Author: Matt Collins
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Getting to Critical Mass: 8 Ways to Kickstart a Marketplace Business
Are you thinking of setting up a two-sided marketplace business? It’s a hard thing to do, so you’re going to need all the help you can get. Why not learn from how other people have managed it successfully in the past? One challenge of creating this kind of marketplace is that you’re going to have to…
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What’s the Future of Local Advertising?
What will local advertising look like a few years from now? BIA/Kelsey recently released slides about the local ad marketplace in the US. A few interesting points they make: It’s Big – The local ad market brings in $133 billion annually It’s Fairly Traditional – 92% of local ad spending still goes to traditional media…
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Google Boost – Simpler Self-Service Ads for Local Businesses
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…
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Tips from Business of Software 2010
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…
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New PayPal Checkout Page
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:…
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Realities of Small Business Websites
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…
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How to Speed Up Web Development Using a PSD to HTML Service
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…
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Group-Buying Deals for London
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…
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Launch48, October 2009
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…