received very encouraging responses toward the company that I work for, Blyk (the new ad funded mobile network for 16-24’s) – Especially as the audience consisted primarily of old-skool creative types who tend to be a little staid in their approach toward new technology!

The questions flowed, as did the free beer – You can listen to the podcast here.