Home » Archive by category "Business and Tech" (Page 16)

Who’s is bigger?

25 Sep 2008

There’s a great little startup also based in London called The School of Everything which has the incredibly brilliant concept of allowing anyone to teach anything and have all of the information located in a central place. Want to teach piano lessons? Find students, get listed and charge through the site. Want to offer home yoga classes? Done. Want to be the foremost local teacher on soap carving? Great but don’t expect many people to sign up.

Alex and Henry, the CEOs of Spoonfed know the team over at School of Everything and swung by their office earlier this week for lunch, something which ended up getting a write up in their blog. This post made the rounds through the Spoonfed office today and we of course expected their lunch to have involved some highly intellectual conversation, innovative business initiatives, cutting edge technology… and all that jazz.

Imagine our surprise when the School of Everything blog exposed their true conversation: a debate between whether the School of Everything team or the Spoonfed team has the bigger teapot.

Tea is a big deal in this country.

StumbleUpon

24 Sep 2008

As promised, I want to explain a bit about StumbleUpon which I mentioned with regards to Oh How Lovely! the other day.  This will also give you a bit of an idea of one of the many things I do at work all day.

StumbleUpon is a social bookmarking tool which means that it is a social network (like Facebook or MySpace in that it allows millions of users to connect through shared interests or backgrounds on the same website) based around your favourite sites on the internet.  At it’s most basic, StumbleUpon stores your web favourites and bookmarks online so that you can access them from any computer.  But where things get interesting is when you bring in the rest of the social network.

When you register with StumbleUpon, you enter your interests and install their toolbar to your web browser (which adds another row of buttons to the top of your screen when you’re on the internet).  That toolbar includes a little graphic that looks like this: and when you click that button you are taken to a random page on the internet that someone else who is a member of the site had added to their list of favourite bookmarks and tagged with an interest of yours.

For example, let’s say that I discovered a page on this blog, saved it to my favourites on StumbleUpon and tagged it with the word ‘London’ (you need to provide tags for all bookmarks you save).  Then, let’s say you registered for StumbleUpon and listed ‘London’ as one of your interests.  When you click the button, you might see my page appear on your screen – simple as that!  Of course it gets a bit more complicated… in the tool bar you can give sites a or which makes it more or less likely that others will see it again.

Where this all gets very interesting is when you look at how StumbleUpon can be used from a marketing perspective.  With millions of people out there using the button, you want to make sure your page appears when they are looking for interesting sites.  It’s a very simple way to reach people who are interested in your content who may never have heard of your website.  On Spoonfed, we have hundreds of articles including great music reviews, writeups of art exhibitions, theatre commentary and more that’s not necessarily unique to London – we’d like people around the world to start noticing our quality content.

StumbleUpon has a pretty smart algorithm and you can’t just favourite your own site thousands of times hoping other people will see it.  The more diverse your own account is, with lots of different favourite sites from a number of interest groups, the more likely it is that a new find will appear to lots of other Stumblers.

Confused? The important things are that StumbleUpon lets you save your bookmarks online so that you, or any of your friends, can always access them from any computer AND it helps you find sites throughout the internet that match your interest but you may never have heard of.  Keep clicking around and if you see The Top Floor Flat or Spoonfed pages appear, be sure to give me a !

Pubs and Stumbles

22 Sep 2008

Tonight I went out to dinner at a pub called the Churchill Arms. I pass by this place nearly every day on my way home from work and can’t help but notice it. If you didn’t know it was a pub you might well be mistaken into thinking that it’s some sort of botanical garden shop, or horticulturalist club. The entire building is completely decked out in baskets of hanging flowers and the effect is quite beautiful.

I had been told that inside, in addition to your standard English pub, there was also a remarkably tasty and quite reasonably priced Thai restaurant but until tonight had never gone inside to visit either. Upon walking in, I was completely overwhelmed by the Winston Churchill and other period memorabilia on the walls. It was like an Applebees extreme but not kitschy or junky. You couldn’t even see the walls for all of the hanging posters, framed pictures, postcards, and for some strange reason, the occasional ocean buoy. But all of this was no where near as odd as walking past a few bar tables and finding myself in a proper Thai restaurant, complete with the front takeaway counter with people yelling at each other in Thai and piling delicious-looking food into Chinese take-away containers.

