sylleptic - mark hopwood’s blog

020 8568 0022 is the number for Green Tomato. They’re a taxi company that only uses hybrid cars, and I had a ride in one last week. The driver told me he spends 20% of what his non-hybrid colleagues spend on fuel. Toyota can’t tell stories like that because of regulations around fuel consumption calculations, but I think it speaks for itself.

The only downside I can see is that the cars are so quiet when the engine is off that pedestrians don’t hear them coming!

http://www.greentomatocars.com/ is the URL.

Can you spot the mistake? I just bought this “4-way screwdriver” for £1 in Maplins. It does indeed have 4 screwdriver heads…

Not a spelling mistake, I promise…

I’ve had two contrasting experiences over the last few days, that both (weirdly) involve online marketing and gorillas. In the first, we downloaded London Zoo’s Gorilla competition, which involves feeding and interacting with a virtual gorilla on your desktop. It’s quite nicely done creatively, if a bit arduous to play, especially if you’re competitive and have to win at all costs. The problem is, it hasn’t been tested too well, and the whole thing stopped working for 3 days last week when the Zoo’s agency lost its Internet hosting. A really poor experience, and it’s probably put a lot of people off playing the game.

The second is the brilliant, brilliant Gorilla Protection blog. What a simple example of blogging being used by a business, in this case a charity. You send a donation, the next day you can see it making a difference. They put videos, photos and stories online of the work they’re doing almost every day. Why aren’t more charities doing this kind of thing? It’s so effective, and so cheap. Here’s one of their videos.

DSCN0777.jpg, originally uploaded by harkmopwood.

Moneysupermarket “no 1 price comparison site” ad next to the “price comparison sites might not offer the features you need” ad from Direct Line. Marvellous adjacent ad placements at Clapham Junction.

I helped to run a consumer forum for Zoomf.com last week. Poppy’s written it up here. I had a great time, and it’s always incredibly useful to listen to first hand comment. The group was young and skewed toward rented property, which means it’s not 100% representative, but it was terrific to hear the things they liked (simplicity, speed) and the things they wanted (trade secrets, of course!) 2 things that surprised me: the group is hardly using the mobile web at all, saying it’s still too slow and expensive, and how much they were using the web. Hardly any TV, hardly any print, they were all using the Internet for something like 6-10 hours per day.

And of course Facebook was the website none of them could do without.

I’d like to echo Zoomf’s thanks to the participants: I had a really good time and learned a lot.

http://www.wildlifedirect.org/blogAdmin/gorilla

This blog has up to date information from the field about the Wildlife Direct charity’s work to protect gorillas and other wildlife in Africa. It’s a brilliant use of blogging to support fund-raising, and to help people see what their money is buying. There’s video too.

Whenever I’m talking to businesses about blogging, it always has to be authentic, factual and based on something real to the organisation, and all of that’s true here.

This story at the BBC says that there’s evidence of Internet addresses at the CIA have been editing content about Iranian politicians, among other things, to make them more favourable to US versions of events. The report also says the Vatican seem to have been editing entries about Gerry Adams, the Irish Republican leader.

Why would anyone be surprised that this is the case? Open source software development leads to lots of people debugging code and generally making it better, of course. But why would people have the same high ideals when it comes to other sorts of content? Of course vested interests come into play. That ’s easy to sniff out when it’s the entry about a company like Burger King, or Agency.com, but it’s a lot harder when it’s political.

Again, the question of how reliable user generated content can ever be rears its head. In time, we will need some kind of classification system or provenance checking that means we can tell which street maps were made by the public, and which encyclopedias were written by spooks.

JP Rangaswami recently won a “CIO of the Year” title from Waters Magazine. I first came across him when I read that he’d opened up his email inbox to all his staff. This interview is pretty wide-ranging and interesting. It covers his team’s work on web services around BT’s 21st Century Network (which is “all dressed up with nowhere to go” if there are no applications that use it) as well as considering the organisational and cultural changes that are happening inside BT today especially the impact of blogging, wikis and collaboration tools within the company.

We’re looking for an excellent .NET development team leader to work in my team in London. As an experiment, we’ve advertised on Gumtree, because I was speaking to someone who got really good results from an ad there for developers.

The ad is here, if you think you might know someone, or be interested yourself.

I’ve been talking to the team at Walkit.com over the last few days. They’ve got a fabulous website, that creates walking routes for people, showing them calories consumed and CO2 saved if they walk instead of driving, and today they launched walkit.com for Edinburgh, just in time for the festival. The team is tiny, and they’ve produced something that works really well, generating enormous amounts of public interest and PR.

And then there are my friends at Zoomf.com, who’ve produced a fully functional property search engine that spiders websites, has the most attractive Ajax user interface and all sorts of web 2.0 bells and whistles in the pipeline. Again, small team, massive result.

The output of the teams building these sites is phenomenal, when I compare it with some other projects that I’ve seen, and that’s got me thinking about the variables that drive productivity in software development. Both of these teams are immensely self-motivated (driven by love of a cause, their personal work ethics, the possibility of building a business that has value to investors), both have almost total freedom to choose the process and technologies they use, and they make extensive use of software that others have built. Whether it’s Google Maps, Drawlive, Wicket, Thinkingcap, PHP, Apache or whatever, they’re leveraging the work of thousands of coders to create their products. They’re re-using, and making that an art in itself. They’re building mechanisms that allow people to contribute even once their sites are live: feedback, new walking routes, star ratings and comments … So in the end, all their customers become product developers too.

As for the low productivity projects, I see lack of clear, timely decision making on every one of those.

Oddly enough, the problems with technical projects are almost never technical.