A post a day for the month of June

Posted on June 1, 2009

Once upon a time I tried to set myself the goal of a post a day forever – it was hard and I failed almost immediately. Forever, it turns out, is a long time. Days, weeks or months later I look back and think, this was supposed to be the future; Where are the flying cars, the robots, my posts?

So I’m going to try an experiment. I’m going to write something here every day for the whole of June. I’m going to try to avoid writing the posts all in a day and scheduling them, because that’s not writing something here everyday.

I’ve just been to BarCamp Leeds 2009, sproozi is coming along well, we’re re-launching GoRoam to focus more on consulting work we do and want to get more involved with, I’m getting involved setting up some coworking, open coffees and other things to try to get more involved and collaborate more with the local entrepreneurs and the digital community in Hebden Bridge; so really there isn’t any excuse, I have enough to say to easily fill 30 days.

So, a post a day for the month of June – Day 1.

A change of direction?

Posted on September 23, 2008

A few months ago we announced Citrus, a suite of tools we’d been developing for estate agents. Despite our bullish attitude to building and selling the application we’ve taken a step back over recent weeks and taken a long hard look at what it is we’re doing. The result of the look is a change of direction, back to some ideas we’ve had in the past about personal search, bookmarking and some location based services. It’s a bit too early to get into too much detail about what we’re planing but I wanted to take the time to give a bit of an explanation of why we’ve changed our minds. 

The market has changed, there is no doubt, but we know that. On reflection though we decided our assumptions were probably wrong. We knew there were not going to be a lot of new players entering the market but existing businesses probably aren’t going to want to change, software tools and they’re not going to want to part with money especially if they had already paid to have a site developed and especially if they’re being forced to lose people.

Then came the next blow to the project,  we were asked to shut down the only current user of our software. They’d decided to put their business on hold because of changes to the Spanish regulations and the current state of the market.  So now we were facing selling a product, in an unfriendly market without our evangelist. 

I’d also be lying if I said that we had generated the interest we’d hoped to generate, we didn’t. It goes without saying that had we generated that interest, or close to that interest we wouldn’t have had the moment of introspection and we wouldn’t have needed to take this difficult decision.

Building an application targeting estate agents

Posted on June 30, 2008

By all accounts the property market is in free fall and we’re taking the possibly bold decision to launch a product with estate agents as our primary market.

The product is called Citrus and it’s better way for agents to sell property online because frankly the existing solutions are all pretty lame. We got here through our work with a good friend Colin and his spanish property business Spirit of Granada. In developing the website for his business we realised that the existing solutions weren’t easy for a small company or sole trader to work with, they involved lengthy contract terms, high costs and confusing feature sets and options. We want to change all that and think that our insider knowledge of how these smaller agents operate will allow us to build an application for the market that doesn’t suck.

Stay tuned to find out.