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I’ve been in and around startups for a while now in the UK, and I’m constantly surprised by how disjointed the community seems to be.
Backtracking…
This post started life as a simple tweet asking if there was a Twitter List for UK Startups and gossip around that topic, but it didn’t seem to produce much fruit. A couple of google searches later, and not much more had been found.
So, I started my own lists, and it generated discussion. It seems that I’m not the only person who is intensely frustrated by the state of the startup community in the UK.
Different Culture
What came across is that there are a lot of people wishing that we had a better culture for startups in the UK. There is a wealth of information on how to do a startup in the US but the majority of UK stories are anecdotal or just plain luck rather than to do with any culture.
UK Startup Heroes (and Heroines!)
Given all of this, I decided to put together a list of startup Heroes (which become Heroes and Heroines after @girlygeekdom got this tweet in). Now, I thought that if I tweeted to my (almost) 1000 followers, I’d have 20, 30, 40 people in no time, and possibly a whole lot more.
Take a look at the uk-startup-heroes list on twitter.
The idea was to find heroes and heroines from the UK – people who had either tried multiple times to get a startup off the ground (and were seen as courageous, good guys/gals) or had got a startup going that was used by the community and successful.
But… it took quite a bit of time to get going. I came up with 4 or 5 and then they came in very slowly. The UK Twitterati article from Wired December 09 (which I’m in!) came in useful, but wasn’t totally helpful.
The UK Startup Community Isn’t That Big
As if you didn’t know. And it’s not that organised either! There are a few people who try to pull disparate pieces of information together, but that’s about it. It’s been a struggle to reach 22 people on the Heroes (and Heroines) list.
We need a better organised community for Startups. Currently, we’re not doing ourselves any favours in trying to get VCs and Angels to fund us as there’s nowhere for them to really meet us and know what to do.
And don’t get me started on Camps and Sprints and Event…
@loudmouthman and I had a conversation around this which was basically…
We just don’t need another meetup to find out who we are, and then create a half-baked application in 1 day that really goes nowhere.
Barcamps/Events are great for socialising, but they aren’t great for building brands and applications that will get funding. If that were true, we’d have loads of startups in the UK… but we don’t.
Time to get real and Grow Up!
As a startup community, we need to stop seeing “Business Model” as a dirty phrase and stop complaining about the lack of startup investment support from Government, VCs and Angels and just get on with it.
We need to organise events that lead groups of entrepreneurs together over more than a weekend, and help to develop real, credible businesses.
It’s not just that the startup community needs some sparks to ignite it, but it’s also that startups feed startups. The more you have, the more money is around, the more startups will get created.
It’s time to get real and start building some great British innovative, competitive, collaborative, exciting startup companies… which may just help to get this country out of the economic hole!
Don’t you agree?
(There’s more to come on this… this is just the opening salvo!)
Caveat: I just want to say I love the NHS and think it’s a great idea and my Dad was an NHS Doctor for 30+ years. Doesn’t mean the implementation/service is always good.
Choose and Book – Does it do what it says on the tin?
I have recently had the experience of trying to book a hospital appointment via the NHS Choose and Book system. This system is intended for people to organise and manage their own hospital appointment. I received details from my doctor as to my booking reference and my password and was given the website details.
So far so good… until I’ve tried to use the system.
Screenshots are at the end of this blog – it may make sense to look at these first…
Booking? There’s no booking
I used the website to organise my appointment at my local hospital. So far so good. I received a screen stating the date and time of my appointment which was 3 weeks away, and a button to “Book Appointment”, which I clicked. I uploaded the details into my Google Calendar and thought that that was that.
But… that would be too easy wouldn’t it. I ring up on the day of the appointment to ask a couple of questions as to exactly where to go etc and if the snow that had fallen had meant that my appointment had been cancelled, only to be told that I didn’t have an appointment.
Not only was this very annoying, but it was also organised with my wife to drop me off and pick me up, I’d arranged no meetings that day, had arranged everything around not being around in the afternoon at all, and made sure that I had nothing outstanding in terms of deadlines. I had organised around this appointment.
Five (yes five) phone calls later lasting around 45 minutes in total, and lots of frustration and yelling later, I find out that the online system never booked my appointment, even though I had clicked “Book Appointment”. The reason…?
