The Big Picture is essential for the small decisions

Elon Musk is a huge inspiration for me. He has been involved in creating 4 businesses worth over $50 billion. The character of Iron Man is reputedly based on him. He is now launching a project with the aim of commercialising space travel with the bigger goal of supporting life on other planets. What a dude!

Am not sure to what degree he has always claimed it, but now he is all about big picture stuff. He says he doesn’t aim to make a business; he sets out to solve problems. Big problems. From making a reliable way to send money over the internet, to reducing the use of fossil fuels in cars, to making a mass transport that is safe and as fast as Concorde, to exporting human consciousness to other planets- all lofty goals.

As I blogged about here, most people don’t see past the end of their own nose (although I question whether it is a physical rather than selfish issue). The only problems they see are their own. And I have constantly said that that will not lead anywhere for their happiness (unless technology chips in). We need a better awareness of the context for our lives. Today, even the average middle class citizen is living a princely life in terms of health, life expectancy, food options available, security, comfort, technology and freedoms to travel compared to any time known in history. Some people might claim there have been other times- some ancient Chinese societies perhaps- where the average person had a better standard of living, but I think health care, cheap flights and technology swing it for me.

I hope with my commitment to making the history of the world more accessible: the periods of wealth and decline of nations, the natural disasters that are common place, the corruption of powerful leaders, the circumstances that nurture remarkable individuals, the behaviours and decisions made by groups of people under certain pressures, and the whole myriad of complex situations that have spawned from the first human civilisations up to todays world, will help to provide the tools people need to see a bigger picture and understand how they fit into the world.

I dream and work hard everyday to make this a way of me being able to lead an independent life where I am free to work on further projects that can help the world. I am in no short supply of ideas of my next move. But I have much work left to do on TimeMaps first.

I would love to know at what stage Elon Musk let space exploration drive his short term goals and to what extent it helped him in his decisions. And I’d love to hear about the overarching big picture ideas that have sculpted the decisions us “normal” people choose for their own life.
Please send me yours?

TimeMaps makes its tv debut

The TimeMap of World History, my companies website, was mentioned on BBC Click today. Although it was only given about a minutes worth of footage, we got a nice spike in traffic, of about 4,000 new visitors, all of whom seemed to have a good poke about.

The TimeMap of World History was featured on BBC Click

With this bump, our traffic went over 60,000 visitors this month and the wind certainly seems to be behind the sails at the moment, as our traffic is climbing month on month. It was only 20,000 a month a few months ago.

This is still only one tenth of my target for my first target for the website, as I believe it has real value to anyone who wants to understand more about history- a user base who create millions of web searches everyday. But I am happy with progress as we could not claim to have promoted the website with any real effort yet.

I did contact the journalists who make this program. This is what I did. I did a bit of background research into the presentor/reporter, and found out that she was a really cool, interesting person (she can be found on twitter @katerussell). So when I approached her I made my email short (opening emails must always be short- 2 sentences max!) but funny. I appealed to her fun nature. She replied to me saying that she would take a look at the site. A month or so passed and I thought the contact had fallen into a black hole, so I prompted her and quickly let her know how the site was of benefit to people. That was it, we were on the show. To be honest, I think the product did the selling. It does help to have a unique and super cool website. But still, its not for everyone and you have to get yourself noticed.

In about February of next year I am hoping to dedicate a lot of time to promoting the website in a real way. I am very much looking forward to this. I’ll let people know what is effective.

The ideas Entrepreneurs DON’T follow up..

While I was swimming this morning I was wondering about something.. I have loads of ideas, so so many, and I think that lots of other people do too. Most of these ideas just sit in my head, or maybe I have a conversation about them a few times, but mainly they don’t get acted upon.

I am not saying that all these ideas are good. But what if some of them had some legs? I have always been a creative person and I also have a great deal of start up business experience as well as industry specific experience. One thing I have found, after many ideas fizzling out, is that you really have to only focus on one idea. Use all of your creativity and energy to make this work. It is so incredibly difficult, after a hard days work, to take time away from your hobbies or partner, just chilling out, or whatever, to then start launching a new idea or project.

Yet, entrepreneurs are both creative and know how to get things done, so their ideas/ visions are probably worth something. I think there is a good opportunity here for a re-think into “business as usual”. This area is where real collaboration could be encouraged. Whether it is between entrepreneurs and students, or through some great on-line networks. Or maybe something else. Maybe some kind of internship scheme where entrepreneurs get free labour to support people to run their ideas. Creating some kind of trickle down of ideas as well as skills.

If something that solves this problem exists already, I would love to hear about it. I will gladly throw a few ideas in the pot.

