Entrepreneurial Geekiness

Ian is a London-based independent Chief Data Scientist who coaches teams, teaches and creates data products. More about Ian here.
Entrepreneurial Geekiness
Ian is a London-based independent Chief Data Scientist who coaches teams, teaches and creates data products.
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Week of SkillSwaps (including me on screencasting)

ShowMeDo, sussexdigital November 9, 2007

Danny has organised a whole week of SkillSwaps (overview on Upcoming) for the week commencing Nov 19th. The events are:

For my Master Screencasting I’ll be covering:

“Learn about screencasting to share videos of your software online. We’ll talk about making screencasts – Ian’ll show you how and then some volunteers can make their own. Online hosting options will be discussed.”

The important parts are:

  1. Showing you how to make your own screencasts
  2. Getting them hosted on the web for free

Hope to see you along. Thanks to Danny for organising such a packed week!

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£5 App Day *Tomorrow* on Sat 10th

Entrepreneur, sussexdigital, £5 App Meet November 9, 2007

We host our first-ever day-long £5 App event tomorrow (full itinerary). We have 25 confirmed on Upcoming, another 10 by email with people travelling in from as far afield as Birmingham and London.

Hopefully there will be students from Sussex Uni and maybe random people from the 10,000 brochures that Wired Sussex have distributed. It’ll be a good event 🙂

Thanks again to Alan at Sensible Development for hosting us.

In summary – the day runs from 10am to 6pm at Pelham House in the North Laines – just off of Trafalgar St and 5 minutes from Brighton station. We have 9 speakers in 5 sessions, the event is free, you can drop in and out of events as you see fit.

We will have the internet (+hopefully wifi) and some of the sessions are practical so bring your laptop. It wouldn’t be a £5 App event if it didn’t involve some drinking after…

Session list (more detail):

  1. (10am) Perils of Boot-strapping and Growth after Boot-strapping (myself, Alan Newman, Raj Anand)
  2. (11.30am) Developing your £5 App (£5 App co-founder John Montgomery)
  3. (2pm) Social Media Marketing (Premasagar and Madhava, Jon Markwell)
  4. (3.20pm) Search Engine Optimisation for your website (Paul Silver)
  5. (4.40pm) Successful Copy-Writing (Ellen de Vries)

David and Paul have blogged about their SEO/web-copy session, Raj has blogged about his growth-after-bootstrapping session. I’ve blogged about us on the Digital Festival site. You’ll find write-ups for all of our previous events on the official £5 App site.

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Improvements to ShowMeDo

ShowMeDo November 9, 2007

Kyran has completed some fantastic new work on our ShowMeDo:

  • New frontpage (a few weeks back) resulting in a 10% decrease in bounces from the frontpage
  • New portals for Python, Ruby and other categories
  • Site-wide unification of font choices
  • Cleaner interface for the header and sidebars

I’ve also worked on smaller changes:

  • Speed-ups throughout the site by making less DB queries
  • Integration of our Google Group to the frontpage for greater exposure

The DB improvements came via John’s great SQLObject performance guide.
Lucas won the most-popular-video-of-the-month award this month (and received a £20 prize). This is the third month we’ve run the competition and it is working well. The prize is based on an author’s position in the 30-day most-popular list.

Finally – we’re working to let authors receive PayPal donations for their efforts. Authors will keep 100% of whatever they are given, this is another step we take to say thank-you to authors for putting in their hours making such fine tutorials.

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ShowMeDo Services – now with prices!

ShowMeDo November 5, 2007

Phew, it has been a long time coming. Our Professional Screencast Production Service service now has a price page which details the cost of our plans.

The plans cover ‘basic hosting’ for a trial service (allowing up to 1,000 plays per month) along with a Silver (£100 p/m) and Gold Plan (£500 p/m) which carry varying capacities for increased usage.

The Gold plan would suit a large company that wanted to play many videos. Usages might include marketing screencasts to tempt users to learn more and support screencasts to relieve support phone calls.

The costings page also carries information for how we can create marketing and tutorial screencasts and how we can host regular video content.

Next…we need to integrate our statistics package and get the data visualised.  You can learn more about our screencasting services and do feel free to contact us if you’d like to learn more.

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5 Pound App *Day* on Saturday 10th 10am-6pm

Entrepreneur, Life, ShowMeDo, sussexdigital, £5 App Meet November 5, 2007

For the Digital Festival we’re having a whole day (sign up->Upcoming.org) of £5 App Goodness aimed at moving your project forward:

  • When: Saturday 10th November, 10am-6pm
  • Where: North Laines, see Upcoming
  • Cost: Free
  • Food/Drink: You supply your own, shops nearby
  • Wifi? Yes, laptops welcome
  • Sponsor: Alan Newman of SensibleDevelopment (plug: talk to Alan for bespoke Java web solutions) – thanks Alan for providing the location!

We’re holding a whole day of £5 Appness to help move everyone a step forward with their respective start-ups and projects. We have 5 great sessions each with 1-3 speakers, each session is interactive, we want everyone to get something productive out of the day.

Programme for the day:

10am-11.30am The Perils of Bootstrapping (Ian Ozsvald, Alan Newman, Raj Anand)
I’ll give some feedback on the problems associated with bootstrapping borne of practical experience growing ShowMeDo and Services over the last 2.5 years. Alan will speak on related problems for EffEffElle and Sensible Development, Raj will cover fund-raising for growth past boot-strapping. Questions will be encouraged, war-stories will be told.

11.30am-1pm Developing your £5 App (John Montgomery plus others)
John and assistant(s) will cover some of the tools and techniques that will help you start a boot-strapped project quickly and keep it growing at a sustainable rate. Some things are key (e.g. source control, test frameworks) but are often ignored. The talk will include stories from the coal-face.

2pm-3.20pm A simple example of Social Media Marketing (Madhava and Premasagar, Jon Markwell)
In part continuing from Tom Nixon’s talk on Social Media at Vine Networking, Madhava and Premasagar (DharmaFly.com) will give a £5-App Talk on how they use Social Media for low-cost yet high-impact marketing for their clients. Topics will include building a Facebook App, MySpace, Flickr and Blogs. John Markwel will join the talk discussing Google’s new OpenSocial platform along with Facebook application development.

3.20pm-4.40pm SEO (Paul Silver)
Paul will continue his talk from BarCamp and give us the low-down on easy and successful ways to improve your rank in search-engines. Paul can give practical advice during the session, we want to kick-off SEO improvements for a few of you during the day. Paul offers SEO as a commercial service – you’ll receive expert advice for free by attending.

4.40pm-6pm A guide to successful Copy-writing (Ellen de Vries)
Ellen is a professional and experienced web-copy-writer who is little known (yet…but that will change soon!) in the geek scene. She plans to run a very hands-on session where we learn copy-writing by deconstructing each other’s web sites. Ellen offers copy-writing as a professional service – you’ll receive expert advice for free by attending.

If you want to move your project forwards on Saturday November 10th then mark yourself as Attending.

Paul Silver’s Hack Day on Nov 17th is a related event.

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