First, the background: as a mentor and investor in tech startups, there’s only so much time I need to spend face-to-face with people, and since clients are as likely to be in Lausanne, New York or San Jose as Sydney, I don’t really need to maintain a city office, or spend more than a day a week in the city if I plan ahead.

But working from home has drawbacks for such a distractable guy. My productivity plunges if I get distracted by hanging out the washing and finishing the newspaper, and I miss the chance to bounce off other creative, entrepreneurial people.

This is how I'm often distracted: by kayaking

I was keen to try and solve these two problems, and was investigating establishing my own co-working space in the neighbourhood if need be.

One phone call and an hour later, I was being given a guided tour of the creative co-working space…

The day after we moved house, I was at ZUBI Bar, one of the best locations in Newport, an extremely funky and fun coffee shop on the main strip. Big, charismatic South African Steve and his team of loud, cheerful, playful baristas and waitpeople are happy to share their Wi-Fi connection if you order a meal.

I told Steve about how I was considering starting a co-working space. Steve knew somebody I had to talk to: “Simon Bond, a guy up the street who’s got a space with really fast internet access and a few spare desks”. Sounded intriguing!

Got Simon’s contact details? No, but Steve thought the owner of the local Apple reseller, Mac&Me could help, so I went looking for Margot. She  had Simon’s number because she was also setting up a training room and Apple service centre in Simon’s space.

One phone call and an hour later, I was being given a guided tour of the creative co-working space, NewportNet.com.au from Simon and his wife, Karen. I’d gone from worrying about finding someplace to work to finding the perfect workplace in an afternoon.

ZUBI Bar, like the best of Surry Hills transported to the Northern Beaches

Thanks to St George Bank opening a branch downstairs, this brand-new building has high capacity optical fibre all the way from Newport back down to Sydney. When stockbroker Simon was looking for office space to relocate his busy broking business, he happened across the developer at [address] and discovered that much of this optical fibre cabling was sitting un-utilised.

Simon’s connections run far and wide, including senior management at Internode, the Adelaide-based internet service provider. Simon knew just the people to help him put in the hardware required to utilise all that unused high-speed bandwidth.

Simon needed some high-speed, reliable internet access for his broking firm: if Internode could install and configure the necessary internet plumbing, could he build the Northern Beaches’ first high-speed internet access point for small creative entrepeneurs? Would Simon Hackett of Internode back that idea with some technical people and hardware? The answer was a resounding yes.

He’s a bit of a visionary, is our Simon, and he and his wife Karen have an admirable vision for the Newport business community: “build it and they will come”. That is, create a bright, open, collaborative business environment for the creative entrepreneurs of the Northern Beaches, give them access to the services they needed, make it affordable and too good to refuse, and they will come.

That certainly appears to be the case so far at NewportNet, with video production company Stem Media and Mac training and retail business Mac&Me joining me as anchor tenants in the new space.

The entry to NewportNet

As well as high-speed internet access (currently 10Mbps up and 10Mbps down, with both Wi-Fi and Ethernet available throughout) the premises includes elevator access, secure car park, meeting room, kitchen, bathroom and several lockable offices about 4m x 4m. All the desks are IKEA and the chairs are Herman Miller.

One of the offices

Downstairs you’re a block or two from banks, chemist, post office, supermarket, organic produce market, several great restaurants and cafes, and the wonderful ZUBI Bar.

A typical desk (in this case, mine)

Space in NewportNet is available by the desk or by the office, by the day, week, month or longer commitment.

Meeting room

If you’re on Sydney’s Northern Beaches and you’d like to share a workspace with other professionals in a casual and collaborative environment, get more details at NewportNet.com.au  au, follow us on Twitter as @NewportNetAU or drop in at Office 1, 341 Barrenjoey Rd, Newport Beach 2106 (Google Map)

By the way, if you’re lower down the Northern Beaches, I’d recommend you check out Co-Worka in Dee Why.

