Matt Collins

Author: Matt Collins

  • Brownbook – a Crowdsourced Yellow Pages

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    Matt Collins
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    I just came across these guys: http://www.brownbook.net/ They’re a sort of open yellow pages where anyone can add, edit or review businesses. This is very similar to what sites like WeLoveLocal and Yelp are already doing, but in a world where many small business owners have yet to really get to grips with online marketing,…

  • Will the UK Start Regulating Social Networks?

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    Matt Collins
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    photo credit: Urbankudos “Nine out of 10 say rules should govern social sites” According to Bobby Johnson in yesterday’s Guardian (Facebook Information Should be Regulated, Survey Says), “89% of those surveyed by the Press Complaints Commission said there should be a set of widely accepted rules to help prevent personal information – such as private…

  • Washington Post Hits Hyperlocal Hurdles

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    Matt Collins
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    photo credit: Ed Yourdon Newspapers as we know them are dying. Offline readership numbers are dwindling as more and more people find what they need on the Web. Owners and editors everywhere have been grappling for some time now with how to stay relevant in today’s increasingly online world. Some think the answer is to…

  • Death of a Startup: Why Meetro Failed

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    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.…

  • FatDoor is No More

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    Matt Collins
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    I’ve just been catching up with TechCrunch, and read that FatDoor, a social network for neighbours, has closed down. At one point it sounded promising (and had a fancy-looking neighbour-mapping feature), but I guess things didn’t look good in their beta testing. The founders have changed direction, launching a new site called Center’d, with an…

  • The Big Word Project

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    Matt Collins
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    photo credit: sowri Here’s a neat idea… these guys are selling words from a dictionary.

  • Best practice RESTful queries in Rails

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    Matt Collins
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    photo credit: alexanderdrachmann I was recently helping a friend out with his Rails project and we were trying to figure out the best way to handle queries in a RESTful Rails app, i.e. returning a subset of items meeting certain conditions. After a bit of poking around, here’s what looks like the most promising convention…

  • How to Find a Technical Co-Founder

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    Matt Collins
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    Credit: Robert Scoble So you’ve got a great idea for a killer Web startup but you’re not a techie yourself? You’re looking for a technical business partner or CTO; someone who understands business but can pull the technical side of things together and make your ideas real? This kind of person can be hard to…

  • Enabled by Design

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    Matt Collins
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    I had the pleasure of attending Social Innovation Camp this weekend. It was a chance to meet some great people, all with an interest in making the world a better place by using web technology as the basis for social ventures of one sort or another. A little like Startup Weekend, the idea was to…

  • How to Find Top Tips on Almost Anything (…or Just a Few Random Things for Now)

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    Matt Collins
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    photo credit: Seth Thomas Rasmussen Do you collect tips and tricks? Do you want to know how to do almost anything better? And do you like to share what you know? Then Tipfo is for you. The alpha version of the site is ready to try out now. Expect broken links, amateurish logos and all…