photo credit: Tony the Misfit TechCrunch ran an interesting post-mortem article yesterday by the founder of Meetro, a location-aware instant messaging platform, that recently closed its doors. Meetro’s idea was to let users download an application onto their wifi-enabled mobile phones that would then allow them to find other Meetro users nearby to chat with. [...]
Continue reading about Death of a Startup: Why Meetro Failed
It’s been a few weeks since my last post, so there’s a fair bit to catch up on. I’ll start with what’s been going on with VillageRatings. I spent a while grappling with adding a large database of UK placenames and locations to VillageRatings. This turned out to be quite involved, mainly because the dataset [...]
Taking the usability tips I received yesterday, I’ve spent most of the day updating the VillageRatings site, applying the “low-hanging-fruit” changes. Here’s the new-look version.
Continue reading about VillageRatings – now with improved usability (hopefully!)
At Internet World, the affable and knowledgeable Simon and Alex (I hope I have the names right) from Nomensa and a very nice chap from Cyber-Duck gave me some great advice for VillageRatings (much of which will be generally applicable) that I hope to put to good use in the months to come. Here’s the [...]
I’ve just finished adding mapping features to the VillageRatings site. It turns out that displaying maps is relatively easy, thanks to the wonderful Google Maps API. What is tricky (in the UK at least) is computing the right longitude and latitude values for the things you want to display on the map (in this case [...]
How long could I live in Peckham without creating a Peckham-centric web site? Not very long. OK, so PeckhamLive is never going to be big. And it’s not the prettiest site to see the light of day. But it could be useful if you happen to live in Peckham and are looking for local information. [...]
I’ve just re-implemented the VillageRatings site in Rails. The site allows people to read about UK villages and leave their own feedback on them. You can now list villages in order of their ratings for any attribute or overall average rating which wasn’t possible before. And, thanks to Rails, the homepage has been completely overhauled. [...]
LondonTwenty is designed as a starting page for Londoners. The idea is to provide categorised links to the top twenty (or so) sites for Londoners of which people might not otherwise be aware or of which they might not remember the names. It also has a London-specific search engine. The next time you’re looking for [...]