What is your on-line influence?

Klout.com is really interesting. It is trying to give every person on-line a score about how much impact they have. How much klout. When you access it and link up your social media accounts it tells you who influences you and who you influence.

It is obviously not using a good algorhythm as it says I am influenced by people I’ve never even heard of – and my top 3 terms am influenced by are “games”, “iPads”, and “queens”!!???- but maybe thats because my activity is so low I barely register. I weigh in at 42 (.26).. Which is 2 above the median level. So basically I hold no sway at all 😦 (Tell me something I dont know).

If you have a klout of 70 or above thats really strong. 80+ and you is da’man. 90+ you could more or less run for government and stand a good shot a the top job. In terms of popularity at least.

I have heard stories about klout- such as people going to hotels in the US and being upgraded because they have a high klout score. These people will say good things about the hotel and lots of people are willing listeners.

I am doing some research on who are the influential people in my social network for a campaign I am about to run and have found it captivating. It must be not accurate- as from my example- but it does show that if you always click on the most influential person from someones “influencers” and repeat, eventually you get up to some massive on-line presences like O’Reilly Media (80), the NY Times (99), and on to Mitt Romney (91) who I was surprised to find takes most of his influence from Barrack Obama (99). Obama takes his from Joe Biden and also FLOTUS. She takes hers from Beyonce among others.

So yeah, its not accurate and doesn’t represent real influence over a given time period but in general terms it does show influence. And it is very addictive and fun.

(Nefariously Cute) Google Panda Help Sheet – SEO

Google is clever. They use names like “Ice Cream Sandwich” and “Panda” to make us think they are cute. And then make us into slaves that are forced to work hard on the way our content is presented to fit in with them – never mind the initial concept or quality of the content.

I blogged recently about how lame Google is for dealing our fair search engine results.

I have since found out that Google basically recognised that fact and have included big changes in the way it ranks websites. As usual it has not done a good promotion job to those webmasters who are not selling commercial products (directly) by not making this information widely and easily available, unless you are totally on the pulse about SEO, which most people aren’t because of how ineffective “search” has previously been for them.

The new updates, “Panda” (awww your so cute Google how can we despise you for being rubbish and ineffective when you have make names like Ice Cream Sandwich and Panda or -____- as my girlfriend would put it), is attempting to implement usage statistics such as time spent on the website, pages per visit and bounce rate to effect search rankings. This is expected to raise the quality of sites in their results based on user engagement. Hopefully it will be it seems to me to be just as easy to game and will be even better for established companies who get masses of direct traffic to benefit from.

Google has created a list of guidelines for webmasters that can be found HERE. I suggest you take a look or you will be penalised for not spending massive amounts of time tweaking your website.

Note: I am very sceptical in this post and being very sarcastic (am pretty irked at Google at the moment but am usually more upbeat – infact, this was just an off the cuff blog but I did a good one earlier which I will post later. I actually think it is the best one I’ve written to date..), but all this being said I do understand that a top rank for a well typed search term is highly sought after due to its impact of being like a marketing campaign ran for your site every day. I also believe that the extra power that search offers is that people find you, which makes them think that they are in control, as opposed to being cornered by telesales or other direct marketing campaigns. My main concerns are the nature of how difficult it is for small businesses to compete with the large budgets of corporations. In order to be competitive we have give up our time to hone our website in-line with a single companies web guidelines, which in the end take your bright concepts and make them dim.

Google inhibits innovation and Search is not a strategy for small businesses!

Our company receives about 30-40,000 visitors per month to its website. The vast majority of these, about 75% come from search engines. Our top ranking key word brings us about 450 visitors, which is about 1.75%! And that word is, you guessed it – the name of our website: timemaps. Pffft – according to Google we are only good for appearing near the top of the search engines for the name of our website. The rest of the search traffic comes from long tail results.

The next highest words that bring us traffic are “world history timeline“. This brings us 0.63% of our traffic; about 180 visitors. Using Googles Keyword Tool I can see that there about 27,000 monthly searches for these words and using Webmaster Tools I know that we have appeared 6,500 times in it’s results and have a click through rate of 3%. So we are near the bottom of the page, underneath the fold.

The problem I have with Google is that we easily have the best world history timeline on the internet. Surprise surprise, Wikipedia is number 1 and barely contains anything, rather it just directs peoples away to further content. There are a few wall charts you can buy in the other top slots – who will be undertaking highly targetted SEO work to ensure people find them; and there are some very old websites that contain list of dates and events – these will have many old websites (the older the better for Google) linking to them who have accumulated a strong page-rank over time.

