We Are Team Rubber

I’ve worked in Soho for around 2 years now - and surprisingly (or unsurprisingly) I’ve never been into a porn shop.

Until today.

After finally finding out of how to make book barcodes (for aMap), and buying the software to create them, I then discovered that there are two types of barcode, and wasn’t quite sure which one to use.

Given that we’re surrounded by bookshops on the Charing Cross Road I thought it would be a good idea to pop along to one of them and ask them which was the correct barcode to use for books.

Having been initially failed by the sales desk lady at Foyles, I headed across the road to the Soho Bookshop (one of the last independent bookshops in Soho - which sells mainstream books on one level, and then has a porn section in the basement). The sales lady in the Soho Bookshop didn’t know anything about barcodes, but said her manager might - who worked in the basement (obviously).  So I boldly descended into the basement, passed walls of porn mags and a carefully constructed butt-plug display, to find the manager standing at the sales desk.  Carefully putting my example barcodes on the till desk - adorned by a montage of giant cocks and the like - I explained my barcode dilemma to discover he knew nothing about barcodes (again)- but that if I wanted a porno, they had a great 2-4-1 offer . . .

So emerging from the basement barcode in hand (and porn free), I headed over to Borders to see if they knew their barcodes.  And thankfully they did.  Without a cock or butt-plug in sight, the nice Borders lady advised me on which was the correct barcode for books - which was a relief.

http://www.webdevconf.co.uk/

Yesterday I attended the Web Developer Conference, an event organised for students of the Web Design degree course at the University of West England. The attendees where split roughly 50/50 between students and professionals from and around Bristol.

Of all the talks, I especially enjoyed ‘Designing for hyper-connectivity’ presented by James Box,  not least because he mentioned Lost within a few minutes of beginning! His talk centred around hyperconnectivity and how we make sense of The Web of Data that we have access to and how we make that data meaningful. The themes he touched on made me think of a conversation I had with Tom Abba a few weeks back whereby he spoke about the progression of Data to give it meaning. I will illustrate it below:

A example of this model working in a TR project would be Consultations - Delib do online opinion research and public consultation that will involve targeted audiences (data) giving responses (information) and help organisations make informed decisions (knowledge =resulting in= wisdom).

Things I learnt:

Cursebird - a twitter swear searching api.

programableweb.com - online repository of api’s.

yahoo pipes - pipes.yahoo.com, an application that aids in the drawing and syndicating of information from the internet, like mashups but with a swish drag and drop interface.

Whenever I run through my viral marketing spiel one of the first things I explain is that there are two types of viral:

The first is where the “creative concept” acts as the viral agent - i.e. some highly creative type comes up with the idea of a gorilla playing the drums or a chicken that’s subservient, and this creative concept is then passed around and brings your brand fame.

The second is where the “product” is the viral agent itself - i.e. you’ve created such a darn hot product that everyone’s talking about it, spreading the message and wanting to buy it.

And its the second type of viral that really excites me.  “Viral products” are for me the holy grail of business.  If you can create a product that requires zero marketing budget because it’s so darn amazing that everyone’s talking about it, then you’ve just created a cash machine (and put marketers out of business).

So, it was based on thinking that made me think - OK, if we’re so darn good at running viral campaigns for other people then why not have a craic at creating our very own cash-spewing viral product and make a mint.

So we did - or rather are doing.  We’ll be launching said “Rubber viral product” at the beginning of December, ready for the x-mas shopping rush.  And over the next month or so in the lead up to our products launch I’ll be writing a series of blog entries about the concept of viral products, and also revealing bit by bit what exactly our viral product idea is.

Excited?  I am!

N.B. this post was first written for my Brand Republic viral marketing blog

Google announced an increase in both profit and revenue today - showing a 26% jump in profits - showing that the advertising networks (such as our own Viral Ad Network) have the potential to not only weather the current economy, but grow within it.

The fact that Google’s stock rose 8% on the news may also be a sign that the markets have room to recover - since even with reduced inter-bank lending there is obviously enough liquidity in the markets to make the most of a clear opportunity.

Not that Google is immune to the climate - they have reduced their hiring, only hiring 500 employees in the last quarter (according to news in about 5 minutes ago) - a dramatic drop (not like us - we’re growing, and looking for python programmers in Bristol among many other careers)

Tim W

Ach, I’m not looking for arrogant gits, but if you’re a good developer, you’ll know it. Right now I need good developers and programmers like I need clean air to breathe.

We have a decent environment (in Bristol) in which to write software. It’s not perfect; it’s a bit busy, but we care and say thanks, and the people are ok and I reckon that counts for a lot. We also have version control and testing and decent chairs and lunch, a lack of fear and no pissy politics.

I’m not going to play CV skills acronym bingo (believe that’s a game for recruitment consultants); good developers and programmers get stuff done without needing ‘a year’s experience of this’ or ‘three year’s experience of that’.

Here’s what needs to get done:
- build some internets pages. Our internets pages generally use extensible hypertext markup language and cascading stylesheets There may be other ways to do it, but we’ve found these ones are pretty good and not too much hassle. We’re also using some javascript, which seems to suck less these days.

- make some python applications. Generally python doesn’t suck. That’s something. We use it to try and make apps that don’t suck, for business reasons that don’t suck.

- query some databases. They happen to be MySQL flavour. They could have been something else, but that’s what they are. I figure it’s an implementation detail compared to designing efficient queries.

There’s a bunch of things to get done right now. There’ll probably be some more things to do after that. Stick around until you’re bored of us. Sound interesting? Drop me a line andy@teamrubber.com

cheers,

Andy

In Cluetrain, one of their first examples of where the web will take us is about a car dealership that offers shoddy service getting bad publicity online and their business suffering as a result of online conversations. Word gets around.

