December 30th, 2009 |
Published in
comment
Fortune 500 listing excerpt
According to Wikipedia, Raytheon makes …
Coca-Cola makes bottled sugary water. Read the rest of this entry »
December 21st, 2009 |
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agtweet
Right, so O2 have started offering Twitter from your mobile phone over SMS.
Now who do I know that does that? Oh yeah – me. So is this good news or bad news? Well, the good news is that it means more people are using Twitter although I’m still detecting a slow down in the number of Irish Twitter sign ups. Read the rest of this entry »
December 21st, 2009 |
Published in
humour
Market Size: €6 Trillion (revahealth.ie)
Market Share: 85% (daft.ie)
Customer Retention: 97% (backmeup.ie)
Sales Channel: Public Speaking (getexceptional.com)
Lead Conversion Rate: 100%
Tax Liability: 10% (U2)
Administration: none
Company Car: Spaceship2
December 16th, 2009 |
Published in
tip
‘Giving back’ as the American’s call it seems to be all the rage these days. Perhaps a latent guilt for money/success drives people to try and rebalance the scales a little. Of course they’re bloody unlikely to much of an impact. 95% of the worlds population live in vast pools of poverty. A relentless focus on profit and money is perhaps wearing on the soul after a while.
Let us be clear about this however. I’m pretty sure there is no such thing as an altruistic act. When I take part in some kind of charitable activity I’m in it to make myself feel better the next time I meet someone working with drug addicts or rehabilitating abandoned quadriplegics. One group that I’ve been keeping an eye on from afar is Connect Ethiopia. Read the rest of this entry »
December 9th, 2009 |
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Uncategorized
Ever had awful service in a restaurant? Been overcharged at the till in a Supermarket? Had your phone company rip you off while you were roaming on Holiday?
Infuriating, isn’t it. You do at least have the pleasure of taking your business somewhere else however. The same cannot be said for your government.
Like it lump it, no matter how uncleanly the hospitals or how backward the public transport, you pretty much just have to grin and bear it. Or do you? Read the rest of this entry »
December 5th, 2009 |
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comment
Although I hate the term, you could roughly describe me as a entrepreneur. Like most entrepreneur’s my Mother despairs at the fact and really wishes I’d just get a proper job with a carreer path. With that in mind, I thought I’d try and put one together. Read the rest of this entry »
December 4th, 2009 |
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comment
I was talking to a pretty technical friend of mine a couple of nights ago. He was all aglow after coming up with a killer application idea for the iphone. This guy is smart. He runs a successful company and has raised funding the past. Yet, he makes the same mistake I do, you may do, and pretty much any technical person does. He thinks
technology > design > marketing > market
in that order. When you have a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail, and nerds love hammers. I liked the idea of building a Spanglish button for Firefox of a Irish Twitter SMS gateway. The idea and challenge of getting it to work is so entoxicating that you just can’t wait to jump up and get started.
We’re handicapped by the fact that we can run off and start building things. We don’t have to pay someone else to do it. As such, we don’t value our own time and make an honest judgement on whether it is worth the investment.
That is all fine and well if fudging around with stuff in your spare time but there is a real opportunity cost. Rob on Software’s excellent post on the correct order to come up with opportunities
market > marketing > design > technology
While we may consider our technical ability to be an advantage, it is actually our biggest handicap. Outsourcing might not be as much fun as coding it up yourself, but it does force you to stop and think about whether its a runner. If you had to spend your own hard earned cash on something – would you still do it. I’d argue that maybe you should fire yourself as CTO if you ever really want to get over your technical handicap.
December 3rd, 2009 |
Published in
SEO
This morning we are spending the day looking at our sales copy on Piehole and thinking about how we can improve our click throughs. SEO has been a somewhat thankless task for us. The market is small and haven’t been very successful on getting click throughs on our targeted keywords . We do appear on the front page of most of the useful ones but getting to the next stage is a little trickier. A useful model I am going to use, that I learned about a couple of years ago at John Coburn’s SEO seminar for small business, is AIDA (attention, interest, desire/decision, action) and it works like this. This is the original default title:
Ireland’s Largest Voiceover Directory Read the rest of this entry »
December 3rd, 2009 |
Published in
agtweet
Just a quick agtweet update. I tried running a ‘double your texts’ promotion today to see if I could stimulate some sales. Lets just say, it didn’t work – at all. I guess its not always about price.
December 2nd, 2009 |
Published in
sales
Natural sales resistance is that icky feeling you get as soon as you feel as though you are beeing sold to. It is a inbuilt defense mechanism that we all have and is aimed at keeping our hard earned sheckles in our pockets.
It raises both necessary and unnecessary caution. A lot of the time it will stop you from making a silly mistake, other times it stops you from doing something you really should. For example, in my dating days, there are many, many, many girls who’s natural sales resistance was alerted every time I asked them for a dance. Many of these poor creatures missed out simply because they were unsure of my true intentions. Read the rest of this entry »