We knew all this from the outset so we created a highly innovative product that provides a visual way of looking at world history. Since we set off on our journey 4 years ago, the web has changed significantly and people have stopped creating websites, and now more often contribute to others (web 2.0), or just curate the content of other sites (social bookmarking) . But none of this provides enough strong link content to individual websites to appear high in search terms.

OK, the obvious point I have to deal with here is that, maybe our website is just not good enough to make it go viral. But infact we have got significant traffic and every now and again someone adds us ta social book marking site such as StumbleUpon or Reddit and we get thousands more extra users. But the small number of actual links created from peoples own domains are is not enough to improve our position in the search engines. Our website IS awesome. We were invited to present our website to the National Council for Social Studies in the US due to how useful it is for education, and one other factor that makes me believe we have a good website is a story from my friend. He was in Thailand working as a teacher. While at a random beach party he overheard some people having a conversation about history and the name of our website occurred. He spoke to them to ask if he heard it correctly, and was told from this guy about how amazing our website is. We get comments like this all the time from all around the world.

CONTENT IS NOT KING ANYMORE!

Recently, an SEO company called me up to offer me a free report. After they had taken a look at the competitive landscape they ran a mile. They said it would take a year of constant sustained effort to begin to rank for the terms we are suitable for – they knew we couldn’t pay for that. What is the answer here, Google?

I know very well that some very inferior products to ours make 6 figure sums each year from adverts alone by ranking high for the search terms we want – one of these sites was even featured by Google as a success story. They plough in enough resources to maintain these positions, and should everything change, then with all this profit, they could innovate over the top of us.

In a nutshell, Google fails small businesses. More precisely, “search” is not a business strategy for small business as Google inhibits innovation with their current search ranking mechanisms. Google – who’s motto is “don’t be evil” – is really, actually, not that good!

The Opportunity of “Who am I?”

A picture from a science museum that has no relevance to this article other than the image which is good. But maybe if its still on you should try the museum.

I hang out on Twitter a lot. I can’t say I am that bothered by it but I like to put myself out there, get involved in interesting chats and be considered as someone who is well respected within “my realm”. It would be great to be thought of as someone who can offer help and advice and interesting resources to someone who needs my expertise. The only thing that is holding me back from this is that I have not yet worked out what “my realm” is or what I specialise in. I think that this is often the case with startup founders as we have to become master of everything: product design, marketing, building relationships, strategic thinking, bootstrapping, administration, what else is happening in your field, and much more. I could claim I am a master of startups but I am sure that as soon as I tried to make that claim mine would collapse beneath me.

I used to be the guy who held the flag and said “come with us, this is going to be amazing, sign up here!”, but now I work behind a computer screen and am dwarfed in my industry by experienced pro’s – historians, history teachers and education technologists – who I could not pretend to be like. Or are they really that good? Maybe they just like to appear that way infront of social media? I never understand how they can spend so much time on Twitter when doing such meaty work as I am? Also, does Twitter and social media in general not really mean it matters less what people claim to be as there as so many more voices involved in the discussion? Could social media really expose the facade or reputations that people really claim to have?

I plug away doing what is needed to make our products awesome and to get people to consider them. It is my only aim within my business and it involves many complicated procedures. Maybe there is an opportunity for a business that walks people through the process of “who am I?” so that discussions on social media have more context? There are some attempts, such as about.me, but do they go far enough? I reckon one day this will all be automated. An avatar connects to your life: education, social network, career, interests, sports and more granular information within these things so you don’t need to do anything. Then it would be more clear about who you were dealing with and what they were all about.

Don’t know how all those words came out anyway, I only wanted to point out this resource – http://show.mappingworlds.com/world/ – which is awesome! It visualises the world based on statistics rather than land mass. Very interesting.

Is gamification so effective because it a parody human parenting?

the tech is like a baby

I have touched on this subject briefly before, now I want to talk about it again. I do realise it sounds a bit weird, but I am becoming more convinced that the gamification of technology works well because it is like a parody of a human behaviour.

I was visiting my friends tonight who have just had a little baby girl. She is 3 weeks old and very cute. She would cry when she was hungry to make her parents feed her. If she was agitated they would play with her or rock her. The more she is nurtured and looked after the more likely she will grow healthily.

OK, this is where it might go weird as I struggle to explain myself.

The gamification of computing is everywhere. Even on this WordPress site I get a little badge after I have completed a certain amount of posts or gained new followers. WordPress is rewarding me for nurturing and growing my blog.

