Hopefully we’ve given you a bit more ammo to build kickass ideas for your clients and web apps! We’ve open-sourced the whole project, so please feel free to download and hack away :)

A huge thank you to @mikekus and @elliottkember for all their hard work – you guys rock.

9:38 Update: Twiggy works in the browser! Visit http://www.elliottkember.com/twiggy to try it out. It also works on the iPhone!

How to use the beta

You can use the Twiggy beta in two ways:

1. Open the .wget file with Opera – it will automatically install the widget.

2. Go to the download link in your mobile browser. Your mobile device will need to be widget enabled (S60 Nokia phones and others)

One of the reasons we’ve been able to build Twiggy so quickly (roughly two days) is because jQuery works so well with the Web Run Time on the phone. There is a jQuery plugin for the Twitter Search API, so we simply used that. Bam. Here are the links for the jQuery plugin:

1. Complete info on the plugin
2. GitHub repository

Build a widget, win £20,000

If you’d like to try to build a mobile widget, you should enter it into the Betavine £20,000 competition. There’s no strings attached to the money, so it’s a sweet opportunity. I’m one of the judges, so I’m looking forward to seeing the entries.

Here are three great resources to learn how to build mobile widgets:

1. Betavine
2. Widget basics
3. Creating your first widget

We recorded a live video this morning and explained the tech a bit more:

Photo credit: flickr.com/photos/islandfreedom

Other news on the Twiggy front

* We’ve decided to opensource the project on GitHub, when we’re done, so you can all download the code and use it however you please.
* Mike has updated more screenshots of the progress of the Twiggy site:

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He’s already uploaded Day One for you to enjoy (in HD!). It’s 2x real-time so that you can actually watch his design process and (hopefully) pick up a few tips!

Photo courtesy of flickr.com/photos/karenhorton

Here are some TwitPics of the current state of the design (early stages). Mike will be regularly taking screenshots of the design.

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I interviewed Mike and Elliott to get their thoughts:

Also, we’ll be Qik’ing throughout the week, so here’s our first video.

Photo credit: flickr.com/photos/pixeljuice23

I just came out of a meeting with a potential client who is interested in us helping them build a community and create a discussion with their target market. They’ve got amazing products and smart people – but they just don’t know where to start with Twitter/blogging/word-of-mouth/etc.

They’re a powerful, well-known and smart company. But they’re starting at zero – they don’t have an online community right now and they need to build one from scratch. And they’re not the only ones.

It’s amazing we’ve ended up in a world where huge corporations are on the same playing field as us little guys. All their powerful marketing campaigns, brand power, and advertising dollars seem to be less effective. Big spend TV ads? Mute. Banner ads? Come on. ‘Branding’ campaigns? Not personal.

There is no ‘personal’ life anymore

I know a lot of folks who try to separate their personal life and their professional life. If you’re interested in building community, there is no difference. It’s all the same. ‘Bleasure’ is a word Lisa Price coined, and I think it’s a perfect description: the melding of ‘Personal’ and ‘Business’.

You need to accept every friend request on Facebook. Hate that idea? Try this: The Facebook homepage re-design makes it really easy to create groups of friends. Add all your real-life friends to a group called ‘Buds’ (or something similar) and filter the updates. When you get friend requests, just allow them to see your limited profile. This isn’t as good as sharing everything, but for you more private folks, it should work fine.

Also, if you’re serious about building a community, you better not even think about protecting your updates on Twitter. If you need a ‘personal’ account for your family, that’s fine (and you can use Matt to update multiple accounts). But for your ‘public face’ it’s got to be wide open.

There’s not shortcut

It’s going to take you 1 – 2 years minimum to build a real community around you. Not only is it going to take a long time, but it’s going to require real passion and time. No faking this one. Hiring a part-time blogger to throw up a couple posts a week isn’t going to work either.

If you have 20 minutes, you’ve got to watch this. Gary explains it better than I can.

Money isn’t the answer … or is it?

Traditional methods of reaching customers – basically spending huge amounts of money – are being rendered obsolete. When was the last time you clicked on a banner? When was the last time you clicked on a link in Twitter? Exactly.

Spending money on big media campaigns is a bad idea (in my opinion) but spending big money on a full-time community manager, is a good idea. So the truth is it’s still expensive to create a community, but the money is being spent on something completely different. You should now be spending your marketing budget on:

* Meetups and beer
* A community manager
* A designer and developer to be creative

Here’s a really good example of creative content. Instead of spending a ton of money on banner ads or TV campaigns, Samsung did something smart and creative. Check it out:

So what does work?

