Skip to content

Ensuring quality and speed to market with your new website or mobile application

Sunday, April 15, 2012

I have now been involved in approximately 350 web site and mobile application launches over 7 years spanning the full market spectrum: AU$200.00 to AU$450,000.00. I wanted to distill the top 4 most common client-side controllable issues that impede the speed to market, the launch-readiness and overall launch-quality of your website or mobile application.

For entrepreneurs, this should read as maximising the chances of success for your minimum viable product (MVP). For business, this should read as ensuring speed to market, ROI, minimising administration time, minimising distraction cost and opportunity costs.

Compared to other types of project management and development that I’ve been involved in, such as event management and property development, technology development is materially more difficult and complex. I am not alone in this view. Technology development can be a highly non-linear process where issues emerge in very unpredictable ways, have cascading and unpredictable effects on the overall system and have highly intractable sources.

There are a number of sources of delays that are addressed by a professional web development company. One major source of delays for amateur web developers stem from device and browser support. Websites can look and functional very differently based on the hardware and software used to access them. In Australia, there are approximately 15 economically significant carrier supported mobile and tablet devices, with varying operating system (OS) vendors, screen sizes, screen resolutions and OS versions in use. There are two dominant operating systems on the personal computer, with five dominant web browsers, all with many versions in use. This results in over 500 combinations of hardware, OS, screen sizes/resolutions and browser versions. Each one of these versions can theoretically render a webpage differently. Sometimes in minor ways such as minor positioning and alignment issues. Other times in massive and catastrophic ways such as a mini-site for a marketing campaign backed with a large marketing budget that doesn’t save entries on a mobile device. This could result in tens of thousands of entrants having a very bad brand experience. Professional web development companies use development frameworks and libraries that significantly mitigate cross device and cross browser support delays.

Conclusion: If your web development company is not using a dominant front-end and back-end framework, do not use them.

Other sources of delays in software development companies emerge from the following areas and you should ensure that your technology company doesn’t meet any of these criteria:

  1. A lack of good distributed version control software
  2. A lack of non-email based communication software for issue/feature discussion and bug/scope tracking
  3. A lack of highly technical account and project managers.

You must be able to speak to account managers and project managers who fully get it and do not need to hassle the programmers for every minor technical detail.

There are a four major pieces of advice I have for prospective web development clients looking to ensure their speed to market. All of these pieces of advice stem from the same idea, which is to clearly understand the goal at the start of the project, then use systems thinking to work backwards to understand the mechanical links, causative factors and non-reversible (or expensive to reverse) decisions along the way. As a result, do things in the right order and not hold any aspect of the project up.

Before I introduce the four pieces of advice, I wanted to outline what I believe is the ideal process that a client should undertake when embarking on a web or mobile project.

Step 1: What is the business or marketing objective of the technology piece?

Do not proceed past Step 1 unless you clearly understand and can clearly articulate the technology piece’s strong marketing purpose (either in attack or defense) and/or how it links to a business objective set out in a business or strategic plan. For example, an objective might be adequately described like this: This Facebook Page we intend to build will use a carefully constructed set of marketing content that encourages users to share with their friends a compelling opportunity for users to enter a competition which offers a demonstrably valuable prize to our target audience that fulfils part of our new customer acquisition strategy and online brand building objectives. This is a reasonably well defined answer because it links how the technology piece sits within the broad business or marketing plan, and outlines a user engagement process that is plausible. If you cannot construct a believable link between usage of your technology piece and a business/marketing outcome, do not build it.

Step 2: What are the critical success factors of the technology piece?

Do not proceed past Step 2 unless you understand what variables your technology is most sensitive to. In order to prioritise your spend and focus, you must know – or have a good idea about – any show stopping functionality, regulation or design attributes.

Step 3: How do we know at key milestones of the technology roll-out that we are successful?

