Take me to Crowdstorm.com

Nearly there - Crowdstorm V3

Philip Wilkinson on Apr 25, 2008, in Entrepreneurship, Products, Social Media

We’re getting ready to launch the new Crowdstorm product (V3) tonight and Sobek is currently tweaking the google adwords code while I’m browsing iStockPhoto looking for better images of numbers in circles! Strange what you do late at night…

I liked the image above as it reminds me of the networking effect of people sharing product recommendations with each other.. Right, time for another cup of tea and onwards and upwards..

Crowdstorm version 2 - iterate, iterate, iterate!

Philip Wilkinson on Jan 24, 2008, in E-Commerce, Entrepreneurship, Products, Social Media

One thing which has been really interesting over the past 5-6 weeks is that having an actual site live is a very useful thing. We debated for quite a while whether we were going to put the current version live, bearing in mind the list of bugs and elements that didn’t quite seem to work correctly, going through the following points:

• You actually have deployed something which is a great morale booster
• You learn a lot from how people use (or don’t use the site) through asking them, and mainly analysing detailed statistics on usage
• It’s a chance to get out of a development environment and really see what the real world issues that are thrown at you are.
• People stop asking you when you are going to launch!!!
• Users who come to the site think that it is a finished version and may not be patient with the flaws
• You have to keep fixing the bugs in the live environment which takes up valuable development time
• Investors start asking for traffic figures on the site and to see “traction” when you’ve only just launched and know you need to put another 20 things live and perfect them before your plan really kicks in.

Well - what “have” we learnt directly in relation to Crowdstorm then?

1. Not implementing a menu bar sucks in terms of navigation!
2. Developing the site with a graphic design team and then implementing everything in one big chunk is wrong and inefficient (I’ll explain why further down in this post)
3. We shouldn’t let design get in the way of functionality and usability - it may look great but not if people can’t use the thing
4. Use some good quality analytics packages - we have a combination of our own internal tools, Google Analytics, and Clicktale
5. Make sure you get the blend right between people who want to browse and people who want to search and know what they want.
6. Some design elements and layouts on the web have evolved in a certain way for a reason - being adventurous is good but need to pick the right battles
7. Don’t try and gain traffic too quickly so that you can get feedback and improve the proposition before the masses arrive

Iterate, Iterate, Iterate!

The first version of Crowdstorm was a big step for us in terms of trying to build functionality and a design with no historical work to base it on. We took the concept and vision, built 75% of the functionality, then got a graphic design team in to come up with our look and feel. Once the graphical work was done and we were happy with any changes, we then tried to match the CSS / XHTML up with the technical feature set to create the finished product. There was no real way to go back and tweak things without losing time and money.

Fast forward to Jan 2008 - and Crowdstorm V3. This time we have a great team who have had me drill the words “iterate, measure, deploy” until their ears bleed. In a small team of 5, we’ve got two technical developers, one front end interface designer, a search engine specialist, and a product / commercial guy (that’ll be me then).

We build a basic wireframe of a page, write what we want from it, look through any data from the existing site to back up our ideas for change, then code a designed page up in CSS / XHTML. We look through it, play around with a few elements, then go and simplify it by reducing 20% of what we have on it. Once we’re happy with this first version we get the front-end hooked up to the technical backend and deploy it on our beta site behind the scenes, then move on to the next page.

Even then, we’re constantly going back to the older versions and trying new things with the implemented design and refactoring in the technical implementation. We run the analytics software on the pages and get people to try it out too. The main thing I’ve found is that this works very, very well, but it does rely on having all the team on-board in order to understand that nothing is set in stone and everything they do will change.

It’s what I love about the web - seeing a product as a living, breathing entity that evolves every waking minute of the day!

UK online ad spend to triple by 2019!

Philip Wilkinson on Jan 22, 2008, in E-Commerce, Entrepreneurship

Predictions out on monday from the Advertising Association and World Advertising Research Centre (WARC) and published on StrategyEye - stating that UK online ad revenues could hit £21.97 billion by 2019, up from £15.98 billion in 2007. Now that is some long-term prediction from those people with the crystal ball!

It actually does make sense even in the short term as even if you believe the “predicted” downturn in the global economies, online ad spend is most likely to actually increase as advertisers look to place their money in the most cost effective and trackable channel - the internet.

Look for ongoing increases in display ads, online classifieds, search marketing, and vertical-niche channels.

A Merry Crowdstorm Christmas

Philip Wilkinson on Dec 22, 2007, in E-Commerce, Entrepreneurship, Fun, Social Media

Have a great holiday and we’ll be back in the new year with a whole heap of announcements. Thanks for everyone’s support this year - we couldn’t have done it without you.

