Matt Collins

I’ve been working on a new service lately, called ReceiptFarm. The idea of it is to take the pain out of doing expenses. It works like this: You send us your expense receipts once a month. We scan and input them. You get a report about your spending and a digital archive of your receipts. [...]

I’ve been researching some new business ideas lately and it struck me how rarely people seem to discuss quick and cheap ways of testing the critical assumptions upon which business models are based. Often we’re keen to play with Excel, but less keen to check that the numbers we’re typing in are grounded in reality. [...]

Making Stuff Happen in 48 Hours The last couple of days I was involved in another “build a website in 48 hours” event. This time, it was Launch48, organised by a couple of friends of mine, Ian Broom and Adil Mohammed. Thanks to lots of great work from Ian and Adil, some generous sponsors who [...]

John Buckman, founder and CEO of Magnatune.com (and founder of BookMooch), gave a really interesting talk on how to be successful as an Internet entrepreneur at Loic Le Meur’s recent LeWeb08 conference in Paris. He had a lot of good, practical tips about what he sees as the ‘right’ approach to entrepreneurship. His presentation is [...]

This weekend I was lucky enough to be part of the second Social Innovation Camp. Like the first SI Camp back in April, the idea was to get geeks and social innovators together for an intense couple of days to work in small teams to prototype some socially-beneficial web tools. It was a huge amount [...]

This is a great slideshow (with audio) on how to use metrics to drive the development of your web app. Designing and Optimizing the DNA of a Killer App by Dan Olsen – Startonomics View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: software consumer)

Greg Sterling over on Search Engine Land shared some interesting findings the other day from a Yahoo study into consumers’ behaviour when choosing local services and providers. The numbers regarding consumers’ choice of research tools (generic search engine vs. vertical search engine vs. internet yellow pages) are particularly interesting as there’s quite a lot of [...]

One of the more successful UK hyperlocal sites so far, UpMyStreet, has had a makeover. It has a new homepage and, according to the site themselves, improved local business search and rating functionality. Do the updates to their local review system mean they’re keen to get into the space that the likes of Qype and [...]

Can Sales of Desktop Apps Predict Successful Web Apps? Attending FOWA a couple of weeks ago got me thinking about web apps in general. With the move from desktop to web-hosted software, I’m wondering if what’s selling now in desktop versions will be a good predictor for what people will pay for in web app [...]

photo credit: Mr. Siegal According to Journalism.co.uk today, hyperlocal news site Outside.in has confirmed that it will be launching a UK version. They report that the UK site is currently in beta. Outside.in currently powers ‘buzz maps‘ for the Washington Post that show which places are currently being mentioned most by local bloggers. No doubt [...]