Chattp (Chatup) is a new service straight out Harmonypark's Sandpark lab that lets you add realtime chat to the sites you are viewing through your browser.
To use Chattp you just type in a url and Chattp will chattify your page by augmenting your browser window to add in a realtime chat panel to the left hand side of the window.
Anyone you share a Chattp link with for a specific page or website will be able to participate in that chat, and each link is unique, so multiple chats can take place on any particular url.
Have a play and feel free to share it around. No login is required to use Chattp.
We gave a presentation at The Hospital Club on How We Make Apps And Services as part of their "And Then The World Presents " event, a monthly talk exploring the latest innovations in the creative industry.
The audience was a mix of creative/technical types, planners from the advertising industry and brand managers. We hope they now have an interest (if they didn't already) in how an agile/lean approach can also benefit those outside of the startup community.
This slideshare deck tries to capture some of the ad-libbed stuff into a readable online format.
If you're not familiar with the concept of the Minimum Viable Product made famous by Eric Ries, or the simplicity and benefits of introducing A/B Testing, this will hopefully serve as a simple to understand introduction.
As a company we have definitely benefitted from bringing these principles to bare on what we do, be it making apps, web services, product ideation or creating online x offline type installations and experiences.
The main takeout is that testing can actually be a lot of fun when instead of just coming up with ideas you are also tasked with playing around with different variations and putting them out there and comparing efficacy, which happens a lot with startups, but not enough with agencies that market more established businesses.
It's been a big undertaking, but today we have launched Thrive, our new online tool for managing tasks, teams and time.
Businesses make and lose money in the present, not the past. Thrive helps you to estimate, schedule and manage work across your team via personalised daily todo lists that allow you to track tasks & time against budgets, scopes & deadlines in realtime.
We've got a 60 second video above to help explain it all.
There are already some really cool companies working across different creative disciplines who are using Thrive, and we're now looking for more companies to come on board and try it out.
Thrive is based upon the premise that no matter what business you are in, time is the window through which you experience the world, and as a business asset it is perishable.
Thrive will help you to plan how you use the time you have available across your team with a view to improve the way you spend it to achieve the goals of your business.
If you are a professional service firm and treat time as billable this is of fundamental importance to pay attention to. If you make products then you have to manage how you leverage the time you have to make the best products possible.
Thrive creates a personalised daily todo list for each user which is called a 'Today List'. When you manage a project with Thrive you schedule tasks to your users and these tasks appear on each persons Today List based on what deadlines are coming up and what jobs they are assigned to work on.
Work is scheduled using a Liquid Time philosophy to visualise how to allocate tasks across your team based on what time they have available. This helps you answer the often murky "when can we do something by?" question.
As a Thrive user completes tasks on their Today List new tasks are added to the list based on the remaining time in each working day. As tasks are completed your project plans are updated automatically and in realtime to reflect the amount of work that has been done and what is still to go. This means that your project plans are always in sync with reality, and not a dangerously out of date sketch of it.
In a business sense Time = Money and in a scientific sense if you can't measure something you can't hope to control it. This is where Thrive steps up and gives you the tools to take control of the business you work in and to better focus the way you spend your day to achieve the goals and deliverables you have in your sights.
Thrive helps you migrate from the reporting paradigm of looking back at what happened to being able to see what is about to happen across your projects and your business. Armed with this insight you are better able to determine how to best spend the time you have to make sure that potential profits never become definite loses.
You can use it within your company as well as with freelancers and external partners who can log in regardless of their timezone or location. This helps to integrate and streamline the way you work, no matter who you choose to work with. You can also control how much or how little each user can see or do.
We feel that simplicity is important too so with Thrive you enter a task only once and we help you manage it from estimating time and cost through to building scopes of work that can be scheduled to create a timing plan of work that is then assigned to a users, tracked for progress and profit margin and then analysed for improving future process and performance.
We all hate filling out time sheets too and that is why with Thrive they become a by-product of ticking off items on your Today List instead of silly forms that you have to fill out long after you have forgotten what it was you were working on.
We're also hard at work on our roadmap of where we see the app heading over the next 12 months, and we'd like to get your feedback on board to help inform how we progress.
For many years we've been part of a private ongoing Skype conversation on a thread named Junkarama. Junkarama is the place where we post all of the best links and content we come across during our travels on the internet.
Think of Junkarama as a collaborative super-filter for HOT links on the web.
During a recent Sandpark hack session we created an app to extract the links that get posted on the Junkarama thread and then to post them into a live publicly available stream for all to see and share. We call this new stream Junkarama Greatest Hits.
You can either visit the Junkarama page (which is now live), or pretty soon you can follow Junkarama on Twitter and receive your dose of all the webs best links that way (still to be implemented...).
Currently submission rights are by invitation only.