Do not proceed past Step 3 unless you can clearly describe what success looks like in both the fullness of time and at key project milestones. Having some quantifiable targets say 1 month after launch, 3 months after launch and 6 months after launch will allow you to get an understanding of what kinds of metrics you need to measure from the launch date itself. The approach to technology now is to learn quickly from initial users and customers. You need to have the data at the end of the month 1 to make good decisions about whether you need to change something or stay the course. You need to know if you are doing the right amount of the right things. Further, this will allow you to set reasonable expectations around the results that are achievable for your budget to ensure the resilience of internal buy-in the project within your company. If you do not have a budget, one can be derived by working backwards from a risk-adjusted net present value of the commercial value of the targets that have been set out.

Step 3 can also enable to refine your budget. By thinking carefully about targets before embarking on a project and how they are going to be achieved, you are implicitly discussing payback period and return on investment. You may realise that to achieve a given ROI or payback period, you may need to adjust your initial functionality specification, budget or marketing strategy.

Step 4: What is our marketing plan to leverage returns from the technology piece?

Do not proceed past Step 4 unless you clearly understand how you are going to launch the technology piece. It is imperative that the launch and marketing strategy is fleshed out before building anything, otherwise you’ll almost certainty end up with a product that isn’t exactly the same as what you believe you can sell. The marketing plan must be very resolved before the product design phase because you must understand what communication requirements, content, commercial functionality and customer engagement functionality is required in the technology piece.

Step 5: What is my website or mobile application going to do and going to look like?

Do not proceed to Step 6 until you have used the information from Steps 1 through 4 to shape a crystal clear picture of the functionality requirements and design requirements of your technology. You need to be able to explain the sustainable value proposition of the technology piece both internally to your business and externally to the market. It must stack up logically, economically and in terms of priorities and opportunities costs on both sides in a sustainable way for whatever duration you have set out.

Step 6: Have I tested my concept, functionality and design with independent prospective users/customer?

Do not engage your technology development firm until you have actually validated your assumptions and tested on independent people if, how and why they’d use your technology piece. These test subjects must be independent – friends and family give bad advice for a number of structurally unfortunate reasons, even if they are in your target audience demographically or psychographically. They either have an agenda, or will be overly optimistic/positive because of emotional connections, or be overly pessimistic/negative because of jealousy or some other social force.

Finally, I come to my advice for ensuring speed to market for your web or mobile application:

Avoid feature creep – do not change things during the first major development push. If you have completed steps 1-6 properly, your first development phase should be very well defined. Changing it mid-flight is expensive and is often, in my experience, done for the wrong reasons such as reactions to the market which diverts the piece from the marketing or business plan. Feature creep, even in an agile development model, can slow down projects in non-linear ways and should be avoided in the first phase.

Devise, write down and test your marketing plan – it only needs to be short, but so many of our clients come to us without a clear idea of how the technology piece is actually going to be used by anyone. If this isn’t corrected at the start, we get to the end of the development process and need to retro-fit a large amount of new content, pricing information, e-commerce adjustments, new or different pricing methodologies, a freemium model, etc. This is slow and expensive.

Write the content first – so often, technology pieces are designed, then completely built and tested, then the client then spends weeks writing and refining content before the site goes live. Other times, the design might only allow for a certain content length without causing aesthetic degradation, and squeezing in heaps of content can have quite a negative impact on the user experience. Having the content at the start of the process allows designers to accommodate the length and nature of your content, so that there are no surprises at the end of the project. There is zero downside in having the content mostly resolved before engaging the technology firm.

Design everything – so many graphic design firms and insourced graphic designers represent a design as being complete, when in fact, there are a large number of workflows and elements that have not been designed. The developers then start on the technology build and don’t have any guidance on the design in many areas of the technology build. In mobile apps and websites, this is often things like how to display error messages or validation warnings on form submissions , how content is going to type-set with real content – rather than placeholder text such as tables and lists and how loading bars and progress bars might work. Often designers resolve all of the individual screens quite well, but neglect the interactions between these screens, which is very important and slows down the development process when clarity is required in these areas. Again, this can set the project back a long way if certain information comes to light about how the user interaction is going to work which results in a work having to be re-done.

I believe the following is very true: the time lost in extra design work at the start of the project getting the design exhaustive of all user interactions is significantly less than the time lost in corrective measures during the development process. If the corrective measures aren’t done, it is also significantly less than the market share/brand experience loss of a technology piece that doesn’t have polished user interactions.

