that canadian girl

Over the past few years, QR codes have been used in various places as replacements for website URLs or to promote products. It’s always felt a little bit naff or unnecessary. Watching TV tonight, BBC Food promoted a specific recipe by using a QR code on screen. A quick scan takes you directly to the [...]

Lately, I’ve been meeting tons of great owners of small businesses with fantastic ideas, boundless enthusiasm and passion for their work. What struck me was how poorly equipped they were, technologically speaking. From working with computers that only booted when they felt like it, printers that had to be coaxed into cooperating and accounting still [...]

Last night, I gave a talk at Cambridge Mobile Apps Group (yeah, it’s a mouthful, I know!) about marketing your own app with no budget. When I arrived at the venue, Tony, the event host, shot over to say hi. With a slightly concerned look on his face, he told me that the room our [...]

In recent months, we’ve printed the Alfred logo on stickers, handy little keyboard brushes and we’ve made our own bowler hats to wear at SXSW Interactive in March. Yet, I think this trumps them all; Alfred user and good friend Zettt created a giant bowler hat in Minecraft and shows it off on video. Even [...]

A few days ago, Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (or EC2 to you and I) had a catastrophic failure. The world kept turning, but unfortunately, the third-party collaboration/SVN tool we use was on the affected East USA zone where the issue started on Thursday. It wasn’t until late Sunday night that we regained access to our [...]

See the full size pic on Flickr

Bought from Stephen Edward Graphics on the lovely Etsy.com

In the spirit of Christmas generosity, I’m giving away a half-day of consultancy to a local startup or entrepreneur who needs help marketing and promoting themselves. Cambridge and East Anglia are full of clever people doing amazing things, with many solo flyers or startups creating great products. In some cases, you might just need a [...]

Those who have followed the Alfred development in the past year will know that we’ve discovered a lot through building our own community around it (possibly the most awesome community out there!) Last month, I gave a talk at Cambridge Geek Nights, sharing some tips, tricks and discoveries we’ve made while developing and marketing Alfred. [...]

A few months ago, Twitter published a State of Twitter Spam blog post. It claimed to have reduced spam from fake accounts to little more than 1%, lowering the number of offers for prescription drugs, dodgy online scams and invitations from busty babes. We complain about Twitter more than we praise them, but this deserves [...]