All posts by Jim Muttram

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Thoughts on identity

3rd November 2011 Jim Muttram Leave a comment

One of these days I will get to actually go to Web 2.0, the famous internet conference in San Francisco founded by Tim O’Reilly who originally coined the term “web 2.0”. Each year I promise myself I will go and each year things come up and somehow it never works out.

However, luckily they are far-sighted enough to post the presentations online so at least I can get a virtual update on the latest thinking.

I haven’t yet even had time to do even this, but one presentation I have seen – and which I think is very significant – is by Christopher Poole aka “moot”. Christopher was the founder of 4chan and of new startup Canvas. He speaks very persuasively about the need for multiple identities online and criticises the push by Facebook and Google + to insist that we only have one facet to our personalities. I heartily recommend a quick look.

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Media in the open

25th September 2011 Jim Muttram Leave a comment

This is the weatherman for ESPN Chicago doing his stuff in a studio in a shop front on Michigan Avenue. It gives new meaning to the term “transparent media”.

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Brand perils in the advertising economy

23rd September 2011 Jim Muttram Leave a comment

This is a screenshot of the Wall Street Journal daily email that I received this morning.
Clearly someone, somewhere in the venerable WSJ thought it was a great idea to carry some network adverting on the mail shot – after all, why not? Money for old rope.
Problem is that it is old rope that these ads are promoting – actually worse than that. The top ad for weeks had been “6 -Year-Old Mom looks 27” which claims to promote a miracle cure for wrinkles, and the next is selling online masters degrees. Just the sorts of things one would expect the WSJ to be endorsing!

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Kabbage finds niche

22nd September 2011 Jim Muttram Leave a comment

One of the really interesting things about the internet is the way that the data which is thrown off creates new and exciting businesses that simply could not have existed before. One such case was brought to my attention by an article in Bloomberg Businessweek about startup Kabbage.

Kabbage – named after the slang name for money – has a clever risk model that analyses data from sites like eBay, Amazon and Yahoo! such as transaction history and user ratings to produce a creditworthiness score.

By doing this they are able to advance money to small traders (they are not a bank so they can’t loan) who otherwise would fail traditional financial services criteria.

This is exactly the kind of brand new business (Kiva is another example) entirely made possible by the essential characteristics of the web.

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Phone becomes wallet

19th September 2011 Jim Muttram Leave a comment

I have been reading an interesting post from Springwise (one of my sources of innovation inspiration, by the way) which points the way to an ever greater role for the smartphone in our lives. Navigo is shortly going to be trialling a service in Paris which will allow travellers with NFC enabled smartphones to pay for their tickets with their phones. NFC is already in some Android phones and the chances are the iPhone 5 will incorporate the technology too. Is this the beginning of the end for the wallet.

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Scribe – doing the job for me?

11th September 2011 Jim Muttram Leave a comment

I was reading about the new feature called Scribe on the Blogger in Draft blog. This post is being written using this interesting auto-suggestion system. It takes some time to get used to reading the word forming ahead of the cursor – which you need to do if you are going to really take advantage of the functionality. And for touch-typists it is probably more of a hindrance than a help. But I can see it being quite useful if you find yourself lost for words.
One more example of the spurt of functionality coming from the Blogger team – see my last post on the iOS app.

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Dangerous ways to celebrate

22nd August 2011 Jim Muttram Leave a comment

The BBC just answered a question I often find myself asking: how dangerous is firing a gun into the air? The answer, apparently, is “fairly dangerous”. It seems obvious that if you fire a bullet into the air it will come down to land somewhere. And research from 1962, quoted by the BBC, shows falling bullets can reach a terminal velocity of 300 feet per second, 100 feet per second more than is required to penetrate a human skull. In populous areas where a lot of this celebratory gun-firing seems to take place, the chances of falling munitions hitting the unsuspecting must be quite real and often presumably fatal.
The BBC cites a number of cases of known deaths; for example, these:

When the Iraqi football team defeated Vietnam in 2007’s Asia Cup, three people were killed in Baghdad amid widespread gunshots as fans celebrated. Celebratory gunfire in Kuwait after the end of the Gulf War in 1991 was blamed for 20 deaths.

So now I know and it doesn’t make watching the celebrations in Tripoli any easier. I just watched BBC footage of a man firing off anti-aircraft rounds into the air to mark the liberation of the city (the firing happens at about 2.02 minutes in). Someone somewhere probably regrets that he chose to show his enthusiasm in quite that way.

Update: Another article in today’s Guardian has more on the subject. If you are shot in a regular way your chance of death is between 2% and 6%, according to the article. If a falling bullet lands on you it is closer to one third. There you go.

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Time to get back to blogging again

21st August 2011 Jim Muttram Leave a comment

Blogging has been pushed into the background lately owing to the enormous popularity of Facebook, Twitter, Google + et al, but I’ve noticed a bit of a reappraisal going on. The latest example was Hugh MacLeod of Gaping Void who put his decision to cut out Twitter and Facebook to refocus on his blog thus:

Why? Because Facebook and Twitter are too easy. Keeping up a decent blog that people actually want to take the time to read, that’s much harder. And it’s the hard stuff that pays off in the end.

Besides, even if they’re very good at hiding the fact, over on Twitter and Facebook, it’s not your content, it’s their content.

The content on your blog, however, belongs to you, and you alone. People come to your online home, to hear what you have to say, not to hear what everybody else has to say. This sense of personal sovereignty is important.

I am having similar feelings. I realise I first started blogging on August 11th 2005 which means there is a lot of me invested in my blog. But for the past year I’ve barely blogged at all, keeping up with what is going on through Twitter, Google + and, to a lesser extent, Facebook. That, I sense, is about to change a bit.

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How to succeed at product design

2nd February 2011 Jim Muttram Leave a comment

There is always a lot of mystery around why one product succeeds and another, pretty much identical one fails. In a very honest post Isaac Hall, founder of Recurly.com sets out to explain. His product pre-dated Dropbox but ultimately failed to be anything like as widely known or successful.
The main reason for this boils down to overcomplication. As he says:

If you’re starting a new company, the best thing you can do is keep your feature set small and focused. Do one thing as best as you possibly can. Your users will beg and beg for more functionality. They will tell you their problems and ask you to fix it. My philosophy is that they’re right if their feature request is right only if it works for 80% of your customers. Until you have a lot of resources, stay focused on your core competency.

Of course there were some other clever things Dropbox did, which Isaac mentions:

closed beta – creates pent up demand while allowing the company to scale the back end to cope
having a Mac client – many of the commentators are on Macs even if PCs still dominate the world
creating an early product video which created viral buzz around the product

I would also add – having a very fashionable brand design in tune with the Web 2.0 design ethos.