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The Junkarama Greatest Hits public stream was created during Sandpark, which is our 10% time initiative for playing around and hacking new apps and services together; The content however is powered by many.
It was made using a script (written in ruby) that talks to Skype through Applescript and extracts content from the Junkarama thread. This returns a list of the new messages, and sends them off to a web app that posts the links online. When possible, the content is automatically embedded from the links via the embed.ly API.
Along with many other locals, we were cautiously optimistic about David Cameron and Boris Johnson's East London Tech City announcement on 4 November. Not only was the Shoreditch tech scene getting recognition and a boost from No. 10 and the Mayor, but £200 million of equity finance was announced, intended to catapult Silicon Roundabout and the East End into serious competition with Silicon Valley and help realise the government's ambition to make the UK "the most attractive country in the developed world for early stage and venture capital investment." Right on!
Accordingly to Willets, the £200 million is not a new initiative but rather a "topping-up" of the venerable Enterprise Capital Funds programme whereby private venture capital firms invest in companies with both private and public money.
A show of hands amongst the dozens of entrepreneurs at the event made clear that the relevance of these sorts of funds to Silicon Roundabout and the putative Tech City is limited: only a few had even heard of their existence. Simply put, tech start-ups don't need VC millions from the outset, they need seed or angel funding in the tens of thousands to get off the ground. It's never been less capital-intensive to start a company but of course that doesn't remove the need for funding altogether – if just 5% of the £200 million was earmarked for distribution as seed funding 100- 200 new businesses could be launched, many of whom would then feed into the VC deal flow in good time.
Conversely, rising rents & business rates, tightening visa restrictions, ineligibility for other programmes such as National Insurance relief for new employees, and the inevitable brain-drain into the Olympic park campuses of the Silicon Valley giants post-2012 will act to curb tech start-up growth in and around Shoreditch. Nothing we heard on Monday night suggested otherwise.
To his credit the Minister did promise to come back to TechHub in the new year with those running the ECF in tow, to explain the programme and let us know "how the government's backing for venture capital is working." Someone needs to explain to him however that supporting London's start-ups is not the same thing as supporting London's venture capital industry, and that a gated community of VCs, Google, Cisco and McKinsey & Co. does not a Tech City make.
Calling our app famous is an exaggeration, but if you are reading this post because of the headline you have just learnt a valuable lesson about getting your own app noticed.
Chatterbucks has however been posted to the App Store homepages of iTunes US, UK, Across Continental Europe, Latin America, India and more, so it has bubbled up to the surface from a sea of other apps.
Now for the actual lessons/tips for improving your odds of creating an iPhone App success
Lesson 1 - Simplicity stands out in a crowd
The common predicament of the app maker is that they have loads of great features that they want to show off, but there are only a few pixels initially available to achieve this.
Think of a billboard on the side of a motorway with people wizzing past in their cars. If you try to sell all of your benefits in the handful of seconds available you will clutter the message to the point of incomprehension (in a semiotic sense saying everything at once is equal to saying nothing at all).
We tried to reduce our idea (and its icon) to the essence: Money + Talking +Playful.
We also looked at the colour-rich and vector-dense icons we had to compete with and designed something that was the opposite. As you can see on the above App Store screenshot, our icon really stands out in a group of icons by visually saying less.
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Lesson 2 - Give people something to be curious about
Colonel Sanders had his secret herbs and spices. Coca-Cola have their secret recipe ingredient known as 'X'. What have you got?
In our case we have Natural Feature Tracking AR which allows you to augment 2D images (logos, illustrations, pictures, packaging etc) without needing a barcode/glyph/marker, so we wanted to let people know that our app has a special ingredient in the mix too.
There isn't a standard icon for the kind of advanced computer vision technology we put into a users fingertips, so we made our own. People kind of know what AR means, so we went for a simple 'AR+'. The text then sits in between two colour ribbons which symbolise the layer it augments between you and reality.
The important thing is that you signify somewhere within your promo material that your app has something new/different going on that will tap a potential user's curiosity.
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Lesson 3 - Create promotional content that others can leverage for mutual benefit
When we launched we posted a video on Youtube and within a few minutes an AR Blog had picked it up and added the video to a post. This lead to a mention and video embed in Die Zeit (The New York Times of Germany). We also had a mention on THE NEXT WEB with our video included (after we contacted them). This started the ball rolling.
By creating promotional tools (like videos) that bloggers and other press can spice up their content with you are greatly increasing your chances of receiving a writeup.
If you write a press release, keep the tone informal. Journalists like dealing directly with the creators and developers of apps, so share your new invention as you would with a friend in a bar and not in what you perceive to be the correct PR speak.
