Earlier this year, giants came to Liverpool. I was rapt. Addicted. Each day I woke my girlfriend early. A morning taxi to see a giant diver wake up near two football stadiums. Forced rushing after a night’s drinking to see what a little giant girl would do next. If you just saw the pictures, the […]
Imagine a vast multi-dimensional space. Each point of it represents a specific need that a specific person has, an iota of utility. The dimensions represent crazy things… Is the need in Africa or in Europe? Is the need on a LAN or on the web? Can travel to satisfaction of the need be done by […]
I decided to investigate Heroku’s early years. You can learn a lot from even quite recent tech history (see my previous article on version control). My tool? The Internet Archive. It’s an elephant that never forgets your pivots. 1. November 2007 – code in the cloud Ruby on Rails is riding high. But impossibly hard to deploy. […]
At mySociety‘s annual retreat I gave a lightning talk about how I’ve come to realise that products and markets are the same thing. I’d originally intended it to be a blog post, so here you are. It’s a story of geeks learning. What is a product? It really is magic. Before the invention of products (whatever that […]
Today’s audio blog is about the excellent DoESLiverpool, and why you should be their friend too. listen to ‘Do epic shit’ on Audioboo Being a friend (who does epic shit) of DoESLiverpool costs £9 a month. So far the perks are, on the surface, imperceptibly different from those that anyone can get – excellent events, free hotdesking if […]
Complaining that I have a deluge of interesting things that I never get round to blogging, Neil suggested I use audio instead. Here’s the first one. listen to ‘Public Knowledge Gap Filler, a new profession’ on Audioboo Links to the topics in this audio blog: Overview Project, which helps you find stories in large dumps […]
This is the second part of a series of two posts. Part 1 explains how we came to make PledgeBank, what it does, its similarities to GroupOn and Kickstarter, and how we iterated on the product. It ends asking, “Why did GroupOn and Kickstarter succeed, when PledgeBank failed?” This part gives my answer. Here’s what I […]
“I’ll do X but only if N other people will do Y” I was abuzz. A cafe in Holborn. 2003. A secret meeting. James Cronin and Tom Loosemore, who’d made the genius does-what-it-says-on-the-tin FaxYourMP, bought me coffee and changed my world. Wow, there’s actually other people who think computers can revolutionise democracy! And they’ve an amazing […]