So there it is, four easily avoidable traps when embarking on a new technology piece and some guidance on selecting a technology development partner. I’m always happy to field questions, commence and provide additional specific advice in this area, so feel free to email my assistant Bonnie (bonnie @ kdis.com.au).

Filed in Business, Kingston Development

The start-up and sourcing technology development

Tuesday, March 27, 2012

Every week or so I encounter an entrepreneur who is looking to start a technology company.  They usually are seeking a web or mobile programmer who can develop the prototype, beta or even the launch product in exchange for equity in the business.  In a nutshell, the programmer agrees to work for a stipulated period of time, or to deliver an agreed set of deliverables, in exchange for shares in the business.  I wanted to articulate a number of important considerations and lessons that I’ve learned in this area.  I have been on both sides of this kind of transaction a number of times and the same issues frequently arise.  This is what I feel is the best practice in this area.

Outcomes vs. outputs

Far too often I’ve seen entrepreneurs give equity away in their start-ups based in some way on number of hours worked.  This is actually a strong disincentive for efficiency as the programmer gets more equity if they work slowly.  Hence, one should always link equity tranches (allocations) to tangible deliverables – an outcome – rather than time spent on the project – an output.  This way, you’ll protect your shareholding so it can be used for other shareholder value building activities.

This approach is also highly correlated with poor planning and versioning.  That is, where the entrepreneur adds features in an unstructured way on the fly rather than as part of a clear and structured development plan.  This is called version creep in the development industry and is a very common problem.  It is usually fuelled by ideas that emerge during development, as well as, entrepreneur excitement.  Both of these are not necessarily good sources of product design.  Features originating in this fashion are often not tested properly against competitive products and against customer needs and wants.  It can be hugely distracting and expensive.  Just some of the problems of not planning versions properly and allowing version creep are that development takes longer, costs more and affects your speed to market.  These things are all highly correlated with failed start-ups.  There is always more functionality, design, usability and value that you can add to your product.  Always.  You will never be ready, so get on with it and get your product out there.  To avoid cost and time blow-out, have a clear development timeline that is linked to real customer value, rather than including features that are appealing during development.

If you do not choose to vest equity in tranches based on deliverables though a clearly divisible contract, then it is a good idea to have a buy-out option on the developers share. This means that at a future date, the shares can be bought back if, for example, the developer is unable or unwilling to finish his or her responsibility.  By way of an example, you could suggest that at a given date in the future, you can buy back the shares at some pre-agreed buy-back rate.  Usually this would carry a high premium, but at least affords the entrepreneur an option to claw back some or all of the equity allocated to the programmer if things don’t turn out well.

Professionals vs. amateurs

One should always consider the alternative to bringing a programmer onboard (insourcing).  There is an alternative.  One can use a development company who will complete the required development on a contract basis.  This way, structured programming timelines can be set out and the development company can work to make these a reality.  You tend to know your cost and timelines with a lot more certainty under this model, but there can be significant upfront financial costs.  To fund these costs, one can raise capital from external sources.  The end result is to give away a similar amount of equity as you would have under the programmer equity model, but with much better cost and timeline certainty.  This approach also gives the entrepreneur the chance to avoid one of the biggest failings of new entrepreneurial projects.

Other benefits of raising money

One highly correlated benefit of performing a capital raising early is that you test your concept against industry leaders and experts early, rather than spending a large amount of time on a possibly flawed idea or planned execution.   Entrepreneurs tend to be very anti-establishment, so can hate taking advice, but there is so much to be gained from a quick chat to a few people who know what they are doing.  In technology, it never too early to raise money.  As a rule, you want to minimise the number of capital raisings, as each one results in a dilution event tor your share.   It is too hard to speak in general terms about when one should and should not perform a capital raising, but the process of raising capital is very beneficial for a start-up.   Raising money for technology development will ensure you ask yourself and your team the hard questions at the start.

Overly technology focused

One other advantage of outsourcing your technology is that you don’t overly weight your team and your thinking on the technology.  In web and mobile, the technology is very rarely the bit which will make or break the business.  Rather, it is the strategic execution of the business plan with a sophisticated and fully embedded marketing plan that spans across all areas of the business.    So many times I’ve sat down with entrepreneurs who keep telling me how good their product is, or how good their code is.  I ask, but how are you going to systematically get users or customers?  This is never met with as much enthusiasm or confidence.