The team from Mac&Me in their training space

Bugherd experienced a brief outage early Friday morning AEST which apparently was unrelated to the fact that they’d been mentioned in the morning’s US tech press including TechCrunch, GigaOm, VentureBeat, ReadWriteWeb and AllThingsD.

Some of the coverage on the investment announcement

It wasn’t news to me exactly, since there’s been talks with the 500Startups team since Alan and Matt pitched in the 500Startups Mountain View office with the Startmate crew back in April, but it was great to be able to talk about the deal finally, and especially gratifying to be mentioned alongside some other really promising startups.

Alan and Matt will be over in Mountain View in July and August, for demo days with the 500startups team and other meetings. But Bugherd’s not attending for the full incubator program because it’s further along in its journey towards hugeness.

500Startups’ decision to invest means they’re excited in the potential of the product and the company, particularly when it comes to delivering a service all early-stage web startups need: a great issue tracking tool. Interested enough that being on the other side of the Pacific isn’t too far away, even. Hope we can get Dave McClure and Christine Tsai out here soon to visit and meet some of the other great people in the startup community here.

I’ll keep track of any further coverage of the announcement at http://bit.ly/500startupsinvestsinbugherd

Try Bugherd now if you need the world’s simplest bug and issue tracker. I have it on good authority the free beta period is about to close, but beta users will get a big discount when pricing is announced in the near future.

Has someone already tweeted this?

We share official TEDxSydney Twitter and Facebook access and it would look dumb if we tweeted, say, a housekeeping announcement more than once. So, when tweeting/FBing from the official TEDxSydney account, check the tweet/FB stream on the profile page first to make sure your information hasn’t already been tweeted, and if you think it’s necessary, also check with other frequent users of the account first to make sure they haven’t already tweeted/FB’d it.

Personal account versus official TEDxSydney account

It’s fine to tweet or FB about TEDxSydney from your personal account — please do. But please remember to do it from your own perspective, not from TEDxSydney’s perspective. Similarly, when communicating from the official TEDxSydney account, try to remember to do so from the perspective of TEDxSydney, not your personal perspective. For example:

@bigyahu Just bumped into the most interesting artist while in the queue for coffee at TEDxSydney (personal perspective)
@TEDxSydney morning tea is now served in the foyer. One brownie per person, please! (TEDxSydney perspective)

Use your initials on Twitter

It might make TEDxSydney less like the impersonal, elitist organisation we’re sometimes accused of being if we inject a little personality into our tweeting, but as we all have different personalities, it will help if we also indicate who’s tweeting from the @TEDxSydney account. Use your initials, prefaced with a carat (“^AJ”) to indicate your identity.

However, being exciting, engaging and informative is more important than clarifying your identity, so if you need more characters from your tweet to get your point across, please omit your initials.

Use an URL shortener with tracking

Later we can come back and measure how many people clicked on the links we’ve tweeted/FB’d to our followers, so we can learn how to do this even better over time. But we can only measure this if you use an URL shortener with tracking built-in. Bit.ly is a great service for this.

This Saturday 28 May I’ll be Social Media Director for TEDxSydney, which is developing into one of the best-known TEDx events in the world. (How big is the TEDx movement? There are 12 TEDx events happening all around the world on 28 May!) With a small volunteer we’ll be using social media tools — primarily Twitter, Facebook, Hootsuite, Tweetdeck, Instagram — to help the organisers, speakers, venue audience and online audience connect, enrich their experience, and share.

TEDx is about sharing, so here’s some excerpts from the guidelines we’re using, which I’ll chunk up into several blog posts for easier digestion. Hope you find them useful when planning your own social media strategy.

Why are we using social media?

