The Ice Cream Man has (aka Matt Allen) has decided to dedicate his life to ice cream, living the ice cream dream – or as he puts it “Slingin’ the cream.  Livin’ the dream”.  Now that’s awesome

The genius thing about the Ice Cream Man is that he’s turned giving away ice cream into a business.  What’s even cooler is that he’s created an *ice cream powered ad network* – a totally genius idea, turning ice cream into a form of media – as with each ice cream he also gives away flyers / posters for nice and friendly brands.

A key to the success of his ice cream powered network, is Ice Cream Man’s partnership with Ben and Jerry’s – who donate all the ice cream for free, and without whose ice cream I daresay Ice Cream Man would merely be *Man* (ice creamless).

So hats off to Ben and Jerry for supporting such an awesome concept, and here’s hoping The Ice Cream Man can navigate his way across the Atlantic and do a tour of the UK for the summer months . . .

Check out the Rubber + VAN team meeting Ice Cream Man:

And Ally and Alex loving the Ice Cream Man a little too much:

Viral Ad Network

Tony’s main theorising is based around managing your energy levels better, and he pointed out initially that “time is limited but energy isn’t”, and therefore it’s up to a person to work out how to best use / manage their energy levels to get more done.

Apparently there’s 4 types of energy:

• Physical energy: this is the foundation of all energy, and is based around certain factors like fitness, nutrition, sleep and rest / renewal.

• Emotional energy: as how you feel influences how you perform

• Mental (focus): the best way to get things done efficiently, is to do one thing at a time for an absorbed time.  Distractions are bad.

• The Human Spirit (purpose):  when you have a clearly defined sense of purpose, especially when it’s based on a vision, is the human spirit enhanced.

The heart of the problem relating to energy management comes down to, according to Tony, how we perceive our mode of operation, with people assuming we operate in the same was as computers – i.e. that we can operate at high speeds contrinuously for long periods all the time.

But humans don’t operate in the same *continuous way* as computers, but instead are *rhythmic*, with our energy levels fluctuating during the day.  This natural rhythm is the Ultradian Ryhthm, which is a 90 minute wave our bodies cycle through.

So what this means is that the best way to get more work done is to align our natural bodily rhythms and create a rhythmic relationship between spending energy and renewing energy.

In practice this means working in *90 minute sprints*, aligned with our bodily rhythms and taking out time to *renew* (re-engergise) before starting over again.  And there’s no more important form of renewal than *sleep* – which Tony says we should really make the most of, pointing out that the best virtuosos violin players in the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra take on average 8.6 hours of sleep a day, which over a week adds up to 14 hours extra sleep a week compared to the average person.

In answering questions at the end of the session, Tony’s top tips to more productive life (which he lives himself) were:

1. Work in 90 minute sprints
2. Do most of your intense / creative work in the mornings, as you have more energy then
3. Go to bed earlier

So there you go – according to Tony it’s not a case of “snooze you lose”, rather “snooze you win” . . .

Well, I say “new office” – it’s really a temporary thing (sadly) as we sort ourselves out over here. The awesome thing about Perth is it’s openness, as it’s based around the Swan River which is a massive great thing surrounded by amazing houses (one of which I’m camping out in for this leg of my trip) with amazing views . . . all of which makes working that *little bit easier* – especially as you know you’ve got amazing beaches 2 mins away.

Today’s the *official start* to Delib’s tour of Australia, so I’ll be heading off to see various lovely people in the WA government, who I expect will have various degrees of sore heads and sunburn after yesterday’s Australia Day celebrations ; – )

@DelibThinks

Having initially seeded the story to local press, the project was picked up by the York Evening Press – who ran a story with the headline “HORN SUPREMACY”  – a genius nod to everyone’s favourite Matt Damon schlock-buster, which made me laugh – though my dad didn’t get the reference ; – )

If you’ve got an ideas for Ultimate Alarm concepts, add them here Ultimate Alarm ideas

See the VuVuTech 5000 concept video here:

+ amusing local newspaper headline below!

Pictures below…

Big Paper: an open data essential

Best seats, best view #1

Very South By Southwest

Arduino. Proper wires and things.

Best seats, best view #2

Processing Your Freedom data – matrix style

Generating Haiku from Your Freedom data…

Colston Hall – good location for this

Pencil – my favourite tool

Thinking up ideas

Start the day

This morning we had a room full of multi-talented front-end developers, back-end developers, designers, journalists, bloggers, tweeters and publishers, all ready to share their ideas and get making…..

So why have a Hack Day?

“Because it’s fun to make stuff, good to work with the council and talk, tweet and blog about it”. Mr Andy P.

Hack day can explore opening up data the council has and doing more with it, Hack Day is about using data in ways that can benefit people in the city. Bristol City Council.

