Monday morning...

nyaaaaaaaarrrrrgggggghhhhhhhhhhh............

That's the noise made by a slumbering flexjex employee (that would be me) as I struggle to wake up on Monday morning. Presumably similar noises are heard around the country as we all face a new week and ever colder winter mornings (although this one was at least pleasantly bright and sunny)

So, what's new in the world of flexjex I hear you say(?) Well, here's the Monday morning news in brief:

1. Open letter to all flexjex users now posted on flexjex.com - here. As announced we've got lots of changes in the pipeline, this is just a preview ;)

2. Along with all the changes we're planning for flexjex we're also keeping an open mind on other interesting projects. Nothing set in stone yet, but any comments would be welcome on the following thoughts (some aren't exclusively flexjex, but possible collaborations with other interesting people in the Cambridge sphere...)

• AR widget for selling fine art (AR = Augmented Reality, see previous post for further details on the type of stuff AR can mean)


• Power meter - see your carbon footprint, by fuel source for UK consumption. Anyone interested in choosing a 'greener' supplier...?


• Widget for Chumby (see below) the possibilities are almost endless...

Feel free to add your comment on any of these below - this is your chance to bash the ideas as rubbish/ chip in that you've seen it somewhere else before - we're really keen to hear what you think.

3. [Wildcard] Anyone heard of Chumby? Ed found this weird little thing over the weekend. Our first thought was - "what is it?". You can see it as a (very) fancy alarm clock radio, or as a web-connected, stripped down tablet PC with simple touch-screen interface providing an open source platform for running lots of useful 'widgets'. If you're anything like us, your second thought might be "I want one" Check out the engadget review and take a look at the Chumby site too.

(Editor's note: for those who remember, this is not too dissimilar to the 'Meerkat' we put together in 2004 - looks like Tom was right after all...)

That's all for now folks, cheers - Ed and Kevin - team flexjex

flexjex is changing...

Our last post was a quick catch up - lamenting the fact that October had whizzed by and outlining the things we're working on here at flexjex.com HQ. Since that post was drafted on the fly* we didn't fully explain the detail of our plans. Well, we've settled down a bit now - feet on the ground at Beginspace in Cambridge - so we thought we'd take this chance to fill you in on what we're up to:

"flexjex is changing"

Based on user feedback and our experience over the last 6 months we've done a lot of reflecting on our progress so far, how people are actually using flexjex and what people have asked us to improve. We've concluded that we should change the site to make it simpler. We've decided to do this in two ways:

1. A reduction in the number of steps required to do simple things on the site and;


2. A re-focus on the important functionality of the site, which now consists of 3 core elements:
• User Profiles
• Listings
• Actions (Bids, Comments and 'Likes')

Soon there'll be a page up on flexjex.com giving more details of how and when these changes are coming, but in any case we expect to have the new site ready for re-launch in the next few weeks... fingers crossed!

Beginspace

The other big project we're involved in (as if one wasn't enough) is Beginspace. For the uninitiated, this is best described as a mash-up of community/ social enterprise/ new business advice centre and start-up incubator. We're involved mostly as support and as one of the start-ups being incubated at the 'space' (which is a temporary location, in the old NatWest Bank, near the Grafton Centre in Cambridge.)

We're also involved in the dragon's den-style -"pizza-the-action" evenings, following the launch event last night:

3 teams line up to pitch ideas - 1 team each from a social enterprise, a community project and a commercial start-up. The audience is a diverse group of students/ postgrads and MBAs (last night from ARU, but next time from CUE/CUTEC) fuelled by pizza and inevitably beer (they are students, after all...) they volunteer their time/ energy to help on the projects they hear pitched. Start-ups get free help, students get a taste of the action, working for a real start-up, and CV points to boot - everyone's happy ;)

Well, hopefully you're up to date with the goings-on here now. Please bear with us as we go through these changes - there will inevitably be some things which aren't 100% first time... Meantime, we're also getting more projects and keeping flexjex.com up to date in it's current form so check out our projects page for the latest selection!

