Over the last weekend I was representing Startup Weekend Manchester online, streaming hours of video content to viewers at home and recording it all to archive on youtube.
And here it is! Almost 30 videos from the initial pitching session through to an interview with the winner who goes to London on Thursday. Enjoy!
This weekend the geeks and hackers took over the top floor of the Museum of Science and Industry in Manchster for 24 ours of coding.
There were about 50 teams hacking together tools, games, services and pointless but amusing Rude Goldberg threads. The Award Ceremony took place on Sunday evening. Here is the video:
The live stream went very well and I also recorded loads of great footage which i'll be posting up in the coming days.
Nathan
Last night Northology was at the Manchester Lean Startup meeting when the MVP Generalisimo Eric Ries himself skyped in! The full video is here:
The event was hosted by Manuel.
Sponsored by Thoughtworks.com
Video by www.nathanrae.co.uk for Northology.com
The first talk on Tuesday was from Hector from Ektagon about his new app/service which hopes to do an end around facebook's 15% limit/ransom on post views. Will he suceed? Let's see!
See www.bigpick.ektagon.com for more info.
After the break it was Martin Bryant's turn to spend five mins showing us as many new and interesting apps as possible!
The last talk was Nathan Rae's entertaining talk about a twitter camaign to get Danny Boyle some more twitter followers!
There were also talks by Ian Forester about "How to be Interesting," Brendan Keegan with www.MMUagencylife.com and a guy from Manchester Climate Monthly. These weren't really relevent for the Northology blog though but I may publish Ian's later.
Let me know what you think. I know the lighting is terible and as I was only using my small camera it didn't cope very well. If these videos go down well I'll take my pro camera along to future events.
Nathan
Some photos from the Manchester Digital BBQ at the Atlas Bar last night. We all had a great time, the bar staff were very relaxed and there were far too many free drinks!
What was your favourite part of the evening? How did it compare to last year? Let us know in the comments.
Nathan Rae's Raspberry Pi setup with UnicornOn Saturday Ben Nuttall organised the second Raspberry Pi event at Madlab. Here's what happened in his own words. To read his the full story which covers the first Raspberry Jam and more of Bens story check out his blog.
I’ve now run two Raspberry Pi events in Manchester, affectionately known as the Raspberry Jam. The first in June, which was the first Raspberry Jam in the UK, and which featured on the Raspberry Pi Foundation’s website where we gained recognition for getting people together to share ideas, demonstrate what we’ve been doing with the Pi, and getting kids interested in building games and writing code as well as inspiring people all over the UK (and the world) to set up their own groups. Continuing the success of the Jam, our second event took place a month later in July, which was equally enjoyable. The July event took place on the same day as the first Cambridge Raspberry Jam – a huge event attended by 300 people and hosted by the Raspberry Pi Foundation at Cambridge University. A number of the attendees from the first Manchester Jam went along to the Cambridge for this, so we look forward to hearing from them about what went on there.
I've edited the section where Ben talks about the first event including how a young girl started programing with Scratch.
The second event was much like the first, except I introduced an idea I saw at another event I attended at MadLab recently – LAMP & Beyond – run by Jeremy of PHPNW / Magma Digital, whereby attendees were asked to contribute post-it notes of skills they had to share and skills they wanted to attain – with the intention of matching groups of people up with a person to lead them in learning a new skill, be it language, development tool, source control package or the latest hipster technology! This worked really well and everyone got a lot out of it. With the Raspberry Jam I hoped this would allow beginners to get started, others to share ideas and help each other with a leg-up without having to figure everything out for themselves and overcome initial issues and get on with something cool. A few people wanted to learn Python so I tutored a few people through some basic constructs of the language compared to what they’re used to in their own languages. Some people needed an OS image loaded on to their SD cards so we had a few people helping them with that, others were making games again (Amy returned to continue with her projects) and some others had the Pi running on an old serial terminal! Towards the end I finally got chance to do something for myself – I got my Pi talking to a breadboard using the PyPi GPIO library! We figured out which pins were which and hooked up an LED with a resistor and controlled its on/off status with a Python command – followed by a few functions (let_there_be_light() and such) which could be called to turn the light on or have it flash. A pretty cool start to external hardware controlled by the Pi. The interesting thing about this ability is that it would be possible to program the Pi to do something and have it do it without use of an external display – just listen to events happen and do things according to the state of those inputs – anything from controlling water sprinkler systems based on soil moisture to … well, anything!
I think it’s fair to say that everyone who comes to one of these events finds something out about the Pi they didn’t know before – the skills sharing nature of the Jam is to be praised and I would encourage anyone of any age or experience to attend one – or start their own!
The next Raspberry Jam is at Madlab on 11th August. Make sure you are there!
Do you have a Raspberry Pi? Are you doing anything interesting with it? What are your Raspberry dreams? Let us know in the comments.
Hi this is Nathan covering the Manchester Lean Startup Club in the MAD LAB on June 14th 7 - 9pm.
So we are doing intros and there seems to be lots of interesting people! I see Tekin, Ian and a couple of others I recognise...
