Tag Archive for 'Marketing'

Intruders.tv interview on Kindo (about scale/product/marketing/revenue)

Published
by
Gareth Knight
on 2008/6/30
in Uncategorized
. 1 Comment

Was at Open Coffee last week (looking for developers), and did this interview with Vincent and Eugene from Intruders.tv on Kindo. Talked about how we’ve tackled some of the usual web app issues like scaling our userbase, internationalisation, product dev, marketing tricks, revenue generation….
_ Intruders.tv interview on Kindo.com

Kindo.com is a “new take on the traditional family tree”. In this interview, we sit down with Gareth Knight to talk about Kindo and their user acquisition strategy. Gareth shares with us his experience of attracting users to the site and the effectiveness of strategies such as blogging, Google AdWords and PR.

If you’re building a webapp, could be useful ;-)

Being emotionally tied to your app makes for a good days work!

Published
by
Gareth Knight
on 2008/4/3
in Uncategorized
. 0 Comments

Today’s been one of those days where I’ve focussed on one thing only, for the whole day, so that we could release a major new feature in 14 languages. So that literally means just doing one thing. OK, so I deleted some emails, and answered one or two, but by and large apart from lunch, it’s been nose to the grindstone to get this done. Same for the rest of the team.

And you know what, it’s been one of the more satisfying days in a long while I think for two reasons:
1) we tried something new and got everyone involved in some way
2) we decided this morning we were gonna do it, and we’ve all stuck together today to do it - and I don’t think we would have done if we weren’t all tied to Kindo the way we are.

It really is a baby for us all. Bottom line - Being emotionally tied to your app makes for a good days work! In the days when doing client work was bread and butter, it was a hard ask to get this involved, ‘cos it was always something transitory - this is a totally different feeling.

So we’re done now, and it’s a satisfying feeling - I’m off for a curry with my brother!! ;-)

PS. stay tuned for the update!

Brace yourself Sheila, Kindo is on TechCrunch

Published
by
Gareth Knight
on 2008/2/7
in Uncategorized
. 0 Comments

This morning we all got into the office and started the day as usual. Get in around 9, get the day started with review of actions (sharpen the saw) and meetings that need to happen, then the daily SCRUM (yesterday, today), then get to it… We knew there was an important press release going out today, but we didn’t know what was going to happen or how it would be reacted to.

Then in the space of a few minutes we’re on the front page of TechCrunch UK, US and France.

We’ve followed a deliberate and intentional strategy (which is obvious by us having 14 languages) of going local fast, which is also reflected in the many blog posts from Kindo friends around the world, so I guess I’m trying to say that whilst we’re not officially an English site (English is not the language with the most users for us), it sure feels good to get that kind of brute force exposure to tech people all over the world. You just have to look at the number of RSS readers that TechCrunch US has (659K), then add UK and FR, to wonder whether our servers will melt today… ;-)

On another note, Nils has written a really good post (IMHO) about where we are now, which I’m not going to try and re-produce in tone, but I will say that I’m going to do my best to make sure that when we’re a teenager we’re going to rock ;-)

Anyways, more soon - some factoids for you that might be relevant:

  • Built with Segaull php framework, flash, jQuery and MySQL
  • Been live for 15 weeks
  • Languages include Arabic, Chinese (simplified and traditional) and Russian
  • Users in around 150 countries

;-)

350+ Social Networking Sites

Published
by
Gareth Knight
on 2007/10/25
in Uncategorized
. 0 Comments

Good list of social sites from Mashable for you:
_ SOCIAL NETWORKING GOD: 350+ Social Networking Sites

Kindo coverage around the world….

Published
by
Gareth Knight
on 2007/10/18
in Uncategorized
. 0 Comments

We’ve been working pretty hard the last few weeks to get Kindo to a Public release, so this week we started telling people around the world about Kindo, and asking for their feedback.

The result has been that we’ve now got people from literally all over the world (73 countries now) using Kindo, with the exception of a few countries/areas (Greenland, most of Africa, some of the Middle East, Mongolia, and two South American countries I don’t want to name here ;-) So it’s pretty exciting stuff! To react to this we’re going to be rolling out some more languages soon, and focussing on making the application as consistent as possible across all languauges (not easy given differing string lengths…).

