Author: Matt Collins
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GoodGym – Winners of SI Camp 2!
This weekend I was lucky enough to be part of the second Social Innovation Camp. Like the first SI Camp back in April, the idea was to get geeks and social innovators together for an intense couple of days to work in small teams to prototype some socially-beneficial web tools. It was a huge amount…
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How to Use Metrics to Optimize Your Way to a Killer App
This is a great slideshow (with audio) on how to use metrics to drive the development of your web app. Designing and Optimizing the DNA of a Killer App by Dan Olsen – Startonomics View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: software consumer)
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Local Search Habits: Findings from a Yahoo Study
Greg Sterling over on Search Engine Land shared some interesting findings the other day from a Yahoo study into consumers’ behaviour when choosing local services and providers. The numbers regarding consumers’ choice of research tools (generic search engine vs. vertical search engine vs. internet yellow pages) are particularly interesting as there’s quite a lot of…
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UpMyStreet Gets a Makeover, Improves Local Search
One of the more successful UK hyperlocal sites so far, UpMyStreet, has had a makeover. It has a new homepage and, according to the site themselves, improved local business search and rating functionality. Do the updates to their local review system mean they’re keen to get into the space that the likes of Qype and…
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Predicting the Top-Selling Web Apps of the Future
Can Sales of Desktop Apps Predict Successful Web Apps? Attending FOWA a couple of weeks ago got me thinking about web apps in general. With the move from desktop to web-hosted software, I’m wondering if what’s selling now in desktop versions will be a good predictor for what people will pay for in web app…
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Outside.in to Launch UK Version of its Hyperlocal News Site
photo credit: Mr. Siegal According to Journalism.co.uk today, hyperlocal news site Outside.in has confirmed that it will be launching a UK version. They report that the UK site is currently in beta. Outside.in currently powers ‘buzz maps‘ for the Washington Post that show which places are currently being mentioned most by local bloggers. No doubt…
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Trinity Mirror Starts Geotagging Local News
photo credit: Peter Ito The Guardian’s Oliver Luft reported on Wednesday that the Trinity Mirror-owned Liverpool Echo has launched a map-based news service where they are geotagging news stories and allowing for postcode-based searches. According to the article, Trinity Mirror have plans to roll this out more widely. Trinity Mirror also have other experiments with…
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Is there an Opportunity for Low-Cost Local SEM?
Greg Sterling has an interesting post on his Screenwerk blog on the challenges of selling SEM to small local businesses. He argues that most small businesses don’t understand enough about SEM and all the metrics involved to evaluate an SEM service except by trying it. When they do, often the ROI is not great because…
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UK Advertising Industry Statistics
This data has been out for a few months now, but for anyone whose business depends on advertising, it’s worth a second look. It’s from the World Advertising Research Center’s Advertising Statistics Yearbook 2008. UK Advertising Expenditure at current prices, 2007 Advertising Medium Total advertising expenditure £ millions Year-on-year % change Press 7,716 -1.6% Television…
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MapQuest Local: Where Have You Seen this Before?
MapQuest recently launched a new local service called MapQuest Local that more or less follows the Localmouth pattern. Like Localmouth, they’re aggregating content from a number of local information providers to provide guides to individual places. Currently, the information they’re aggregating includes business listings from City’sBest and CityGuide, news from Topix, weather from WeatherBug, events…