Ideal engagement model

In my experience, it is always advisable to raise the capital required to engage professionals who are held tightly to deliverables who have clear reputational and legal accountability.  This enables the entrepreneur to plan and organise around relatively certain timelines.  It allows them to focus on the key success factors which are usually the strategic and tactics around the execution of the business plan, rather than technology.   I have two brands that can assist entrepreneurs in this area.  Kingston which is a full service premium technology development company that services some of the largest brands and companies in the world.   Kingston has worked with many entrepreneurs to make their ideas a reality and worked with them to take these businesses to capital raisings and to international markets.

Sven & Sven is a managed outsource company, where the team writes the specification of your start-up’s needs and outsources the technology development to our development partners overseas.  This way, costs are reduced but project management, product design and specification are not compromised.  If you are well funded and want to mitigate as much risk as possible in your venture, use Kingston.  If you are on a tight budget and want to de-risk your start-up, use Sven & Sven.

www.svenandsven.com
www.kingstondevelopment.com

Filed in Uncategorized

Australian Leadership Awards 2012 – Now Open

Friday, February 10, 2012

Kingston Development has launched the new Australian Davos Connection website (www.adcforum.org).

At the same time, the Australian Leadership Awards are open for nominations for 2012.  Anyone who is working hard and exercising leadership towards improving the political, economic, social, technological, legal or environmental shape of Australia between the ages of 24-45 should apply.

Filed in Business, Development Sector

KD Symposium – Tech Entrepreneur Best Practice

Tuesday, September 13, 2011

blue-tree-studios

This is an invitation only event and has sold out.

Phillip Kingston is at the forefront of Australian technology and innovation, having helped guide hundreds of start-up companies, marketing campaigns and new technologies over the last 7 years.  At just 26 years old, Phillip has had the privilege of being a tech entrepreneur since he was 16.  Over this time, he has experienced a wealth of both successes and failures.  Phillip’s principled approach to entrepreneurship and his blend of marketing acumen, business theory and entrepreneurial flair will make this symposium the business event of the year not to be missed.

The event launches Phillip’s ‘Tech Entrepreneur Best Practice’ framework which has been designed to assist entrepreneurs with their professional development.  Key themes throughout the framework are: new venture evaluation, revenue model identification and optimisation, business planning, partnership and joint venture formulation, venture introspection, decision making and strategic thinking skills.

In just over 2 hours, Phillip will discuss best practice across the first three stages of a new venture:

1.       Idea: What idea to pursue? Finding ideas, having ideas, the role of an idea in a venture

2.       Commitment Decision: Do we do it? Risk evaluation, earning potential and skills required

3.       Initial Revenues: How do we do it? Finding the first customers, marketing new ventures

Phil is an experienced entrepreneur and company director, sitting on a range of private company and not-for-profit boards in Australia. For a full bio, please visit www.phillipkingston.com.

When and where:

Tuesday, October 25, 2011
6:30 PM to 9:30 PM

Blue Tree Studios
126 Bertie St
Port Melbourne, Victoria

This event is sold out.

Kingston-Development-Entrepreneurs-Symposium

Filed in Business, Kingston Development

Business Benefits of Social Media Marketing

Wednesday, August 31, 2011

Thanks to the Australian Institute of Professional Photography (AIPP) and Blue Tree studios last night for hosting my talk on the business benefits of social media marketing.

There were a number of you that I didn’t get a chance to speak to. If you’d like to get in contact, I’d ask that you please connect with me on either LinkedIn or Facebook or both. There were a number of half finished conversations that I’d like to finish. There were also a few people I didn’t get a chance to speak to individually. So please connect.

Here are the slides:

Business benefits of social media marketing

Resources:

A 55 page guide from PhotoShelter – worth a read: Social Media for Photographers by PhotoShelter

The War for Eyeballs: An Introduction to Internet Marketing by Phillip Kingston from Buy it now

A practical guide to Twitter for Business by Twitter Inc.

