9 posts
A few of us at MxM have waited several weeks for O2 to sort out their supply issue with iPhones for business users (we nearly gave up and bought them as ordinary punters from Carphone Warehouse, but the Free of Charge thing seemed worth hanging on for…).
With the economy in general down-turn and the consequent drop in advertising spend, we joked with a client last night that they should look at investing in bingo, dieting or dating, even though it’s pretty far from their usual business. So I’m not altogether surprised to hear that Penguin Books have got into dating.
Sending email programmatically can be tricky, especially if you’re sending it in bulk.
Unless you’re careful it tends to get marked as spam, and the problem is exacerbated by the fact you’re unlikely to know about it – users rarely trawl through their spam folder – and rarer still let you know your email has been caught there.
Our latest release, Protect The Human, a social campaigning platform developed for Amnesty International’s UK division, marks an important milestone in Made by Many’s life. It’s nearing our first birthday and on the back of the private beta release of Metrotwin, we quietly released Protect The Human to the world on Tuesday.
I’ve recently been doing a bit of Rails auditing, and I thought that I’d just run through the main things I check; all fairly generic attacks that aren’t specific to particular Rails websites.
SQL injection
Actually, I haven’t seem much of this, probably because it’s one of the more well known attacks and people generally seem to be aware of it.
Following up on Alex MacCaw‘s post on collaborative filtering. The plugin we recently released acts_as_recommendable allows Rails developers to quickly add some user-driven recommendations of items to their latest great millionaire-making startup. At Made By Many we’ve been developing some great niche social-media Ruby On Rails sites recently with New Bamboo and Headshift. The new edge of social media is in the maths, commenting and rating is so old-school, it’s what you do with that data that counts.
A few weeks ago I was quoted in a New Media Age article about Ruby On Rails and the London agency market (available online for subscribers) and it’s worth following up a few things, especially on Made By Many’s involvement with Rails.
At Made By Many we like to remain technology agnostic, which is why we don’t have a large team of developers. We feel this benefits us and our clients more by not overly invested in one thing that limits our creative output and may not be the best solution for our clients. This enables us to consult on the whole range of technology strategies and lets us play with best technologies around.
Data-based recommendations have really revolutionized marketing and web services, making patterns out of the massive amount of information collected about people in order to give them relevant ads, products, friends and music as well as whole host of other things.
Amazon, for example, tracks my browsing history and buying habits to give me a list of products that I’d hopefully be interested in, and usually their algorithm is spot on. I’ve no doubt that recommendations have contributed greatly to their success.
Likewise, Last.fm indexes my music collection and tracks what I listen to in order to give me recommendations about music I haven’t listened to. Like Amazon, they’re usually give pretty good recommendations
A client reported yesterday that members of the Europe-wide internet group of his parent company had reported that UGC (ooh, that ugly term) had crested the wave and was crashing. The evidence given was that a user generated video site in Germany had bombed.