Does this reflect the human interaction with their baby? I have a very new, empty blog and the more I look after it, the healthier it will become. Unfortunately I am not the best parent to this blog. But if I had a new baby, the more I fed it (wrote content), and security I give it (build credibility), and encouraged it to learn and play (have people comment), the more healthy it will become.

So, my question seems to be: is the gamification of, well, everything, so popular because it acts like a nurturing parent?

Startups this week

If you’ ve read this blog before you’ll be aware that I work in a cool place. Its called TechHub (@techhub) and is full of the most exciting, interesting and coolest startup companies in London. So far this week I have met with four businesses/ people that have stood out for me. Maybe it was because their business was solid or maybe because the people in it gave me confidence in them.

Early in the week I was in need of some help with my Google Adwords. Despite having £180 in my account I couldnt get them to show. I got on Yammer and reached out and a girl called Margorita told me to go and show her the problem as she had experience with them. It turns out it was a technical error (as in, not my fault for once) and she sorted me out with some contact details for their support desk. Her company was called Wheely and they made an app where you could turn it on and just tap on a map where you want to go and a taxi journey would be quoted for you- how much, how long. So quick, so simple. She was a smart girl and I reckon it will do very well. It makes peoples life easier.

Then came an Irish guy who, after selling his first software development to the Financial Times, is now making a Twitter app called Career Follow that lets people who are looking for job connect with companies posting vacancies on Twitter. This would give the searcher a head start and an early opportunity to connect as well as showing they are tech savvy. The app filters the huge data feeds of Twitter easily and nicely for the job seeker. Move over Monster..? Not only was it a nifty idea but the brains behind it, Joe, was an unassuming Irish guy with a brain the size of a planet.

The next fascinating conversation I had was with a guy called Kavin originally from South Africa. His company makes a face to face chat feature for apps. Like Skype but within apps. He told me some of his war stories such as landing off a plane in the US to seal a huuuge deal with Yammer, the day it got bought by Microsoft! Deal over. Another one was that he paid £50k for a key to some code which got made open source the following week! But his company was going well and they are looking towards a promising future.

And then today I met a guy for a code problem solving lunch called Phil who is making the most fun app called HelloKaraoke (@hellokaraoke). Not only did he set me on my way with my code, but is a super cool guy working on a great product that is the Draw Something of the karaoke world. I can’t wait for it to kick off for him..

TechHub is full of people on a mission where the goal could literally be a pot of gold (especially the Irish guy!). I did not mean to talk to these people I just bumped into them but no matter who it was the stories would be the same.. people on a mission to carve out some turf on-line and unleash their code made beasts into the war for the limited space infront of eyes and ears.

A Normal Day in The Office

I had cool day today.

I woke up late because being my own boss, I can sleep in if I want and I work better when well slept. So I did.

At 10am I walked in my shorts, shirt n flip flops to hire a Boris Bike to ride into TechHub in Shoreditch. After about 5 minutes of riding in for the first time since I moved flat, I came across a dedicated bike track called the Cycle Superhighway that took me 2 miles directly, away from traffic, right into the centre of London. I never knew such things existed. London was built for me!

I arrived into Techhub and booted up. Found I’d had 3 sales. Nice. My A/B testing is going well and traffic is building. After a couple of hours someone asked me if I wanted some lunch. Say what? Apparently a group of people often cook dinner for each other and they had some left over. I feel like I’m a newbie in the place but what the management team have done there is amazing. Not only is the place top notch and affordable working space in the middle of Silicon Roundabout, in super-cool Shoreditch, but they work hard to make it into a community. They put on events and drinks and encourage lots of participation. And I felt part of it. Which is great for a start up entrepreneur working on their own project which is a hard slog and no-one to share the burden with.

The network effect kicked in and due to lunch and meeting new people I found out that I could get a 1 to 1 meeting with a Google Guru the following day. Yes please! Perhaps they can tell me what is wrong (/or possibly right) with my website where we get 1000 visitors through search engines everyday and yet our top keyword only brings in 15 visitors!? How come we are not competing for bigger hitting search terms?

In the afternoon after a year of being frustrated with a technical problem with my Adverts, I put it out there on TechHub’s Yammer network, which is like an internal Facebook. 3 people with experience replied and it is now on the way to being fixed. It had taken me a year of frustration and their good nature and expertise fixed it in one afternoon. That network alone is probably worth the Techhub registration fee. There are some amazing people in the building and they are all so friendly.

I rode my bike home to Canary Wharf and the sunset across the water was so nice. Used 360 to snap it. Its above. It really needs to be viewed on the occipital website – http://360.io/UEyFn4

So just a normal day in the office really but London really has got it going on for start up businesses!!