• Extend and enrich our relationships with our community;
• Encourage interaction and exchange between community members;
• Feedback channel, customer satisfaction barometer;
• News and information distribution; and
• Brand reinforcement

When representing our organisation online, be:

• Informative
• Engaging
• Exciting
• Courteous
• Witty
• Humble
• Accurate
• Timely

Remember

• We have our brand (and those of our partners, sponsors, customers and suppliers) to protect
• Nothing is ever truly deleted from the web

Mick Liubinskas at Pollenizer is “Mr Focus” — much of the value he brings to clients is his ability to create and maintain laser-like focus; on the problem a startup needs to solve, on finding customers, on raising capital, on recruiting the right team.

Me? I’m more “Mr Shutterspeed”, “Mr Aperture”… basically, anything but “Mr Focus”. I wield my firehose-like lack-of-focus on many projects, many products, many problems and many ideas. Not all of them at once, either, it’s more of a wild spray across from the first to the last and back again.  Sometimes this frustrates me, I know it can frustrate Mick when we work on something together. But it’s who I’ve always been and I’m making progress, really I am.

But enough about me, let’s talk about what I’ve been doing lately…

Earlier this year I snuck in as one of the mentor/investors participating in the early-stage tech startup seed fund Startmate.com.au but, since I’m Mr Shutterspeed, how could I possibly stop at just one early-stage tech startup seed fund? So now I’m delighted to say I’m also a mentor/investor in Pollenizer’s new Pollenizer Ventures fund (no separate website for it but here’s Pollenizer’s announcement).

The $500k seed fund is made up of some of Australia’s most experienced technology veterans including:

Scott Farquhar, Atlassian
Mike Cannon-Brookes, Atlassian
Matt Macfarlane
Stuart Richardson, Adventure Capital
Adrian Vanzyl, Adventure Capital
Matt Dickinson, Growth Angel
David Cooper, Deloitte
Mark Greig via Elevation Capital
Adam Broadway
Rob Antulov & Nick Gonios via 3eep Ventures
Chris Hitchen, Getprice.com.au
Domenic Carosa, Dominet Digital
Phaedon Stough, Mitchell Lake
Tony Faure

…and yours truly, Mr Shutterspeed.

Whereas Startmate is a seed fund for technical founders looking for business advice, Pollenizer Ventures is a seed fund for business founders looking for technical advice, so the two ventures are quite different and compliment each other nicely. After all, how else could Mr Focus also be involved in both funds?

TEDxSydney 2010 was Sydney’s first direct experience of TED, the innovation festival phenomenon. Now TEDxSydney is back for its second year, scheduled for May 28, 2011 at Redern’s Carriageworks complex.

TED’s reputation has grown partly thanks to an open and engaging approach to sharing ideas with the internet community. TEDx is an endeavour designed to spread TED even further and give people not just the chance to attend a mini-TED event, but to plan and host their own TED-like conference, reflecting the spirit and purpose of TED while addressing their own local cultural values and issues.

I was fortunate enough to attend TEDxSydney 2010, and it blew my socks off — the calibre and the scale of the event went far beyond my expectations, encompassing science, politics, gender and sexuality, design, art, music, indigenous culture and more. Although auditorium space was limited, TEDxSydney included a second stage outside the auditorium with live crosses, vox pops and post-presentation interviews with speakers, as well as an active Twitter stream. For a first effort from the organisers it was hugely impressive. You can still watch the presentations, available on YouTube.

Now I’m utterly stoked to post that I’ll be a member of TEDxSydney 2011′s all-volunteer organising committee, helping as Social Media Director.

I’ll be working on helping people who can’t attend TEDxSydney get the most out of the live and archived content we’ll be publishing, helping people interact with each other and the speakers, and using social media to learn about what people like/don’t like about TEDxSydney 2011.

If you’ve got thoughts about that, please let me know, follow @TEDxSydney on Twitter and join the Facebook Page.

Here’s one of my favourite sessions from last year, featuring Michael Kirby on the separation of Church and State.

I'm 29th! Yay! I'm waiting by the letterbox for my certificate

The best part of this news is not that I was ranked 29th most influential person on the Federal election (that is as ephemeral a position — and comes with all the prestige and cachet — of being in the third car at the traffic lights).

