17 posts
On the first of September Made by Many turned four.
We took a photo to mark the occasion but in the busyness of the last couple of months, we sort of forgot about our commemorative shot. Happily, Conor did not, and this week he sent it round. So here we are, most of the many, mostly looking a little goofy, but mainly feeling very proud to have made it to four.
The Financial Times closed FT Tilt on 13 October which was a big surprise and a bigger disappointment because it bore so many of the hallmarks of a successful web media product: it was niche, it was a rich source of hard-to-get information, it aggregated content and viewpoints, it filtered information really well, it was aimed at a wealthy, professional and highly interested target market who might be expected to participate and even shell-out to cross a paywall.
Tilt was an emerging markets news service created by Paul Murphy, an editor with a successful track record in product innovation with the markets blog FT Alphaville. The powerful idea underlying Tilt was that the source of global market influence was tilting (their pun) to the BRICs and that you couldn’t rely on reporters in London, New York or Tokyo to get the best information about what was happening in Shanghai, Sao Paulo or Mumbai, you had to go to the source. Tilt was all about creating a network of organisations and individuals in situ in emerging markets and aggregating and distributing their intelligence to a community of market analysts and investors in global financial markets around the world, people who are part of the FT’s natural constituency.
So why did it fail? Almost certainly not because it wasn’t a good idea. Felix Salmon in his blog at Reuters argued that
When one talks about Apple's design, one immediately thinks of Jony Ive's modernist, rational industrial designs for computers, peripherals, and of course the iPad and iPhone.
Okay, so most of our pals will know by now that we’ve been involved with this 50/50 thing for the last 50-something days. It was a ‘somewhat loopy’ idea to try and raise money online to save lives in East Africa by asking a coalition of partners to come together to build 50 little things.
We need your help.
We're proud to announce that we're running a Lean Startup workshop in collaboration with the folks at Leancamp as part of Internet Week Europe (7-11 November) in London. Read on to find out about the event and how to sign up.
In collaboration with my husband (@johnnybennett), I launched the Kids Draw for East Africa project last Friday on the 5050.gd platform. Utterly moved by the 50/50 call to arms, I wanted to do something to help, and our own daughter inspired the idea behind the solution.
A child is dying of hunger every six minutes in Somalia. In six minutes, a well-fed British child can paint or draw a picture that can mean the difference between life and death for someone else’s child. Kids Draw for East Africa is an online auction of kids' art.
Wow. So as many of you will know for the past two months we've been collaborating with Good for Nothing on the 50/50 campaign to raise £1million for East African famine aid.
Last night I went to Hide&Seek's marine themed Sandpit at the National Maritime museum in Greenwich.
Sandpit is a regular playing and playtesting event where artists, game designers and theatre makers present completely new games. There's running and scurrying and solving and hiding and plotting; paper and brightly-coloured hats and treachery and more. It's intended primarily for adults.
The GALACTIC EMPIRE has secretly begun construction on a new armored space station even more powerful than the first dreaded Death Star.
In May of this year, Atul Gawande delivered the commencement address at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Gawande is a Rhodes Scholar, a surgeon, a New Yorker staff writer and an associate professor at both the Harvard School of Public Health and Harvard Medical School. He's also on Twitter: @Atul_Gawande.
Dr. Gawande's commencement address, published in The New Yorker under the title Cowboys and Pit Crews, is about change. I read it Monday night and have been thinking about it ever since. One question in particular keeps running 'round my head:
We humans are doing an amazing job of changing our world… but how are we doing at adapting to the changes we create?
