Great evangelism for your startup.
// November 28th, 2008 // 0 Comments // Fun, Social Media
Just in time for all those social media industry xmas parties, we give you this “I Twitter and I vote” range of clothing, merchandise, stickers and badges. Go nuts.
100% sale proceeds during December ’08 will be donated to supporting future WebJam events in .AU.
Get bumper stickers, badges, tees and more...
// November 3rd, 2008 // 0 Comments // Industry, Startup
Photo by Nite Scape
Whether it’s business or charity, the money almost never comes from where you expected — have you noticed?
Last weekend I took part in the Sydney to The Gong bike ride, a 90km social fund-raising event put on by the MS Society. Participating with 14,000 other cyclists, volunteers and support crews is inspirational. I try to raise some donations from friends and business contacts too.
I’ve been doing a lot of fund-raising lately; for Oxfam, another MS Society event, the Juvenile Diabetes Assocation, GetUp, the Smith Family, and for the Serkong School in the Himalayas. I’ve noticed that my ‘regular’ donors have started drying up as they received repeated requests for just a few dollars more. Fair enough, that’s expected.
But what’s unexpected is who donates. Every time, there have been high-net-worth friends who have the cash but don’t donate, and friends and colleagues of mine who I know are doing it tough, yet they donate generously and often. In between, there’s some noise in the data that ruffles the line on the graph — people I happen to catch on the right day, people who know someone affected by multiple sclerosis when I happen to be raising money for the MS Society. But it’s not hard to remove the noise and see that there’s only three types of people in this world:
Whether it’s raising funds for a charity, finding time to help refine the idea for a new business, or even the number of days outstanding on your accounts receivable, it’s always the same pattern.
Some believe the winner is the one who dies with the most toys, and every dollar you give away will take twice as much effort to earn back. Bills should never be paid until the last minute. Do unto others before they do unto you. (more…)
// October 29th, 2008 // 0 Comments // Communication, Me, Other news
A good rule to work by. Unless talking is what you do, in which case, more talk.
// September 19th, 2008 // 0 Comments // Industry
I’ve used the same user ID (bigyahu) for just about everything I’ve signed up for online since 1996. Now you can find out how that happened and why it turned out to be a good thing for me professionally on www.bigyahu.com.
There are links to my personal and professional background and a photo for the curious.
My latest series of business cards from Moo.com are printed with “Just google ‘bigyahu’” underneath the contact details.
Now, when I give someone my card, they can google me (go and try finding me amongst all the other guys called “Alan Jones” if you’re wondering why it had to be “bigyahu.”) Thanks to the indexing power of Google and the archiving power of teh intertubes, anyone who googles “bigyahu” will have clear evidence that (a) I’ve been doing this stuff for a very long time; and (b) I practice what I preach.
My personal brand is coming along nicely. What are you doing to develop your personal brand? Call me if you need some advice.
// September 18th, 2008 // 0 Comments // Other news
The guys who really sent the Diet Pepsi and Mentos viral momentum spinning so hard that even I’ve had a go at it are now about to start a new craze in the office environment with slinkys made of Post-It Notes. If I was 3M, I’d be sponsoring these guys so fast their eyes would water from the wind made by the flapping of hundred dollar bills…
EepyBird’s Sticky Note experiment from Eepybird on Vimeo.
// September 17th, 2008 // 0 Comments // Uncategorized
In my line of work I spend a lot of time pointing to things on web pages, and this is most easily done with a picture of the web page itself – a “screendump,” “screenshot” or “screen capture.” I take so many of them that my Flickr stream is quite a boring place to be unless you’re in a related line of work. I use and highly recommend Skitch from Plasq as the best tool on the Mac for easy and flexible screendumping but even it has limits. Skitch can’t, for instance, take a screendump that extends beyond the current screen – necessary for web pages that extend ‘below the fold’ of the bottom of the screen.
You can try taking several screendumps vertically and stitching them together afterwards in your graphics editor, but it’s easy to overlap pixels, mis-align and leave bits out. Fortunately, OS X provides another solution, which works great as long as you don’t need to include the ‘chrome’ of the browser’s own interface in the screenshot.
Quick and dirty solution: print the web page as a PDF. In the Print dialog box in Safari, you can choose to save as a PDF, or even to open the PDF in Preview, from where you can save or copy and paste into other apps.
'Printing' to a PDF file is a handy way to get a bigger screendump
In many situations, this will do the trick, though PDFs sometimes don’t include background colours and you’ll find your web page cut up into A4 pages unless you also create a new custom page size just for screendumps, like this:
Creating a custom paper size before printing a PDF to get it all on one page
From there, Preview will let you export your PDF as a JPEG or PNG for use in HTML editors, blog editors, Powerpoint and the like.
But wait! There is a better way (there almost always is) if you don’t mind downloading and installing just one more application (but this one is free.) Paparazzi is a great little app that does one thing and does it beautifully – takes a screendump of the entire browser page and lets you save it in a variety of image formats in the blink of an eye. Also optionally lets you do a timed screendump (useful for drop-downs,) saves thumbnails and lets you set a crop size for your dump.
Get Paparazzi from Nate Weaver at Derailer. He mos def rocks my screendumpin’ world.
Just look at the vertical height of this screendump thumbnail from Lifehacker!
// September 14th, 2008 // 0 Comments // Mobile, Music
I’m loving The Feeling’s music at the moment, particularly the 2006 song ‘I Love It When You Call.’
Then it struck me how good it would sound as a ringtone on my iPhone.
Just in case you think it would sound great on your iPhone too, here’s the ringtone I made.
(Just drag it onto iTunes and it should appear in your list of ringtones.)
Don’t thank me, just buy the album, it’s great!
// September 9th, 2008 // 0 Comments // Products, Startup
You could fly to San Francisco, be horrified at the cost of even a cheap hotel room, then spend USD500 just to be there, or you can watch the TechCrunch50 conference live on USTREAM and just pay the streaming bandwidth cost. This is the first time I’ve ever seen a USTREAM live video stream acceptably from Australia, so if that’s been the experience for you too, give this one a try – it seems to be working really well.
On the TechCrunch50 site you can skip directly to the video for each presenting startup immediately following their presentation.
// September 8th, 2008 // 0 Comments // Advertising, Mobile
Tweak o’ the knob to Gavin Heaton for locating Chris Schaumann’s recent presentation on digital brand advertising in the Asia Pacific region (see the presentation below.) Only 5% of advertising budgets in the region are spent online so it’s no wonder that Schaumann finds 65% of all marketing spend in 2007 had no effect on consumer behaviour.
For me, the numbers that really struck me were on slide 43, which researched 21 mobile branding campaigns and found a 24% increase in brand awareness, 12% increase in message association, 5% increase in brand favourability and 5% increase in purchase intent. I’ve never been much of a believer in mobile brand advertising, preferring instead to apply it to social marketing and click-to-buy. But here’s some clear evidence that mobile brand advertising works – at least, in Asia.
There are some other surprising results to be found in Chris’ presentation comparing YouTube, embedded video and TV for delivering video ads. You won’t believe how well YouTube scored against TV…
// September 4th, 2008 // 0 Comments // Me
Wow, that first one worked! So here’s another panoramic movie of the view from the top of a mountain looking down upon the village of Tabo, where my wife and son and I lived for three weeks last month. To the north east is Tibet, to the south Kinnaur, and to the west, Ladakh (look at the angle of the sun – the shots were taken in the early afternoon.) Enjoy!
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