Moment.Us Makes the News!

Moment.Us co-founder Andrew Ko has been interviewed by the Manchester Evening News about his smartphone app, which assesses factors including the location, date, time of day, weather and more, to create custom music playlists.

Here's an excerpt from the piece.

'Ko remembers the 'eureka moment' when he first came up with the concept. He said: “I was walking to class on an overcast, chilly day and I wanted to listen to some downbeat music but I kept having to press 'next' because my iPod was playing all the wrong songs. I thought 'my iPod should know not to play me Christmas songs in March.'

“These days we use our phones every day, including to play music. Our phones know so much about us and our habits. Moment.Us is about tapping in to that knowledge to help understand the person. It creates playlists of songs that feel the same, not just sound the same.”'

To read the full article, click here.

An All Male Panel at the BIMA startup seminar in Google Campus

On Tuesday I went to the BIMA (British Interactive Media Association) startup seminar hosted at Google Campus, in collaboration with Rackspace. The panel was a great mix of large companies and startups, who all have experience relevant to those starting up today. The panel of speakers included John Webb from Rackspace, Benjamin Southworth, deputy CEO of Tech City, Joe Stepniewski founder of Skimlinks, Damian Routley the CEO of Glow, Jean-Michel Deligny of Go4Venture, Alex Wood, the editor or Tech City News, Drew Benvie founder of new comms agency Battenhall, and the chair Justin Pearse of Bite. However, it was rather hard to ignore that all eight members of the panel were male, and indeed, so was everyone who spoke on stage, including the welcome speech from BIMA and the closing remarks from Rackspace. This was picked up on Twitter Candace Kuss and Karen Barber, and then mentioned at the very end of the session by Craig Le Grice, the Executive Committee Member of BIMA. 

I got in touch with Craig who said that "Benjamin Southworth and Joe Stepniewski were fantastic additions to our panel - but both were in place of their respective female CEOs (Joanna Shields, CEO at TCIO and Alicia Navarro, CEO at Skimlinks) who were invited first but unfortunately could not attend due to diary commitments." 

Craig went on to say that "Speaking personally, I'm a huge advocate of - and fighter for - equality in our industry. I work with a number of startups and actively encourage diversity and the building of companies based on talent, regardless of gender, race, sexuality etc. I welcome the day when no woman attends a technology or digital focused event and feels she's at a boy's club."

This situation is clearly not ideal, especially as there are more than enough women who could at least match the experience on the panel. However, it is positive that people are realising that an all male panel is no longer neccessary or acceptable, and hopefully, these all male events will become a thing of the past. In the mean time, check out these future BIMA events and get involved in the discussion.

• 6 June - BIMA Thirstday (an event held every month on the first Thursday)
  • A networking event for anyone involved in digital. Every member is invited so the group is always a diverse mix.
• 24 July - Digital Hall of Fame
  • A formal ceremony to honour the five new inductees to the Digital Hall of Fame, and the inaugural BIMA Hot 100 list of digital's biggest talents. The '100' list is voted for and so represents a great cross-section of the industry.
• 12 September - The BIMA Awards
  • BIMA's annual awards, recognising the best of the digital industry, are in September. The call for entries is open now and the judging panel has been announced. Check out http://www.bimaawards.com/judges.php to see the great mix of judges.

Are Product Days Productive?

Sometimes you just need to knuckle down and get some work done. But what's the best way to do this? And what about all the other stuff you need to do before you can even start? Well, yesterday Seeker had a Product Day, and so I decided to catch up with the Founder and CEO, Daniel Wilson, to see how (and whether) it works.

1.       What is a product day ?

A product day is a full day when we step out of our regular roles to understand what we’ve got in the product, where we are as a business, and what we want to do over the next 3-6 months.  It gives us a chance to think about our tech and our customers at a higher level.

2.       Why did you arrange it?

The main point was to stop any silos of purpose and knowledge building up, as we’re all working semi-independently because there aren’t many of us.  We need to all be working on the same plan, or we won’t make the right sort of progress.