Anyways, onto the blog posts and reviews that I want to say thanks for! (In no particular order at all)

Spanish:

Italian:

German:

Swedish:

English:

Welcome to the Kindo Beta release!

Published
by
Gareth Knight
on 2007/9/7
in GTD and Productivity
. 3 Comments

This has been a long time coming, and it feels good to finally get there, albeit with a mountain still to climb!!!
Personal reflective blog post to follow soon…

A little while ago we released an Alpha to a small group of people, to gather valuable user feedback. Thanks to those great people, we’ve had our heads down improving Kindo, and as a result we’re releasing the Beta, and at the same time opening it up to a wider audience for more feedback.

We’ve made the following progress:

  1. Kindo is much faster now
  2. The Kindo tree is now much more stable and knowledgable
  3. You can invite family members to your tree
  4. Many more user interface improvements and enhancements
    • *Note: we’re continually adding more, so please tell us about things you think should work better or be more obvious.
  5. The internet is global now, so we’re releasing in 7 languages:
    • English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Swedish, Afrikaans, Polish; with Russian, Turkish, Hindi, Hebrew and Arabic on the way.

Our mantra has become “Speed, Simple, Pleasure“, so in a nutshell that means we’re always trying to make Kindo faster for you, simpler, more intuitive and perhaps most importantly a pleasure to use.

Our new URL is http://beta.kindo.com/.

What can we do to make Kindo better?
If you dont like it – tell us why.
If you do like it – what are you missing?
Join the conversation on our blog, we’d love to hear your opinion.

Don’t worry – the same login details apply, and your data is all still there.

Have fun!

Senior Web/UI Designer/Front End Developer at Technovated

Published
by
Gareth Knight
on 2007/5/24
in Uncategorized
. 0 Comments

Location: London, UK
URL: www.technovated.com

Description
Do you believe in user focused, web standard design and development, driven by simplicity?

Technovated is a web software start-up based in South-West London, looking for a motivated, senior-level UI person to help us deliver a compelling product for a venture backed project.

This is an opportunity to own the entire user experience, from turning ideas into compelling HTML/CSS mockups that our engineers can run with, where you will be tasked with putting together the bleeding edge of web technologies and design aesthetics to produce an engaging, immersive product. Your background should include a blend of the creative and technical sides. Your technical proficiency and real-world experience should also show in your portfolio. You should have 3+ years experience developing frontend interfaces, be able to create mockups, and be a great communicator.

In return, you’ll have the opportunity to work on a visible web product with an extremely talented team in London.

Responsibilites:
• Ownership of interface design.
• Designing storyboards, page layouts, site grids and interface demos, and prototyping.
• Ability to apply design thinking skills upstream of the traditional role of the designer.
• Knowledge of the capabilities and limitations of modern front-end technologies & approaches (XHTML/CSS, ActionScript, JavaScript, AJAX, DHTML, etc.) and the curiosity to tinker and play.

Required experience:
• 3+ years experience in front-end web development
• Experience translating comps and wireframes into flexible and usable code templates
• Strong working knowledge developing cross platform/browser compatibility (IE, Firefox, Safari, Opera, etc.) for dynamic web applications
• Hand coded (X)HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Please provide evidence of progressive techniques, separation of markup, presentation and behaviour layers in your front-end code including use of unobtrusive JavaScript
• Experience with Smarty, Flexy
• Experience in developing web applications with rich client interfaces using AJAX, drag and drop, and other DOM Scripting techniques
• Familiarity with JavaScript frameworks and animation libraries like Prototype, Scriptaculous and JQuery
• Knowledge of SEO best practices
• Experience with SVN
• Excellent verbal, writing, visualization, and presentation skills

Desirable:
• Medium to strong PHP skills
• Experience with Seagull PHP framework a definite plus
• Familiarity with Apache

To apply:
E-mail your cover letter and resume to hello AT technovated DOT com
Subject header must have UI WEB DEVELOPER-LNDN.