The point I’m trying to get across is that creating a community from scratch is hard, time-consuming and fraught with danger. But it’s the only way to reach people now.

Would love to hear your thoughts below.

Photo Credit: flickr.com/photos/mdutile

We’re partnering with Betavine to help spread the word about standards-based mobile web widgets and we thought the best way to do that would be to actually build one :)

Here’s a little sneak peek for you:

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We’ll be live-blogging and videoing the entire process so that you can learn how to build and use mobile widgets for your ideas and business. We’re excited about the technology because they’re open web-tech (HTML, CSS and JavaScript) and completely Standards-based. It’s also exciting because it allows you to reach the non-iPhone market, which shouldn’t be ignored.

Feel free to tune in next week!

P.S. Don’t forget that you can win £20,000 no-strings-attached cash if you win the widget competition. Last entries on April 30th.

Andy at Elevensoft commissioned us to design the marketing site for Orchestrate, a web app that helps service and maintenance professionals schedule location-based tasks. Here’s a sneak peek of the home page:

Stay tuned for the launch at OrchestrateApp.com

Here’s why: everyone loves designing and building for the iPhone. Who wouldn’t? It’s a very sexy, powerful and easy-to-use device. But here’s the problem, there are millions of people that don’t have an iPhone (or don’t want one). What about them? There’s a huge market that’s being ignored … and that’s where mobile web widgets come in.

Here’s a quick video to actually show you what a mobile web widget is:

Some examples

Here are a couple screenshots of very simple widgets:

Clock widget

Flickr widget

Twitter widget

Standards based

The thing I love the most about mobile web widgets is that they’re built with standards-based, open-web technology. We’re not talking about some proprietary tech from some huge corporation. It’s straight up HTML, CSS and JavaScript.

Dan Appelquist is working hard with all the carriers and device manufacturers to get everyone to agree on standards so that these widgets can access device level functionality like contacts, location and photos, no matter what phone they’re installed on. BONDI and OMTP are the beginning of this process and are progressing quite well.

Distribution

If you build a widget, how will you distribute it to millions of potential customers? First of all, Vodafone will be placing the widgets in the ‘Widget Manager’ which will be pre-installed on many phones – currently compatible with 10 popular S60 handsets across the UK, Spain, Germany and Italy, with South Africa due to launch next month – a potential audience of around 1 million customers. If you want to install a widget, all you do is click ‘install’ and it downloads and installs (it’s basically a simple zip file).

You can now upload your widget to the Betavine Widget Zone, which will include your widget in the Widget Manager.

Competition – Ending April 30th

In order to kick things off, Betavine are offering £20,000 (cash!) to the person who designs and builds the best mobile web widget. I’m one of the judges, so we’re only going to pick a winner with a really kick-ass widget. The competition closes April 30th, so move quick.

Thoughts?

I know that widgets aren’t as elegant or usable as iPhone apps, but it’s a huge move in the right direction for reaching non-iPhone audiences. As web designers, developers and entrepreneurs, I think that’s super exciting.

What are your thoughts?

The competition closes on April 30th, so get cracking! Here’s more info on the competition and how to enter.

If you’d like to learn more about how to build mobile web widgets, Betavine is a great place to start.

Photo Credit: flickr.com/photos/dkilim

[UPDATE: The deadline has been extended till Monday, March 30th]

1. Your URL to be posted to the ThinkVitamin.com news (93,000+ readers)
2. Me to tweet your URL (8,900+ people)
3. A free pass to FOWA Dublin, FOWA Miami, FOWA Tour (all four cities!) or FOWD London?

[Photo credit: flickr.com/photos/gaetanlee]

All we need from you is your email address. We’re teaming up with Betavine to help spread the word about mobile web widgets to the web design and development community.

By signing up below, you’re giving Betavine (who are cool – I promise) permission to say hello and let you know about exciting news (like the £20,000 prize they’re giving away to the person who builds the best mobile web widget). You can, of course, unsubscribe at any time, with no questions asked.

I’ll pick one winner on Wednesday, Feb 25th Monday, March 30th.

Only two rules. You need to …

1. Live in one of these five countries: USA, UK, Italy, Germany, Spain
2. Be a web designer or developer

If you can’t see the form above, please use this version.

There are some important questions to answer here. The primary one being: Should businesses be transparent and honest, even when it might hurt them?

I’d love to hear your thoughts …

[Photo credit: flickr.com/photos/grantmac]

Re-Tweet magic

Once you’ve built up 500+ followers, you need try to get re-tweeted as much as possible. If you don’t know what a re-tweet is or how to do it, Kevin’s written a quick post on it.