Filed in Kingston Development

Nine Commandments of Tech Startups in Australia

Monday, August 1, 2011

We’ve recently launched a new tech start-up addressing a very small but noticeable hole in the Australian IT recruitment offering.   Cramped while EasyJetting from Geneva to Edinburgh, I wanted to share how we firstly identified and then addressed what I consider the nine biggest ‘opportunities for improvement’ for tech start-ups.  We are not sure yet what the success of Re.cruit.Me will be, as we have just launched to a private trial group.  We have tried to be diligent in avoiding many common mistakes made in entrepreneurial ventures.  Here are the very commandments we used to guide our new venture.

Background

Recruit Me screen candidates

Re.cruit.me (www.re.cruit.me) is a web-based B2B application offering employers the ability to easily screen candidates for technical roles before their existing recruitment process kicks in.  It also offers recruiters a cost effective way to screen and then categorize their candidates that they advocate for and to best serve the employers that they assist.

If you believe some pretty smart dudes in business, interviews are not places for technical and skill assessment, but instead for assessing attitude and cultural fit.   Richard Branson says to hire for attitude and the rest will follow.  Job specific knowledge and aptitude will come much quicker to a candidate who is both well versed in the fundamentals and has the ‘right’ attitude for your company.  The rest will – according to the space man – follow.  Re.cruit.Me’s role in all of this is to enable recruiters to cost effectively categorize candidates based on their technical expertise and to enable smaller companies who handle their own recruitment to only interview candidates that have the fundamental skills.

KD’s Nine Commandments

One: Marketing starts at conception, not at birth

Common to anyone in advertising circles, new businesses often get their product ready for market and only then do they incorporate marketing principles.  They engage the marketing consultant with “sell loads of this, please”.  At this late stage, the agency is not able to research and advise the most appropriate pricing, markets, product design, functionality, packaging, positioning and brand.  Hence the creative process is stunted with too many non-negotiables.  Entrepreneurs have been known to focus overly on the inventive step – the product or service itself – rather than on the markets and the actors therein.  Risk averse entrepreneurship is customer led.  Think about your customers from the start, not once you want to start generating sales.

Two: Do not change the world, improve it

The incentives for the various actors in your marketplace must be considered.  If your product or service is likely to adversely affect an established industry, you will have a tougher time ahead of you.  Alternatively, if you can shape and then demonstrate that your innovation will help all key actors in the industry, you may find you have a much smoother ride.  At KD, our approach to systems optimisation and automation is not to enable employers to fire staff, but to create opportunities for those staff to make the company a lot more money.   For Re.cruit.Me, initially we were unsure how the product would be received by recruiters.  We absolutely did not want to interfere with those companies that can afford to utilise a recruitment professional or company.  So we ensured that the product would not cause employers to reduce their use of recruiters, but to make the recruiters a little more effective and lives a little easier.

Three: Understand your business

We went into Re.cruit.Me to assist the industry, not to make money.  The industry will judge us and if we get the thumbs-up, we’ll probably do OK out of it.  The business model is strong – with low marginal cost.  We understand the market well as we built it originally to save time at KD.   As the product is powered by KD – a software company – we are both a customer of and a supplier to Re.cruit.Me.  Our prima facie concern with the business model is the time-disconnect between when our costs are incurred and when our revenues are collected.  We are at once a publishing company and a testing platform – and most of our competitors are either one or the other.  We plan to get hit with key cost centres each quarter as we develop new questions and improve our testing platform, yet our revenues are both seasonal and tied to variables outside our control, such as economic outlook, government decision making and technology trends.

Four: Evolutions are mainstream, revolutions are radical

It is important to always consider human behaviour change when embarking on a new venture.  One should ask themselves how much change they are expecting their constituency to undergo in order to consume their product.  What are the educational, political, social, environmental, technological and legal issues that my consumers have to consider? Each actor may have to adjust their behaviour differently to the last.  A good innovation is often one that requires the least amount of behaviour change per unit of economic return.  The test I use in measuring the extent to which an innovation is a revolution or an evolution is thus: if my consumer group was a company, would they need to create a new budget line item in order to buy my product? If it fits within an existing category of expenditure, then it is an evolution.  If they need to change their MYOB cash flow statement, then it’s a revolution.  Re.cruit.Me could be a new line item for some organisations that we are targeting, hence we needed to ensure that our price was very small and our value proposition sufficient to justify this change.

