#business (468 links)
"Here’s a pricing technique that sounds, at first, like the dumbest newbie move of all time. Call it ‘fill-in-the-blank’ invoicing. Or ‘pay what you want’ pricing. The notion is, you do the work first, then let the client decide how much to pay for it." Heavy caveats.
Via ihart.
- Organic Startup Ideas paulgraham.com
The best way to come up with startup ideas is to ask yourself the question: what do you wish someone would make for you?
- Invest in Hackney invest-in-hackney.org
Details and links to managed workspace providers in Hackney.
- Why trivia is so important | Life and style | The Guardian guardian.co.uk
""This has come to be known as the Colour of the Bike Shed Phenomenon: the time spent on any item will be in inverse proportion to its cost and importance. Relentlessly, the trivial squeezes out the non-trivial [...] Similar effects – where small stuff preoccupies us because it's small – course through our lives [...] I fear that something related is also what's transpiring whenever I get that delusional feeling of achievement from having powered through multiple unimportant items on my to-do list, leaving untouched the few tasks that really matter. Taken together, Parkinson's two laws amount to a wry but certainly not trivial warning: the work we do expands to fill the time available – and, half the time, it's not even the most important work."
An interesting (though obvious, after-the-fact) consequence of increasing our hourly rate, is that the customers that were left tended to be exactly the type of customers we’ve always wanted to work for — they appreciate, value and demand high quality, and are doing interesting things.
- Grand Union sells for £15m as Jaimes Leggett quits for Ogilvy - advertising news - Campaign campaignlive.co.uk
Grand Union, the full-service digital advertising agency, has completed its sale to the digital network FullSIX in a deal estimated to be worth £15 million.
At a time when the limits of the more traditional capitalist model of shareholder ownership stand cruelly exposed, John Lewis's ongoing success is increasingly prompting all three main political parties to point to it as a possible template – for other companies, for schools, hospitals, even local councils.
Via markrocky.
Heroes are damaging to a team because they become a crutch. As soon as you have someone who’s always willing to work at all hours, the motivation from the rest of the team to produce reliable, trouble-free software drops. The hero is a human patch.
- ongoing · Doing It Wrong tbray.org
What I’m writing here is the single most important take-away from my Sun years, and it fits in a sentence: The community of developers whose work you see on the Web, who probably don’t know what ADO or UML or JPA even stand for, deploy better systems at less cost in less time at lower risk than we see in the Enterprise. This is true even when you factor in the greater flexibility and velocity of startups.
- 8 Lessons From the Creativity and Technology Conference - Advertising Age - Digital adage.com · Archived on
"Bring tech-heads into creative conversations early to color communication ideas with what's possible in web development." But don't call them tech-heads.
- Do music artists fare better in a world with illegal file-sharing? — Times Labs Blog labs.timesonline.co.uk · Archived on
- Why front-end developers are so important to the future of businesses on the web - paulcarvill.com paulcarvill.com · Archived on
"A [front end developer] is responsible for everything that sits on the client side of the web stack — the content, presentation and behaviour layers. Few other roles touch so many other key aspects of a business as does a [front end developer]’s." Amen to that.
- 10 things to do for digital agencies « digicynic digicynic.wordpress.com
Most of which are fairly obvious. Still, useful to point at.
Via nickandjess.
- The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs: Monkey Boy's three-legged race fakesteve.blogspot.com
A classic quote from last time round: "The Borg-Yahoo merger won't work. Here's why. It's like taking the two guys who finished second and third in a 100-yard dash and tying their legs together and asking for a rematch, believing that now they'll run faster."
- Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule paulgraham.com
When you're operating on the maker's schedule, meetings are a disaster. A single meeting can blow a whole afternoon, by breaking it into two pieces each too small to do anything hard in. Plus you have to remember to go to the meeting. That's no problem for someone on the manager's schedule. There's always something coming on the next hour; the only question is what. But when someone on the maker's schedule has a meeting, they have to think about it.
The way we do this is by having a 1-hour meeting every Tuesday morning where my manager presents a PDF report that outlines these figures and colours the report either Red (we're in trouble and we better do something about it), Yellow (We're in danger, but it's fixable) or Green (we're on track to achieve our goals).
At no. 1, "Max Tundra’s Limited Edition Kosher Chicken Soup". Ah, Ben.
- Seth's Blog: The art and skill of working with bureaucrats sethgodin.typepad.com
Have you noticed that most airports feature the same restaurants? It's not an accident. The people who run these chains have organized themselves to be good at dealing with municipal organizations. Same thing goes for design firms, creative firms, accountants etc. that deal with large corporations. In my experience, 40% of the fee goes for the work and 60% goes to pay for the do-overs, staffing, project management and hassle that comes from working from big organizations and committees. A lot of small businesses get burned when they charge just the 40% and the client expects that the other 60% comes for free. It doesn't.
- Engineers Are The Best Deal - So Stock Up On Them techcrunch.com
"Software engineers today are about 200-400% more productive than software engineers were 10 years ago because of open source software, better programming tools, common libraries, easier access to information, better education, and other factors. This means that one engineer today can do what 3-5 people did in 1999." And so say all of us.
Custom M&M's. Feels like we've done the custom sweets to death already but you never know.
