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It’s become increasingly popular to “donate your facebook status” to various charities and causes. And overall, it’s a great idea – you show your support, you can quickly raise awareness amongst all of your friends and you get that warm fuzzy feeling of having done something good. Karma points all around. But amidst the general chatter and noise of Facebook, a status update for charity is, literally, the least you can do. So what’s the next step?

Lovebox, a new London startup and brainchild of The House London, thinks they’ve hit on a new way to spread the word about charities and show some internet love for various causes all through a little pink box. In their own words,

Lovebox is a digital wristband to help raise money and awareness for different charities around the world via the web. Each month we add another good cause and featured charity for you to support…. Social networks and the internet help us share information quickly. Lovebox is a simple but effective way for you to show your support for charities.

Imagine checking out your favourite social network and all you see is Lovebox! Swap your profle pic for a Lovebox avatar.

As Lovebox is still in Beta stage at the moment, their features are pretty limited. All that is currently available is the downloadable Lovebox image – for ease of use when you’re ready to swap it in place of your current profile pic on various social networks, and their current charity of choice, Cancer Research UK.

There are a couple of issues with the service that hopefully will be addressed as the site grows. The selection of only one charity per month as the Lovebox supported cause is slightly problematic as not all charities appeal to all supporters. Also, convincing us self-involved web users to change our digital signature, that is, our ever-present profile picture, might not be quite as easy as convincing us to change our profile statuses. Also problematic is the fact that profile pictures are not clickable links so a sea of Loveboxes is all well and good, but if others don’t know what they mean and have no way of finding out, it can be a bit of a challenge to get the word out.

Yet issues and growing pains aside, Lovebox certainly has a lovely vision: a sea of pink hearts, Loveboxes, covering the face of social networks across the planet. From Twitter to Facebook, MySpace to Bebo, Hi5 to IMVU, a Lovebox just might become the universal sign of giving and charitable donations if the Lovebox team has anything to say about it. And the appearance of one box can cause hundreds of others on the network to sit up, take notice and consider supporting a charity themselves.

So what are you waiting for? Download your very own Lovebox and start showing a little love today.


Lately around the London tech scene, a hot topic of debate has been the role of women in technology careers, especially compared to their male counterparts. One woman has decided to skip the petty debate and go straight to featuring some of the exciting projects and backgrounds of other women in tech on her blog Girls’n’Gadgets.  Leila, founder of Girls’n’Gadgets, is dedicating the entire week to featuring the females that make our industry so great.

I was incredibly flattered when I got invited to do a guest post on Girls’n’Gadgets and be featured as one of the women of tech this week and today, my bio goes live on the blog.  Here’s an exerpt of my bio, which goes on to recap a bit about my background in tech and my current projects with Spoonfed.

I sit staring at source code in an empty computer lab, trying to embed a flash animation of a fish into a website for my sixth grade science project. If I could go back and speak to my eleven-year old self now, the message would be clear: don’t fight it, Meg, you’re destined to be a geek….

Read on at G ‘n’ G Women in Tech Week – Meaghan Fitzgerald, Spoonfed and be sure to check out some of the other great women of tech featured this week.


Last Tuesday, I attended my second London Bloggers Meetup. The timing was excellent as Spoonfed’s iPhone application had just that day been featured in TechCrunch and I was excited to show off the application (I even got a snazzy iPhone for the night to take along). This past meetup was supported by the charity Fashion Targets Breast Cancer which was setup by Ralph Lauren in 1994 as the fashion industries response to breast cancer. The campaign raises funds for Breakthrough Breast Cancer, the UK’s leading breast cancer charity and to date has raised over nine million quid!

As always at these sorts of events I had a fantastic time chatting with the other attendees and met some very interesting Londoners. I’ve heard that relatively quickly the London tech scene becomes smaller – that you begin to see the same faces over and over again (to be fair, this is probably true of Silicon Valley as well) but I’m still at the point where each person is a new introduction and I’m happy to keep it that way for a while. Most of the people I spoke with were in marketing or PR – and to be honest they seemed less concerned with chatting about blogging with other bloggers than they did about finding bloggers to write about their companies – but I always enjoy being with a group of tech savvy individuals that shares a common lingo and interest. Looking forward to the next one!


iPhone Fun

I have suddenly found myself in what is perhaps the most hectic week of my time in the UK thus far.  A full recap of my somewhat excessive social life will be coming forthwith however I wanted to share my excitement over the recently released Spoonfed Events Radar Application for iPhones which is now available for free from the iTunes store.  Now, anyone in London can discover what’s on near them with their iPhone with our incredibly nifty app that includes both listings and the “radar” which shows what’s on in the vincinity.  Take a look at a video demo of the app:

The app has also been featured in TechCrunch UK, in an article that has already sparked some debate.  Read the full article about the Spoonfed Events Radar for the iPhone.


This evening I attended a regular London event called Open Soho – so named for the area of town (Soho) in which it occurs.  Tonight marked the 6th Open Soho and the event is self-described as

Devised by PopJam’s Alex Tew and Irish opportunist Paul Walsh, OpenSoho has helped create a community of like-minded followers through its Facebook group and Twitter page, causing a clamber for tickets each time they’re made available. With a sponsored bar and late-night dancefloor, OpenSoho is a highly acclaimed night on the tiles for those currently causing waves and shaping the future of the UK digital, media and advertising scene. These folk work hard and play harder, come join in the fun.

I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect as I entered the venue, located on the second floor of a rather posh-looking restaurant.  As has been the case for many of the meetups I attend, I went alone.  Generally speaking, attending events solo is difficult but for something so based on networking I didn’t expect to have any problem and was right to think so.  What a charming, social, friendly group of people! I’m fortunate to have a story (“I moved to London with no job, no place to live and not knowing a soul!”) that gets people interested but I think even without a tag line I would have had some incredibly interesting comversations.

I’ve had some trouble nailing down a focus for this blog, as I’m sure many of my regular readers have noticed.  London, of course, plays a prominate role but so does technology and the two subjects have not come together very often.  Open Soho has, for me, combined the best of both with Londoners truly excited about their startups and businesses all meeting together in one of the best parts of the city, while sharing their technological and internet-related thoughts and ideas.  I met part of the webteam that runs What’s On Stage, a London theatre website hoping to meet some techies instead of just more theatre critics; someone who seemed to be taking advantage of the fact that London is a fashion capital with his upcoming Facebook app focused on the modeling industry; a fellow American in London looking for ways to get people jobs and many more besides.  Plus there were a couple of familiar faces from previous meetups I’ve attended.

Tomorrow morning I’m off to Scotland for the weekend but I’m very glad I got one final push for tech, business and networking in this week before I switch to the polar opposite, rural setting.  All in all it was a great event and I very much look forward to the next one.

I should give a plug to the sponsors of this evening’s bar and Open Soho event, the endlessly cheerful and sugary sweet I Like U Coz, the site that lets you tell anyone in the world exactly why you like them.  Go check it out!