Tim Malbon's posts

Instagram, I loved you.

You were my first real relationship after Twitter, and right now I feel angry and bitter about you turning your back on all the good stuff we had going. I feel shut out by you, and I can't bear the thought of you and Facebook, you know... 'together'... 

I don't know how I can keep all this hurting inside of me...

So, back from another SXSW :(

It's great to be back in a country where the butter doesn't contain sugar by default, where fizzy drinks don't come in buckets and where you can buy meat in units of less than one pound. But... I will miss adding cheese and chipotle oak-smoked maple-flakes and sugar-coated tequila-bacon dust to my deep-fried food. If we hadn't got out when we did I would not have fitted through the doorway of the plane.  

It was another awesome trip for Made by Many for many reasons - not least because of the way people embraced Picle, the iPhone app we launched. 

We promised to make Picle an open experiment in Lean product innovation. To that end, we approached SXSW as a giant customer development exercise. This blog post is about how we prioritised the feature-set that we launched with, and how we might grow and evolve from that Minimum Viable Product.

Alex Harding is an Interaction Designer  at Made by Many and the inventor of Picle. This is the story of Picle in Alex's own words - a story already blogged on this website, but told through a beautiful video that Alex and Paul Wyatt made last week.

Last week we announced the forthcoming release of an iPhone app for SXSW called ‘Picle’. The reception was overwhelming, and we’re really excited to announce that Picle is now available in the app store.

But, hold on... before you run off and start Picling there is something we must remind you of...

SXSW has been an important event in the Made by Many calendar over the past few years.

We take as many people as possible and we always have a great time - we learn, we swarm, we go to lots of parties and we live together for a week in some big houses in Travis Heights. We also get to spend some quality time with our clients, do some new biz and hang out with lots of people we'd only otherwise know through Twitter and Instagram. 

For the past few years, we've tried to launch something new for SXSW: a homepage takeover and/or a new app. Last year we launched Hollergram for the iPad - an app designed specifically for SX that turns your iPad into a  glowing sign, and that simultaneously tweets your wittiest bon mots into the stream. Gosh, how we all laughed!

This year we are beyond super-excited to announce the birth of Picle. Our most ambitious Made by Many product yet - an iPhone app that uses photos and sound to give users storytelling super-powers.

Here's a little preview...

Christmas is coming, the goose is getting fat, and our little festive update to Holler Gram is now in-store.  

Welcome to Holler Gram Seasons. 

More screenshots below.

Sara's already written about the Tomorrow Award we were lucky enough to win recently. What we haven't shared is this brilliant video from the judges that they showed on the night - some great quotes about the work from the 'monster' judges including Big Spaceship's Michael Lebowitz, Robert Wong from Google Creative Labs, and Dentsu's Masako Okamura. 

We launched a DareBot a few weeks ago, and I decided to test it on myself.

DareBot is a 50/50 project and last night I reached the pledge amount of £400 for famine aid in East Africa, which meant I had to shave 1/2 my moustache off and go around like that for a day (today). I still have to pluck 30 moustache hairs out with tweezers to raise the additioanl £30 that @jeremyet has pledged (I have to post the audio for this on SoundCloud).

Part of the deal with DareBot is to post proof of the dare having been completed - on Instagram, Twitter etc,  so this post has a bit of that (as well as the 'proof of payment' screenshots). But I'll also explain how DareBot works and why it's based on some of the things we've learnt about, as well as how we might continue to develop it. 

I was lucky enough to be asked to take part in this year's Metaphwoar, organised by Andy Whitlock and Poke as part of Intenet Week Europe. 

Tim Malbon at Metaphwoar! 2011 from Poke on Vimeo.

The coalition of projects affiliated with the 50/50 campaign has raised nearly £25k (that’s around $39k in USD), which is an amazing achievement.

True, we’re nowhere near the £1m mark at this stage but we still believe there is the potential to raise lots more money, and our plan was to learn and iterate towards this. There is an extraordinary coalition of (almost) 50 little experiments created and run independently by individuals and teams. Fundamentally, we are trying to understand how distributed teams of Internet-empowered people can take the initiative in terms of fundraising instead of relying exclusively on traditional institutions. We’ve all been trying to work out how to leverage networks and new models of digital engagement to raise money for famine relief

So, now is the time to review what we’ve learnt and pivot: to correct our course and to optimise what we’ve got.