There has been no shortage of great ideas so far today around different data sets and the creative ways to utilize and represent information.

Teams have been formed and are currently scattered around Colston Hall to work on and develop ideas and digital tools.

Some of the main ideas so far include:

Doing more with the ‘Your Freedom’ Dialogue data the government has now released
Ideas include making the data simpler to understand, running an analysis to discover the most discussed ideas and even condensing these down into poetry.

Mapping out the creative hot spots in Bristol

Looking at Bristol City Council environmental data on shopping trolleys being dumped in rivers and water quality data

Or even a rather unique idea which combines the two, such as creating a mobile game involving getting a shopping trolley home without it going into the river (including info on water quality of course!).

Using Bristol bus data and developing a web app that draws upon live Bristol Bus information

This would allow users to discover where the nearest bus is and when it’s due. Ideas have even been discussed about creating a ‘hyper-local’ bus route newspaper.

We will re-gather at 5 to review the demo’s and prototypes of all the ideas being discussed. Exciting stuff!

We’re here in the Colston Hall

all day, so feel free to drop by and see what’s going on.
If not, then we’re tweeting under #bristolhackday, and will be blogging more too…

So, it’s nice to get a bit of outside recognition for your work – like a tap on the back to say “Heck, you’ve got some great stuff going on in your company”.

And the guys at Monocle Magazine did just that a couple of weeks back – as they popped by Delib’s Soho office for a quick chinwag and (mildly painful) photoshoot (it really is that difficult to look so happy and relaxed in a photo).

You can read the Monocle article below, or if you want to part with £5, get a copy down your local news agent.

[N.B. if you haven't read Monocle Magazine before it's an awesome mag - in fact my favorite - covering world affairs, business, culture and design.  Delib apparently fits into the realm of being an *interesting* business.  Which is nice to know!]

For some reason the photographer (Olivier ) was mildly obsessed with the random pieces of art we have dotted around the office (all Bristol graffiti art of course!) – and shot photos of me and Matt posing (naturally) in front of them . . .

Olivier shows us how to pose

Matt attempts a Zoolander-esque magnum

Andy’s post is a philosophy on how to make “good” apps. It’s a great post on the principle of having 80% practicality, 10% glamour and 10% character. Ideologically, this will provide you with an app that people will love and make you a multi-millionaire! However, it doesn’t always work out that way. We’ve seen it many times on Dragon’s Den where a young, hopeful entrepreneur presents their idea, only for the dragons to rip them apart and leave them empty-handed with their dreams in tatters……So who says it’s “good” – my argument is stress the importance of user-centred design.

Who holds the purse strings? Your wife, your boss, the queen? I work in part of a team that develop large scale websites for government organisations as well as advertisers with large budgets hoping to attract millions. The app / pitch can sometimes appear to be king. It’s what wins the client over and wins us contracts. However, that doesn’t always define your app as “good”,  just because the CEO of the company loves your app doesn’t mean Joe Bloggs who subscribes monthly and uses your app day-in day-out will too. If Joe Bloggs and countless others like him, hate your app and it flops……is your app still “good”.

Andy’s model sits perfectly in terms of assessing the values of the user. Ultimately, an app needs to work – 80% practicality. Too often products are thrown by the way side for not solving a problem or doing the job it was meant to do. This is particularly emphasised in our consumer culture today. The user’s value may indeed fluctuate between glamour/character and practicality as good marketing is always effective in blurring a user’s sense of need.

For an app to succeed, the user’s voice is priceless. An app will either thrive or dive by the user’s voice. This can be seen in Apple’s App Store. Angry Birds is currently no. 1 paid for app. This follows Andy’s model of 80% practicality – it’s essentially a great game. It’s engaging, not to difficult, but challenging enough to leave you wanting more. 10% glamour – it looks good, but more importantly it doesn’t distract from the game. The graphics don’t slow the game or make things difficult to see. 10% character – the birds are fun. There are talks of a TV series based on the strength of the characters in the game.

The user ratings and reviews for Angry Birds has propelled the app to the top of the store where it has sat for a good number of months. When making a transaction decision, advocacy is key. A recommendation from a friend, a high rating or positive feedback can carry a lot of weight for a user in whether to take the plunge with your app. Andy’s model is the foundation for creating a “good” app but ultimately the end user will decide whether the app is indeed good.

Hopefully, you’ll see the importance of valuing the user in every stage of the development of an app. User-centred design starts and ends at the user. It continually comes back to the issue of “who is this for?”, “what problem are we solving” etc. it uses usability testing to measure how we’re doing in the process, whether we’re still on track or veered way off course. It isn’t a launch and cross fingers….