Clicking on “Book Appointment” doesn’t actually confirm the booking of an appointment
Yes, you did read that correctly. Apparently, although it doesn’t say this anywhere on the website, the appointment needs to be confirmed in writing e.g. a letter needs to come through my door saying “this is your appointment”. it does give you full details of your appointment as part of the process e.g. time and date and location and a button to confirm that you wish to “Book Appointment” (is this getting repetitive?) but this apparently is not the point.
As part of these phone calls to the bookings system and other organisations, I have found this out. The system can fail at the point of booking an appointment (which is after a user has clicked “Book Appointment”). When I tried to re-book my appointment, it stated online, after clicking “Book Appointment” again having been given a time and date and location again, that the system couldn’t book my appointment right now.
WHAT’S THE POINT?
This is ridiculous
Some points to note:
- The button should state “Confirm Provisional Booking” and also have a pop-up (or something that makes you notice at least) saying “This appointment is not booked until it has been confirmed in writing”.
- The details of the appointment, such as which hospital, building, time, date, should not be delivered to you until after confirmation from the hospital and not before as is the case now.
- The system appears to tell you that the hospital has booked you in and are you happy for that appointment date/time. This is not actually the case. It is actually asking you to confirm availability, and only after telling you all the details does it check with the hospital
- There was no prompt way I could even know that this had gone wrong! Without being given a prompt (note: waiting 1 or more minutes after clicking “confirm booking” is not prompt and is easily missed) message saying that the booking had not been made, how am I to know that it hasn’t been made? What feedback is there stating this?
- The two stage process of choose a time/date and then “Book Appointment” is pointless if the confirmation is going to be in writing anyway. Make it clear that the appointment will be confirmed in writing or it’s not booked
There are more… but seriously it would be too long for a blog post and I have a life to live.
Upshot of all this?
I’ve had to wait 3+ weeks to find out that I don’t have an appointment when I thought I did and now have to wait a further 3 weeks to book in for another appointment… only to find that (at time of writing) the system is down and I can’t book using the internet or telephone.
Again, what is the point? I just want a simple outpatient appointment.
This system is supposed to speed things up and make it easier for people to organise appointments. I’d far rather the NHS had just said “turn up on this day on this date” and did it for me.
NHS IT procurement need their heads examining on this one
After tweeting about the frustration I’d had on this, I received a reply saying that the same thing had happened to someone else. If a single tweet can get this response, then I’m certain we’re not the only ones.
Oh… and anyone who thinks that this system is “ace” needs their head examining. It may work, when all systems are working fine, but there was very little to zero thinking about how the system would fail if the hospitals networks were unreachable, and whoever signed off on the copy for the site (seriously… “Book Appointment”?) needs to really evaluate their career choice.
Oh… and don’t get me started on public sector procurement. This was probably a £250,000 (minimum) website built by a “preferred supplier” who employed cowboy coders and made a significant profit.
Choose and Book: Value for money? Time saver? Not on your life… and that’s unfortunately what the NHS is there for!
Screenshots of User Experience
From the second time I tried to book… which also failed:
and this appeared after more than a minute of waiting…
I’ve been wondering lately how my twitter stream is perceived and whether or not it is enjoyed by all and sundry who have the joy of reading it.
Twitter is where I do most of my social media interaction and as such, I’d love some feedback or “tweedback”. There isn’t a simple feedback mechanism (apart from “follow” and “unfollow”) that can easily be added into twitter and I’d like more than 140 characters of response (if the person so wishes).
So this is my tweedback blog. Any tweedback on my twitter stream, please post a comment here and I’ll get it!
I love twitter (here’s my profile: @PaulDJohnston). It’s my favourite social network, mainly because it’s so simple, quick and social. The best way to use twitter that I’ve found is via a client on your desktop, as the web interface, while useful, doesn’t give you all the info you need at a glance.
Full disclosure: I’ve been using Twhirl for most of the time I’ve been on Twitter (that’s about… 2 and a half years). Twhirl and Tweedeck are clients written in Adobe Air (which is basically Flash on your desktop). Having used Twhirl for so long, I’m quite used to how it does things, but I’ve been increasingly noticing my friends on twitter transferring to using Tweetdeck and I wondered why.
So, here’s a bit of a review of Tweetdeck vs Twhirl.