WOM legend insists that a good experience will be shared with 5 friends whereas details of a bad experience will be shared with a circle double the size. This blog article on Influential Marketing
looks at steps you can take to limit damage from a ‘blog crisis’ (NB- Prevention is better than cure!)

On seeing this I had wanted to put this onto the Rubber Republic blog, but think the article is probably pertinent to all our companies.

In short, here’s what Rohit suggests:

1. Identify the participants.
2. Evaluate the conversation.
3. Respond authentically.
4. Publish your point of view.
5. Monitor and respond to the conversation.

(Number 3 being the most important) (Or is it?)

Charlie Cooper, a member of our multi-talented seeding squad also happens to be the UK Female Number 1 Rubiks Cube Solver extraordinaire.

Team Rubber Has Got Talent!

We employed a phone as a stopwatch to fend off speeding up/doctoring accusations!

Watch this and other quality video genius on our Rubber Republic Viral YouTube Channel

Following a lengthly stroll to Team Rubber Towers this morning - pondering why I didn’t have some sort of hairdryer to ride to work (to preserve both leg effort and precious breakfast minutes) - I finally arrived at our front door ready to embark on a new day of web embellishment.

Much to my own bemusement, upon entering the building, I was ushered straight back out by an orgy of joyous faces and skipping new media types. Before I could consider the reason for this commotion, my unborn question’s answer had already been hatched…

Before me stood a truck, with what could only be described the result of a sordid entanglement between a Moped, a Tonka truck and a rollerskate strapped to its back…The day had finally come, Mr Andy Parkhouse’s Tuk Tuk had arrived! (Want more info on the Tuk Tuk? read this article!)

Amazingly, the delivery man lifted the truck straight off the ramp and onto the street!

I prefer to call it Roller-Ped. So do you probably…

Andy took the beast for a ride almost immediately, and shot around the streets of Bristol like an action figure in a rollerskate. Sadly, the Tuk Tuk suffered from some technical issues on Tyndalls Park Road. Luckily however, Matt was on hand with his bicycle repair kit and the know-how to get Roller-Ped back on her three feet.

Check the picture for proof…Roller-Ped pulled a wheelie on Lower Park row, achieving some ’sick air’. In 50 years time, a little blue placard will hang on this street, announcing the spot of Roller-Ped’s first voyage/wheelie on British concrete.

Long live Roller-Ped.

—-

Update by Andy

Ian, I’ve told you, *it’s a truck* not a tuk-tuk

@ Ric Hurst: the truck is a 400cc diesel Bajaj Hidec, from Sanjay at Tuk Tuk UK. It’s the only one in the country as far as I know. Cost was getting on for £4k including VAT & Delivery.

Insurance is about £250 from Adrian Flux, but would be more if I put a logo on the truck or commute in it. I don’t know the MPG, but it cost me £5.63 to fill up the tank. Four speeds and reverse, turns on a speck of a dust, top speed seems to be around 40mph.

This is an interesting article about the management of meetup.com ‘giving up control’ and allowing employees to set the company’s priorities and projects.

Developing effective ways to collaborate and organise is the biggest challenge faced by bright, creative people working together to do something great, so I’m always looking for ways to work smarter, better, with more panache, flair and fun.

The comments about meetup add some fascinating extra details to the picture: employees are publicly supportive of the move, (some) vocal users hate the new product.

On that basis, I don’t know if meetup have taken a bold creative step to set talent free, or executed a staggering abdication of leadership. What I am sure of is that in our kind of business, ‘control’ is an illusion. Management can guide, lead, direct, inspire, but it’s no easier to ‘control’ talented, inquisitive creative people than it is to herd cats.

Apple are usually pretty tight-lipped when things go wrong, so this email (copied below) I received from them is interesting for two reaons:

1. It’s refreshing to see Apple admit failings - historically Apple have a habit of asking Mac users to believe the Mac experience is seamlessly and endlessly shiny even when it’s not.

   An example of Apple getting it wrong is their toxic policy of deleting messages from their own support forums when they indicate problems with Apple products (I don’t mean to imply that Apple should allow posts of absolutely any type however negative, rather there are better ways to moderate these things in a community than blanket deletion).

2. The message is almost a perfect model of how to admit something went wrong and say sorry. It’s easy to be afraid of both.

– Update –
Apple have followed up the mail with a ‘Status’ blog, another obvious move which shouldn’t scare businesses but often does.

Amazon have a similar status service for their Web Services; arguably Amazon do it better (although their audience appreciate and require this level of detail more than some Apple customers might).

– Apple’s email –

“An important message from the MobileMe team. We have recently completed the transition from .Mac to MobileMe. Unfortunately, it was a lot rockier than we had hoped.

Although core services such as Mail, iDisk, Sync, Back to My Mac, and Gallery went relatively smoothly, the new MobileMe web applications had lots of problems initially. Fortunately we have worked through those problems and the web apps are now up and running.

Another snag we have run into is our use of the word “push” in describing everything under the MobileMe umbrella. While all email, contact or calendar changes on the iPhone and the web apps are immediately synced to and from the MobileMe “cloud,” changes made on a PC or Mac take up to 15 minutes to sync with the cloud and your other devices. So even though things are indeed instantly pushed to and from your iPhone and the web apps today, we are going to stop using the word “push” until it is near-instant on PCs and Macs, too.

We want to apologize to our loyal customers and express our appreciation for their patience by giving all current subscribers an automatic 30-day extension to their MobileMe subscription free of charge. Your extension will be reflected in your account settings within the next few weeks.”