The reason why you gain followers when people re-tweet you is that your username is exposed to people who haven’t heard of you.

How do you get re-tweeted? The key is offering valuable content. Try to balance your “I’m eating an egg sandwich” tweets with “Check out this great article on XXXXX” (the XXXX being a topic of interest). These are the kind of Tweets that get re-tweeted because they are valuable and interesting. Think of your Twitter stream as a micro-blog. It needs to be interesting and helpful. Tips are the key!

Speak at events

I think I gained a lot of followers in the early days because I was always on stage at FOWA. I gave a talk about the costs of Building Dropsend, that created a lot of chatter.

How do you get invited to speak at events? You need to get on the radar of the organizers. You may be the most amazing developer in the world, but if no one knows your name, you’ll never get invited.

Make real-life friends

I’ve gotten to know a lot of the leading figures in the web industry – people who are really influential on the Twitter space. I didn’t have some sort of Machiavellian plan – these were just the folks who were speaking at FOWA and FOWD. Once I was trusted by people, they were happy to connect me and recommend me.

The important thing is that I wasn’t trying to use people – I have a genuine interest getting to know them and be of help if they need me for anything.

Get writing

Ask influential bloggers if you can write a guest post for them. I got to know Jason Fried and Mike Arrington quite well and they’ve been kind enough to let me write several guest posts on Signal vs Noise and TechCrunch (list of my articles).

Tips from Mr Kevin Rose

Kevin Rose has written an article on TechCrunch with some additional tips on gaining Twitter followers – definitely worth checking out.

“Ubiquity is an experiment into connecting the Web with language in an attempt to find new user interfaces that make it possible for everyone to do common Web tasks more quickly and easily. It’s a Firefox extension, so it works on Macs, Windows, and Linux. With only a couple keystrokes, it lets you use language to instruct your browser. You can translate to and from most languages, add maps to your email, edit any page, twitter, check your calendar, search, email your friends, and much more. All without leaving the page you’re on.”

I’ll explain why I think this is such a huge deal after I show you how it works.

Ubiquity for Firefox from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.

Here are some screenshots of it in action:

1. Inserting a map into an email

You can use Ubiquity to easily insert a Google Map into an email (using Gmail). Here I am in my browser, composing an email.

I then type Apple-Space and the Ubiquity panel appears. I type ‘map 19c Charles Street, Bath’ and you get the following result. I zoom in and adjust the map until it’s the way I want it (it’s a live Google Map), then I then click the ‘Insert map in page’ link (circled red):

The final result is a Google Map that’s inserted into my email:

2. Searching Twitter

If I’m in the browser, I type Apple-Space to bring up the Ubiquity panel. I type ‘tsearch ryancarson and biscuits’. This used web services provided by search.twitter.com to return results immediately into the Ubiquity interface. No need to actually visit search.twitter.com.

3. Translate text

You can select text on a web page and use Ubiquity to translate it with Google Translate. I’ve selected some text from a story on CNN and it’s been translated into Spanish. You use the keyword ‘this’ to refer to text you’ve seletected on the web page:

Loads of others

There is a mind-boggling list of commands you can use with Ubiquity. Some of the more interesting ones are:

Map, Email, Google, Wiki, Add to calendar, Check calendar, Weather, Tweet, Word count, Translate, Define, Highlight, Delete, Undo, Digg … and more (great write-up of these commands).

What’s the big deal?

Ubiquity is step towards taking all the power and information of the web, and allowing you to weild it the way you want. The way the web works right now is clumsy. If I want to insert a map into my email, I need to take the following steps:

1. Visit a maps.google.com
2. Do a search
3. Copy the map
4. Go back to my email program
5. Paste the map

That’s actually pretty hard. Google already provides an API to maps, so why should I need to go visit the site? It’s so much quicker to just type ‘map Bath, UK’ and then click a button. Bam. Done.

As we move forward, people won’t say ‘I’m browsing the web’. That’s like saying “I’m using electricity.” Using electricity isn’t the point – you want to do something with electricty. The web is the same. The data and services from the web will be used to execute actions like map, translate, communicate, filter, post, etc. I’m excited about Ubiquity because it’s a step in this direction.

It’s open to everyone

The amazing thing about Ubiquity is that anyone who knows a bit of JavaScript can create Ubiquity commands. The cool part is that you can create commands an other people can ‘subscribe’ to them. Here’s a great video tutorial on how to do it:

Ubiquity Command Development Tutorial 1 — Mozilla Labs from Jono DiCarlo on Vimeo.