Twhirl – http://www.twhirl.org/
Overview
Nice simple client with an intuitive interface. You see your tweets come in, and you can easily just type your tweets and get out there. Very simple to understand, and when I’ve introduced users to twitter for the first time, it’s usually through Twhirl. Has the ability to add not just twitter accounts, but also seesmic, friendfeed and others. Very useful, although with multiple accounts, come multiple windows, which can quickly become a little unmanageable.
It’s simple to use for a single account, and if all you are after is a constant stream of updates from who you follow on twitter, then it’s very simple and clean. It doesn’t easily lend itself to more complex use of the social space, such as twitter search (even though the functionality is there).
The clarity of the interface is my favourite part of Twhirl. Simply being able to see at a glance who is tweeting and whether it’s a reply or direct message is very important to me. It means I can see at a glance if I want to read a tweet or not. Let’s face it, I don’t want to be taking all my time up, but a quick glance can sometimes be all I have time for.
I would give Twhirl 8/10 for being a solid and simple twitter client. It provides a clean, clear interface for novice/beginner twitter usage, and as such is the perfect client to start off with. It is let down by not providing filtering of a stream, and not providing a simple way of viewing real-time search results and grouping of users.
Pros
- Simple one column interface
- Different colours for @Replies, and Direct Messages within the stream allows for quick glance checking of my stream
- Can easily have multiple accounts displayed at the same time
- Only a few buttons, and small functionality subset
- Easy @Reply, ReTweet and Direct Message mechanism
- I like the colours – personal preference I know, but the defaults are easy on the eye to me, and I know that if I see the “twhirl green” on the screen, then twhirl is trying to get my attention
Cons
- No filtering on a stream of tweets
- Can’t display @replies and Direct Messages at the same time as the timeline
- Account management and creation is a little “clunky” and not intuitive – this is minor as once setup, you really shouldn’t need to worry about it
- No “grouping” of users, to display only tweets from specific people
TweetDeck – http://www.tweetdeck.com/
I like Tweetdeck and it’s definitely trying to do more than twhirl. It’s a pure twitter client, and has the added advantage of a multi-column interface. It starts with just “All Friends”, “Replies” and “Direct Messages”. You can easily add multiple columns with groups of your friends in it (you set who is in the groups). This is useful when you just want to find out about a subset of who you follow. You can also set a column for a search on twitter. So if you are interested in a specific hashtag, for example, you can see all public tweets related to that hashtag.
There is lots of information and sometimes it gets a little overwhelming. The most useful buttons I’ve found for each column are the “Mark all as seen” and the “Clear seen tweets” buttons. These allow you to remove from the interface things that are “past”.
The font size is a little bigger than twhirl and as such, you can fit less tweets onto the screen. This is frustrating as I find I do a lot of scrolling. The column width appears to be fixed also (or is difficult to change), and so the interface basically has to take over a maximised space on the desktop, which is not hugely helpful.
There are also other functions, such as adding in 12seconds, Twitscoop and Stocktwits to the interface, but I haven’t used these.
However with the search columns, the grouping and the multiple columns, Tweetdeck can be very powerful in giving information very quickly on a specific subject.
I would give Tweetdeck 7.5/10 for being a good twitter client. It is in my opinion, the best choice for the twitter power user. It has good grouping of users and provides simple filtering of information. Tweetdeck is let down by the interface being not quite intuitive enough and providing too much information within a non-customisable and cluttered workspace.
Pros
- Lots of information available
- Grouping of users is vital
- Search available in the same interface
- Simple Filtering of streams
Cons
- Single twitter account only
- Cannot find a user’s profile without their image being available
- Sometimes too much information
- Easily cluttered
- Lots of features I just won’t use
- Font size and column widths aren’t customisable
I love twitter – mostly because I can interact with a large number of people at the same time, very easily. However, you only ever get “now” on twitter. I very very rarely ever look back of tweets of either myself or others. If I do, it’s never more than the last 10 or so.
Twitter Applications
There are lots of cool apps, such as twitpic and clients such as twhirl and tweetdeck that really add some value to twitter. The interface and the interaction they generate makes a lot of difference to the overall twitter experience. If there was someway of walking a user through these (no there’s an idea) then you could get more people enthused about twitter.
Persistence
But the best twitter apps are those that persist data from twitter. Most tweets just get “lost” in the ether, and very few people will read them. One study showed that a link in a tweet lasts just 5 minutes! So when building applications, you have to think about how twitter is used and how to persist information for a tweet (like twitpic) or that can utilise tweeting (such as tipjoy).