Cheers for now,

Ed and Kevin - team flexjex


* The last post was literally the day after 'landing' back in Cambridge following 6 weeks of travel, 5 countries, 18 flights and around 25,000 air miles, or just over once around the Earth at the equator!

where did October go?

Just a quick update on what we've been up to here at flexjex.com HQ. Firstly though, a big welcome to all the new users who've signed up recently, including lots of new people just back at Unviersity, starting the new academic year.

October feels like it's whizzed by - that because we've been busy working on a big new project for flexjex.com. Over the next few weeks we'll be letting registered users know about some changes to the way the site works in response to how we've seen people using the site, and to direct feedback from users (keep this coming!) We'll also be letting the wider world know through the blog, and through a major relaunch.

The other project which we've been busy with is of course Beginspace. The new premises have been open for a good few weeks now and the first tenants/ users are already in the space. The venue also hosts OpenCoffee on Thursdays and attendance (which struggled with Taboush's new later opening hours) has been well up. Check the beginspace website or pop in to the centre (Fitzroy St, nr. Grafton Centre) for more news.

That's all for now folks, check out our latest projects here, and look out for aour relaunch coming soon,

Cheers - team flexjex

Augmented Reality

Bit off topic, but since this is a technology focussed blog we thought you’d appreciate it. [Here at flexjex HQ we like to think we generally keep abreast of technology developments, even if they’re not directly in our field right now.]

Feels like there is quite a bit of buzz around Augmented Reality (AR) right now – with both big names and start-ups doing lots of interesting work. For the uninitiated, AR is a type of technology which bridges the gap between the digital and physical worlds. In practical terms this includes everything a whole class of technologies: everything from from mobile devices or headsets with cameras able to recognize real-world features, to devices able to project digital information and capture inputs using natural gestures. In general, the field is about enhancing the digital experience by bringing it closer to the real-world.

Nokia, Google and MIT are all working on it, along with start-ups like Layar, AcrossAir and Wikitude. Here, we take a look at some of the recent developments which have caught our eye:

SixthSense

For a start, there is SixthSense from the Fluid Interfaces Group at MIT. This is a wearable device, slightly larger than a deck of cards, which combines a camera, projector and smartphone. It’s touted as:

‘a wearable gestural interface that augments the physical world around us with digital information and lets us use natural hand gestures to interact with that information.’

We can remember Pranav Mistry first demonstrating SixthSense on a TED video from Pattie Maes earlier in the year, but more recently it’s been featured on BBC. It all seemed very ‘Minority Report’ then (as it still does) but the most amazing thing was he explained he’d used off the shelf components for everything in the system. That was exciting for a couple of reasons:

1. Aside from some integration work, it was easy to imagine the devices going into production soon
2. Using off-the-shelf components means the cost is likely to be very reasonable – within the reach of the mass market.

Nokia – ‘Mixed Reality’

Next up, Nokia is getting in on the action with their vision of augmented reality.  Their system combines a wearable pair of glasses with an earpiece and a ‘haptic’ wrist device (which lets you ‘feel’ media) The video may seem a bit unrealistic, but it’s the concept which is important – that an AR-enabling pair of glasses could allow hands-free input, using eyeball tracking, to accomplish basic tasks like surfing the web, listening to music and writing very simple messages.

Check out this write-up from readwriteweb for more comments.

Layar, Wikitude and AcrossAir

Aside from developing new device classes, another way to access AR is by building AR-enabling applications for existing smart devices. Several start-ups, including Layar, Wikitude and AcrossAir have  were recently featured on BBC Technology with their AR browser apps.

Layar takes in information via a Smartphone's camera and on-board GPS system and uses it to project digital information onto an on-screen map. In use, this might mean you see restaurant review bubbles, directions to ATMs or popular shops highlighted and overlaid onto your view of the high street.

