Alex Osterwalder – a new approach to business models

john, April 17, 2012

Alex Osterwalder’s Business Model Generation is one of the most interesting and practical books I’ve read (and used) in the last couple of years. The book outlines a simple and systematic approach to generating new business models, something that allows all sorts of organisations to test and validate assumptions about existing or proposed business models. And it’s an approach that’s easily applied to digital strategy and service design.

Alex explains more about Business Model Generation in his presentation at this year’s Lift.

Demoscene – The Art of Algorithms (a documentary)

john, April 16, 2012

Demoscenes were initially homebrew intros to cracks and exploits. However, since the 1980s they’ve evolved into an artform in their own right. The Art of Algorithms documentary is a good place to start, this awesome Metafilter post on the demoscene is a great place to follow on.

Freelance Digital Strategy Director

john, April 3, 2012

I’ve decided to go freelance for a bit. Remind myself what the world looks like from the other side of the magic mirror and also to build a couple of sites I haven’t found the time for.

So if you happen to be looking for a freelance digital strategy director then please get in touch.

I’ve got board level experience of digital innovation, branding, design and build, content and social media working for agencies, venture-funded startups and on the senior management team of one of the highest traffic websites in the UK. I’m mainly interested in digital platforms and applications, but I’ve done quite a lot of digital campaign and comms work so I’m relatively flexible.

My Linked In profile covers quite a bit of what I’ve been up to recently – from client work like the Avis Art Car project, to internal agency projects like 20things that happened on the Internet 2010 and 2011 (which between them have featured in Wired, Gizmodo, The Telegraph, Campaign, etc and have millions of likes, tweets and shares each), through to thought-leadership stuff like my social media framework (here’s the radio edit).

But there’s a few interesting things that haven’t launched as yet so if you’d like to know more, then drop me a line and I’ll send you a copy of my portfolio and CV. In the meantime I’ll be getting my head round Zurb’s Foundation boilerplate and media queries as well as climbing the odd hill.

Kids Draw for East Africa – 50/50.gd

john, October 17, 2011

kidsdrawforeastafrica

O.K. so it’s going to be a pretty busy week – all-in-all I think I have three projects going live in the next seven days.

The first of which is Kids Draw for East Africa. I cooked the whole thing up with my wife, Charlotte, who’s one of the many at Made by Many who are the people behind the 5050 good project. The 5050 good project intends to launch 50 projects in 50 days then raise £1million for famine relief in East Africa – a wide range of people have contributed so far, from individuals like Charlotte and I, to groups like Grey, Sapient, Fallon and Dentsu.

As parents of a toddler ourselves, we were both horrified by the child mortality statistics quoted by UNICEF, and decided that we wanted to do something to help.

Our daughter brings armfuls of paintings home from nursery every week and because our extended family are dispersed around the UK, most of the time they don’t get to see her handiwork (apart from the occasional show and tell on Skype).

This gave us the idea that by auctioning kids’ artwork online, we could give grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins and friends the opportunity to pay for something we gave away free.

To keep things really simple we ‘recycled’ the mechanic from Poke’s rather excellent The 100 Project and used eBay to power the auctions. And we’ve taken the decision not to use eBay for Charity because we’d rather there was no 9% cut taken by a third party. Instead, we’ll be donating 100% of the funds direct to UNICEF.

The site went live at the weekend with some truly brilliant contributions from kids aged between 2 and 7. Which means we now need some people to get the bidding going (it’s already quite fierce on a couple of them). We can’t wait to see how competitive different branches of one family can be on outbidding each other in aid of famine relief. And no parent is going to see their child’s painting go for less than a fiver. It’s a win/win situation…

And you can’t underestimate how exciting it is for kids to see their pictures auctioned online, to feel like they’re actually doing something directly to help other people.

So, if you have kids and would like to take part there are more details here, but it’s pretty simple – just send us a photo of their drawing to kidsdraw5050[at]gmail[dot]com, with their first name, age and title of the drawing. And we’ll get in touch with you with the address of where to send it when the auction is over.

Otherwise log into e-bay and get bidding.