Another thing to think about is that mainstream press look to more obscure niche sites and sources to see what trends are bubbling up, so target the niche sites and try to get mentioned there, rather than hitting the reception desk of a big media entity where you are unlikely to get a call back or an email opened unless you are previously known to someone on the inside.
The thing to remember is that somewhere out there, someone is responsible for discovering and sharing the new new thing with their audience. Seek these people out. Look for who has recently posted on a topic that relates to you, and try starting with them.
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Lesson 4 - Invest some time to make your App Store images look enticing
When we first released Chatterbucks to the iTunes App Store the last thing we got onto was making the screenshots look good.
It wasn't that we didn't care how our app was presented, but like anyone making an app, it takes so much work to create the initial product that you are a little burnt out by the time it comes to add the polish to make your app look enticing in-store.
Our first round of promo images sucked. They were basically random screenshots from within the app that gave a potential customer no idea of how the app worked in the real world (Chatterbucks is an AR app, so context is crucial).
When we swapped in some glossier app promo images that gave more context to a potential customer of how the app worked (in our case this meant showing the app whilst someone was using it in real life) our sales immediately jumped by 300%!!.
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Lesson 5 - You need to help Apple/iTunes discover you
A few days after we launched Chatterbucks there was an in-store feature on AR apps, but we weren't on the list. We obviously wanted to be added because not only did we tick the Augmented Reality box, we went way further with our markerless tracking powers.
We contacted iTunes and asked how we could flag our app as being AR enabled, but we heard nothing back. A few weeks later we received a mail asking us to provide some promo assets. We made them and sent them over, but nothing came of it. A few weeks after this we turned up one day on the UK iTunes homepage as a New & Noteworthy app. From there Chatterbucks has spread pretty quickly to other iTunes App Store homepages around the world as a Staff Favourite.
We are under no false assumptions that this part of the equation was truly ours to influence, but if we hadn't followed up on a genuine app-related question, we might not have made it onto the radar of someone whose responsibility it was to help innovative new apps bubble up from obscurity.
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Everybody will have a different experience. Hopefully by sharing ours you might be in a better postion to improve your own. If you have any other useful tips/lessons learned based on your own experience feel free to post them as a comment below.
London tech startup Specle have just signed a deal with Associated Newspapers that allows any of their classified readers to upload and prepare content for press free of charge.
The deal will enable classified customers to upload files for publication in the Daily Mail, Mail on Sunday and Mail on Sunday 2, via Specle's online ad spec database specle.net.
The Specle deal with Associated Newspapers has created a 'self service' classified portal where the sender can upload, preflight, colour convert, store and manage all their ads and in this case it's completely free for the classified sender.
The advantage for publishers outsourcing classified production is that they no longer have fixed costs in their business to handle all variety and types of PDF that come in from senders.
A publisher can now outsource to Specle, who will handle the process to ensure that only perfect files come to the publisher – with GWG job tickets – that can go straight into the flat plan.
Our new space is right on the London's 'Tech Canal' by Dalston/De Beauvoir, just across from the excellent Towpath Cafe.
We are still within a few minutes of our old space near the Silicon Roundabout, but slightly further North, which is where we see companies of our type migrating in the near future.
Money talks, as the old saying goes, but with Chatterbucks it really does.
Chatterbucks brings true, high-quality, Markerless Augmented Reality to the phone and the notes in your pocket. Just point your iPhone 4 or 3GS camera at the Queen's portrait on any £5 or £10 banknote and see what Her Majesty has to say.
Chatterbucks comes pre-loaded with tongue-in-cheek quotes, ironic witticisms, fun facts, and makes for the perfect conversation ice-breaker.
You can even surprise your friends by entering your own personalised messages for Her Majesty to proclaim.
[US dollar and Japanese yen currency support coming soon]
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Markerless Augmented Reality technology for the iPhone.
Chatterbucks was developed by Harmonypark + Sam Hare and involves our own cutting-edge, mobile Markerless (natural feature tracking) Augmented Reality technology, allowing Chatterbucks to work on normal English pound sterling banknotes, with no special marker image required.
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Some of the Key points about our Markerless AR technology for iPhone are:
1. Our Markerless Augmented Reality, can work on any image. No more ugly markers, it can even work with existing marketing material/packaging. Currently only 1 other company with apps in the App Store are doing this on the iPhone.
2. We have high framerate tracking, significantly faster than existing iPhone Markerless AR approaches. The result is a smoother and more compelling AR experience.
3. We have unparalleled responsiveness and stable 3D pose estimation, meaning augmented graphics stay tightly locked to the physical object during motion, and don’t jitter when stationary. Again, the result is a more compelling AR experience (though our Chatterbucks demo video isn’t a great illustration of this as it involves someone who has drunk way to much coffee holding the tracked object!).
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If you would like to find out more about this platform or how you might use it for your own company, campaign or content please get in touch.