The best news is that Alister didn’t do the number-crunching himself, he used Pulse of the Tweeters, a service built by a couple of US academics, which you and I and anyone else can use to determine the people on Twitter with the most influence on any topic which Twitter determines is ‘trending’ — being used by enough people to be considered an issue of the day.

More on the people who built Pulse of the Tweeters here but sadly not very much specific detail about how influence is determined, just some general outline about what’s important when determining influence on social networks.

Most services designed to measure influence on social networks generally have a small amount of information available for free about individual users, but rarely publish a list of users in a ranked table, preferring to save that for paying customers.

For instance, Klout shows an almost unintelligible dashboard of my influence score in detail (ooh, look, I’m a “Thought Leader”) but if I want to measure myself against other people, or find a list of the most influential people on a particular topic, I’ve got to pay and/or start finding a developer to connect to their API.

Never mind the data, look at the pretty colours

Unless you’re a Nestlé or Nike there’s little value in tracking your Twitter influence. That’s not to say is some value in being an influential Twitter user — in the past twelve months I’ve gained some valuable business leads, met fascinating new friends and been sent some wine, beer and books to review. Some of my friends have even received swish new HTC smartphones.

But for most of us, Twitter is not (and should not) be business. Our Twitter stream is some new mix of personal and professional, something we’d generate anyway in other media if Twitter didn’t exist. As I say on my own Twitter profile page, we should all try to tweet like nobody’s following. The real you is the best brand you have.

In that case, the best way to turn up on a Top 100 Influential Twitter Users list is accidentally, as a byproduct of your true passions. And the best way to leave it again is to continue expressing those true passions.

Start, by @boetter

Are you a technically-focused startup founder looking for a little funding and a lot of advice to help you get to that crucial point of a Minimum Viable Product and then on to an introduction to investors in Australia and Silicon Valley? Startmate.com.au wants you (or someone just like you).

Startmate is a new early-stage startup seed fund initiated by Niki Scevak. I’m an investor and mentor in the program, and there’s many more impressive names than mine on the roster.

Our first program will fund five startups and begin in January, 2011 in Sydney. We’ll spend three months helping you launch your company and win your first customers.

Applications are open now and interest has been very strong so far, so please do your best work and give us all you’ve got.

Drop me a tweet if you have any questions. They better be good ones…

Startmate wants to help technically-focused founders get started, with a small amount of capital, advice and a mission to Silicon Valley.

Startmate is a pool of funds and a roster of mentors who’ve all built hands-on successful web startups that began in Australia. We’ve been where you’re going and most of us are still on the journey, so we think we bring some useful perspective and experience to the challenges of getting an Australian tech startup up-and-running.

Our first program will fund five startups and begin in January, 2011 in Sydney. We’ll spend three months helping you launch your company and win your first customers.

Startmate is a bit different because:

My wife feels like cancer has taken her body hostage

She’s got two more weekly chemotherapy treatments to go, but that doesn’t make it any easier when she feels as crappy as she does today. She says it was easier, sort of, when she was sicker, because back then she was able to sleep through some of the day. Now she’s not sick enough to sleep that much, she’s left with no energy to do the things that might take her mind off how bad she feels.

She says for her, it’s been like a hostage crisis. The cancer has taken her body hostage, and her body is no longer something she can take for granted, something that is just part of who she is. (Read more…)

Surgeon-General’s Warning: I hadn’t taken my brevity medication before the interview so you may find I rattle on for quite some time.

You know what’s great about this podcast episode? It’s only episode four of a brand-new podcast. It was recorded on a portable digital recorder, in my car, and the total post-production probably took Owen only an hour, from importing, editing and through to hosting on Soundcloud.

Despite the market-dominating power of iTunes and News Corporation and Facebook, more unique new content is being published every year by the people who would have been considered “the audience” twenty years ago.

