HashBang.TV Episode 1
So I mentioned my new personal project for 2012.
Well here is our first episode for your visual delight. I'd be really interested in your feedback. Hopefully we will improve a little every time we do it!
The Application Developers Alliance - 2,300 sign ups in first 3 weeks
Yesterday I had a call with Jake Ward to understand the detail behind the recent announcement of the Application Developers Alliance which I covered in this blog post.
Jake clarified the purpose and mission of the organisation, and answered a few of the questions I posed.
Firstly, and importantly, it is a not for profit organisation. The idea came from the lack of representation of developers in the industry. Research was conducted before setting it up, “We have talked to a lot of developers” Jake confirmed.
Individual membership is free at the moment, and when fees are introduced it will be a nominal amount ~$25 > $50.
They are looking to attract developers of all platforms, and Jake told me they have already signed up 2,300 members in the first three weeks, with 500 – 700 of these being outside of the USA. Reporting a really positive reaction, largely due to being a not for profit, it is clear they are not trying to make money off developers.
These interest levels have promoted the Application Developers Alliance to undertake international activity sooner than planned. Their first non-US foray will be at the upcoming Blackberry DevCon in Amsterdam.
Clearly this answers one of the key questions from my original post - this will be an international organisation, and the discounts on services (like Rackspace hosting) will apply to any member regardless of location.
Jake seemed especially excited by the networking tool within the Alliance, describing it as “a LinkedIn for Developers” This will allow members to find skills to hire into their projects, and connect them with clients.
We discussed at length the “herding cats” metaphor, and Jake agreed that there is no one size fits all solution to address the developer community, emphasising they want the organisation to be open and collaborative to ensure it serves member needs.
This is re-enforced by the decision that the board will have developers sitting directly on it.
So, things look to be off to a fast start. I’ll keep you updated on further developments.
A new project for 2012: HashBang.TV
So, this new project has been in the pipeline for a while.
Its a web TV show focused on the exploding UK software development and startup scene. I co-host with Chris Book. We have already pulled together an awesome team of supporters to help us put out the show, and hopefully it will get better as we build up our experience of being in front of camera!
The idea and inspiration for the show is covered in this post on the new HashBang.TV site.
It feels very strange watching it back, like being naked in public! Still, the preview show and show notes are now live.
Whats the best way to learn to swim? Jump in the deep end and see what happens, so we will be doing our learning in public.
Hope you enjoy.
TMIG: Shoestrings and Straight Lines - event wrap up #cimtmig
So last night saw the third TMIG seminar in London at the BPP Business School.
We had a great turn out of over 70 technology marketers.
Named “Shoestring and straight lines”, we planned the evening to be two constraining halves. Based on the feedback we had on the night I think we successfully achieved that goal.
The first half of the evening was “Shoestrings”. The inspiration of this theme was two fold. Many marketers are facing cuts to their budget due to the economic downturn, therefore what tools and techniques can marketers use to cut through with lower spend. The second stimulus was from the work I do day to day with smaller technology start-ups and entrepreneurs.
Many of these companies do not have anyone with a marketing job title, no formal marketing training, and actually no marketing budget at all. What tips and insights can we as professional marketers learn from these companies at the cutting edge of digital, viral and gorilla marketing? (buzz word bingo alert!)
Shoe strings was introduced by Steve Revill followed by a panel made up of a blend of practicing technology marketers. These were Hermione Taylor, Julia Shalet, Justin Bowser, Mark Evans, and Thibaut Rouffineau.
After a very lively Q&A session with the audience, we broke for refreshments and networking.
The second half was “Straight Lines”, delivered by Alan Moore. A fascinating talk built around the theme of his latest book which you can buy here.
You could tell the audience was totally engaged as it took a brief amount of time for the audience to respond to Allan opening up to Q&A. If the rest of you were like me, my brain was still trying to process the enormous amount of thought provoking information I’d just been given. Thankfully, the Q&A soon warmed up, and again we had a vibrant set of questions. What was even coolier was the audience were asking and answering questions between themselves across the room. The sure sign of an event and subject matter that had struck a cord.
So that’s three events down for TMIG. All the feedback I had on the night was overwhelmingly positive, but let me know if you have suggestions on what we can do better. You can review the tweets from last night by searching for hashtag #CIMTMIG – I’ve included a couple below:
Clapometer conclusive- seems to havebeen a successful event! Congrats to all on @CIMTMIG board and those behind the scenes #CIMTMIG
— Steve Revill (@steve_revill) January 18, 2012
Great CIM seminar Shoestrings & No Strings. Thx to organisers & speakers :) #CIMTMIG @Steve_revill @alansmlxl @jewl
— MrBRtist(@MrBRtist) January 18, 2012
I’ll quickly repeat my plea from last night to get involved and help out. Like all CIM MIGs, TMIG is entirely run by volunteers on top of their day jobs. Anyone that can spare some time to help would be warmly welcomed.
If you are interested, please get in touch with myself or CIM directly.
To end, a final thanks to Steve, our awesome guests, CIM and the TMIG board for making the event such a success.
Find us at our Linked In Group or official CIM TMIG page.
Till next time,
James
Chair of TMIG
Bad news for Turntable.FM as Facebook launch collaborative music listening
Long time readers will remember that I raved about Turntable.FM last summer. It truly changed my music consumption habits within a week.
