Fife Ventures

5 brands that post terrible Facebook updates

fifers — Tue, 09 Aug 2011 10:04:10 +0000

Lauren Friedman gives five good tips to consider when posting company updates on Facebook and also five examples of companies who do not follow her advice in the article 5 brands that post terrible Facebook updates. Her key points are:

Don’t spam your audience
Don’t neglect issues or problems on your page
Don’t use formulaic responses
Don’t automate your updates
Don’t turn off the wall

Embedding video in print magazines

fifers — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 10:08:57 +0000

Successful Farming magazine is the first to launch a new technology that embeds video into traditional magazines. Another example is CBS who has 40 minutes of video that will be delivered to selected Entertainment Weekly subscribers. The advert comprises a lithium-ion battery and a small TFT LCD screen to deliver the video. It can be configured to be interactive and users can recharge the battery via usb. The CBS advert has buttons on the advert page that let the user choose which television show that they want to see previews for. According to Physics Today, the cost starts at $50 per insert and can get as low as $20 per insert for runs of 100,000 or more. It’s not exactly electronic ink in style or cost but we have to start somewhere!

More on the technology can be seen in this KCBS TV2 interview with Americhip’s founder Tim Clegg.

Young People Identify With an Online Community Almost as Strongly as With Their Own Family

fifers — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 10:17:58 +0000

According to a Science Daily article, young people identify with an online community almost as much as they do with their own family. The study was authored by Dr. Vili Lehdonvirta, a researcher at the Helsinki Institute for Information Technology and Professor Pekka Räsänen from the University of Turku, Finland.

It shows that online communities are an important part of a modern adolescents social growth. This may be surprising to many parents since they didn’t have anything like this when they were growing up so their encouragement is likely to be in favour of other activities that they are more familiar with. My daughter is only two years old and I can’t imagine having her chat online to people but I’m sure it will happen sooner than I expect.

The biggest concern I would have for my daughter is the reduction in exercise that would come with spending all of your time in front of a computer instead of being out with mates. I think that my concern might be misplaced since mobile phones are replacing computers as the way that people interact with social networking sites. For example, I can’t remember the last time I logged in to twitter from a browser. I do most of my interaction through my mobile phone app. The bad news isthat I am getting no more exercise since I’ve started using the mobile phone app versus when I accessed these services from my computer so this thinking doesn’t stand up to my empirical evidence.

Online communities will continue to be an important part of everyone’s lives moving forward though so, exercise or not, they are here to stay.

The study, titled “How do young people identify with online and offline peer groups? A comparison between United Kingdom, Spain and Japan”, is published by the Journal of Youth Studies.

Is SaaS a threat to open source software?

fifers — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 14:54:48 +0000

I saw a tweet saying that the Dell CIO Jim Stikeleather claimed at the Nasa IT Summit that open source as we know it is being replaced by software as a service (SaaS) solutions. He said that there would be no more “Apache-like” projects. I understand his sentiment but don’t agree with his conclusion because modern SaaS solutions require quality open source projects to support them. They are the building blocks of SaaS and actually almost all modern software solutions.

We have a recurring conversation in the office that goes something like this:

“Have you seen the new tool xyz.com?”

“No, what’s it do?”

“It makes your life easier by…”

“That’s fantastic. How do they make money?”

“I’m not sure. It’s all open source and they don’t seem to offer any consulting.”

The thing that software company business owners forget is that there are many developers who just like writing software. They like finding elegant solutions to difficult problems. In fact, I like doing that and I used to contribute to these projects in my spare time until all of my time became consumed with running a company and taking care of my kids. There are still smart people out there developing and making software available for free because they just like doing it. As far as I know nobody involved in the early days at Apache ever thought about making money from it. They did it because they wanted something better and thought that the best way to do that was by letting good people from around the world contribute and then sharing (testing) the technology with as many people as possible.

I don’t think it’s an either/or scenario. I think they will both grow and support each other. But don’t just take my word for it, Andy Oram at O’Reilly agrees with me.