No recruiters or offshore development teams.
This is a 3 month contract with the possibility of extension.

Web 2.0 London Geek BBQ - summer kicks off; BBQ Etiquette humour

Published
by
Gareth Knight
on 2007/3/15
in Uncategorized
. 2 Comments

It’s been about a week now since the the good weather has hit London, so I think it’s time to start thinking about the next Web 2.0 / Geek BBQ. This year has seen an explosion of the innovator community in London, or at least, folks are starting to come out of the woodwork, so it would be really cool to meet some new people, while enjoying the sunshine at the same time.

To get you into the mood, here’s a little gem from Tim (if you’re a girl, please take this as humour, from whence it comes ;-)

Right, so if you’re keen for some sunshine, stimulating conversations, and of course good meat, then please leave a comment here to show interest, and send this link to the people you think may be interested… (my mailing list has become to big to wield effectively in Outlook, so I don’t want to miss people out)

In the meantime I’ll start looking at dates and locations.

;-)

Junior / middleweight Front-end developer needed for Soho agency, London

Published
by
Gareth Knight
on 2007/3/9
in Uncategorized
. 0 Comments

There’s a job going for a junior to middle person looking to hone their front end skills in a Soho agency… Details are as follows:

BIO are a young London based digital advertising looking for a full time Junior / Mid weight front end developer who has a passion for working in big brand clients and creative great creative work.

If you are interested please contact Robin Souter at BIO:
robin [AT] thebioagency [DOT] com
+4420 7494 3494
+447900 182 224

Salary: Negotiable

;-)

Technology for Africa ‘07 credit card test passed, speakers announced

Published
by
Gareth Knight
on 2006/12/6
in Uncategorized
. 1 Comment

The last week or so has seen us sit with bated breath, waiting to see the reaction to the web and emerging technology conference we’re going to put together for Africans (with an African context of course). Well, we’re happy to say that the credit card test has passed, and the response has been really positive - At the moment we’re getting a sign up rate of 25% of visitors that view the site, which is not too bad I think. You can view what people are asking for at the conference, at our feedback results page.

So, that’s great but who are the speakers?
In alphabetical order, here you go for now (more on the way):

Andy Budd

Andy Budd wearing a suit but no shirt collar, sits with his hands clasped in front of him.Andy Budd is an internationally renowned user experience designer and web standards expert. Andy is a regular speaker at major design conferences and recently spoke at @media 2006 in London, and Webmaster Jam in Dallas, Texas. Andy is also the driving force behind our annual d.Construct web development conference.

Andy wrote the best selling book, CSS Mastery: Advanced Web Standards Solutions. In this book, Andy shares his years of experience in creating attractive, standards compliant websites.

Andy’s design experience and knowledge has been called upon many times as a judge in web design awards, most notably the Bubu Awards, the ReUSEIT Contest and the Web Standards Awards, which he founded in 2004. Andy currently sits on the advisory board for .Net magazine, the UK’s leading web development periodical.

A more personal side of Andy can be found at Blogography, a popular weblog where he writes about web design and web standards issues, as well as his passions for travel, photography and diving.

Andy is the creative director at Clearleft and runs their web standards training program.

Andy Clarke

Andy Clarke

Andy Clarke has been working on the web for almost ten years. He is a visual web designer based in the UK and started his design consultancy Stuff and Nonsense in 1998. As lead designer and creative director, his clients include local and national businesses, charities and government bodies and he has designed for The British Heart Foundation, Disney Store UK, Save The Children and WWF UK.

Andy is a member of the Web
Standards Project where he redesigned the organization’s web site in 2006. He is also an Invited Expert to the W3C’s CSS Working Group. Andy regularly speaks at workshops and conference events worldwide and is the author of Transcending CSS.

Demian Turner

Demian Turner has been involved in web development for the past 9 years. His primary focus is on developing multi-tier web applications. He also has experience building standards compliant XHTML GUIs, acting in a customer-facing role and managing projects.