AcrossAir has built applications that focus on a niche consumer need – navigating your way around a busy city, and needing to find public transport. Again, their system interfaces with the camera, GPS and screen on a smartphone and accesses data to display directions to the nearest transport – either nearest tube in London or nearest subway in New York. Check out the video below for a demonstration of how it works:

Wikitude has a ‘world browser’ which overlays digital information on an image displayed on a smart phone (much like the other AR firms) but has stolen a march by recently announcing the launch of their Wikitude API (for the layman - an API, or Application Programming Interface, is a tool which other developers can use to write applications that ‘talk’ to Wikitude’s existing technology). This is particularly exciting since it should enable a whole raft of new AR-enabled applications to be built for the Google Android platform. 

Google

As an aside, but interesting nonetheless take a look at the Google holodeck application, which they launched at the Google I/O event in San Francisco earlier this year. TechCruch has a good write-up of the launch, or check out this latest video from the Googleplex showing the Holodeck using Google Earth.

Apple?

With MacWorld keynote expected later today, will Apple chose this moment to get in on the act? Who will give us

• New iPod touch with the same processor, camera and compass as the 3GS (3 to 1)
• Some kind of subscription service to compete with Spotify (25 to 1)
• Glasses with HUD for AR-enabled iPhone (the white thimble you have to wear to recognize inputs set to become next season’s hottest fashion accessory) (500,000 to 1)
• iCar with apple logo-shaped headlights and a free turtle-neck sweater (1,000,000 to 1)

Can’t wait to find out later today. Whether Apple decides to play or not, this is definitely an interesting space to watch! And what about flexjex – is there an AR app coming soon, I hear you ask? Well,  we can’t say it’ll be ready tomorrow – but wouldn’t it be cool if you had an idea for a job, and thought ‘I need this kind of person’ and could see, via your smartphone overlays of people with relevant skills? Would work well in an environment like the Googleplex, an innovation centre in Cambridge where it’d be good for forming ad-hoc teams, but could it also work in the real world, for making new connections just by passing people in the street. We’ll leave you with that thought, feel free to comment with your thoughts too,

Cheers for now – team flexjex

 

Credits go to: Simon Pilgrim, Alex Taylor and Chris Lennox-Lamb for additional Apple keynote predictions.

Exploding some Twitter myths

Lots of people are writing about Twitter right now. There is a good dose of healthy scepticism about a possible bubble coupled with an attitude of ‘it might be fluff, but it’s interesting right now’. The smart people at the Telegraph and Techcrunch have written some sensible stuff, backed up by hard figures. However, a lot more people (I’ll spare them blushes, and us recriminations, by not naming them here) are contributing nothing more than hot air themselves. Since we’re in the technology space (with flexjex and the beginspace project) but have a consulting background, we thought it’d be interesting to bring a bit of strategy-consultant style robust analysis to the table.

Let’s start with a couple of discussions at recent tech meetups in London, namely DrinkTank and MiniBar last week. Lots of people were bandying about Twitter headlines like: ‘I’ve got X thousand followers or ‘so-and-so has 20,000 followers’ Furthermore, quite a lot of people are now thinking of using their Twitter followers to make money. So, given lots of people are chasing this headline, and people are pinning their hopes of making money from this ‘asset’ – what happens if we dig a bit deeper?

In a previous blog post we outlined some analysis we’d done to try to get to the bottom of the issue of Twitter followers, and had used @flexjex followers as an example. We’re working on a tool to make this analysis more widely available (more on this later), but in the meantime we’ve extended it for a specific user: @GuardianJobs. We chose GuardianJobs as an example as they’re a well respected, and very recognizable source, and they’re clearly keen to use Twitter as a tool to reach a wider audience for their job postings. Even for this well-respected source, there are some surprising findings:

From the picture above, what I hope you can see is the following:

• We’ve cut the 1,208 followers of GuardianJobs into UK, US and RoW. Only 612 (51%) are UK-based.
• If you cut the followers into ‘Type A’, ‘Type B’ and ‘Type C’ based on the quality – Only 489 (40%) are ‘Type A’
• We use ‘share of attention’ as a weighting for quality
• We use number of other Twittterers the users are following as a proxy for share of attention. Reasoning being – if you’re following just 100 other Twitterers each of those will get more attention than if you’re following 1,000 Twitterers.
• Overall only 236 (20%) are both UK-based and ‘Type A’ followers.