3.       What did you want to achieve from it ?

We took an inventory of features built, we planned the next 3 months major features to build (develop, or dev), everyone knows our goals around sales and investment

4.       What methods did you use and which ones work best?

We used lots of brainstorming, and we had bits of cardboard and sticky notes, which allowed us to move our ideas around afterwards into more logical groupings.  We used the important/urgent matrix (which is one of my very favourite things) to prioritise our work.

5.       What did you actually achieve?

A sense of purpose and a to do list.

6.       What's the next step?

Today the tech guys are sizing the dev work and planning iterations, and I’m starting to work on more heavily on our sales website, because we realised it was a major blocker to a lot of other work we wanted to do.

7.       Any advice you'd give to startups now in hindsight?

Do more prep than you were going to (My section on “state of the nation” was harder to talk through off the cuff than I had thought), and expect to go through fewer items in the agenda: This is really the time to have those discussions that normally get glossed over, e.g. what’s more important, a new feature or fixed bugs, or sales collateral.

Workshop with Matchbox Mobile

Last week the Collider12 startups had a workshop with Andrew Farrell, co-founder and CEO of Matchbox Mobile. He shared a few of tips for startups based on his experiences during the last eight years.

Sales and Relationships

• In order for any business to grow, you need someone selling your business, making a decent sales team essential.
• You need to have people speaking for you and about you at every opportunity, and this can only happen by meeting lots of people
• By building rapports you can create a mutual understanding and genuine friendship that could take you anywhere in the future.
• People can transcend companies and so one relationship could be your key to many different opportunities.
•  Never turn a meeting down, you never know where it may lead.

Maintain standards and Reputation

• The individual values behind the reason you started need to be maintained and shared with employees and customers. If you lose this vision, you’ll lose direction and your principles.

Hire the Right People to Build the Right Team

• The single biggest challenge I have ever faced is trying to hire the right people. Perhaps it’s a bit simplistic, but I've always found the pub test to be the best way to decide. If you could go and have a beer with them and happily chat for a couple of hours, 90% of the time they’re going to be the right fit for you. You need a rapport that goes beyond their skills and talents, as a time will come where you need to depend on them.
• I don’t think it is cheating to hire friends, as long as they have the skills you need.
• If you have to offer them an incentive to join your startup, they aren’t the right person to join your startup. You need people who are committed and that have the passion and interest already there. Once you start offering incentives, you have to keep it going which is a commitment you cannot make.
• How you manage your mistakes with the customers (as, trust me, everyone makes mistakes) is can be incredibly important. We have made some of our strongest relationships by handing our failures very well. You have to share your successes and failures with your customers as well as your team.

Adapt to Change

• There will always be multiple and rapid changes in and around your business that you will need to adapt to.
• There will also be changes to how your product is used, what your product is, and changes within your company. If you cannot evolve with these changes, you are going to fail.

Make Decisions

• The worst thing you could do is to make no decision at all. It is far better to make a wrong decision as that’s all part of the process to the right decision. By recognising your mistakes you can correct your course to get on the right path to success.

Being the cleverest person in the room counts for nothing if you’re unable to manage your business:

• Taking care of the business is your number one priority.

Quick Q&A with WhichSocial about The Big Data Show

Avin Wong from WhichSocial, one of our startups, recently spoke at The Big Data Show. I managed to grab Avin for a quick Q&A to find out how it all went.

Hi Avin, thanks for taking the time to chat. Firstly, what was your speech about?

Our topic was "How internet retailers can measure & increase social media ROI through Big Data predictive modeling". I discussed how to measure and improve social media ROI. Then our data expert and friend, Dr Robert Pietruszkiewicz  (MD of  SDART.co.uk) talked about how you can use big data predictive modeling to increase sales.

What two facts would you like people to take away from your talk?

1. Measuring social media ROI is not difficult; you just need specialist software like WhichSocial.com

2. Crunching historical analytics data is pointless, internet retailers have to "Act when it matters", i.e. act instantly when their social ROI software picks up trending patterns through their social channels.

Were you nervous?

I wasn't nervous. In fact, I spoke even better when more people turned up and started asking questions.

What questions were you asked by the audience?

The audience mainly asked about how our technology works, i.e. how the software tracks social media ROI.

 How has the experience helped you?

The experience has motivated me to keep on giving pitches, and I am aiming to speak at even bigger events.