Ummm … what about the money?

The ‘trouble’ with companies offering web services for free is that it’s more challenging to monetize. How is Google going to sell ads if you don’t need to go to their site?

Here’s how:

1. Take a slice of revenue being generated by people using the API. Example: The Apple App Store.

2. Charge developers for using the API commercially (it’s still free for non-commercial use).

3. By making it easier to search and find content and products, companies will actually increase the amount of people that visit their site. Amazon search integration with Ubiquity is the perfect example. Want to find a book? Just type ‘amazon-search book-title’.

A couple issues

Ubiquity isn’t perfect though. I think there are two primary issues:

1. It really should be a desktop app, not a browser plugin. You really need to be able to use Ubiquity, whether you’re using a browser or not. In the future, the browser will be the OS, and in that case, it makes sens for it to be a browser plugin. But for now, it really should be a desktop app.

2. Subscribing to other people’s Ubiquity commands is dangerous. If they decide to change the code to do something malicious, you don’t have any control. There needs to be some sort of trust stystem established.

Resources

If you want to learn more, here are some resources you can check out.

1. Ubiquity home page
2. List of Ubiquity commands currently ‘In the wild’
3. Ubiquity Google Group
4. Rey Bango’s list of resources
5. Aza Raskin’s blog – Head of User Experience for Mozilla Labs
6. Ubiquity Blog

Thoughts?

Please share your thoughts below or reply to me on Twitter (@ryancarson). Thanks!

“GDrive provides reliable storage for all of your files, including photos, music and documents. GDrive allows you to access your files from anywhere, anytime, and from any device – be it from your desktop, web browser or cellular phone.”

More info on the Google Operating System blog (unofficial).

Photo credit: Danorbit.

History of the Internet from PICOL on Vimeo.

The web app was already beautifully designed by Jon Hicks and been coded in Rails. I can’t wait to see how the application does in the wild as it’s going to be perfect for a certain niche.

I think it’s really coming together and we’re very excited about unveiling it – hopefully late this week. Here’s a sneak peek. What do you think it does?

The concept was simple enough. We’d give people an incentive to tweet a link like this:

“Please retweet this to help me go to http://bit.ly/10Sgh
or http://bit.ly/4w7t (Rules: http://thinkvitamin.com/uncategorized/win-a-free-pass-to-any-carsonified-event/”

If they were re-tweeted 20 times, then they would enter a draw to win a free seat to any Carsonified event of their choice.

The problem

We started getting comments from some of you, accusing us of “spamming” Twitter. I really had a tough time understanding where you were coming from. Twitter is an opt-in platform. If you don’t like what you read then stop following that person. Where’s the harm?

The harm isn’t in the one or two tweets that you might receive, the harm is that this kind of marketing strategy could snowball into something that could potentially ruin Twitter. And we don’t want that.

What if Virgin came along and said “If you tweet a link to VirginAtlantic.com, and you get re-tweeted 20 times, you might win a holiday to Hawaii” or if Apple said the same thing, but for a chance to win a shiny new MacBook? I would do it and you probably would as well. Chance to win a free MacBook? Sign me up!

If that happened, Twitter would quickly be filled with meaningless marketing messages and it would become impossible to discern the signal from the noise. Since you can’t filter out certain messages from the people you follow then your only choice is to stop following them, which defeats the whole purpose of Twitter. The experience would be ruined.

Twitter is different

What’s interesting about the negative reaction to our re-tweet competition is that the competition is almost exactly the same as our Golden Ticket competition. The only difference is that we asked people to blog about the Golden Ticket, instead of Tweet about it.

I think there are two reasons why some of you felt spammed by the re-tweet competition:

1. Twitter is perceived as a very personal and non-commercial communication channel. We expect people to be a bit spammy on their blogs – but not on Twitter.

2. Since you are limited to 140 characters, there is no room to explain why you’re re-tweeting something. The entire tweet is taken up with the re-tweet marketing message, with no context or personality. On a blog, you have unlimited space to explain why you’re blogging about something.

Lesson learned!

As I’ve said, I now think the competition was a bad idea. I take full responsibility for it and I’m sorry. I’ve learned we need to wield our Twitter ‘power’ carefully and protect the Twitter experience.

In order to be fair to the people who’ve already entered the competition, we will let the competition finish. However, we won’t be asking people to do anything like this in the future.

* San Francisco: 10am
* Denver: 11am
* NYC: 1pm
* Sao Paulo: 4pm
* London: 6pm
* Tel Aviv: 8pm
* Mumbai: 11pm
* Hong Kong: 2am Wednesday
* Sydney: 5am Wednesday
* Tokyo: 3am Wednesday

What is it?

