Posted: January 24th, 2010 | Author: jasonbell | Filed under: Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
How you chop your day up is really up to you. If you are putting your startup together while holding down a job or doing freelance work then your time is a) limited and b) incredibly precious.
My good friend Simon Keen has been trying to get me into the ways of working in the early morning. The reasons are simple for me. Firstly, I work better in the mornings I’m a morning person and secondly, I do need some family time. So first things first.
Early bedtime……
As Simon is working on something and I’m working on something it makes sense to encourage each other to get up at 5am. We will then hold a quick call on Skype at 5:30, gives us time to wipe the sleep from our eyes and get a coffee down our throats.
Two and a half hours clear work, plus I’ve got 40 mins on the bus if I need to do anything urgent.
When I get home from work my brain is foggy…. I need rest and there’s some wallpaper to go up.
Let’s see how this week progresses.
Posted: November 7th, 2009 | Author: jasonbell | Filed under: Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
The time is nigh, the tipping point will occur soon when social media will create more link bait and spam than actual content. This is starting to be seen on Twitter quite a lot now, pointless retweets from bots, follows from bots and now the hacked account direct message fiasco….. we’ve given an inch and the others have taken a mile.
The “fanbox” is something else that’s a bit of a circle vulture as well. It’s a self serving tool for two sets of users. Firstly the likes of the issuing site (Facebook for example) who are wanting to drive traffic back to their wares to justify the advertising revenue costs. Secondly are the “fans” themselves. What I’ve noticed though is that these “fans” aren’t really fans. Most of the time these “fans” are desperate to be noticed to so they’ll join anything to get noticed. Fanboxes merely spread the thin veil of nonsense even further.
In our social media quest to be noticed users have wanting put their name to anything to be noticed. Yes the power of social networking is great, mighty and all that but it’s starting to water down to the point it’s nearly a homoepathic treatment.
And how to you truely measure the returns from these fanboxes anyway? If someone adds you on a networking site it’s never mentioned (most of the time) where the referral has come from. No one I’ve come across anyone asking to link with me and leaving a note, “Hi, I saw your profile on the fans of solenoid relays, you seem like a cool kinda guy. I’d like to add you to me network.”
Fanboxes only work if you truely are a fan in the first place. I personally believe they don’t create a lot of traffic to you or your brand. Perhaps it’s now time to take stock, think responsibly and see where all of this is going. If it carries on this way social networking will be 1% useful and 99% useless.
Posted: November 5th, 2009 | Author: jasonbell | Filed under: Uncategorized | No Comments »
Unless your head is stuffed in a vat of marmite you may be aware that Build Conference is going on in Belfast today. I’m not at it…. no need for me to be at it, I’m not designery.
Andy McMillan just posted this on Twitter.
“Girls, Rock ‘n Roll & Design” — Ryan Sims, describing the typical web designer lifestyle at #buildconf
Which now explains everything in webdesign to me. It’s like being in the band, everyone wants to be the lead singer so they can be at the front, pull the chicks and get all the glory 
The real work comes from the rhythm section at the back, the bass player and the drummer (or programmers as I now know them) who just lock in, get on and don’t make a fuss.
And for the record, 24 years of bass playing and the only people I got to wanted to talk about effects pedals and the strings I used (long shiny ones).
It all makes perfect sense to me now…… (yes it’s all tongue and cheek).
Andy’s put on a brilliant conference, well done mate.
Posted: October 26th, 2009 | Author: jasonbell | Filed under: Uncategorized | No Comments »
The Telegraph reports that social networking is costing the economy £1.38bn.
I’m always bemused by these sorts of figures but there’s so many strangled routes on how to get to the big numbers. How does a survey of just over 1,300 works get to £1.38bn (apart from long multiplication and is this the US or UK version of a billion?).
So a company loses 40 minutes a week per employee to social network, much lower than I expected.
A number of local companies asked my opinion on such matters. My idea was to limit access during the working hours and release the Facebook IP’s over the lunchtime period. So you could do your thang before 9am but then it was blocked until 1pm where the flood gates opened until 2pm then it was back to the grind until 5.30pm. I’m not even claiming that to be my idea, it was just sensible.