The food itself was wonderful. Because most of my cooking at home doesn’t end up particularly spicy (unless I just pour on red pepper flakes which does happen occasionally) I always love getting some food that’s got a kick to it and the pad thai definitely did the trick. This was no Waterville’s Pad Thai Too, folks, this was the real deal and it was wonderful to have a meal outside the flat.

In other news, I use the StumbleUpon social bookmarking tool (something I’ll explain more fully later this week, as well as how I use it to market Spoonfed) with some frequency and today I added my 1000th ‘liked site’ (imagine it’s like all of your saved favourite pages on your web browser, but online). I happened to find a really adorable website for my 1000th pick and I highly recommend you check out Oh How Lovely! which is a blog/online store that finds adorable things all over the internet and puts them in one place. The site also has wonderful weekly give-aways with very nice prizes (I wish I had found it when they were giving away a cupcake print apron! I would have loved that!).

Definitely stop by Oh How Lovely! and check out the lovely things they’ve got.

Bear Hamlet to the Stage

29 Aug 2008

Hamlet gets reincarnated (again… and again… and again…) on the London stages. A quick plug for an article I wrote on the Spoonfed Flavour Blog about Hamlet and the various versions that are gracing London stages this summer.

I’m so beyond excited – I have press tickets to see The Factory’s last ever Underground Hamlet at Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre at midnight next week (after I get back from France). In the show, all of the principles can play all of the roles and are randomly cast after the audience arrives. There is no set or props, they only use things that the audience brings. However even though there’s an element of improv, they are completely strict to the script. I’m thrilled I get to go!

In any case, below is my article about the Hamlets of London:

I know about this Danish prince who’s become really popular lately.  He’s world famous, a smart and worldly guy, and he makes the girls go absolutely mad.  Did I mention that he’s approximately 408 years old?

Alright, so perhaps Hamlet isn’t quite as much of a catch as some of the various modern royals waltzing about these days.  And of course there’s the downside that he’s fictional.  But there’s something about the great Dane that has captured the imagination of theatre and literature buffs as well as the general public for centuries.

And Hamlet has stepped back into the limelight over the last few months.  With culture icons Patrick Stewart and David Tennant performing in this season’s version of the Shakespearean classic at the RSC making headlines, Hamlet was launched into the public eye with a vengeance.  And before yethinks the press doth protest too much the way Hamlet has recaptured the public’s imagination, consider also the Hamlet Weblog and Hamlet appearing on the West End as well.

Perhaps the greatest incarnation of the original emo kid and his Danish cohorts has been produced this summer by The Factory with their Last Ever Underground Hamlet, which is taking place at midnight at the Globe next Saturday.  In The Factory version, the actors can play multiple roles and are cast minutes before the performance and all props are provided by the audience. Joe, our theatre editor, has tracked down one of the founders and principles of The Factory, Alex Hassell, for an interview about Underground Hamlet and the process of putting this event together.

At Spoonfed, we’ve caught the Hamlet fever as well and we’re giving away two tickets to the Last Ever Underground Hamlet performance at The Globe so if you’re interested in entering to win, head over to the competition page.

In the meantime, the play’s the thing to keep an eye out for this year and I highly recommend you take a look at Joe’s interview with The Factory’s Alex Hassell.

Are you a fan of Hamlet or are you of the opinion that it’s just something rotten in the state of Denmark?

read more | digg story

You know you work in a start up when…

28 Aug 2008

Dead tired so this’ll be a short one, but just had to share a “you know you work in a startup when” moment:

Henry, one of our coCEOs came in the other day with a bandage above his eye.  Naturally we were curious as to what had happened, but I didn’t think it polite to ask.  Today I found out that he had received a rather deep cut when his girlfriend tossed a hard drive across the room, accidentally catching his forehead.  He was, in fact, gouged by a hard drive.

Tonight we had a pub night with all of our site content contributors (well, all were invited.  Some came – including a girl from Berkley who is studying and working in the UK!) which meant I got back late.  Another busy day tomorrow!