Jul 29, 2009 0
A recap on any interesting links I posted or retweeted this week
Jul 22, 2009 0
A recap on any interesting links I posted or retweeted this week
Jul 21, 2009 2
The Tuesday Push is a crowd-sourced approach to PR with a little word-of-mouth marketing thrown in. It gives Irish businesses a push on the web and occasionally a little advice.
Today's Tuesday Push is for the business directory Mytown.ie. Mytown provides a comprehensive list of Irish towns, and lists the various amenities, clubs, and businesses that exist within the town. In terms of reach, their SEO attempts seems to have worked quite well - google searches for various business types in a specific area direct me back to mytown. Do we need yet another business listing site? Does it provide any extra benefit over google home, loopthing, facebook fan pages, or however many other sites and directories there are out there?
The site revenue is ad-supported as well as charging businesses for premium listings. They seem to be getting some leverage with traffic according to alexa, and probably as a longer term prospect it could work.
My main suggestions for improvement with Mytown:
Mytown also has forums which are unsurprisingly empty. I think this is a feature which doesn't really add much to the site and could be removed without anyone spilling any tears. As far as I can tell, the use case for this site is in users coming to find the number of the local plumber, they probably don't want to hang around and chat and the development time could be used to improve other features.
Other features that Mytown.ie provides:
Does this Tuesday Push come across as cynical? Maybe I'm a little jaded with the idea that there are a lot of smart developers in Ireland, all working on what is essentially a very basic idea - replicating the phone book on the internet. I might even give it a shot myself.
Jul 16, 2009 2
"Shameless Plug" via modowd @ flickr
It's certainly naive to expect that if you write interesting content people will suddenly flock to it, but it's nauseating to promote every single thing you write. Engage your readers with interesting content that's on topic, and don't expect that they're interested in you writing "OMG! ME TOO!" in response to someone else.
Shame rating: 9.5 flashing-your-unmentionables-to-the-paparazzi-as-you-get-out-of-a-limos out of 10.
"Just putting the finishing touches on something that's going to blow your mind - watch this space!". Unfortunately the predictions never seem to come true. Be careful of "The boy who cried wolf" syndrome; if your every tweet is a cliff hanger don't expect anyone will pay attention when you actually produce something amazing.
Shame rating: 7 attending-the-opening-of-an-envelopes out of 10.
If you're simply reposting the first 50 links from a google search for "Programming tips" then you're really not adding any value. The only people you're really going to impress are those who are too lazy to search for it themselves.
Shame rating: 8 'accidentally'-letting-your-sex-tape-get-into-the-public-domains out of 10
It's nice to read opinions on things, get a personal perspective on current events, or hear an amusing rant. Posting keyword-stuffed top-ten lists about Michael Jackson is pushing it a little bit.
Shame rating: 5 selling-your-wedding-pictures-to-hello-magazines out of 10
Seriously though, have you read spaceavalanche? It's really funny!
Shame rating: 10 getting-max-clifford-to-whore-the-pictures-of-you-dying-out-to-every-newspaper-in-the-lands out of 10
Jul 15, 2009 0
A recap on any interesting links I posted or retweeted this week
Jul 8, 2009 0
A recap on any interesting links I posted or retweeted this week
Jul 7, 2009 0
The Tuesday Push is a crowd-sourced approach to PR with a little word-of-mouth marketing thrown in. It gives Irish businesses a push on the web and occasionally a little advice.
Image via sulla55@flickr
Cmypitch.ie is an online angel network designed to connect investors with startups looking for funding. As an entrepreneur you upload a pitch to describe your business and have it viewed by high net worth individuals looking to invest. The revenue stream fro cmypitch is straightforward - the entrepreneur puts their money where their mouth is, paying two hundred euros for the opportunity to pitch. (Correction from cmypitch: Uploading a pitch to the site is completely free, though there is a fee to pitch directly to investors at their live pitching events.). It's a similar idea to Angel's Den in the UK, which has proved itself as a vehicle to create companies.
From a brief demo of the site, the design is clear and uncluttered. Without actually paying to upload a pitch I can't tell the sort of feedback you can get on a pitch. An ideal situation would be to get commentary on what areas of the pitch investors thought was strong or weak, or some sort of ratings metric across a few areas to determine what people thought of the idea.
The site has racked up a few partners from household names such as Bank of Scotland, Deloitte, and The Irish Times and some entrepreneur endorsement from Eddie Jordan. It looks like a solid enterprise but the proof of the pudding is in the eating - I'm looking forward to see what sort of businesses get funded, and how they fare.
Jul 1, 2009 0
A recap on any interesting links I posted or retweeted this week