As for the company content, it’s really up to the company to put together a policy of nominating one person to Tweet/Facebook on behalf of the company and make sure it’s in the job description.
Giving customer service via Twitter comes with it’s own set of challenges. As it’s a service in realtime users expect responses in real time. The classic 24 hours to reply (as in the days of email) doesn’t wash anymore.
Posted: October 26th, 2009 | Author: jasonbell | Filed under: Uncategorized | No Comments »
As much as I don’t mind answering questions about social networking….
There’s a phrase that’s getting chucked into conversation a lot:
“I was at this course and they were talking about social networking and throwing sheep, I assume they are talking about the popularity of Farmville….”.
First of all, it’s nothing to do with Farmville. It refers to a book called “Throwing Sheep into the Boardroom”, which is all about how companies need to wake up to the fact that social networking relationships can improve their bottom line. It’s not a bad book all in all.
Throwing Sheep is not to be confused with “to throw a sheep”, which is about getting someone’s attention in Facebook (a bit like poking for example).
I’m starting to get tired with all the social media training that’s out there, most of it’s pretty simple easy stuff that you don’t actually need to be taught in the first place. Just my opinion….
Posted: October 11th, 2009 | Author: jasonbell | Filed under: Uncategorized | No Comments »
My head is still full of information…..
Of the 172 registered attendees about 120 turned up (around 70%) which was excellent news. As agreed the day before I’d kick off in the morning, so at 10:30am I presented “Bootstrapping a Startup (or how to eat a fajita)” (
a picture for proof if any were needed). If ten people turned up I’d be happy. When I looked up there was about 70 people in the hall and some notable names as well. Best comment of the day, “
he’s very English”
One unwritten rule of presentations is that a normal 60 second minute will shrink to 45 seconds per minute, a lot of speakers found this out the hard way with various gestures of “5″ or cutting actions being offered from various parts of the building.
As much I would have liked to sat down and listened to a number of talks it just didn’t happen, the full day turned into networking day, I wanted to listen to Ted Leigh talk on time travel….
Lunch was pizza and excellent pizza it was, all the while in more meetings with various folk.
All I remember of the afternoon was sitting through Mark Nagurski’s talk on blurry media and en route going into a room to talk to someone and not coming out for 90 minutes…..
Barcamp Derry: present, learn, network and then lager shandy – perfect.
NITechBlog Podcast (by Davy Sims), interviews with Paul from Learning Pool, Mark Nagurski, Jason Bell and Martin Gilchrist.
Posted: October 7th, 2009 | Author: jasonbell | Filed under: Uncategorized | No Comments »
I’ll be doing a quick 20 minute talk on customer loyalty, the mobile platform and what Datasentiment is doing on Saturday (10th October) at Barcamp Derry.
As it’s an unconference I have no idea what time I’ll be on….
Posted: September 29th, 2009 | Author: jasonbell | Filed under: Uncategorized | No Comments »
Peter Boyle from NWLLA came up with the excellent idea of inviting industry types to Limavady to speak to the current intake of IT folk. I have to admit to start off with I was little skeptical because I’ve done this sort of thing before with mixed response.
What I thought was going to be 30 minutes ended up being just under 2 1/2 hours. We covered the harsh reality that it’s pretty crap out there as Northern Ireland goes, especially the North West. On a positive note we went through the emerging technologies to keep an eye on over the next few years. Moving aside from actually getting a job we then talked about starting up on your own, that’s where it got real interesting. Ideas were flowing I went around the room and asked everyone to share what they really wanted to do, plus we showed the power of the network (in reference to Open Coffee Coleraine/Derry/Limavady/Mid Ulster). With most of the ideas I could put them in touch with two or three people who might be able to help in one way or another.
Plus it was good practise for me as it’s been a while since I spoke in front of anybody, so it was a good trial run before I speak at Barcamp Derry.
Posted: September 20th, 2009 | Author: jasonbell | Filed under: Uncategorized | 4 Comments »
Many folk ask why I don’t own a property and pay rent (or as some call it to me, dead money) on a house.
