Archive : December 2010

Those of you who know me probably know by now that I’ve gone off Foursquare. It seems like a mystery to some, because I was once what some people, at least, would call a ‘super-user’; indeed, though I wasn’t officially nominated as one on the Foursquare Get Satisfaction page, I regularly (at least a couple of times a week) found myself notifying Foursquare of duplicate entries, address errors and so on.  I checked in everywhere I went, and by that I mean even in bars I found myself in at 2am in the morning on a Saturday, or a tube stop that I found myself at in between my daily commute, as long as it had network reception. I didn’t have an excuse for not going anywhere I was invited to by a Foursquare friend, because they’d know where I was.

But then last month, I got fed up and stopped using it. I’ve been asked by a few people to write about why I suddenly exited Foursquare, so here goes.

Last Saturday but one marked the first iteration of Good for Nothing, an initiative from the Pipeline Project, which describes itself as a "creative collaboration gig bringing together awesome causes with a collective of thinkers, doers and tinkerers applying their day job skills to do some good for nothing."

And so a bunch of us gathered on a dark and snowy Friday night eager to find out what we might have to offer to 3 fantastic social enterprises: the Good Gym, Global Generation and the Great Football Giveaway (yes it was a remarkably alliterative event). The process was simple and unstructured: lay out 3 briefs and invite the audience to get their hands dirty. Dan, Tom and Tom, the lovely team behind the Pipeline Project, didn't over-engineer the event but they did push us to take our ideas and initiatives as far as we could go. What can you make live in a day?

Acting on a hunch, I typed "trending" into Google trends and discovered that trending is indeed trending. As the normal end of year predictions are blogged, there's a new type of review post in town: the year in trends.

I am liking the idea of 'Meta-products'. What is a meta-product? The best  examples are Nike+, the fabulously daft Nabaztag and, more recently, Alertme. Generally speaking they're physical objects, rooted in networked technology that are driven by mobile and web services. There is nothing new about this idea, it's roots are well established in many sci-fi and computer science paradigms like ubiquitous computing, pervasive computing or more broadly the Internet of Things. 

Launching today, the Hackers! newspaper is an exciting new idea aimed at doing things you're not supposed to do. A quarterly paper edited by Leila Johnston, fresh from a highly entertaining live-on-Skype interview with Dominic Diamond at Playful '10, it features articles on wide range of subjects, from hacking time to side-channel attacks and even Victorian hackers.

Today is a big day for a charity we have collaborated with for the last two years.

Last night v announced the launch of Volunteering Works, a web-based tool that helps businesses implement, deliver and monitor corporate volunteering initiatives.