Amigo is a service that matches advertisers with email newsletters, and vice versa.

Here’s how it works:

For Advertisers:

* Sign up for an account at HeyAmigo.net
* Enter advertisement title (Example: “Save 50% on mountain bikes”)
* Enter advertisement text (Example: “Love mountain bikes? Save 50% on all models now! Sale lasts till Jan 30.”)
* Enter the URL of their website (Example: http://mountain-bikes.com)
* Enter the price they’d like to pay for each click (Example: $0.10)
* Enter the total budget for the ad campaign (Example: $500)
* Picks categories of newsletters they’d like to advertise in (Example: Ages 18-35, Outdoor, Mountain biking)

For Email newsletter owners:

* Sign up for an account at HeyAmigo.net
* Enter a Newsletter title (Example: “Mountain Bike Enthusiasts”)
* Enter a URL where people signup to newsletter (Example: http://mountain-bike-enthusiasts.com)
* Enter categories for the readers of the newsletter (Example: Mountain biking, Outdoor)
* Amigo then displays ads that are available to the newsletter owner
* Pick an advertisement
* Copy the adverisement into their newsletter
* Send newsletter
* Get paid everytime the ad is clicked

How will the buyer make money?

The buyer of Amigo will be paid 30% of every click on advertisements. This is all paid through PayPal.

What are you purchasing?

* All intellectual property
* All code (PHP, HTML, JavaScript and CSS)
* UK trademark
* heyamigo.net URL
* Hand-over document explaining how the service works and how to administrate it
* The hosting account ($350 per month with BitPusher.com)
* Three days of hand-over time (you’ll need to travel to Bath, England or we can do this over the phone)

Background

* We launched HeyAmigo.net on Nov 5, 2006
* We blogged the entire building of the app at barenakedapp.com/category/amigo

Current revenue

None, as the site has been closed since Oct 2007.

Visitors and Pageviews (Jan 1 2008 – Jan 1 2009)

* 16,370 Visits
* 33,274 Pageviews

Why are we selling?

We are a small team and we don’t have the man-power to have someone work full time as the product manager. Initially, we hoped we could run the app and maintain our current workload but we just got too busy and Amigo fell by the wayside. We still think it’s an amazing idea that, in the right hands, will make someone a lot of money. The idea of pay-per-click advertising in email still hasn’t been done yet and Amigo is a great start in that direction.

You might be wondering: “Why are you building Truvay, if you don’t have time to run Amigo?”. The reason is that Amigo didn’t fit directly into our strategy as a company, so it isn’t worth taking resources off current tasks to manage it. Truvay is very different as it fits perfectly with our events and our community (you guys!). Keir and I will be dedicating one day a week to Truvay once it launches.

Questions?

Please contact me directly:

Email: ryan@carsonified.com

Phone (from US): 011 44 7515 381 860
Phone (from UK): 07515 381 860
Phone (from Mainland Europe): 00 44 7515 381 860

AIM: ryanleecarson
Skype: ryancarson

You must pre-register to bid – it’s easy!

As this is a high value auction (starting bid of $25,000) we kindly ask you to pre-register before you bid. Please email me with the following:

* Your full name
* Your company name
* Your address
* Your phone number
* Your passport number

Here’s what you get:

* Your own dedicated desk
* Free broadband
* Free coffee and tea
* A dedicated phone line with voicemail
* Use of colour printer
* 24 hour access with your own key
* Use of the meeting room
* A fun and vibrant working environment!
* A free coffee mug :)
* Two Carsonified Journals (if you sign up by end of Jan)

Carsonified Office Tour from Carsonified on Vimeo.

There’s only five desks at £395 per month, so I think they’ll go quick. Just shoot me an email at ryan at carsonified dot com if you’re interested!

I noticed that when you pause a video, and you put your mouse over it, a search box appears. It’s like they’re saying “Hey, why not explore some other videos?”. It’s a really natural and interesting way to encourage folks to stay on the site.

Here’s a screen grab of a paused video on YouTube:

It’s important to think about small and helpful ways you can encourage your site visitors to stay a bit longer and explore.

The amazing photo of the sunrise was taken by flickr.com/photos/kanegledhill

Thankfully we’ve enjoyed a couple successful ideas here at Carsonified on the web app front:

* DropSend was built on a budget, grown to a profitable monthly revenue and sold for a healthy sum of money.

* Our internal event booking web app EventStream has been a big help to the company.