Demian specialises in PHP/MySQL/Apache development on Linux and also has experience in system administration, requirements gathering, UML and Object Oriented Analysis and Design. He is the maintainer for the Seagull framework project, and contributes to SimpleTest, Max Media Manager and the PEAR open source projects.

Malcolm Hall

President and CEO of Open Box Software, a 50+ team of .Net developers out of Cape Town.

Born and raised in Cape Town, South Africa, Malcolm was a founder member of a successful start-up (The World On Line) focused on Microsoft Great Plains—a mid-market ERP package—in the 1990’s.

Upon moving to the UK in 1998, Malcolm has, as a member of the Deloitte & Touché (UK) and then e2i (UK) management teams, managed consultancy teams in the London, Central and Northern regions of the United Kingdom. Malcolm has extensive hands-on technical experience and has also programme managed IT projects across the UK, Germany, France, Spain, The Netherlands and the US.

Since founding Open Box, Malcolm has divided his time between US, UK and South Africa overseeing operations and project delivery. He is also responsible for developing further relationships with prospective and current clients, as well as partners and suppliers.

We’ll be announcing more speakers as we confirm, and if you’re interested you can view what people are asking for at the conference, at our feedback results page.

Check out Mike Stopforth

Published
by
Gareth Knight
on 2006/11/28
in Uncategorized
. 2 Comments

_ Mike Stopforth » About

I am a consultant, writer and speaker. I help companies translate real value from Web 2.0 trends and technologies for better business. I’m privileged to have the opportunity to write a weekly op-ed column for the Citizen newspaper and am a technology commentator for popular business and marketing websites including Moneyweb and Biz-Community. I lecture at the Vega School of Branding in Johannesburg and feature as a guest lecturer on executive programs at the Graduate School of Business in Cape Town.

Check it out… ;-)

Tech 4 Africa - Gaining momentum

Published
by
Gareth Knight
on 2006/11/28
in Uncategorized
. 9 Comments

Technology for Africa '07

And so it begins…. We’ve started getting some really good feedback for the Tech 4 Africa conference (last check we were up to about 30 replies after a day or so of being up and emailing to an initial beta group for testing) which has totally surpassed our expectations. When the automated notification emails started coming in, you shoulda heard the shouts of joy! ;-)

Almost surprisingly, the feedback has been along the lines we were expecting:
people would be willing to go to JHB,
wanna know about stuff around web2.0 primarily,
want to hear international speakers, and
think the conference would benefit the African web community.

On top of that, we’re getting some good coverage on the blogosphere so far:
Update as of 27/11/2006:
David Duarte
Cowboysengines (business site: http://www.virtualworks.co.za/index.asp)
Hash @ Whiteafrican.com
Update as of 28/11/2006:
Coda.co.za
Scott.za.net
Muti.co.za
http://digitalafrica.blogspot.com/

Anyone else we don’t know about yet? (If you’re going to blog about it, then please use the following Technorati tags: tech4africa07,T4A7 or T4A)

Which is all good. ;-)

Some people have asked why we’re not just launching with dates and relying on “if you build it they will come” to make it a success - in short, 2 reasons:
1. We are speaking to some really, really high profile international speakers, who naturally want to allocate time to a conference on the other side of the world if they feel there are going to be enough people to make it worthwhile. We’ve invested the time up front to collect some real data, that goes beyond a thumbsuck, to show we’re serious.
2. We believe that business rules should apply - we need to at least break even, and we need to justify further time put into the project, so it makes sense that without real data we can’t make any assumptions beyond that we reckon 10 - 20% of people we email should respond to the initial email asking for feedback.

So, if you’re reading this and haven’t filled in the feedback form on the site then please do, just to prove us wrong ;-) The more data and feedback we have, the more likely we are to actually hold the event and make it something truly special!