Twimages – http://twimages.org
I created twimages.org after a conversation with @Hamlesh and it has produced some very interesting results. All of a sudden a user’s avatar/profile image becomes much more revealing! Because you can get hold of the profile image, you can generate a map of images of twitter user’s for a specific user.
You can see who you have conversations with. It changes over time, and as such, can show a change in who you have conversations with.
Check it out. My twimage is: http://twimages.org/PaulDJohnston
Would love your thoughts on it too.
What do you think?
Reassessing My Online Profile Part 3
September 18, 2009 in business, twitter, web 2.0 | Tags: blog, blogging, blogs, business, comment, communities, community, interaction, online, profile, reassessing, social, social media, startup, twitter, web 2.0, who am i | 1 comment
Read these first:
Reassessing my online profile:https://padajo.wordpress.com/2008/07/10/who-am-i/
Reassessing my online profile:https://padajo.wordpress.com/2009/02/17/reassessing-my-online-profile-part-2/
Before we start…
I’m not trying to be narcissistic here and tell you all how great (or otherwise) I am. This is just a series of posts that have come out of my experiences being online and trying to run a business.
What’s my situation now?
I’ve partially resurrected my business over the past few months after having zero joy with getting another job after losing my first proper job for 8 years (after running my business for 8 years – not being a slacker) in January.
The reason I couldn’t get another job? Simple – I’m too experienced. Now, I’m not just saying that to make myself look better, it’s the responses I was getting from prospects. Apparently, I’m too experienced (and therefore likely to move on quickly) to take on a job in a marketing agency lower than senior management level (which I’ve done) and not able to be a senior consultant in an IT consultancy, because my skills are too “varied”. What is frustrating is that I’m perfectly capable of doing both these jobs (having done them both as a contractor many times in the last 8 years).
So I’ve had to develop my own opportunities and as far as new business development is concerned, I’ve found that Social Media is a great term (er… buzzword) to start a conversation with people who need web and marketing skills. I’ve got a few new clients, including some large charities all wishing to utilise my Social Media knowledge and skills, but I’ve also found that most of the time, it takes a few hours, or a couple of days to tell them most of what they need to know to do it themselves.
The one big client I do have (at least, big for me) is a startup for whom i’m building an interactive online classroom. Great work, but hugely frustrating trying to complete it.
My Profile Online – What’s changed?
I’ve actually stopped a lot of interaction on Social Networks over the summer – mainly because it’s the summer, and I have a family, but also because of holidays and moving house. It’s caused me to really think about how much time I spend online and for what purpose.
I’ve adapted my thinking on what I get out of being online. As far as business is concerned, almost all of my work still comes offline from face to face networking and from existing relationships. In fact, I can’t think of a single piece of work from this last 9 months that has come from either an existing relationship (not online) or through new relationships via offline networking.
So… is Online really that important?
Well, now comes the contradiction. It is important to be engaged and developing online networks. Why? Well, I think it is much more to enhance and develop relationships that are created offline (certainly for me).
The users I follow on twitter (for example – my twitter is @pauldjohnston) are generally in these categories:
As you can see, the first two are people I’ve met, and the last two are generally not. The ones I take the most notice of are the first two and the last one. The interesting people I can dip in and out of, but I’m generally not too bothered what they say.
How does this make me reassess my online profile?
As I have stated before, I’m desperate to setup another startup (have done 3 – all failed – learned loads – pretty sure I know what makes a great startup now). However, now is a rubbish time to try and do that (whatever anyone says) and having no consistent work for 9 months means there is no resource buffer to try and develop something new.
I am having to rethink why I blog/tweet (not how much). I’ve realised that just getting involved in conversations, whilst fun and interesting, doesn’t always help me get my work done. So maybe I need to learn about Getting Things Done and productivity tools, but they’re only useful if I actually have a business to work on.
So, the crux of the issue is me
What it comes down to is that if I tweet/blog and comment, people interact, and if I don’t do those things, my interaction reduces significantly (and generally only a handful of people still interact). I have to figure out Who I Am before social media can really help me to develop a business or any othe form of relationships. Maybe I won’t ever figure out Who I Am though, and maybe that’s the point. The journey is much more important than the answer.
Well that’s just great! I’m pretty much back where I started a year ago! It seems that my next step must be looking after the clients I’ve got and coming up with a business idea that I can take to market.
Then, just maybe, you’ll start to see more of the real more on social media.