Oh, and remember you can always come to Crowdstorm UK or Crowdstorm USA when you’ve got your gifts and want to tell the world how good or bad they are!

Crowdstorm United States Site goes live!

Philip Wilkinson on Dec 05, 2007, in E-Commerce, Entrepreneurship, Products, Social Media

Wow - another milestone and about time too eh About an hour ago, the US site went live at www.crowdstorm.com

Now of course we have to check for bugs, keep bringing in more of our expert review feeds, and tidying up all the loose ends for the next 48hrs. Still - it’s a great feeling to be operating fully in two countries now (UK and US) and evolving our site and platform from there.

Easyjet Inflight Magazine

Philip Wilkinson on Nov 23, 2007, in E-Commerce, Entrepreneurship

I had an amusing text message last night from one of my good friends who was on an Easyjet flight from Lyon back to the UK. It went along the lines of “Hi Phil, I was flicking through the inflight magazine and was shocked to see you in it talking about Crowdstorm!”. Now you have to admit that is pretty cool.

The article is talking about a selection of entrepreneurs and my piece is at the bottom without a photo (apparently the one with me holding my head on my hand wasn’t good enough - pah!)

Read the Easyjet Article

Crowdstorm media catch-up, w/c 22nd Oct 2007

Philip Wilkinson on Oct 22, 2007, in E-Commerce, Entrepreneurship, Social Media

Another week, another load of beta testers into the site, and time for the media coverage to start the journey of initial Crowdstorm coverage.

First up, mashable writes a piece entitled Crowdstorm still kicking”, which is a factual piece about some of the features we are offering but doesn’t really provide an opinion. If you’re reading Mashable - come on - give us some thoughts..

Frostfirebuzz, a very informative site, writes a piece entitled Crowdstorm continues to stumble”, which is a really good piece, albeit misses the point a little bit in assuming we’re relying on users submitting lots of content to make it work (not so). It also suggests we need to get cracking and speed up - oh so true!

What’s really crucial for us now is the execution and speed of delivery here. We know it’s the right idea, our strategy is good, and we’ve got the motivation and passion. What’s going to make all the difference now is the team we build, the challenges we fend off from the competition, and how well we translate the vision into real tangible results in terms of making a great customer product and some tangible revenue.

Bubble 2.0 - is it all over?

Philip Wilkinson on Oct 17, 2007, in Entrepreneurship

Of course not! I was reading Marc Andreessen’s (I never can remember the spelling for that) blog post entitled Ok - you’re right, we are in a bubble which is a highly amusing read. As he quite rightly says, it’s a really good period of revitalisation, new business models emerging, strong trends of growth, and quite rightly - a real promising wave learning from the experience of the past.

With TV on-demand over IP, music moving towards free distribution to pay for concerts, personalisation subtly becoming useful again, the voice of millions all speaking their view, content being chunked and syndicated in micro elements, ecommerce finally innovating again, and a whole heap more - why fear what is not true…   

One day, internet businesses will be like the Walkers and Coca-Cola’s of this world - commodities, but there is plenty of time before that happens.

Crowdstorm media catch-up, week 2 October

Philip Wilkinson on Oct 16, 2007, in E-Commerce, Entrepreneurship, Social Media

While we haven’t embarked on the PR journey yet, we’re getting some nice bits of coverage and well written write-ups in a few places both on and offline:

1: The Business magazine wrote a piece on “Social shopping sites prepare an attack on the high street” which discussed a few of the US “clipping” sites before touching on an aspect of what Crowdstorm is doing in terms of being a research platform.

2: Lee McCoy followed up this article with his own insightful thoughts and also how he thought this could relate to affiliate marketing in some form.

3: Our friends at Exciting Commerce talks about their first glance at the beta siteWhy do I get the feeling that the work has only just begun?

Update - Ok - I missed out one:

4: The Consumerist talks about three ways to improve your online shopping experience, with Crowdstorm providing human filters to the world of products.

Crowdstorm at FOWA 2007

Oliver Godby on Oct 04, 2007, in Entrepreneurship, Social Media

We’ve been eating up the expertise and information on show at FOWA 2007 over the last couple of days…It’s amazing to me that so many people are doing so many things with the Web, and yet all of them think three things are true:

1. Utility Computing is a no-brainer win compared to managing your own infrastructure.
2. memcached is entirely worth the effort
3. Facebook is cool and all that, but man they need to give external 3rd parties access to the Social Graph if they want to keep banging on about how great it is.

Also…I have been adding to my Portrait Project here at the show; here is today’s shot, of FOWA impresario, Ryan Carson: (click on him to see it in full glory)