Check out Owen’s E-Marketing Insights podcast, it’s early days yet but shows great promise, and that’s the best kind of content there is.

• Product management is mostly about translation
• Managing product development teams is easier if you can rephrase business requirements as interesting, challenging puzzles
• Good product managers are top-level guys, but with a detailed subfloor

Hmmm… some of that may make more sense if you view the presentation below. Let me know what you think…

What do you do when you know you should be attending a weekly industry meetup but just can’t seem to get there, week after week?

As the crow flies, the nearest industry meetup to my home is North Shore Coffee Morning (#nscm) held each Thursday morning in Mosman, on Sydney’s leafy lower north shore.

It’s a great meetup: small, interesting, diverse group of people, good coffee, and great networking. According to Google Maps it ought to take me about 14mins to drive there, but I find Google Maps is rarely right about trip durations in Sydney, and typically it takes me between 20-30mins to get there, find a park and lob on in. Since I can only afford to spend an hour at #nscm, I’m taking two hours out of my highly productive morning and spending as much time on the road as I am networking with the regulars.

What to do? Why not create my own ‘lower North Shore coffee morning’ instead? I have a spacious living area with a lovely outlook, a great Italian coffee machine, good coffee beans, and enough cups and seats for about twelve people. I enjoy playing barista. Ticketing can be done quickly and easily in the cloud for next to nothing these days (see Amiando, Eventbrite and Eventarc for starters) and I can use a cheap ticket to (a) cover the cost of coffee, milk and muffins; and (b) give people some motivation to actually attend rather than (as I do) say they’ll try to make it. Any money left-over after consumables will be donated to Oxfam via my Trailwalker Sydney 2010 team. Maybe I can have the industry networking event come straight to me.

So tomorrow, in my home, Lower North Shore Coffee Morning will have its debut. If it goes well and people enjoy themselves, it might make a monthly reappearance. Tickets for this first iteration are limited to 12 and as I write this, there are only three tickets remaining.

If you’d like to come, it’s not too late — just use the order form below.

If you come, please bring passion, enthusiasm, good humour and curiosity. Also, please bring either a book, an artwork or some music to lend/give to someone else. Use of the WiFi, fireplace, comfy chairs, garden, huggy old dog and rope swing are included in the ticket price. The Twitter hashtag is #lnscm.

Our house is 10mins walk from St Leonards station, 3mins walk from the 273 and 274 bus route stops at Naremburn shops, and all-day street parking is available in Dargan St and surrounding streets.

Hope to see you there!

- alan (@bigyahu)

Online Event Registration with amiando

The thought for today: when branding, be true to who you are. Customers have a seventh sense for these things.

Very little trickery used here, just the iPhone in my pocket with the apps Darkroom (for minimising blurring in low light) and Tiltshiftgen (for a touch of blur, saturation and brightness).

Check my Flickr feed and you’ll see a significant percentage of my photography in the past year has been low-resolution because I’ve been taking more shots on my iPhone than my DSLR.

It’s certainly not the quality of the lens or the performance of the shutter and sensor that make the iPhone my camera of choice; it’s the programmable power of the apps I’ve installed, the fact that I can post photos direct to Flickr, Facebook and Twitter. Most importantly it’s the way the iPhone is always in my pocket, on the arm of my chair, in the glovebox of my car, and since it became my alarm clock, on the side of my bed.

If I were a futurist I’d predict in the next five years, the photography industry will be dominated by devices that have lenses and sensors, but also have SIM cards, 3G and WIFI radios, address books, calendars and browsers. Quality of lens and sensor will still matter, but quality of OS and apps on your ‘camera’ will increasingly matter more than the lens and sensor.

It may be tough for a phone maker to make good cameras, but it’s well-nigh impossible for a camera maker to make good phones. Unless you’re a premium professional brand like Leica or Hasselblad, better merge or seek to be acquired by a Samsung or Nokia. Yes, Nikon and Canon, I’m looking at you.