When you think about it that’s quite interesting. This is just one example of a Twitterer which, like a lot of other Twitterers, is trading on the fact that they use Twitter as a channel to reach their customers. However, of the headline 1,208 followers, the true number that are actually relevant is only 20% of that total. Now, it could be argued that the thresholds we’ve applied to categorize the ‘Types’ may need adjusting and to a lesser extent that the location metadata might not be 100% accurate/ complete, but it wouldn’t change the key finding here – the myth that should be exploded – that the underlying relevant followers is actually some fraction of the headline number of followers.

So, what’s the conclusion? It seems clear that the healthy cynicism we talked about before is quite justified – indeed it can be quantified using analysis like the above. If this is to become a valid tool for doing business, a channel for reaching customers and an asset to be flaunted in the pursuit of that aim, then we need some kind of quality control tool. What is needed is to be able to:

• To easily assess the true worth of a Twitterers followers from the ‘buyers’ perspective, and;
• To advertise the worth, the quality, of your follower pool from the ‘sellers’ perspective.

The good news is we’re working on a system here at flexjex which we hope will be able to do that pretty soon. It’s interesting stuff and we’ll have it prototyped soon, so check back soon for more!

Cheers for now – team flexjex

‘beginspace’ and other Cambridge things…

Cambridge is quite an exciting place to be right now. Last week flexjex went along to three regular networking events down in London; Drinktank at Jewel Bar, the Bootlaw Summer Party in South Ken and MiniBar in Shoreditch. What struck us was that;

• There were so many Cambridge-types around at these events, taking their start-up ideas to the big smoke. Big shout outs here go to the mixcloud guys (Nikhil, Mat and co), Broadersheet (@plc), Amir Chaudry (@amirmc, more on Amir later) and Alan Hemmings (@goblinfactory) amongst others. (not forgetting the fact that flexjex was there too!)
• Amongst the non-Cambridge people in the room there was a lot of chatter about Cambridge-based start-ups, big ideas coming out of the city and events going on here now and in the near future.

Put both of these together and there was a well above-average amount of buzz around Cambridge

Aside from the great ideas and start-up companies in the city, another thing people were talking about is the start-up friendly culture which exists here. A pretty good example of this is the Springboard programme recently launched by Redgate. (Apologies in advance here, the entries have already closed, so you’ll have to wait until next time or read on for alternatives if you didn’t get an application in) The concept behind Springboard is very simple – give some start-ups a place to work for a couple of months, mentoring, internet, food and some cash to live on and watch great things happen – both for the start-ups and Redgate. No catch, no equity required and no tie-in. Top marks (and good luck!) to the nice people at Redgate including Neil Davidson for funding the idea and not forgetting Amir doing lots of hard work behind the scenes.

However, Springboard is not the only idea of its kind in Cambridge at the moment. An idea coming out of the Citylife centre is to take advantage of funding available to stop empty shop units blighting the high street. Led by Martin Clark and Jeremy Parsons ‘beginspace’ will occupy the disused NatWest unit on the corner of Fitzroy and Burleigh street (near the Grafton centre in Cambridge.) The concept promises to be an interesting mix of business and community activities with the overall aim of starting-up as many as possible over the the 3months October-December and building up to a Dragons’ Den style funding competition. Key features are:

• Free space in the premises which has a range of configurations: desk/ meeting space, exhibition space and a public foyer for customers
• Mentoring on issues like funding, social enterprise, careers and arts
• Benefit from ‘buzz’ around lots of similar start-up activities and PR coverage
• Meet new people and make introductions for places you could ‘move on’ to after the programme finishes

If that sounds interesting, have a look at http://www.beginspace.co.uk and check out the details. You can register your interest there, and more info will be added over the next few weeks. Perhaps it’s a good idea if you missed out on Springboard?

