19 posts
To wrap up this week, here are some interesting links that have been floating around the office, and some of this week's tech news that caught our eye. From the slowly growing relationship between advertising and venture capital to Google's latest ventures, it's all there.
This week's videos are in keeping with the week's theme, about lean startup methodology and customer development. Enjoy!
This week's curated Slideshare presentations are on the theme of customer development and lean startup methodologies. As a company who follows these principles ourselves, it's rather useful to see how they're being used by others, and indeed see if there are interesting new things we can learn and continue to apply to our work.
Hopefully you’ve read Heather’s post about how she came to Made by Many to do an internship and what she learnt in all that time with us. It’s been a great 6 months (she left last weekend), and we all really enjoyed having her here, not to mention how we appreciate the fantastic design work she did on a number of our projects. I got her to answer a few questions before she left – here’s what she said:
I first heard about Made by Many while I was searching for internship options. I was attending Boulder Digital Works, a graduate program at the University of Colorado, and completing an internship is part of the program. After many hours exploring Made by Many's work, Twitter streams, Flickr photos and blog posts I remember stumbling upon a post that particularly resonated with me. It was called "The Future of Wireframes" and was written by Isaac Pinnock, a co-founder of MxM. As I read it, I remember feeling a synchronicity between the thoughts expressed in the article and my own ideas. I realised Made by Many was where I wanted to go for an internship.
Last weekend I participated in the Guardian/Rewired State SXSW (or in hash tag form #gSxSW) hack day event. I had a fantastic time, met some great developers and journalists, and was part of the team that came away with the prize for best hack. Surely this is worthy of a blog post?
Following up on Cath’s recent post about what Conor calls ‘application obligation’, I thought it would be interesting to see what apps people in the office feel obliged to use, and why. More interesting than the apps themselves (Twitter as a service took centre stage, as I expected), was the reasoning behind why people altered their behaviour to fit these apps or services into their lives, instead of the other way around. I’m presenting them below so you can read them for yourselves (in most cases I’m simply putting their words into the third person so as not to take too much away from the content – they make really valid points):
The days are ticking down until the mother of all networking, tech-goggling, idea-exploding, tequila-swilling events, SXSWi.
Last year we headed West en masse, but this year we're taking a slightly smaller contingent (note I did not say 'keeping a lower profile' – there'll be none of that!). However, in keeping with last year, we're kicking off our Austin mission with a London tweet-up.
This week's theme, as you may have guessed from Darryl's interview on Monday, is company culture and how that impacts a business. One of the most popular presentations on the subject is the one by Netflix, which is a really good look at how the company hires and retains talent. But luckily I've been able to dig up a few other good presentations on the subject from the last couple of weeks. Read on for more.
One of my favourite blogs to catch up with what's happening on the brand side of things on the web is Brand Blakes for Breakfast - it has been for years now. I thought it would be interesting to reach out to Darryl Ohrt, who started the blog a few years ago, to tap his brains on all things Humongo (the agency where he works) and internet. And lo and behold, he had some really cool things to say, especially with regard to agency culture and how Humongo approaches the issue. Coming up below...