Of course the music industry quickly identified it as a threat, rather than a solution to solve their fucked business model, and forced Turntable.FM to block all traffic from the US. As I wrote at the time, these actions are pointless as it is easy to spoof a US IP address. Still the hassle eroded the group I was regularly DJ'ing with and my usage dropped off to near zero.
What a huge missed opportunity.
I've been keeping tabs on Turntable.FM's attempts to secure the licensing they need to re-open to non US customers, but so far silence.
Then the news I'm sure they were dreading. Facebook announced on Thursday that they were launching "Listen with" which basically does exactly what Turntable.FM does, except of course you are locked into the Facebook platform.
The blog post says it is rolling out now, and I assume that Facebook have enough lawyers, muscle and money to make the music labels play nice. Its amusing reading the comments on the blog post praising Facebook for coming up with such a cool idea.
Whilst writing this post I checked in on Turntable.FM for any news and the site was down. I'm not sure if that was scheduled maintenance, or coincidence, but their Twitter account hasn't posted for 48 hours either. There is no mention of the Facebook announcement in their stream.
I can hear the biting of lips in New York from here.
Rapportive: Bringing your social graph directly into to your inbox
My latest piece for ITProPortal is now live.
Its my take on Rapportive, a social plug in for GMail.
Read more here.
Herding Cats. The Application Developers Alliance – a trade body for an amorphous blob!
Interesting news ahead of CES. The concept of a trade association for app developers has surfaced again.
Jon Potter, formerly of the Digital Media Association, will launch the Application Developers Alliance at the CES trade show. He references the lack of organization within the developer community, and the need to bring it together.
It seems the Application Developers Alliance will aim to offer members the pretty standard array of trade association benefits – member networking, business match making, discounted services and industry lobbying.
The announcement has got pretty good pick up in the tech blogosphere, and there is speculation that RIM and Google may be involved. A positive start.
Frustratingly there is scant further information. It looks like its in stealth mode at the moment, the Application Developers Alliance website link was broken when I tried it,but there is an operational Twitter account @AppsAlliance. I have messaged Jon via Linked In, so I will report back.
I’m assuming the concept has been heavily researched with developers to get this far, so the thing I’m most interested in is the insight behind the need for a trade association, the reaction from developers, and their willingness to pay.
The concept of a single addressable “developer community” is an urban myth. Developers hang in tribes around particular languages, platforms, operating systems, or beliefs. Rather than being singularly addressable, they are by definition completely fragmented. Each individual tribe requires specific attention, knowledge and understanding of its particular needs. So far I've not come across a one size fits all solution. Trying to figure all this out, is both the challenge and appeal of working in developer marketing.
During the first year of BlueVia I have been open that our goal was primarily to raise awareness. Therefore the team attended over 100 events in 2011 and we spoke to pretty much everyone that would listen. The pure marketer in me wasn’t comfortable with this less than precise method, but it worked. We were also in startup mode, and there was not the time to attempt to develop a sophisticated segmentation model of the community ahead of launch. We did kinda try, but quickly discovered there was nothing out there we could use as a framework, it would all have to be from scratch.
That changed into the second half of 2011. Since then we have been working hard on creating our own segmentation of the community, which will allow us to identify much more precisely who would benefit the most from BlueVia.
However, it hasn’t been an easy piece of work to deliver. This is why I’m so keen to hear from Jon on the approach for the Application Developers Alliance.
If you accept that generic messages to the developer community will not work, then you have to be much more targeted in the way you tailor your proposition to individual developers.
Below is just a small sample of the categorisation attributes we identified and considered during our segmentation work
- Technology – perhaps the simplest approach is clustering around the developers preferred development platform – iOS, HTML5, Android, Ruby, .Net, Java, etc. This is relatively easy but risks missing the nuances of their actual needs and drivers.
- Organization type – is the developer an independent, a startup, in academia, an agency, a charity, an enterprise? Each situation brings its own set of needs and approaches
- Business Model – is the developer seeking to generate direct revenue from app sales, advertising, text messaging, in app billing or are they seeking to grow audience and market share, are they an open source developer, or a little of everything?
- Geography – another myth is apps are global. There are very few Facebook’s and FourSquare’s out there. Understanding the regional dynamics of technology, business, and competitive conditions is vital. I hope the Application Developers Alliance is intending to be an international body, and not just focused on the USA.
- Industry Vertical – is the developing producing apps or services for a particular vertical like games, financial services, energy, health, retail, etc
As you can see, the number of possibilities can quickly multiply, especially if you look to combine these to create a rich persona.
Patrick Mork floated the idea of an app trade body back in August 2011. I will have to reach out to him to see where that went, and if he is aware of Application Developers Alliance. The Mobile Entertainment Forum (disclaimer: I’m a board member) has also spent considerable time trying to figure out how it can become more relevant to independent developers, recognizing the huge contribution they collectively make to the mobile content and commerce industry.
So news of the Application Developers Alliance is welcome, but it faces some interesting hurdles. I’d love to analyze the detail, and understand exactly what kinds of developer Jon is intending to sign up. Its well documented that many developers are very negative towards marketing activities, even if its pushing something that directly benefits them. It will be fascinating to see how the Application Developers Alliance is pitched to them.
What do you think? Do developers need a trade body and will they sign up?