The pros and cons of frequent software releases

fifers — Thu, 12 Aug 2010 12:34:18 +0000

We have been updating and maintaining a third-party piece of software for a client for over seven years now. Recently they have started releasing new versions every couple of weeks. For a SaaS solution, this works well because there is no work needed on the customer’s part. On the other hand, I won’t buy another phone from HTC because they were too slow to update the firmware on the HTC Hero. So where is the perfect balance? It depends on the industry of course but here are some pros and cons of frequent releases that you should consider when deciding your release schedule.

Some advantages of a frequent release cycle:

Easy to fix minor issues quickly (like browser bugs)
Smaller number of new features means users are more likely to try them all
Decreased chance of upgrade problems
Tighter feedback loop – problems in this release can be fixed soon in the next release
Forces stakeholders to break feature requests down into more manageable chunks

Some disadvantages of a frequent release cycle:

Constant change can be disorientating to your users
For non-SaaS software, you introduce cost to your customers
Extensions and third-party software might struggle to keep up
Large features and changes are harder to plan for

At Fife Ventures, we assume that users expect rapid and frequent bug fixes but not frequent and numerous feature updates. We believe that this provides a good balance of making sure things work as expected and introducing change.

vBulletin 4.0.4 fix for slow response times

fifers — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 10:25:53 +0000

We have a vBulletin installation for one of our customers. (I hope this doesn’t surprise you. We use the right tool for the job even if it’s not our tool!) After the upgrade to 4.0.4 our performance monitoring tool reported over a 500% increase in our page load times. We saw others having the same problem in the vBulletin forums and after a bit of work we found the problem and a solution and posted it on the thread in the vBulletin forums. The problem is that the vBulletin PHP code is calculating the size of the HTML file but apache is gzipping it and reducing that size. The web browser is waiting for the uncompressed quantity of data to come through and essentially hangs. Our fix is to let Apache report the size if it’s doing the compression.

We also went to the support site and reported the issue to them via the paid support channel. Unfortunately, we received this response:

Hello,

You need to report it in the bug tracker.

Best regards,

Dave (not his real name…)

So their software release causes a huge slowdown in performance, we find the solution and we are told that we are using the wrong channel to report the issue. Wow. Now I understand that you have channels and you try to get people to use them but compare that message with one that would have cost them very little money and not made me want to look for an alternative product:

Hello,

Thank you for this fix. I’ve added the issue to our bug tracker here and our team will review it soon.

Please report issues like this in the bug tracker in the future.

Best regards,

Dave (not his real name…)

My version has very little additional work and results in a happy customer. The response also leaves me wondering what kind of issue do I send to the support team? Did we include too much information? Had we just asked the question “My site response time is slow since the 4.0.x upgrade. How do I fix it?” would we have received the same brush off or would we have received an actual response? Maybe they would have sent us to our own discussion board post!

I guess it just proves that even makers of community software can mismanage their own community sometimes.

I’ve Joined the Balsamiq Mockups Bandwagon

fifers — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 22:51:18 +0000

I thought that Balsamiq Mockups might not live up to the hype but after using it for about 45 minutes and clearing many tasks out of my backlog in the process I’ve decided to become a fanboy too. The principle behind it is that it’s a mockup tool and it does that well. After a while I started thinking that it would be nice if there were templates or some sort of folder structure so that I could really build a prototype but if you add all of those things it loses the beautiful simplicity that makes it so great! I like the fact that as a company they are striving to keep it focused and not let feature creep destroy this wonderful product.