- Milton Glaser - Ten Things I Have Learned miltonglaser.com
- The Three Sexy Skills of Data Geeks : Dataspora Blog dataspora.com
Statistics, data munging and vizualization.
Handy-looking feedback tool.
- Dear Dustin Curtis | Dustin Curtis dustincurtis.com
If the UX architect at AA.com is actually pretty good, then why does the site suck so much?
- Report Paints a Painful View of Ad Agencies « FUEL LINES Fueling Ad Agency New Business Through Social Media fuelingnewbusiness.com · Archived on
"Forrester Research believes today’s ad agencies are not well-structured to take on tomorrow’s marketing challenges, needing to move from making messages to establishing community connections." What, really?
Via eldret_99.
- GigPark gigpark.com
Discover the trusted service people your friends use
I’ve seen a lot of web apps launched recently which haven’t succeeded. They’re not failing miserably, and they’re not wild successes. They’re just kind of puttering along, sapping just enough resources to be a problem, but not succeeding enough to really take off. The majority of these apps were built by small web design firms or freelancers who bought into the dream without really understanding how much time it takes to make an app succeed.
- Kickstarter kickstarter.com
A funding platform for artists, designers, filmmakers, musicians, journalists, inventors, bloggers, explorers...
#design #music #business #social #work #creativity #ideas #entrepreneurship#fundraising#funding #art #startups - Shopp — plugin ecommerce for wordpress shopplugin.net
An e-commerce plugin that adds a feature-rich online store to your WordPress-powered website or blog."
- FAQs - Change Of Company Name Resolution | Companies House companieshouse.gov.uk
"How do I change my company’s name?" Why, by passing a special resolution at a general meeting or by having all member sign a written resolution, then paying a tenner to Companies House.
- Interview: Mr Best Buy goes looking for bargains in Britain | Business | The Observer guardian.co.uk
"[Bob Willett] says it is wrong for analysts to focus on store openings, as the internet is key to growth - web sales are rising faster here than in the US. "Up to a third of our business will be done on the web, so you don't need hundreds of stores," he says."
- CoTweet™ - How business does Twitter cotweet.com
"Designed for businesses using Twitter to engage existing customers and attract new ones, CoTweet is a comprehensive Twitter business platform that supports both proactive marketing communication and response-driven customer support." Wow, way to make it sound really boring.
If you're Home Depot, and you've got 150,000 employees, half of whom are on Facebook, you had better be thinking about this. Social media is no longer experimental.
Via markrocky.
- Getting Real: Have an Enemy (by 37signals) gettingreal.37signals.com
When we decided to create project management software, we knew Microsoft Project was the gorilla in the room. Instead of fearing the gorilla, we used it as a motivator. We decided Basecamp would be something completely different, the anti-Project.
- List of UK retailers on Twitter | Blog | Econsultancy econsultancy.com
Not a bad start.
Digital had been seeping into our world for about three years and the Napster effect was apparent. Being a small company and working directly with artists, we could really hear and see what was starting to happen. It was a realization that fighting it wouldn’t work; understanding it and being able to grow it was what was going to work. It was a psychological shift for us.
The old digital agency model is not helpful today. Instead, the industry can learn a lot from social start-ups (like Vimeo - who I am in love with, or SoundCloud) and work as fast as possible, being entrepreneurial, pragmatic, and nimble [...] People in traditional agencies - ‘old new media’ and our cousins in advertising - say they find all of the above quite challenging - which is weird because these agencies are stuffed with really smart people.
Via markrocky.
- CR Blog » Blog Archive » The Designers Republic Is Dead; Long Live The Designers Republic creativereview.co.uk
Designers Republic goes under. "I’ve never liked that agency model - it’s not where creativity lies. DR accidentally ended up there in order to service bigger clients. I’m not being ungrateful to the people who ran the business side at DR – it wasn’t their fault. I’m glad we did it - it took getting there to make me realise that it wasn’t where I wanted to be."
Via blech.
- 2009 - The Pull Music Paradigm Shift Emerges - MTT - Music Think Tank musicthinktank.com · Archived on
Interesting, but sort of scary and wrong at the same time.
What advertisers buy when they purchase a magazine or TV ad is slice of the attention of some subset of that media object's audience [...] A web page, in contrast, is typically festooned with hyperlinked visual objects that fall all over themselves in competing to take you elsewhere immediately once you're done consuming whatever it is that you came to that page for.
- this is sippey.typepad.com: project management lingo sippey.typepad.com
“Is there Project Management Lingo?” Yes. Yes there is. My favourite in the comments: "What Would McGyver Do?"
Via russelldavies.
- The ugly man behind the curtain in music publicity... - Music Think Tank musicthinktank.com · Archived on
- Rumblefish | Sonic Branding and Music Licensing rumblefish.com
Find and license music for any project—TV shows and advertisements, movies, websites, video games, podcasts, and more."
- adaptive path » blog » Peter Merholz » One way for surviving the downturn - delineate your business value (#7 and #10 in a series of 16) adaptivepath.com · Archived on
By understanding a business’ problems or opportunities, we can figure out what behaviors we’re hoping to engage, and then connect that behavior to a financial outcome.
Via alastc.
- EMI's £700k taxi bill • The Register theregister.co.uk
The report says that costs at EMI Music were out of control, and that reporting structures were so dysfunctional, management struggled to find out the true picture.