Matt Collins

Google today announced ‘Boost’ a new, simplified self-service ad offering. It’s in beta for the time-being and only available in a few cities in the US, but it could be an interesting step in helping small businesses get started with online advertising. Google have, for some time now, been encouraging small, local businesses to set [...]

Patrick over at Micro ISV on a Shoestring has a fantastic post summarising lessons learnt at the recent Business of Software 2010 Conference. He goes through highlights of a number of talks and it’s good reading for anyone in the business of selling software. Here’s one nugget I found particularly interesting that’s potentially handy for [...]

I was just making a payment via PayPal and discovered that PayPal have a new checkout page. Here it is with the payment via PayPal option showing (this is the default for people who already have a PayPal account): As before, those who don’t have a PayPal account are instead prompted for credit card details: [...]

I spend a lot of time with people who know a lot about the web. They’re either building online businesses or they’re 30-something friends who live in London and who use the internet frequently in their day-to-day lives. That’s why I found it interesting recently to work with someone who’s outside of that circle, to [...]

Could you be saving yourself time and money with a PSD to HTML service? PSD to HTML services allow you to send in the design for a web page as a PSD file (the kind of thing your web designer will create in Photoshop) and give you back a set of HTML and CSS files [...]

Very soon, together with my co-founders, I’m going to be launching a new venture. Like VouChaCha, it’s going to offer local deals. And like MenuLover, it’s food-related. This time, though, there’s a new twist: group buying. The group buying bit works like this: When you sign up for our service, we use the bargaining power [...]

130 assorted programmers, designers and business folk; 6 eager teams; one crazily ambitious goal. Launch48 was back. The goal? Launch a web startup in under 48 hours. I attended the first Launch48 event back in February. It was great fun and a fantastic way to meet people with entrepreneurial flair. That time, the local voucher [...]

I recently spent some time comparing current e-commerce platforms (a.k.a. shopping carts). It’s a complicated area, so I thought I’d share my findings here in case they can be useful to others. These are my opinions and analysis based on my own research and experimentation and are biased towards sites targeting a UK market. First [...]

Here’s a great slide deck from Dave McClure on startup metrics. If you’re doing a web startup, these slides are a great summary of a lot of the stuff you should be thinking about (IMHO). Check out slides 9 and 12 in particular. The appendix at the end has some further details on some of [...]