Have a great few days off and enjoy the holiday season. It has been a great 2006 (even though we only went into beta in Q4) and both Chris and I want to say a big thank you to everyone who has helped and supported Crowdstorm so far.
We’ve got some great plans for early 2007 when we get back and know it will be the year when Social Shopping really takes off.
In the meantime, enjoy the drinks, read your books, play the games, and fall asleep happily!
We’ve taken advantage of the christmas period to do an office move from our small 4 person office to a whopping 15 person one! We’ve even got the paintwork to match our company logo colors…
“Why?” you may ask…. Well, we’re actually sharing the space with another company called Genie Group which is a vertical search engine that runs a range of site such as Broadband Genie to let people compare broadband, and also a new stealth start-up here in the UK which I’m not allowed to tell you anymore about!
You’ll see the photos down the left hand side (randomly selected from the set) and you can click the link to see the full set on Flickr.
One thing we’ve said we always wanted to do was to operate an open door policy and let any UK Web / Internet start-up either come and visit or use part of the office for a meeting or workshop you want to run. All you need to do is send us an email / IM when you’re in the Waterloo area - and up you come. Bring the odd diet coke and peanuts and we’ll be happy
We also managed to rope little Sam Sethi into carrying across our plants - thanks Sam. Both him and Mike Butcher are getting ready to launch a really exciting new blog (even just calling it a blog is actually an understatement for the things planned), and you can currently view their first post and sign up to the RSS feed. After all the fun they had with Techcrunch UK, it is time for a fresh start.
So, anyway, here we are in the new office. The wireless connection is now working and we have a nice kitchen right next door which has plenty of spare for our beer fridge. Will it make us more productive? Will it make us more professional? Nah - but isn’t it just the looks that matter
To help get us in the christmas spirit, we’ve created a set of products that a group (about 20) of UK and US web entrepreneurs and key internet people want for christmas. These guys have kindly submitted their top 5 items (some of them are very strange!), along with the reasons why they chose them and sometimes a funny little video to watch.
The Mutado boys seemed obsessed with Zoo Animals, Rob Loch wants to fly in a Mig 29 with a girl from the Ukraine while drinking cocktails, and Walid & Sokratis look like they shot their video down some dodgy London back alley! All good fun.
Feel free to have a look and please digg it if you can:
An excellent post by the RealSoftwareDevelopment blog was published the other day listing the best of the best websites
Crowdstorm is down on the right hand side about half way through under Shopping. They seem to have missed out our logo though - pah!
It’s a pretty interesting list with some businesses with a lot better propects than others. I wonder if we will see the list increase over the next few months and then start to decline during the middle of next year?
Well, Crowdstorm was mentioned in the Saturday Times this weekend in a piece they actually called “social shopping”. You can access the article here.
Nice of them to feature us but I get the feeling that the author David Rowan got a bit confused and blended the features and functionality together of all the sites he mentioned, when actually each of us offer different things right now. For example, he mentioned that all of our competitors measure the buzz around products - this isn’t true, as only Crowdstorm really does this.
I did like the way he mentioned that he wanted the buzzy items for christmas of a Nokia Digital Pen and KitchenAid Mixer - which he extracted from the Crowdstorm site So, kudos to both the Times and the Guardian for picking up on this social shopping trend and helping to bring it into the mainstream awareness!
As we thought, there are lots more blogs and media publications talking about the rise of the social shopping / social commerce trend. Luckily we identified it aaaaaaages ago and have built the first iteration of our site to take advantage of it
In the blog post from Genuine VC, David Beisel talks of the startups in this space categorised into “laggards” and “leaders” - and we’re in the latter - yey! What is interesting to note is that this space is so new that there is still everything to play for in dominating both the US and European spaces.
We’re all still rapidly innovating and there are many opportunities still to explore. One thing’s for sure - we’ve been working on a revamp of our site which we think will make things a lot more simpler yet increasingly powerful at the same time. I’ve seen some of the work in progress and we’re going to call it Crowdstorm Epsilon (to get one up on Flickr).
Well, it was definitely entertaining that’s for sure. Lots of big brands were demonstrating their latest products (Sonos, Sony & PS3, Toshiba, Arcam..) and all had very professional stands. The Crowdstorm one was, how shall we say, “different”! We managed to get a banner up in our 3×3m shell with the Crowdstorm logo on it, I borrowed a table and chairs from Sonos next door (thanks guys), blew up some balloons, and got the Crowdstorm bee girls to come and help out with our 5000 leaflets. We even had some screenshots on the wall and a big blanket covering our bags!
At least we made an effort eh….
I think we generated a good amount of buzz and managed to tell people what Crowdstorm and Social Shopping was all about. Thanks to Kylie and Charlotte who were great sports in dressing up in the bee costumes - we were all very tired by the end of it but happy it all went well.
We’ve got quite a nice selection of amusing photos and videos from the show too:
So - was it worth it? Definitely. We got a chance to really speak directly with potential customers about the site and if they understood it and would use it. We met lots of interesting people, made some good business contacts, and above all had fun. It was a lot of work and I think we now really respect the people who put on stands for these types of shows.
We’ve been making some changes over at Crowdstorm HQ and the more observant of you may have noticed that we launched our “comment rating” feature yesterday. This enables you to rate any comments left by a user on any product or talk post and give it a “good”, “neutral”, or “bad” rating.
If enough people give a bad rating to a comment, then it will become hidden to prevent you viewing it again. You can also filter the comments according to their different rating thresholds so you can opt to only show “good” comments or “good and neutral”.
Also, for those of you based in the UK, we are pleased to announce a partnership with the Stuff and What Hi-Fi show this weekend (3rd - 5th Nov) in the Novotel London West Hotel, Hammersmith. Basically this means we’ll have a presence there so you can come along and say hi to the Crowdstorm team. We’d love to see you and talk about your experiences and suggestions for the site.
The show is also a great opportunity to try out the new Sony Playstation 3 console - months ahead of the UK launch on a huge 65″ plasma screen. Sony and Toshiba will also be trying to win your affection with their Blu-Ray and HD-DVD technologies!
The organisers have kindly put aside some tickets for our Crowdstorm members and you can visit www.bestofstuff.co.uk to buy them.
We also have a 3 pairs of tickets we can give away so if you drop me an email at philip dot wilkinson at crowdstorm dot com then I can get your name on the door where you can pick them up.