Lets hope these events are successful and help good things keep coming out of Cambridge!

Cheers for now – team flexjex.

What we've learned about social networking [so far...]

Some general observations before we start. Some people, like these guys at the NY Times, say 'starting your own company is hard'. I agree. Other people, like these guys at Microsoft, say 'starting your own company is rewarding'. I agree too. Just a couple of reasons why are 'you never know what's coming next' and 'you learn a lot', which brings me on to some recent discoveries...

Those of you who followed our blog posts on Twitter, (see first and second here) will know we've been running a little experiment for the past couple of weeks. First up, lets review where we've got to with that. The graph below shows our progress in terms of 'followers' [blue line] and 'following' [red line] Using the follow-cull-follow process to exploit the 'Reciprocity rule', we've notched our way up to the magical 2,000 follower mark. You can see the effects of this process from the periodic dips in the red dotted line. Anyway, the 2,000 followers level is special because there is a follow limit of 2,000 people until you have more than 2,000 followers yourself... so we're almost there.

So, 'what does all this mean?' I hear you asking. Well, as we said in the last post, having loads of followers means nothing unless you can do something with them, so what is that going to be? That is our latest project which we've just started work on. We can't say too much about it right now, but I can say it will be multi-platform - i.e. available on a selection of these high-traffic sites (see fig below), thanks to compete.com, and complement the existing flexjex jobs marketplace model.

It will also involve some interesting analytics on our 'follower' demographics (we use this term in the general sense - it will have different meanings across the various platforms). To give you an idea of the type of analysis we mean, let's look at a breakdown of our Twitter followers so far:

• 52% UK-based, 26% US, 13% RoW and 9% Unknown location
• Our average follower has tweeted 1,139 times
• 3% of our followers joined Twitter in 2007, 18% in 2008 and by far the majority, 79%, joined in 2009
• 61% of followers included an "http://" link in their last tweet, of which half (29%) were http://bit.ly/ and a further 10% http://tinurl.com/ shortened-URLs.
• 18% were re-tweets or references to "RT"

Those are the highlights, but we can also drill-down to a very fine level of detail - looking at activity, engagement and themes amongst other things. Crucially, using the excellent Twitter API, we can do the same for other users. This allows us to do comparisons, and 'quality rate' our followers, the follower pools of other users and the 'feeds' of other users - with this we can do some interesting stuff...

How do we turn this into an opportunity? We're working on it, and hope to have something prototyped soon ;-) One thing's for sure, you'll hear about it first here so check back soon for more

Cheers for now, team flexjex

flexjex.com rolls out nationwide!

As some of you may know, step one on the flexjex.com world-domination plan was 'conquer Cambridge'. Well, while it'd be premature to declare that 'mission accomplished' a la Bush, we're well on the way and are now going nationwide.

As you can see from the map on the right, while the biggest cluster of users is undoubtedly still Cambridge (you can just about make out the biggest blob just north of where London would be) we're now seeing users from all over the country, from Glasgow to Plymouth.

We've driven this expansion by advertizing more widely, and by carrying a broader selection of projects on the site. As well as Cambridge jobs, we now include opportunities in, amongst others: London, Birmingham and work-from-home jobs such as the iPhone developer projects and merchandiser/marketing roles.

For the last month, our top locations were Cambridge (48%), London (26%), Oxford (3%). The remainder, 23% of users were from across the country, including Manchester, Birmingham, Bristol and Plymouth.

In terms of absolute volume last month was also one of our best ever, with traffic up 25% vs. the prior month and on target to hit c. 2,500 uniques this month. The big challenge now is to maintain this growth as we continue the roll out!

