I will be CEO of EmberAds ltd and I’ll be working with some of my friends to make online advertising less shit..
EmberAds has been my baby for about 4 years and I’ve tried a few times to get it off the ground but its both technically ambitious and logistically a headscratcher..
When we started PizzaPowered last year the aim was to work on three products until one of them
Whilst I cannot go fully into the details (there will be a formal press release at some point soon that is a) spell checked and b) legally checked (this blog is neither) ) something along the lines of the above happened and that has given us an opportunity which we have grasped with both hands and after a lot of keeping quiet and planning from Monday I’ll be working with some of my awesome friends;
So thats what we are doing and let me tell you, I am EXCITED! :)
What will happen to Think Visbility?
Think Visibility will still happen under Hodgetastic Ltd (I still own hodgetastic, It just dosn’t pay me a salary) March 3rd is already looking amazing and we are very excited by it, EmberAds will be there in full force and sign you up and demo the product
What will happen to the Sweet Shop?
Click N Mix is going to be a separate company very shortly which I will have a majority share but Lorna wil taking over the day to day running of the shop.
What will happen to Leeds Hack
What do you think ;)
What will happen to PizzaPowered & the other products
PizzaPowered has served its purpose so will be put into stasis for a while (with the other products) and when Ember has made its millions and we have some spare time, we will come back to it and finish off everything
How can I find out what the team is up to
You can follow us on twitter @emberads or at some point soonish we will have some email list on the website… we will also be at ThinkVis.
]]>To those who might wish to “torrent” this video: look, I don’t really get the whole “torrent” thing. I don’t know enough about it to judge either way. But I’d just like you to consider this: I made this video extremely easy to use against well-informed advice. I was told that it would be easier to torrent the way I made it, but I chose to do it this way anyway, because I want it to be easy for people to watch and enjoy this video in any way they want without “corporate” restrictions.
Please bear in mind that I am not a company or a corporation. I’m just some guy. I paid for the production and posting of this video with my own money. I would like to be able to post more material to the fans in this way, which makes it cheaper for the buyer and more pleasant for me. So, please help me keep this being a good idea. I can’t stop you from torrenting; all I can do is politely ask you to pay your five little dollars, enjoy the video, and let other people find it in the same way.
Sincerely, Louis C.K.
Boom, earned even more of my respect and $5 via Paypal
No DRM, no regional restrictions, no crap.
]]>Stick a hundred or so geeks in a room and give them a challange and a prize to compete for and step back and watch the magic happen.
It all depends, some people do it for the prizes (I’ve won everything from Lego Mindstorms NXTs, A trip to San Francisco, an AR Drone, £10,000 of 02 Media Spend, An xBox 360 to random items from the pound shop and iPhone Stickers)
Hack Days have enabled me to work in some amazing places, this weekend for instance I’m spending the weekend working in The Guardian HQ which is one of my fav. hack day venues.
My coding ability has increased twenty fold since I started hackdays, for the first few hack days, I’d come up with the idea, pitch it to the team, let them develop it and twiddle my thumbs for 22 hours then I’d do the presentation at the end of the day.
Now I feel confident enough to actually contribute to the team development wise and it’s only because of learning in this high pressure time limited enviroment.
Depending on the hack day you go to, that won’t matter, at Leeds Hack we had three or four people turn up how had never done any development before and at least two of them stayed the full 24 hours going through tutorials and asking questions, 24 hours later they had a github repo with a website in they had developed themselves (and they understood what a repo was!)
Usually they are set by sponsors, for instance FlyBMI gave us exclusive access to an API and had a prize for the best use of that API.
Prizes are also given for ‘best in show’, ‘most useful’, ‘comedy hack’ and whatever else the organisers think will fit.
]]>So had the first Think Visibility with Pick N Mix and it went down a treat, within seconds we had a massive queue of eager conference attendees waiting to get hopped up on sugary goodness.
Then I sort of left it for a bit, in between conferences we had a hack day (Leeds Hack) and we took some sweets there as well but I still had a lot of ‘proper’ work to do.
After the September conference, we had an enquiry to hire the Pick N Mix boxes, I looked into it and did some quick numbers but dismissed it as another ‘distraction’ then the following week we had two more enquiries and I started to look into it properly, I threw up a landing page for an events website Exciting Events and waited to see if it gained any traction.
Quite quickly, Exciting Events started to get some enquiries people were looking for the services we offered and so I put some packages together for Pick N Mix hire that would
So at this point I had a product, a price, a target market and some customers…. and that was nice but wasn’t exactly where I wanted to be.