Mobile Operator Giffgaff Pays Members for Community Participation

fifers — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 15:19:08 +0000

Giffgaff is a mobile virtual network operator (MVNO for those who like acronyms) with a customer community focus. They rely on their members to do advertising for them and even to answer support questions. They enable this model by paying real money to customers for performing different activities. Each point you earn is worth a penny of real money and here are some of the rewards you can earn:

50 points: Send your friends an email about giffgaff
500 points: Send somebody a SIM card and they activate it
Variable points for participating in the community

The community participation is interesting. I dug a little deeper and found out that each month they reward customers based on their level of participation. The rationale and explanation is explained in this blog post and here’s what it boils down to:

Band 1: Top Contributors get 3,947 points
Band 2: Average Contributors get 1,071 points
Band 3: Low Contributors get 248 points
Band 4: Non-Contributors get 0 points

I do understand that making £40 a month for effectively being an excellent support representative does fall below minimum wage in most countries. However, it is a substantial amount of money for what is generally considered a free activity. It’s not a way to make a living but it does make customers feel like they are being rewarded for helping out when they do. And this is how their community has benefitted (Here is the full blog post):

43% of their customers are getting a Payback
The average payback is just over £14
The biggest payback is an amazing £654
26% have earned £5 payback by getting a friend to join
29% have earned payback by helping in the forum

That last one is interesting because it means at least 29% of their customers actively use the forums. Does this mean you have to pay people to use your community now? I don’t think so but it does mean that one option you have when considering how to improve your community participation and quality is good old-fashioned cash.

Nokia Acquire Plum

fifers — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 17:33:30 +0000

Nokia have just announced that they have acquired certain assets of Plum Ventures, Inc. Plum develops and operates a cloud-based social media sharing and messaging service for private groups. Nokia say that they will include this as part of their Ovi offering. Unfortunately for those of us who are just hearing of Plum, their website is down so we’ll have to wait to find out more.

This comes after a recent announcement for Facebook Connect and Nokia’s Facebook App. Nokia know that a usable, mobile solution for social networking is the next killer app and are ensuring that they will be a major player when it happens. Fife Community is mobile enabled and we can utilise our mobile experience to help you mobilise your existing information and services.

Cricket Meets Twitter

hootbah — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 11:06:19 +0000

The fast pace of social networking and the cricket community crashed head on during the 2009 ashes series between England and Australia. This normally subdued, old world, low technology, traditionalist following sport was brought alive by the social networking site of Twitter.

Cricket is a team sport played with a bat and a ball which dates back to the 16^th century. The rules/laws of the game were standardised by the MCC (Marylebone Cricket Club in London, England) in 1809 and little has changed from there.

England play Australia at test cricket which the series is named the ashes after a satirical obituary published in The Sporting Times back in 1882 after Australia beat England at home for the very first time. The celebrated rivalry has continued every since.

The technology used in cricket to umpire the game can be described as quite basic when in comparison to lawn tennis (another 19^th century British sport). Video footage can be used by an off field umpire to determine run outs, catches and boundary decisions when requested by an on field umpire. However the cricketing community as a whole embraces and advances technology. Cricket commentators have the use of Snickometer, Hot Spot and Hawke-Eye which have all been developed for the use in cricket.

Even with these technological advances I still did not expect the cricket community to jump head first in to twitter. Never before have I seen this community shows its true global appeal. Followers from the North pole to the Everest base camp were keeping up to date with the goings on in the game through twitter and most probably the BBCs TMS (Test Match Special) ball by ball radio coverage.

Journalist, commentators and correspondents old and new were tweeting the news, scores and generally anything about the cricket world during the ashes test matches. These include Henry Blofeld (@blowersh) — the old? –, Alison Mitchell (@bbctms) — the new? –, and new celebrity interviewer Jonathan Agnew (@aggerscricket). Sky’s David ‘Bumble’ Lloyd (@bumblecricket) being the cricketing tweeting king with over 40 thousands followers. These numbers are dwarfed by those of Lily Allen (@lilyroseallen 1.2 million followers) who without the power of twitter would not have been the Saturday lunch time TMS’s view from the boundary guest.

Prior to this I could not see the size of the cricketing community. From a relatively simple (in idea) social networking tool (Twitter) we can see that the cricket community spans age ranges from the very young, to the very old and over the largest of geographic areas. These community driven metrics are an invaluable resource that can only show the strength and value of social networking and online communities.