Take me to Crowdstorm.com

Which? Awards 2008 - the best products and services

Philip Wilkinson on Jun 17, 2008, in E-Commerce, Products

Update:

Winners announced:

• Best Audio/Visual Brand - Panasonic


• Best Domestic Appliance Brand - Miele


• Best carmaker - Mazda


• Best Broadband Provider - Zen Internet


• Best Airline - Singapore Airlines

Tonight at the British Museum, there is an event called the Which? Awards going on, to help find the ‘best of the best’ in products and services.

Apart from all the boring fluff leading up to it, the 1:45pm (a whole afternoon jolly) kicks of with:

• Best Domestic Appliance Brand


• Best Audio Visual Brand


• Best Broadband Provider


• Best Credit Card Provider


• Best Current Account Provider


• Best Carmaker

We’re going to send some guys over to cover it and hopefully have the results for tomorrow.

On a final note, sometimes people confuse us as competing with Which? where as we’re actually a research hub that brings the best reviewers and publishers together in one space - including, hopefully, some of the great content they have over there. Oh - and we don’t charge for it

Crowdstorm awards anyone?

7 iPhone Interface Issues that Really Need Fixing

Philip Wilkinson on May 26, 2008, in Products

With everyone talking about the possible features in the new upcoming iPhone V2 - I thought it was actually worth a piece on a range of user interface improvements they could offer at the same time. Some of which you’ve probably been inwardly fuming about but never really thought it deserved enough energy to mention.. so here we go..

1. SMS and Phone should not be separate. The Phone area has contacts, voicemail etc.. but not the SMS option which would fit much more nicely in this section rather than being an independent icon and area. Americans - please listen - SMS is not some new fangled phone add-on.
2. Contacts needs a “search” function. There are numerous occasions where I can only remember a surname or the company the person works for - don’t make me drill alphabetically through the entire list. Sure, I can reverse how the names are sorted in terms of first or surname first - but this is a pain to keep changing and doesn’t help when I need the company name.
3. Clicking a phone number in email / Safari should be cleverer. I like the feature to click a number and it immediately starts to dial it - but please start to handle country codes better! If someone types +1 (0)233 34434 - it tries to dial the entire thing including the number in brackets and of course fails. Learn that a number in bracket is optional and only used if the country code preceeded by the plus symbol is not used.
4. You can’t switch to something else while listening to a voicemail. Often someone leaves a message from a “blocked” number and reads out the number I should call them back on via the voicemail message. So what I try and do is flick to the dialpad to type in the number as they read it to me, yet the voicemail then stops and needs to be played again. Pah.
5. Calendar needs a search function too. If it’s supposed to be a mirror of iCal - put the search in!
6. Stop overwriting Safari windows. I’ve noticed in the latest software that if you click a link from an email to open up a new window in Safari, it will tend to overwrite something you’ve previously had open if the maximum number of windows are already open. I’ve left a webpage up their once to come back to later only to find the iPhone has loaded a new page over it.
7. Finally, have a single button easily accessible from the main menu that lets me turn on and off any battery-sapping features in one go - wi-fi, bluetooth, and now 3G. Do we really need to keep going to settings all the time…

Site is being a tad slooow!

Philip Wilkinson on Apr 30, 2008, in Products

The site’s being a bit slow this week after the soft, soft launch - mainly due to our cache being optimised for the old site rather than the new one. We’re on the case as top priority and hopefully there will be some significant speed improvements over the weekend. Thanks for being patient!

V3 Crowdstorm has arrived - UK & US

Philip Wilkinson on Apr 25, 2008, in E-Commerce, Products, Social Media

Hurray - we’ve finally got our much improved site out there for Crowdstorm UK and Crowdstorm USA

We’re concentrating on making it stable now, ironing out the remaining 67 bugs, and ensuring the speed is high enough. If you see any bugs or want to make some general feedback - use the green link at the top of the page, fill in your comments, then press submit. We’re not making a big fuss about this one as we’ve still lots of things to do to it.

You’ll notice we’re now importing a lot more content in user reviews and expert reviews, and we’ve got a few deals to announce in the next few weeks. Also - welcome to our new Television and DVD Player categories!

Key things still to do:

• Clean & simplify a few of the pages
• Implement new designs for user profiles and dashboard
• Work on a smoother login process
• Make it easier to ask questions and submit other content types
• Improving the algorithms for Crowd recommendations, related review content etc..
• Rewrite and check all the emails and alerts we send to users
• Watch and monitor how everybody uses the site so we can improve things..

Lastly, as mentioned above - this is a quiet release and we don’t want anyone blogging it in the current format, if you don’t mind. Ta very much.

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..

Search & Filter Updates - pre Typhoon Update

Philip Wilkinson on Feb 08, 2008, in E-Commerce, Products

We’re having to write some new features and code for the next site iteration Project “Typhoon” due in the next few weeks, and thought that we should put some of them live at least on the current site to get some testing and feedback from everyone.

So, as of this morning (taking no responsibility for the bugs) - we’ve deployed a new Site Search and much better Filter Options for browsing attributes and review content types (e.g. video, expert reviews). So in more detail:

Site Search

Before we had some sort of weird hybrid thing whereby you would type something in the box and then it would display the results in a small cramped lightbox. Often there were no results as it was locked down to only matching exact terms for the two categories (cameras and games) tha we have deployed.

Well, know we’ve opened it up to be a full search results page that queries not only products but every single piece of review content we have brought into the platform. That includes expert reviews, user reviews, videos, question and answers, and thoughts:

So we obviously still need to work on relevancy of the thing and of course keep importing more and more content to get better results - but now is a great time to get some feedback on how we could do better when it goes into the new release. So please give it a go, for example with terms such as Canon Eos 40d

Improved Filter Options & Content Types

We’ve split out Expert Reviews & User Reviews so they have their own objects now and also replaced “comments” with Thoughts which is designed to be short pieces of text that people just want to say about a product or about the category generally (e.g. strongly recommend buying blu-ray now as HD-DVD has lost). We’re debating whether we even let people leave these thoughts without having to login… what do you think?

Really would appreciate any feedback so far and any bugs you find.. What would you improve?

Philip Wilkinson on Intruders.tv 2008 - future of ecommerce

Philip Wilkinson on Feb 06, 2008, in E-Commerce, Products

I got collared by the Intruder chaps (Vincent & Eugene) the other week whilst coming out of the OpenCoffee event in Waterstones. Here’s how it went:

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!

2008 Prediction - online ad spend continues to grow

Philip Wilkinson on Jan 07, 2008, in E-Commerce, Products, Social Media

With markets “potentially” in down-turn’s or corrections, it’s always interesting to consider that the internet actually benefits from those sorts of times as with money tight, marketing executives will continue to gravitate toward the internet, looking for more measurable ad formats to buttress their positions.

This year alone, the US will hit $27.5 billion in terms of online ad spend:

(Chart courtesy of emarketer)

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.