The Web Pitch

As Steve mentions on his blog, Microsoft’s Mel Carson was lucky enough to interview Twitter co-founder Biz Stone in Cannes last week.  Mel does a great job on the interview. Watch the video above to learn:

• What is Biz’s favourite Twitter app?
• How many registered apps use the Twitter API?
• Why is Biz Stone in Cannes with lots of advertising people?

Google are set soon to release “Wave” and I predict it will be a major game changer. Imagine email, instant messaging, wikis, forums, blogs, mobile, SMS all being replaced with Google Wave.  Check out at least the first 40 minutes of video for an introduction to the developer preview. I can’t wait to try it out.

I recently finished reading, “Innocent – Our Story and Some Things We’ve Learned”. A great insight into the culture of Innocent Drinks. The book provides an excellent overview of the history of the company and the ethical and environmental stance the business takes in sourcing its ingredients. The book also offers lots of practical business advice for entrepreneurs. If you are a fan of the drinks, this is a must read book!

The video above summarises the Innocent story in under ten minutes and features co-founder Richard Reed.  He discusses five areas in which he believes has made Innocent Drinks a success. These areas include:

1. The nature of things made – 100% natural, 0% concentrate.

2. Procuring ingredients in an ethically and environmentally conscience way.

3. Producing packaging with a lighter foot print  (recyclable/biodegradable).

4. Conserving energy – (refusing to air freight fruit and sourcing locally produced produce).

5. Sharing profits – 10% of profits are donated to good causes.

Overall, by following the guiding principles above, Innocent is building a business which is “net positive”.

UPDATE

Take a look at the video below for a tour of Innocent Drinks at Fruit Towers in West London.

Fantastic.

Ignore Everybody: And 39 Other Keys to Creativity is based upon the hugely successful, Change This Manifesto, entitled “How to be Creative”. Building upon his earlier work, Hugh MacLeod brings together his collective wisdom of thoughts on creativity.

As Steve Clayton describes, there are a number of stand our chapters in this book. In particular, the following chapters stood out for me: 

Chapter 8 “Keep your day job” with the excellent description of Hugh’s Sex and Cash Theory.

Chapter 11, “The more talented somebody is, the less they need the props”. This chapter serves to remind us that the tools aren’t important. True creativity comes from within, regardless of the tools used.

Chapter 3 “Put The Hours In” stuck a particular chord, where Hugh states “Doing anything worthwhile takes forever. Ninety percent of what separates successful people and failed people is time, effort and stamina”.

And Chapter 18, “Merit can be bought, Passion can’t”. In this chapter, Hugh states that: “The only people who can change the world are people who want to. And not everybody does”.

Absolutely. Sometimes, being passionate about something and wanting to change things is great. However, it is important to remember that not everyone may feel the same way.

Overall, the book is an easy read, with Hugh’s unique blend of wit, genius and dark humour. Though his cartoons have been available on Gaping Void for years. It is a real treat to finally have some of them available in book form.

Ignore Everybody is a book that can be summed up with one of Hugh’s own cartoons (see above). It enriches your understanding on ways that creativity can prosper. Whilst at the same time Hugh simplifies the process, with tales from his own experiences.

I wouldn’t just recommend this book for people seeking new ways to be creative. This is a book I would thoroughly recommend for mums, dads, friends, lovers, co-workers and neighbours. Ignore Everybody is a book for everyone. We all display creativity in our everyday lives and Hugh’s book helps us to remain focused.  A common sense book for modern times.

If you want to get a flavour for the book, sample chapters are available here.

Ignore Everybody is available for pre-order on Amazon and will be published by Portfolio on June 11, 2009.

With thanks to Maureen at Penguin Books for the advance copy of this book.

Last year I reviewed Seth Godin’s latest book called Tribes. I enjoyed this book and  Seth’s talk at TED is a great synopsis of the book. In a “Twitter world” where we follow others, Tribes empower individuals. The book serves as a good reminder that by starting a movement, it is possible to change the world.

A nice presentation from Mojave Interactive for Marketers looking to use Twitter.

Hat tip to @Twitter_Tips

Meg Pickard recently updated the iconic ‘original Web 2.0 slide’ of start-ups. It is interesting to see which companies have survived and which are now long forgotten. Of course many more start-ups have now been born. But the above picture was the original Web 2.0 collection and has been a classic feature of many presentations over the last few years. 

Click on each picture to enlarge the view.

If you have used Twitter search before, you may notice that you can only go back a certain amount of time and/or number of tweets for a given search. In fact, if you read the Twitter search documentation, you’ll note that the folks from Twitter say, "We also restrict the size of the search index by placing a date limit on the updates we allow you to search. This limit is currently around a month but is dynamic and subject to shrink as the number of tweets per day continues to grow."

Thus was born The Archivist, a Windows application that runs on your local system and allows you to archive tweets for later data-mining and analysis for a given search. The Archivist allows you to start a search and will get as many results as it can on the initial search.  If you leave The Archivist open, it will update with the latest results every 10 minutes.  You can also close The Archivist and open it later. The Archivist will save the tweets and get all the tweets it can since that search.

The Archivist will display a chart that shows the number of tweets per day for a given search, so that you can quickly assess traffic for a given search. For more comprehensive data analysis, The Archivist lets you export Tweets to Excel. It also natively saves tweets in an XML format, which could also be parsed  for deeper data analysis.

Install The Archivist today!

Print Friendly is a nice site which helps to correctly format web pages for printing. The site also optimises your printing, by removing annoying ads to.  If you print content from the web, Print Friendly is definitely worth checking out.

H/T to Steve

Hot on the heels of sites such as Twistori and Twitterfall comes Visible Tweets.

Enter in a search term and watch the results display as an animated display on your screen. Very cool.