Around the same time I started joking about opening a shop to Heather but they wern’t jokes really, they were just ways of gauging her reaction and it’s fair to say her reaction wasn’t what I was hoping for;
NO!, YOUR NOT OPENING A SWEET SHOP, YOU’VE GOT TOO MUCH TO DO ALREADY HOW ARE YOU GOING TO MANAGE A SHOP, YOUR NOT EVEN IN THE CITY MOST OF THE WEEK
So I had two options, I could work on convincing Heather and showing it was a good idea or I could do it anyway and surprise her
As usual with these things, the latter always appeals to me.
Heather is now afraid to leave the house for more than two days because I usually choose this time to get something delivered she has previously said no to (or where I think she might say no) for instance - A full metal dance mat from Norway, A Cardboard cut out of myself, Some barcode scanners, A new set of walkie talkies and of course 15 oversized Pick N Mix boxes.
So I started making enquiries and telephoning places in Leeds that I knew had a lot of empty space.
The Core was one such place and after trying to get hold of someone for two days, they gave me an offer of close to £5000 a month for a small kiosk area in the very empty shopping centre, I’ll be honest, I was a bit shocked at this price and soon came to the realisation that this was the reason for the empty space, I was looking for a small starter area somewhere in the region of £500 a month and tried to talk about a rolling 30 day contract and how we would attract people from the city into the shopping centre but they just were not interested.
So I sort of gave up…
]]>Just over two years ago I decided to get some Pick N Mix at my conference, our event has always been known for doing things a little different and I thought it would be interesting to see what the reaction from people would be.
They Loved It!
At this point I should probably mention that I’ve always wanted a shop, I never knew what I wanted to sell or even the first thing about running a shop but I’ve always wanted something offline that wasn’t 100% dependant on the internet.
During the course of my work in online marketing for the previous years I came to the realisation that when it came down to it, all I was doing was changing 1’s and 0’s on a server somewhere and that it didn’t really have much impact in the real world.
So I researched “Pick N Mix Hire” online and found it to be, a lot more expensive than I had assumed, sometimes you have to pay for travel and staffing, sometimes you have to pay for the sweets separately and it all seemed a bit dodgey.
“It doesn’t matter, we will just buy the boxes and scoops and do it ourselves” I said to Heather one afternoon.
DO YOU REALISE HOW EXPENSIVE THOSE THINGS ARE??
Bloody acrylic is WAY expensive and because I wanted the proper style Pick N Mix boxes with the lid and everything, I was looking about £90-£150 each! and I wanted 10 of them..
So that idea sort of went out the window until one afternoon an eBay alert of mine was set off, I have these set up for all sorts of things (LEGO WHOLESALE / JOB LOT < £50).
The alert that went off was (PICK N MIX BOXES JOB LOT WITHIN 50 MILES), it turned out a newsagents in Preston had decided not to do Pick N Mix anymore and were selling the boxes off at a vastly reduced rate.. So I bought 10.
At this point I should probably point out that I don’t drive, my girlfriend doesn’t drive and my housemate who does drive, wasn’t in the county at that point..
So I had a challenge, I had to find someone near Preston who could pick up the boxes at a time convenient to both parties, deliver them to my house at a time when someone is in and ask the person to pickup the boxes without telling them publicly what they are picking up (we like to keep #thinkvis things secret).
Luckily I have some fantastic friends in the guise of Kat & Kian who came to my rescue and delivered the boxes within a day or so…
So there we have part one of how I came to start an online sweet shop, there is still a few parts to go and I hope this provides entertaining if not informative to my fellow internet folk.
]]>Unlike Leeds Hack I’m not the dictator in charge of this weekend, I’m sharing that responsibility with Ashley Mann who deserves a massive pat on the back for getting the event this far, I also want to give a thanks to NTiLeeds who have provided us the fantastic OBH for the weekend to hack in.
There are some fantastic prizes this weekend, rather than the usual iPod’s and Nintendo Wii’s, We made the decision to give more ‘cultural’ prizes (well I made the decision and gave Ashley the job of getting them, I’m really starting to love this co-organising), the most important prize is the chance TO DRIVE A STEAM TRAIN!!!….. I KNOW!
At the time of writing, 3 tickets remain so hurry up and get one quick, it promises to be a weekend of fun..
Now where did I put that bubblewrap?
]]>Hello and welcome to the new blog, I’m having a play with getting rid of Wordpress and moving this to a static site, mainly because I’m sick of having to keep it updated and the site is usually dead until I do a fairly decent post that makes it to HN so lets see how this does.
I’m using something called Octopress and to be honest I’m not sure if I like it or not but we will give it a go and see what happens.
I’ll be reposting / updating some of the old posts from the blog but a lot of it was outdated and useless so might as well have a fresh state
Who knows, maybe it certainly looks pretty doesn’t it :)
]]>