* Matt was a successful small app which didn’t make us any money, but was really fun to build and got us a ton of press coverage. Awesome.

But we’ve also failed pretty badly with another web app called Amigo. We launched it in late 2006 and received some great press. The idea was solid (pay-per-click advertising in email newsleters) but the problem is that we were naive and we thought we could run it in our free time.

Wake up call: you can’t run a web app in your free time.

You can build a web app in your free time, but you sure as hell can’t market it, grow it, maintain it and promote it. Once you build a web app you need to pay attention to all the details. Things like:

1. A/B testing
2. Conversion rates
3. Usability tweaks
4. Email marketing
5. Blogging
6. Networking and sales

So Amigo is going on the chopping block at Ebay so another owner, with time and money, can make some serious money with it. I’ve never sold a web app on Ebay, so it should be an interesting ride. Stay tuned.

Time to build a big app again

So now with three successes and one failure under our belt (well, two if you count DropSend’s short-lived predecessor FlightDeck that I coded in PHP), we’ve learned a huge amount about what makes a great app and what doesn’t.

With that in mind, I’m very excited to announce that we’re building a new web app called Truvay (a play on the Frech word trouver which means ‘to find’). It’s the brainchild of Keir Whitaker and I’m fricken excited about it.

Mike Kus will be designing it and Elliott Kember will be building it and we’ve set up a pretty interesting arrangement with Elliott (as he’s no longer working at Carsonified).

Here’s the rough contract that Elliott has agreed to:

Maintenance
=====================

* Work at least 8 consecutive hours per week every Monday

* Answer all support emails within 24 hours

* Use Basecamp for project milestones and todos

* Use a bug tracking solution (suggestions?)

* Blog at least once a week on Carsonified.com about the development and progress of Truvay, before and after launch. This isn’t a part of the 8 hours of consecutive work every Monday

Ownership
=====================

Carsonified will own all intellectual property for the project.

Financials
=====================

There will be no charge for building or maintenance of the app, but instead Elliott will receive a monthly cut of the revenue. This will be after expenses, which include:

1. Hosting bill (bandwidth, rental, etc)
2. Marketing costs (variable but will include AdWords), which Elliott will be consulted on
3. Bookkeeping
4. One day of Ryan’s time per week for management (normally charged out at £800 per day, but reduced to £300)

Elliott will receive 10% of monthly revenues, after the expenses listed above. If he launches the site on time (3pm April 20th), this will increase to 15% (hat tip to Natasha on that idea). When the site hits $25,000 monthly revenue (excluding VAT), his take will increase to 25%.

His monthly cheque will be determined by a snapshot of the revenue on the 1st of every month at 9am.

If the app is sold, Elliott will receive 10% of the cash price, after lawyer and accountancy costs.

Notice period
=====================

Either party can terminate the contract with one month’s notice. After the one month notice period has ended Elliott will stop receiving monthly revenue and will no longer be eligible for 10% of any future sale price. If we receive a Letter of Intent for an acquisition, we will not be allowed to cancel the contract, providing he is still dedicating at least one day (8 consecutive hours) per week to the project.

Your thoughts?

Normally companies would just hire a developer to build a web app but we don’t want to take that financial risk right now. I think that this deal is a win-win for Elliott and Carsonified. He has the potential of making serious long-term revenue and we get to launch the app with very small financial risk.

Love to hear your thoughts …
[Photo Credit: http://flickr.com/photos/babsphotosecosse]

“My sis is looking for an affordable, but fast and reliable backup drive for her Mac. Suggestions? Is Firewire or USB faster these days?”

I got a huge number of really helpful responses, so I thought I’d go ahead and share. Enjoy!

=============================

stuscuba: @ryancarson Firewire if you can…I wouldn’t touch Western Digital I’ve found them serioulsy flakey

boboroshi: @ryancarson there are drives with both – check out owcomputing.com. not sure of shipping to uk. i have abotu 8 of em

davehodg: @ryancarson anything but lacie.

kyleridolfo: @ryancarson For the absolute fastest speeds I’d recommend an eSATA card and eSATA drive. They are available for both MBPs and MacPros.

erskingardner: @ryancarson that is one i have and it’s awesome.

lewisking: @ryancarson firewire is faster for big files as it stays at a constant rate, USB jumps up and down in speed. As for drives, WD 1TB £80 odd.

pd0: @ryancarson what kind of backup drive? If just USB HDD, buy any. Otherwise, Time Capsule or @dropbox, IMHO

stevekennedyuk: @ryancarson FW800 is faster than USB2.0 (800Mb/s vs 480). FW is 400Mb/s, however USB max is burst, FW sustains