I’ve also been asked what I’d personally like to see at the conference, so for posterity, here goes:
1. Web app dev in Africa - what it takes, how to do it, what markets are ripe
2. How the web can help Africa lift itself up - technologies that come into play, mindsets that need to change, strategies that work
3. What Africans need to do to compete internationally - once we’ve gotten over the bandwidth issue, what needs to happen for Africans to create more Thawte’s and PayPals.
4. What web 2.0 really means for business - technologies, trends, people -> how can it be leveraged?
All underscored by a good vibe, good music, good networking, and some good ‘ol fashioned fun of course ;-)

If you want to stay tuned to what’s happening, then watch this blog, and/or our business’ blog category wev’e setup for the conference (yes, I know the theme is still default K2 - something about the cobblers shoes I think…;-( - so it will change soon enough, as well as being an addition to our shiny new site which is being designed as we speak).

Also, we’ve been asked what to do if folks are interested in helping out:
1. Email us to say so whether you think you can help with something small or big - the more help we get the better - and we’d really appreciate it. Up front, we don’t have cash to pay people now, but as and when that happens then we’re all about getting the right help, so that may be an option. Right now, telling 10 of your mates would be the best help in the world!.. and…
2. Blog it - please blog it and help to moibilise the troops ;-)
3. If you have a speaker you would really like to hear, then please do email us to say so - being able to tell speakers they’ve been asked for by people is good motivation for them!

Cool - more soon - time to go to bed ;-)

TECH4FRICA 2007 - Technology for Africa: A web and emerging technology conference

Published
by
Gareth Knight
on 2006/11/22
in Uncategorized
. 1 Comment

We’ve been a long time in preparation for this, and it’s taken a huge amount of work to get to this point, but I’m happy to say that we’ve launched the site for the TECH4FRICA 2007 - Technology for Africa: A web and emerging technology conference, and we’re starting to mail the people we know to tell them about it…

Here’s the blurb for ya!:
We’re trying to figure out whether there is demand for a web and technology conference in Southern Africa, and we’d really appreciate your help if you can spare a few minutes.

What’s the big idea?
We’re convinced that there should be web and technology growth in Southern Africa, so we’re really interested in getting together a bunch of leading, internationally respected speakers and thinkers from the industry to discuss what’s happening and what’s possible.

Some of the things we’d like you to get out of the conference:

* Hear international speakers and authors presenting in your own back yard.
* Discuss what the global web and technology opportunities are over the next 5 years
* Understand what technologies are making the biggest impact
* Thrash out how the web can positively play a role in the development of (Southern) Africa
* Create a fun, informative event where you can meet and interact with other people like you

Call for feedback
Of course, there are loads more things that are important and that could be discussed, so this is why we’re asking for your feedback – we’re committed to a bottom up conference where you get value for money, you make new friends, and where you walk away inspired.

Let’s hear from you
Tell us what you think by filling out the questionnaire below. Stay tuned, and tell your friends! We’re looking forward to seeing you in 2007. We won’t sell, trade, or abuse your data. We’ll only email you if you express interest in attending this conference.

And that’s it!

Tell us what you think by filling in the questionnaire at:
http://www.technologyforafrica.org/

Also, please tell as many people as you can, blog it, add the site to http://del.icio.us, http://digg.com (and others like Reddit and Newsvine), and tag it for http://technorati.com/.

Actively looking for South African / African writers and bloggers

Published
by
Gareth Knight
on 2006/8/17
in Uncategorized
. 14 Comments

I’m *still* throwing this into the wind to see where the seeds fall, so here goes:

I’m looking to get in touch with anyone who is African or South African (or for that matter interested in matters relating to Africa / South Africa) that is interested in writing and/or blogging on matters relating to Africa/South Africa, especially if they’re not already doing so for technical reasons (as in, they’re not sure how it all works and so they’ve not really got started).

I’m looking for people from anywhere, so they don’t have to physically be in Africa, and I’m also interested in whether they are passionate and want to talk about stuff that is important to them. All the technical bits I can teach, so don’t let that be a limiting factor.

Also, if you’re already a writer, and/or have your own blog and you’re talking about Africa / South Africa, then please do get in touch.

Similarly, if you read and comment on this blog regular like, then please get in touch as well - I’ll probably mail you in the coming weeks but it would be good to get a heads up of your interest anyways.

If you know anyone that fits the above descriptions, then please forward this post to them!

Cool - here’s to the interweb and all it’s magicality ;-)