Five: Versioning misunderstood

It is very important that you get to market as early as possible, regardless of your views on the competitiveness and speed of innovation in your market.  VC’s often suggest that if you are not embarrassed by your product 2 weeks after launch, you are too late.  There is always more functionality, design, usability and value that you can add to your product.  Always.  You will never be ready, so get on with it and get your product out there.  We have a list a mile long of features we want to add to Re.cruit.Me, and as a web development company, we are in no better position to implement these features. However, we know the cascading and catastrophic problems that emerge when companies keep adding more and more functionality to their initial product offering.  Launch as soon as you believe that you can add some value to your market.  Particularly in web-based tech start-ups, you can be very open with your customers that more is coming.  You can even publish a schedule of when features will be rolled in.  This is a great internal document at the very least.  We’ve launched to a private group of recruitment companies and private tech companies to get their input which will feed into the next version’s functionality priorities.

Six: Leave no stone unturned

Challenge all of your assumptions.  Businesses regularly fail because of only one untested assumption.  Not having data is no excuse to not challenge everything.  Apply broad based thinking to your product, what might people of different socio-economic groups think? What might large businesses do in response? Which part of our product is the best? Why is it the best? How does our product stack up against competitors? Who are we competing against? Are we competing within a category of spending, such as HR, or for a specific line item such as screening tests? Perhaps we are in competition with a completely different business in a completely different market? These kinds of questions will not only allow you to address any immediate weakness in your entrepreneurial logic stream, but should allow you to narrow down on your core value proposition and help you refine your differentiation strategy to maximise your chances of success.

Seven: Think big, act small

Many entrepreneurs are so caught up in essential, but distracting operational detail or product development that they do not give themselves time to sit back and think, what will this company look like in 10 years if we do everything right and everything goes well? Will we have offices around the world? Will we have one big centre? Will we not even have an office?  Will we be a transnational or a small giant? Will we be a services company or a product company? You should try and articulate a picture of what you see the future looking like, so that decision making today is consistent with that vision.  In this way, time, strategic thinking and resources today are not wasted on sending the company in the ‘wrong’ direction.

Eight: Misplaced paranoia

Don’t worry about idea theft.  Speak to as many potential buyers, channel partners and suppliers as possible.  Rarely, they will ‘steal’ your idea.  Most of the time, they will give you valuable advice, and give you an honest idea as to whether or not your innovation will work.  At Re.cruit.Me, we spoke to recruitment companies large and small, technology companies (our primary customers) and the general market.  A healthy level of paranoia is good for entrepreneurs, but it can be better placed than in idea theft.

Nine: Fair pricing

The two dominant approaches to pricing theory are known as value-based and cost-based.  That is, do you start from the position of “how much can I charge for this?” or do you start from “what does this cost me to provision?” respectively.  For small innovation injections into an established system like Re.cruit.Me, we wanted to keep pricing very low – just a small margin higher than our costs of content development, promotion, hosting and software development.  We went into this business not to make money but to sustainably help the industry.  This serves as a great offensive and defensive strategy.

Phillip Kingston is the author of the War for Eyeballs, the Managing Director of Kingston Development, Vice Chairman of the Centre for Sustainability Leadership and a fund manager for VC firm Voyance Capital.

Filed in Business, Kingston Development

Social Media for Photographers

Friday, July 15, 2011

Dear attendee,

Firstly, thanks you very much for your participation and contributions during my workshop on Social Media on Thursday 14th July, 2011.  Thanks to the Australian Institute of Professional Photography and BlueTree Studios for hosting me.  BlueTree Studios is an awesome space and it was a pleasure speaking there.

Secondly, there were a number of you that I missed at the end as I had a conference call.  I’d ask that you please connect with me on either LinkedIn or Facebook or both. There were a number of half finished conversations that I’d like to finish. There were also a few people I didn’t get a chance to speak to individually.  So please connect.