SteveMarshall: @ryancarson FW800 is, as @drewm said, fastest. FW400 runs 380MB/s stream, USB2 can only do that in bursts (ie. short periods).

tanya_peasgood: @ryancarson FW is a more consistent transfer speed than USB and FW800 is much faster if available. I’d get a Seagate FreeAgent – has both.

nikf: @ryancarson Maplin were doing some good deals on External drives recently (Maxtor & Seagate USB drives).

john_oshea: @ryancarson Go Firewire if possible. Avoid Western Digital “MyBook” products like the plague unless she has a penchant for data-recovery
herus02: @ryancarson Firewire = 800mb/s, USB = 400mb/s.

rik1p: @ryancarson DON’T BUY AN IOMEGA ULTRAMAX – had 3 fail in less than 2 months. Buy 2 seperate drives and RAID (mirror) them. FW800 FTW.

drewm: @ryancarson FW is faster. FW800 is fastest, but new Macs have no support. USB2 is similar to FW400 for small files, slower for large.

pauljevans: @ryancarson Recommend USB 2. I *love* WD Passports, small, silent, robust, cheap. Up to 320GB. Perfect Time Machine drives.

JulianKross: @ryancarson FireWire trends indicate it’s on it’s way out. FW800 still beats USB 2.0, and the deals are everywhere on those drives

lachenmayer: @ryancarson USB2.0 is slightly faster than FW400 (480 vs 400Mbps). And seeing as FW has disappeared from MacBooks, I’d say go with USB.

lvtrii: @ryancarson Firewire’s still faster, for now. USB3 is coming, though. And that’s 10x faster

kjlloydie: @ryancarson this is an awesome portable backup drive: http://is.gd/aZ8W. Also, Firewire is way faster (shame it’s not on the new MacBook)

roba3000: @ryancarson WD my book http://twurl.nl/4z7hps

spaulds1: @ryancarson ur sister will want firewire;I like Western Digital or LeCie Drives. Use Carbon Copy Cloner.

awojtowski: @ryancarson Personally prefer Western Digital. If she isn’t editing video or rendering high end graphics I would say usb 2.0.

nikf: @ryancarson USB are cheaper. Firewire more consistent transfer speeds (but would only matter for 1st backup w/Time Machine). Avoid MyBooks

G_Masta: @ryancarson Firewire is still the faster interface, no matter what the USB guys say. FW800 is the shizza. WD MyBook is great

If you’re for an amazing developer, Elliott really kicks ass. If you’re trying to find someone who really understands the web industry and has amazing ideas, Simon is your man, and if you need someone who’s an expert in Mobile, just get in touch with Dom. We’re really sad to part ways with these guys – they kick ass.

So why did we do it?

We did it to make sure that Carsonified would make it through this recession. These weren’t emergency cuts. It was a pre-emptive decision that will give the company plenty of what Jason Calacanis calls ‘Runway’ – cash to see us through slow times.

What are you doing about the Recession?

Whether you’re a employee, freelancer or entrepreneur, you need to be thinking about several important issues right now. These tips should be followed at all times, but they’re especially important during an economic downturn.

Employees

1. Make sure you’re earning revenue for the company and covering your salary. As brutal as it sounds, the founders of the company are going to be looking at your salary versus the amount of revenue coming in and making a decision accordingly. If you’re not directly bringing in enough revenue to cover your salary, it’s going to be very hard for them to justify keeping you on board. If you aren’t currently covering your own salary, then make sure to be able to demonstrate that your revenue stream is increasing dramatically and you’ll soon be covering your salary and making a decent profit for the company.

2. Demonstrate that you have profit-generating ideas. Create and execute simple ideas that bring in profit for the company. These can be things like selling t-shirts or sending valuable leads to the sales team (make sure your boss knows you did this!).

3. Volunteer to do extra work. I’m not talking about kissing the founder’s ass. I’m talking about doing anything you can to help the company survive. The more you demonstrate that you’re committed to helping the company make it through the recession, the more valuable you’ll become.

Unfortunately, even if you’re working hard on the above three points, sadly there’s no guarantee that you’ll be able to keep your job. Sometimes your company just doesn’t have enough time to allow you to build up levels of revenue or value and they will have to make a tough decision. If you think this might be the case in your situation, it’s important to communicate early and often with your boss to ask whether your job is at risk and what you can do about it.