The future of photography is not about what happens in the process of capturing the image, it’s about whether there was a camera present at all, and about what happens to the image after it’s been taken.

But first, how to explain a product that doesn’t exist, in a video? You can’t show people the product.

Well, the product is used to help people collaborate on ideas. People in groups are easy to shoot, but how do you convey the development of ideas without a big special effects budget?

The solution: a visual metaphor. We came up with groups of people building ideas out of Lego-style bricks.

Then the brainstorming got a little out of hand and we agreed we’d try and build the brand-name using the bricks and feature them in the climax of the launch video.

Oh boy. For a week I struggled with designing the brand name in letters large enough to be legible in a wide shot writ small on a YouTube-sized video, while using a brand of bricks that really didn’t stick together in shapes much bigger than 30-40 blocks. Forget good typography, this was survival-of-the-fittest-letter-shape.

In the end it took a lot of silicone adhesive to keep some of the more unstable letters (like ‘R’ and ‘S’) together. We got the shot done, but for a few days afterwards I was left seeing my surroundings re-imagined as Lego bricks. ‘If I had to build that car/building/person out of bricks, how would I do it?’ was all I could think of.

Here’s some stills from the shoot:
Can we pull this off?
Pause for further direction
Cast member on monitor
Collaborating on an idea
Shooting the CEO in a lift scene
Cast holding the letters

Here’s a much more impressive video project using pixelated shapes. I wish I’d had half the special effects budget and a tenth of the creativity of this team!

Here’s the first half of our route (captured before my iPhone battery died) and our 10-12 mins/km pace is good, although it was largely downhill (following a river towards the sea is like that).

It was raining heavily at times and I was soaking wet but warm with the exercise and a moderately warm morning. Nothing makes wet shoes and socks fun, however. The rain meant I was unable to snag any photos, sorry.

It’s very cool to live in a big urbanised city like Sydney and still walk from the outskirts to the interior almost entirely in the bush for 20 of our 25kms.

It’s cooler still to finish a training walk right on your front door. Most endurance training events involve a lengthy train or car journey at either end, and there’s generally nothing worse than spending an hour or more, wet, muddy and tired, in a car or train waiting to get home before you can slip into a bath.

Next weekend I’m visiting friends in Melbourne but the team will be out there training again, and I’ll have to catch up during the week. Spare a thought for them, and spare a dollar or two if you can to sponsor us — we still have more than $1,000 to raise in donations before the event, in less than a month. Ruh-roh!

Here’s the online donation page.

What are you made of? It takes something special to be in the bush by 7am on a rainy Sunday.

]]> http://js-kit.com/rss/doingwords.com/p=1946 0 http://doingwords.com/2010/04/03/great-tagline-when-you-care-enough-to-hit-send/ http://doingwords.com/2010/04/03/great-tagline-when-you-care-enough-to-hit-send/#comments Sat, 03 Apr 2010 01:50:30 +0000 alan jones http://doingwords.com/?p=1943 Someecards.com is a provider of ‘ecards’ — the things Hallmark and Facebook make a fortune out of these days. Unlike the boring twats at Hallmark and Facebook, the ecards on Someecards have a particular dry satirical tone I love. It extends to their killer tagline, which neatly summarises what Someecards does and how important their product really is — “When you care enough to hit send”.

Great stuff!

Someecards - when you care enough to hit send

In this animated short, George Metaxas confronts the demon of the blank sheet of paper and comes off second-best. It’s an amazing animation, constructed entirely of paper, cardboard and blu-tack, and it took over his bedroom for the four months it took him to complete it. What a creative way to avoid writing for almost half a year! Congratulations to you, George.

You can read a brief interview with George here. Otherwise, enjoy this short film. I know I will be — I have a blank sheet of paper and a deadline to avoid!

the Blank Page from George Metaxas on Vimeo.