Resources:

A 55 page guide from PhotoShelter – worth a read: Social Media for Photographers by PhotoShelter

The War for Eyeballs: An Introduction to Internet Marketing by Phillip Kingston from Buy it now

A practical guide to Twitter for Business by Twitter Inc.

Social media for photographers

Contact Details:

Phillip Kingston

Kingston Development:

1300 652 998

www.kingstondevelopment.com.au


Filed in Business, the war for eyeballs

An identity crisis is what the entrepreneurial community needs

Thursday, June 30, 2011

Over a coffee last week, I was asked to provide a snapshot of the current state of the entrepreneurial scene in Australia to a returning entrepreneur. I outlined a number of structural matters that I believe affect the depth of the Australian entrepreneurial community.

As I fly now, London-bound, having watched one too many Glee episodes, I am fully charged with the confidence to express these feelings publicly. If you’re reading this, then the benefits of a thriving entrepreneurial community are clear to you, so I won’t labour that point.

My team and I work with entrepreneurs to help turn their ideas into a reality. Our work encompasses management consultancy and technology development across all internet applications — mobile and web.

As a relatively large supplier to the entrepreneur sector, I have noticed the different attitudes and approaches taken by entrepreneurs and consequently the results that follow. I witness firsthand the role and importance of the entrepreneurial community for these businesses, as do many of us, but also how small it is compared to what it could, or rather, should be.

Read the full article as published at Australian Anthill Online

Filed in Business

Saving Paper Money – Part 2

Saturday, May 14, 2011

Well blimey!

This post comes to you from London, England, approximately 3 months later than intended. The original methodology I stipulated was to start with a review all usage to establish a basis. This, it turns out, is much more difficult than I thought. It seems there is a pronounced observer effect in the office. As soon as I started banging on about paper, paper usage became much less visible. I think I clearly communicated a message of “Only use paper if absolutely necessary” too early in my research phase. In hindsight, you’d not tell anyone what you were doing until you’d gathered your data. I missed one too many science lectures it would seem.

Summary of personal changes:
1. Don’t print
2. Don’t write

Summary of changes made in the office:
1. Reduced number of networked printers from 2 to 1
2. Moved networked printer into back room, so there is a long walk to collect printed material
3. Regularly guilt staff members into using less paper
4. Encourage staff to suggest paper saving ideas

Anecdotally, I believe that I was quite successful in reducing personal use. I also believe that I have communicated a ‘paper-less’ message to approximately 40 business owners and senior management over this time. In client meetings, I would often explain why I wasn’t using a pen or paper to take notes but using my iPhone or Asus Netbook (eee-pc). This would start the conversation about being paperless which was often fruitful for all.

Whilst I am an environmentalist, the purpose of this first step was to first see if it is possible to conduct modern business in an efficient way without paper. The answer to that is dependent on your industry (naturally), but as a technology professional / general capitalist, paper for day to day business use is a habit, not a necessity.

Key areas that I could not completely remove paper usage:

1. Contracting – NDAs, purchase agreements and contracts of sale
2. Receipts / tax invoices
3. Toilet paper / tissues

I will continue my study further into personal reductions and then return to my original thesis of office paper saving.

Filed in Kingston Development, Sustainability

Introduction to Drum and Bass

Saturday, March 5, 2011

With the increasing mainstream popularity of Pendulum, a lot of normal people are now at least casually interested in drum and bass (DNB). DNB has traditionally been a nerd and raver dominated genre. Now, as it is getting cool, I thought I’d share 10 tracks with y’all assuming you are DNB bandwagon jumpers looking to get the inside word on what is hot:

Vocal (Entry Level):
Sunchase and Yana Kay – Remember Me (Pendulum)
Aphrodite – Calcutta
Bjork – All Is Full Of Love (Chris Su)
Chris Su – Solaris Theme (VIP)
Future Prophecies – September

Dark / Heavier:
Future Prophecies – Dreadlock
Calyx – Thru Your Eyes
Noisia and Teebee – Lost Cause

Dub Step:
Black Sun Empire – Hyper Sun
Black Sun Empire – Arrakis
Black Sun Empire – Driving Insane

However, it just occurs to me that my readers are all either nerds or ravers so perhaps I’m preaching to the converted?

Filed in Music, Uncategorized