Entrepreneurs and Freelancers

1. Cut unnecessary costs. And I mean all of them. Here are some ideas:

- Sell the company car and ride a bike. I sold the company Audi A6 and now ride a bike to work – great for getting fit.
- Rent out desks in your office.
- Book your travel tickets way in advance to take advantage of early-bird offers.
- During business trips stay at a cheap B&B instead of in a hotel room.
- Learn how much your broadband, phone and electricity cost. Can you change providers to save money?
- Go through your P&L statement line by line and check all the figures. Any over-spending should be identified and cut.
- Double-check everyone’s credit card statements and get on top of any over-spending.

2. Get deadly serious about watching your cash flow. I’d recommend doing this every week, no matter how big your business. The most important thing is to plan on a decrease in your revenue of at least 20% with costs increasing by 5%. Make this a variable that you can change in one cell which then updates all your revenue forecasts.

3. Require 50% payment up-front from your customers and make sure this is in their contract. Don’t be a hard-ass (as they’ll just ignore you) but make sure you get paid early.

4. Diversify. At Carsonified we recently branched out into consultancy, marketing, design and development. We are pretty good at all these things but we previously only did them for our own products. As soon as we offered these services to other companies, we immediately created a new revenue stream.

5. As hard as it may be, it’s time to lay off staff who aren’t directly generating revenue. If you avoid doing this now, you might go out of business later which means you have to lay off everyone, which will be much, much worse.

6. Think hard about what sets you apart from your competitors. Why should your customers spend their hard-earned cash with you?

7. Take really good care of your big customers. We should take good care of all our customers, but make sure youre paying extra attention to the folks who do a lot of business with you. Ideas: Send them thankyou and birthday cards, call them, send them a personal gift and remember their partner’s or kids’ names.

Thoughts?

Times are tough but if you’re smart, you have a great chance of surviving. The key is to not stick your head in the stand – be proactive.

What are your tips for surviving the recession? Please share below.

In a (misguided) bid to stimulate the economy the British government has just decreased the sales tax rate here and all the shops and businesses are having to update their prices.

Here’s what it said:

==================================

(Thank you Darling!)

We’re passing on the new lower VAT rate immediately.

Pret’s ‘Just Roasted’ coffee, ‘Just Made’ Soups & Hot Wraps, dine in prices … in fact all VAT inclusive prices have already been reduced.

Good news for you, a bit of a nightmare for us. We’ve got thousands of price tickets, hundreds of menu boards and now they’re all wrong!

You’ll pay less straight away.

We’ll get the labels right as quickly as we can.

==================================

The funny thing is they’re simply obeying the law, not doing something special or out of the ordinary. They are required by law to charge the new sales tax rate. So why does this flyer make you smile? Three reasons:

1. They’re using familiar and friendly language.

2. They’re letting you know that the tax rate change is a pain in the ass for them but it’s more important to take care of you, even if it’s harder.

3. They’re not afraid to be human and say ‘Hey, we’re bummed we have to do this. We’re like you and we hate boring admin crap.” It helps you to identify with them.

You basically think “Aw, thanks guys – much appreciated.”

In tough economic times, just remember that you need to give your customers even more reasons to spend their cash with you. Taking care of them and being a friend just might put you in front of the competition.

In addition to the financial benefits, it’s just a better way to live, right?

We’ve decided to do a bit of web design, development and consultancy for outside clients in 2009. As the economy is tightening up, we thought it was wise to diversify our revenue streams a bit, just in case.

We constantly get folks asking if we can build sites or apps for them, so I’m really excited to see what will happen. We’re only going to accept a few interesting jobs, so please get in touch right away if you’d like to work together (ryan at carsonified dot com).

Here are the things we can help you out with:

1. Web app/site design and development
2. Web app/site consultancy
3. Small business and start-up consultancy
4. Online marketing consultancy

We’re looking forward to cranking out some beautiful and exciting work! Just shoot me an email at ryan at carsonified dot com or give us a call …

From UK: 01225 324 980
From US or Canada: 011 44 1225 324 980
From Europe: 00 44 1225 324 980

I originally said we wouldn’t sell them, but I’ve caved to the masses and we’ve decided to release 100 for those who want to buy one. They’re actually quite expensive to produce so we thought we’d claw back some of the  costs and spread a little joy, all at the same time :)

Here’s what you’ll get:

1. Limited edition (numbered) Carsonified Journal
2. Pencil and sharpener
3. Jute bag with the Carsonified tag – completely compostable and climate neutral. Perfect size for a MacBook Pro.
4. Personalised thank you card from the Carsonified Crew

Journal ($45 + shipping)

Shipped to UK $49.00 Shipped to US/Canada $69.00 Shipped to rest of world $79.00