Manuel is leading the discussion as well as being the slide share chief! You can see the slides here http://www.slideshare.net/digital-tonic/lean-start-up-tools-lean-startup-manchester
We starting off by discovering if everyone in the room knows what MVP means. If the only thing you are offering is a landing page with an idea is there any ethical problems with getting people to sign up for a non existing service? Mixed thoughts on this... If you are only looking for feedback you shouldn't promise a product. Don't spend too much convincing your self that your idea is good if you know that it is - get it out there.
If you find the right people who want to be early adopters they will stick with you thru the development process until you have got a fully featured product to sell.
Here's a photo us all:
Launchroc, Unbounce and Kick Off Labs are great places to start to get up a landing page to Split Test ideas, products and services.
Manuel asks about how people use MVP within companies or products to add new features? Andrew Threlfall is telling us how some people add a list of non existing features then only codes them when enough people click on the links. Or even when someone asks where the feature that they are paying for isn't there. Manuel says an "invite your friends to input into your wedding plans" feature that is on @bridebook has never been clicked on yet so won't be rushing into that.
Customer Development - What "data" do you need to capture and how should do it? Formal discussions or set questions? "If you were to describe our product how would you describe it?" "If you didn't use our product which would you use?" Or even as simple "Why did you buy our product?"
Customer Development Tools Which tools should you use? Andrew says the only tool should you use is the telephone! As engineers we love Survey Monkey and big data tools and pie charts but talking to customers will give you more than enough info. Face to face is also a great for feedback and you also get to see how your customers actually use your product. Giving a taste of features early keeps them sweet.
Usability / UX / Feedback - How do you get feedback from users? Put a feedback email on the site... don't hear much though. Manuel uses uservoice.com and Tekin uses www.intercom.io to get real time feedback and solve peoples problems.
Testing your UX can be done by looking over the shoulder of a user and give them a short task to do. How much time do they spend on each part of the process? What are they doing right? You can do this remotely using www.inspectlet.com to see how thick your customers really are. www.fivesecondtest.com is a quick and easy way to test simple aspects of your site but doesn't test the complete UX. Then Usertesting.com gets real people to go thru the whole process and gives you much more data.
Silverbackapp.com has a great character which looks like it was done by George Coghill from http://coghillcartooning.com/
Measuring Your Metrics - Kissmetrics.com is great as it triggers retrospective tracking when users do a certain action or sign up. This means you have the full story of a customers progress thur your site upto the point when they bought into it. Just make sure that you are complying with all the EU laws on this one though - Thanks Tekin. www.totango.com is a bit confusing to everyone but it seems to be a good fit for some. Make sure you don't spend all your time playing with analytics and not building your product but make sure you have a set of good measure and make sure your data is real.
Acquisition -> Activation -> Retention -> Referral -> Revenue are a good five to start with.
Well that was very interesting. I think I'm going to find a few people to interview about their projects. See you later...
Last night Northology was covering the SMC_MCR and Future Everything event about the digital future of Manchester. I don't have enough time to write up a full report but as I live streamed the panel discussion I thought I would put it up here.
Ustream has attached a 30 second pre roll advert but as it is in HD and over an hour long, I think this is a fair price to pay.
Enjoy!
Last week Josh and I "launched" Northology at the very friendly Social Media Cafe. Friendly until I mentioned that we weren't really going to be covering web design and social media companies but concentrating on Technology Startups. The crowd turned against us and I only just escaped with my life!
Tonight I'm at Manchester MadLab for the Boot Strap Business Club "Show and Tell" event which is all about tech companies who are making new products and services which are able to pay for them selves from day one. Here's the "live" blog. Please comment below or email me nathan@nathanrae.co.uk with any comments or corrections I need to make.
Tekin (@tekin) is opening the event then presenting Crowd.fm - Still in beta with MadLab as one of the testers. A all in one solution for venues and event promoters to advertise the event across their many social media sites all in one go then track how effective the the links are. Lessons from the founders: Charge your Beta Testers, they'll be more likely to give you honest feedback if they are paying for the service.
Next up Ric Roberts from Publish My Data service where people can upload any type of data who can then licence that data to anyone who wants to pay for it. Aimed at the public sector. Ric was working on Publish My Data part time but has recently gone full time on the project. It is now turning over tens of thousands a quarter and is aiming to productize and grow the service to scale by using SaaS SPARQL as an end point service.
Third up is John Ratcliffe @johnratcliffe with Club Together. Really great idea! A suit of online apps helping people joint own properties deal with issues around their holiday homes, cabins, caravans, narrow boats, etc. Avoid booking clashes, online diary, track and share financial transactions. Rails Web app plus mobile apps coming soon. Risks? John isn't sure the market is there for it yet and the need may be met by Google Docs and Facebook Groups. We'll see.
Lukas White (@lukaswhite) is trying to turn messaging on it's head with Notefire.com by allowing group menders to choose the way they receive messages from lecturers, managers, team leaders, etc. They chose if they want to be pinged on email, text message, voice message, twitter. Audience member suggests they should offer the product to National Rail! Funded by the people sending the message. Apps coming soon.