Cheers for now - team flexjex

Even squirrels love flexjex.com

You may have seen this recent news story on the Telegraph, which originally appeared on National Geographic. A couple exploring Banff National Park in Canada set their camera on auto-timer and got an unexpected addition to their photo.

What none of the stories are mentioning is that the picture has in fact been Photohopped - in the original, the squirrel is actually one of our agents sent out to spread the word about flexjex.com. Below is our artist's impression of how the cheeky little fellow originally appeared:

I'm joking of course, but this does give me an idea for Cambridge. Imagine if just a few of the thousands of Japanese and American tourists currently visiting were to return home with an unexpected surprise in their holiday snaps. Kings College Chapel, punting on the backs and me grinning, dressed as a squirrel, holding a flexjex.com sign. Time to pop out now for lunch I think...

Cheers, team flexjex

Update on Twitter experiment...

For those of you who read the last post concerning Twitter, I thought you might be interested to catch up with how the experiment is going.

We pick up from midnight Tuesday, when we had 323 followers. You'll remember that was a 10x increase on the 33 we'd had just 36 hours beforehand at noon Monday. Critically, we'd established the reciprocity rule - i.e that one way to gain followers is to add people you're following.

The obvious thing to do next was follow more people, which we did, through Wednesday, and into Thursday. All the while, the only input here was a few 'bursts' of 20-30min grazing on Twitter followers, adding them to our list. It worked perfectly, doubling our followers to a peak 639. Bear in mind that for minimal effort we'd achieved close to 20x the original number we had just over 3 days hours ago. But then we ran into some trouble. We hit the limit. Weren't expecting that one. They didn't tell us about that... Oh, yes they did, right here in the forum post you're directed to at the end of this insightful error message: "You are unable to follow more people at this time. Learn more here."

It turns out there are various limits on Twitter account usage, the relevant one in this case is a limit of 2,000 followers. In their words "Everyone is allowed to follow 2,000 people. After that, follow limits are based on the number of people who are following you" The updated graph shows the impact of this limit.

So, what to do next? We tried playing with unfollowing people. which didn't have a great effect. We also saw some erosion of the number of followers based on normal activity. In our case this was around 60 posts - all concerning jobs on the site - in a standard format of "[Job posting] [is.gd URL] #ukjobs follow @flexjex for more and please RT".

So what next? Right now our following is slipping, and we can't just add more at a faster rate thanks to the follow limit. Our slippage rate took us down from a peak of 639 followers at noon on Thursday, to 613 by midnight Thursday. In other words, a ~4% reduction per day. At the current rate, we'd have no followers left in 12 days!

There's only one thing for it: we need a cunning plan. We'll have to have a cull. Since we only followed people based on the expectation that they would reciprocate, it makes sense that we should un-follow people who don't share the love. This will clear headroom under the limit to add more followers who will hopefully reciprocate. That brings us to an interesting question: what is our reciprocity rate? In the beginning, you'll remember I guessed at 50%, but that was on a smaller base and skewed by the existing ~30 followers we had who we were also following (our "actual friends") With a bigger base, we can now take a closer look at our acheived results:

From the chart above*, we see that our reciprocity rate is 330 out of 2,000 (330 +1,670) which is 16.5%. Interestingly enough, we've picked up an additional 283 followers by other means (other than by prompting by following them) or around 12% of the total users we have any relationship with. So, we know ~16.5% of the people we follow will follow back, and we might pick up a bonus 12% for free. Under this regime we can implemement an add-wait-cull-add plan and iterate right up to the 2,000 limit. After that, who knows what next (I don't want to sound too dramatic, but it'sunknown territory - an event horizon of sorts) To find out what's on the other side, you'll have to stay tuned for another update next week... ;)

cheers for now, team flexjex

*NB I originally thought those numbers would look nice on a mondrian chart, until I realised that the 2,283 users @flexjex has some relationship with would pale into insignificance next to the intersection of "Not following" and "Not followers [of flexjex]" which would be the c.45M other Twitter users!