I’m paying for a service: for a landlord to supply and maintain a property for a given fee a week/month. My earnings (I’m currently unemployed due to this wonder recovery recession) pay for that service for which I’m normally happy. If not happy then, depending on the circumstances, the landlord has to put it right.
I looked into mortgages years ago but the mere fact of paying three, perhaps four times, the amount of money back to the bank full well knowing at any time they could recall the debt, well it begs belief why anyone would do it. Between 2001 and 2004 I was watching house prices going skywards with no sign of stopping. That sinking feeling when I turned to my wife and said, “I think we’ve missed the boat”.
The one piece of information that stuck in my head was from an old Open University programme describing how house prices work on average 15 year cycle from bottoming out to peak. If you say that they last bottoming out was in 1991 then by 2005/6 you’d expect to see something happening. At the start of 2008 I had friends merrily gloating under the illusion that “you never lose on property”. How wrong they were. I had to watch as they lost jobs, paniced and desperately tried to sell up as prices and demand took a sharp nosedive.
I’m not planning on getting a “dead pledge” anytime soon. And why? Well the rental rates work in my favour.
If I want to buy a house right now for say, £175,000 then my monthly repayment over 25 years would be (at 5% as a baseline) £1034.72 a month. Now the interest rates are rock bottom but the bank rates aren’t, so any rise (and it will happen eventually this feel good on the interest rates can’t last forever – we need to get real). Nice rule of thumb is to work out the worse case senario, if the interest rate ever hit 12%, which is possible as it’s happened before, could you afford £1859.37 (that doesn’t include the insurances you have to take out either so you could be hitting nearer £2000 a month). An average rent is well below the 5% baseline figure right now.
The rough guide is that a mortgage should take no more than 33% of your monthly income. So at worst case are you earning £6000 a month if the worse case happened? For some reason this modicum of sense totally escaped people and the banks over the years. Asset bound wealth is no substitute for cash in hand. Assets can create avenues to generate cash in form or loans or recouped money from rent. If the demand falls though so does your income from the asset.
For all the people, marketers, media, PR who are spinning out that the recession is over…. it’s utter rubbish in my eyes. On the street there are people panicing and no longer over the value of their house, it’s now a case of not losing their job so they can continue to pay for it.
Posted: August 16th, 2009 | Author: jasonbell | Filed under: Uncategorized | 2 Comments »
The good news is that Open Coffee’s are crawling out of the woodwork, so if you want to network you have no real excuse for saying that things aren’t going on. The reason I started Open Coffee Coleraine and not Open Coffee Limavady was simple, everyone in Limavady practically knows each other and in Coleraine it seems to be the opposite.
So crack open your diaries and get this lot noted down.
Wednesday 19th August – Open Coffee Coleraine: 7pm-9pm @ Starbucks (www.opencoffeecoleraine.com)
Thursday 27th August – Open Coffee Derry: 6pm @ Waterfoot Hotel (www.opencoffeederry.com)
Wednesday 9th September – Open Coffee Mid Ulster: 6.30pm venue TBC (www.ocmidulster.com)
The Belfast Open Coffee meetings happen every fortnight on a Thursday, the dates are listed on the their website: www.opencoffeebelfast.com
The open coffee meetings are no pressure, no name badge affairs. You get what you put in basically, if you want to talk to someone then introduce yourself to them and there’s a high chance they’ll talk back and then get you talking to someone else. It’s not all techie businesses that turn up to these events so don’t think it’s just for dull programmers with nothing else to do. It’s far from that.
If you are a dull techie with nothing else to do you’ll be interested in these bits as well:
Monday 17th August – Refresh Belfast: 6.30pm @ Black Box all about iPhone development this time. You will need to register to get in.
Saturday 19th September – Bizcamp Dublin: All Day – Too much going on to list here…. (www.bizcamp.ie)
Saturday 10th October – Barcamp Derry: All Day – Too much going on to list here…. (www.barcampderry.com)
Thursday 4th – Friday 6th November – Buildconf: you will have to pay for this one but the schedule looks great. (www.buildconference.com)