Productivity

5 things to get you to paperless in 2013 from a consistent blogger on the topic Sven Fechner

Basecamp Breeze – old fashioned email lists (via @destraynor) – very simple, very cheep

eCommerce

14 reasons behind John Lewis’ 44% increase in online sales, the eConsultancy blog is a great source for regular posts on eCommerce

UI/UX/Design

Responsive Design for Apps — Part 1. Jason Grisby is new to me. He is a co-founder of an mobile focused design business and this is a long and well through through post on how to approach small screen design projects. A lot to get you thinking here.

Bat for Lashes Pitchfork Interview. Take a look at the way this presents, really sweet format/UX.

Media, New and Old

Andrew Sullivan’s Ad-Free Publishing Experiment Sees Six-Figure Revenue In First Six Hours – subscription based revenue for a small/niche blog is unusual, initial results of this move, covered here by Techcrunch, are really instructive.

2012: The year Irish newspapers tried to destroy the web – meanwhile in a flashback to the late 1980′s traditional Irish print media covers itself in glory….thanks to Simon McGarr for this.

Is Ireland’s political establishment braced for the impact of social media? – John Kennedy reveals that politicians like the late 1980′s vibe too.

Keith

This two day event will be of interest to anyone looking at the convergence of technology and special needs. More here.

On the first day special guest Joanne Casey is talking. You can see more of her here.

Search Meets Social – September 20th

This is an IIA event (#disclaimer I am the chair) which features a keynote from Rand Fishkin. He is the CEO of SEO software company; SEOmoz. He co-authored the Art of SEO from O’Reilly Media, co-founded Inbound.org, and was named on PSBJ’s 40 Under 40 List and BusinessWeek’s 30 Best Tech Entrepreneurs Under 30.

Additional speakers include ones from Facebook and Mindshare. If this is an area of interest to you get to the Search Meets Social site and grab a free ticket – there are only 150 for the day so they will go quickly. See you there.

Keith

Heritage Portal Website

The Heritage Council in Ireland published an RFT via eTenders in May which closed on 25th May and I have uploaded all relevant documents to Slideshare. Linked as follows and then a screenshot of the current site:

• Main RFT – on Slideshare here
• Additional Information – on Slideshare here
• Google Analytics summary – on Slideshare here
• Additional Q&A – on Slideshare here

3 key learning

Looking through the information provided there are a number of areas which stick out for me.

1. The inclusion of GA information is a great idea – where confidentiality allows it this should be standard practice.

2. It would appear from one of the answers in the additional Q&A doc that there was time pressure on the Council to get the RFT out. This is reflected in the complete absence of information relating to a number of key requirements. One which particularly stands out for me is the “social media/user generated content one”.

This is referred to in a number of places but never gets past a vague aspiration. It is difficult to see how a web dev responding to this manages to cost the scoping and analysis of that piece never mind the delivery of the solution!

3. The Informal Visions document is very useful and addresses some of the gaping holes in the main RFT. Somewhere in the midst of the multiplicity of documents and requirements a Must/Should/Nice to Have exercise should have been done. I have seen variants of this approach used but at the core it allows a developer to quickly identify the key requirements to focus on in terms of both the solution suggested and also the pricing.

This analysis of RFT’s which are not live (that would be too sensitive) is something I will be doing here regularly from now on and I hope you enjoy it. If you have comments and thoughts on the Heritage Portal website RFT please leave them underneath.

If you want to learn more about how to run a successful web project have a look at my July workshop details.

Keith

For Apple geeks, or just geeks this is a great opportunity to meet him

Book for free here.

keith

You can expect to see the likes of:

• Sean O’Sullivan, Managing Director of Avego, and new dragon on Dragons Den
• Sharon Walsh, Marketing Director of Heineken
• Deborah Lynch, Developer Technical Services Manager of Paypal
• Constantin Gurdgiev of Ireland Russia Business Association
• Fergal O’Byrne, Managing Director of SONRU

who, along with many others will explore how the elements of Social, Mobile and Localisation can be used to the advantage of businesses looking at overseas opportunities.

For more information and to book click on this link.

I’ll be there (as I am on the board of the IIA) so I look forward to seeing you

Keith

The next ones are being presented by the author of The Entrepreneurs Guide to Customer Development.

For more information on these workshops and to book click on this link.

From the author on the workshop format: “My workshops are very interactive. I’ll do some overview slides about customer development and lean startups and then we’ll go through the methods in my book to describe your business ecosystem, document assumptions, identify and prioritize risks and then discuss how you might go about testing the risks. Participants are encouraged to bring real life examples and issues we can discuss and hopefully work through.”

Keith

I follow @shelisrael on twitter and occasionally chat to him there. You can see his website here.

Happened to see a tweet from him last week offering a copy of his book to anyone who would then review it so I took the opportunity. I bought and read a previous book of his – Twitterville and have also sampled his 2006 Naked Conversations.

I really enjoyed it. 71 pages (so as someone else said the price could be a little high) but on the other hand I have previously happily paid that price for really well written books which were also an hour’ish in the reading.

This is a topic I have read about and taken advice on for years and this summarises the best of that. He teases out the contradictions in the space and gives entrepreneurs the confidence to go out and win audiences over. Precious little structural stuff (you know the bullet point, image and font size kinda advice) and much more so about the tone and passion which are so essential in the delivery of a memorable pitch.

Nice one. Or as we say in Ireland “deadly”. Oh, should say it is $4.99 on Kindle for April. That hikes it nicely from 4 stars to 5. Link to the Amazon listing here.

As an addition to this I am interested to see that this is self-published using the www.createspace.com service. I know a number of entrepreneurs right now who are actively exploring the self-publishing route.

Keith

In preparation for that workshop, which will include topics such as:

• Initial ideas on what you want and what you need – realistic expectations
• Writing a specification document – format and detail
• Running a tender process – selecting developers, shortlisting and interviewing
• Managing the build once a developer is selecting
• Design
• Information Architecture
• CMS Integration
• Content Strategy

I summarised the 4 key phases of a successful build in the following document – please download and use as you wish.

Keith

This is going to be fun – as part of a new 2 day conference coming up in Wexford this coming Wed & Thur (21st and 22nd March) I am chairing the morning session on Day 2.
Entitled Software and Services it will explore the key trends in the application of technology which businesses and organisations need to plan for in the next 18 months to 2 years and beyond. These are the 5 speakers who will then also take part in a panel discussion at the end of the morning:

Dr. Mícheál Ó Foghlú, CTO, FeedHenry

Adam Grennan, Country Manager, Cisco

Joel Wachtler, Head of Strategy, Eircom

David Walsh, Co-Founder & Group CEO, Netwatch

Stephen Moffatt, Head of Smarter Computing, IBM

For more on what each of them will be covering, together with the full conference details and booking information go to the website www.techovate.com. It is being held in the new Wexford Opera House – possibly one of the nicest venues for this kind of conference in the country.

Keith

What is Good design?

It is not about glossy or quirky or brand identity or even just a strong visual statement – it is one of the key factors which makes a website or app useable for an individual. That is always a strong focus which has to be at the root of every web project I undertake with a client.

Simplify with Clear

This upcoming Clear app makes full use of the unique properties of the iPhone interface and while beauty is there the build from scratch reminds me of Flipboard too – leaving behind all traditional user interface conventions.

Clear for iPhone (Coming Soon!) from Realmac Software on Vimeo.

I like it a lot and look forward to the release of V1

Keith

Thanks to thenextweb which is where I spotted this