Just a note to add here: Each bloke is given 5 mins to present and answer any questions. I say bloke because there is a serious lack of females in the room. None? Maybe one?
Giglr.com! A gig listing site which isn't based on ticket sales. A central web location where any one can put up small to medium sized gig listing and then the venues or bands can check and change the details. Embed the code on the venue website and it keeps their events page up to date with no extra work. Very early days yet so clients so far. One to follow.
Stewart Dyson from Bodybook.com is having some problems getting his PC connected to the projector, all Macs so far. Bodybook is trying to keep people who have started exercising to keep exercising past the natural drop off point. "It's not a starting problem it's a continuing problem!" Keep exercise fun and focus based around challenges such as tying your progress to a charitable donation and using casual game dynamics to keep you on track. Charities can put up a page, consumers can use the app and heath clubs can pay for the white label version. This is one of the most advanced products so far tonight and will be launching a test product in the next few weeks.
Back to a Mac now with The Agile Planner by lone developer Graham Ashton (@agileplanner). What's the problem with agile now? There doesn't seem to be any tools out there which gives enough room to write out the problem in real natural english then process it down into the steps needed to be worked on. Wikis and paper cards are still used extensively… The solution i hear you ask? The Agile Planner has a great UI based on each story on each "card." Cards can be moved around, flipped over to see the details, etc. Graham is looking for local people to test this self hosting app. Looks beautiful but as i'm not a programmer I can't judge how useful it would be. Please give your comments below.
Andy Threlfall presents his time consuming side project Malinko, a job allocation service for companies such as builders, delivery services, contractors, etc. Web app and mobile apps to keep track of everything. Can also send jobs and info out to teams using TOMTOM gps devices. A team of three working on this product and it has been in development for the last two years. Paying Clients though not quite breaking even. Lessons learnt: Too many features in the first versions so clients couldn't grasp what it could do so Andy stripped it back to bare bones and firmed up his sales pitch. Now people are using it.
Break time! Discussions had about the size of the crowd that's turned up tonight. Five or six guys meeting in the pub has suddenly turned into 30 guys sharing their startups.
Philip from CapsuleCRM presenting a CRM which is a widget that turns emails into contacts with loads off added info stored on the Capsule website. Add tasks, checklists, lead details and track all your contacts with the person until you either convert the contact into a client or loose them. Once you have closed the deal all that info can be very easily passed onto a colleague, contractor or directly put it up on Free Agent
I've just announced Northology. Got two laughs in the Q and A section. The idea also got a good reaction.
Andrew from Need www.needhq.com tells us the problem he found with people asking him to work or recommend others to work. He solves this by providing a form where people can submit their "need" and see who can fill it. Freelancers then receive an email but can only respond with a yes or a now! Freelancers have a profile with daily rates, experience and approach filled out. This speeds up the process and reduce the friction for everyone involved and can all happen within an hour. People creating the "need" will pay for it. Questions: Can clients give feedback? Freelancers are invite only to keep quality high but Need may have a feedback feature in the future.
Kennelboard.com is a booking system for kennels and catteries! His dad owns some kennels but says all the existing soft wear is shit so as a developer he decided to build a better product. Lessons learnt: I built a custom product for my dad then had to strip it right back to make it fit the rest of the industry. Also it a very low tech client base with people crying out for better tools. Not sexy but loads of small businesses have needs that developers can meet and monitize.
Raj from Edocr (the worse name yet?) the "youtube for documents" or so he hopes. I think this seems to be a slightly less well made version of Docstoc though they seem to integrate with just about every social network ever invented. Integration with Zendesk and a couple of other services. I also don't see how it's boot strapped. No mention of business model mentioned yet. Oh I see that it's a subscription model starting from free up to $40 monthly.
Michael @mheap from Tweetdig.com did some command line wizardry to sort out his display and get's a chuckle. Tweetdig is an automatic email foldering filtering app for twitter. Looks like it will appeal to this event's audience but the first version Michael is showing is way too techy and complicated. They then designed a button pushing input system that creates the filtering rules which then can then tweaked afterwards. Paid for mobile apps will bring in some
Paul Stacy from Fatsoma has yet another gig service provider which enables venues and event organisers to create a network of resellers who earn commission on the tickets they sell. Started in 2007 and now shifts 500,000 tickets a year! Success! Nice inspirational story!
Shaff @hashpointfive (smartest dressed guy yet!) with twotial.com, a sentiment analyst system! How to turn it into a product? Route 1: Tells users what other people think about stuff. Meh. Route 2: Compare the Market based on service not price. Good. Route 2: Sentiment analysis overlaid over political debate. Yay. Shaff is basically outsourcing his product development process to the event. We're aiming for "Klout but not shit!"
Great event! I can't hang around tonight at the pub as I'm travelling down to London tonight to live stream the Amir Khan vs Lamont Peterson press conference tomorrow.
