In through the outfield

Let’s hear it for the blog

That’s not a quote from me, but is the title of a short but proselytizing discussion with marketing guru Seth Godin author of Purple Cow and legendary management author Tom Peters.

According to Tom, “no single thing in the last 15 years professionally has been more important to my life than blogging”.

There are lots of other interesting and inspirational snippets on the Open Forum website courtesy of American Express.

Many thanks to Leon for pointing out this free resource for aspiring entrepreneurs.

Protect your content against online plagiarism and theft

Many of my Business Advice clients are concerned about rivals stealing their on-line content, so I was pleasantly surprised to come across the free Copyscape service whilst researching a replacement mobile phone on the Mobile Phones UK: Reviews & Best Buys website.

All you need to do is post in your website address and see where (and how much of it) is appearing elswhere on the Web. Needless to say Copyscape offer a premium service with no monthly limit and batch searching for a fee.

Copyscape recommend you put a warning notice on your website to help scare off any potential content theives.

Defend your site with a plagiarism warning banner!

A full house for Blueprints for Business

Last night’s Blueprints for Business: A proven route to success, the latest in our Inspiring Entrepreneurs series was a full house, including some very young aspiring entrepreneurs from BBC Dragon Peter Jones’ new National Skills Academy for Enterprise.

As in previous events the speakers provided some fascinating and inspiring insights into starting and running a succesful business. In this case the subject was franchising, an often neglected area of business opportunity for entrepreneurs. As several of the panellists pointed out, joining a franchise is probably the lowest risk route to starting your own business, as the product or service and brand has already been established.

As Atul Pathak currently running 15 McDonald’s franchises put it; here was a business where the product and customers were delivered to the door for him. All he had to do was ensure he ran the restaurants efficiently and provided excellent customer service. The fact that he was required to spend nine months working in a McDonald’s branch covering every job, from cleaning the loos to cooking and serving burgers helped ensure he knew how to those things when it came to starting his first restaurant.

Atul divides his customers into two sets; internal and external. The internal customers are his staff, and the external customers are those who consume his restaurants products. He is also passionate about working with the local community, which he said was in line with the corporate McDonald’s ethos.

Sophie Atkinson managing director of Autosmart, the car-cleaning firm that was crowned “Franchise of the Year” in 2008, was clear that the franchising route was the way to ensure stability and loyalty. Her franchisees remain committed to the business and often stay for ten or 15 years, compared to around 24 months for employees in sales roles.

Toni Mascolo OBE, the man behind Toni & Guy who starting with one salon in 1963, has built probably the world’s most successful high-street hairdresser brand using franchising. He doesn’t need to advertise for franchisees since almost all his applicants come from existing staff, or in the case of Japan the children of the original franchisees. For him the key to business success and surviving four recessions is love what you do and express that in your customer service. The fact that Toni still regularly cuts customers hair is testamant to his dedication and commitment.

Update:
Cmypitch.com have also written a review of the evening on their blog, Why franchising appears more attractive to both parties in a recession.

Otto Rohwedder and the greatest thing since sliced bread

The greatest thing since sliced bread

I’m sure you will have heard this phrase before, used all to often to describe the latest gizmo or gadget. But have you come across the name Otto Rohwedder? I’m guessing you haven’t.

Otto, originally a jeweller, was the inventor of the world’s first mechanical sliced bread, which went on sale on July 7 1928,  in Chillicothe, Missouri.

After many setbacks, including a fire which destroyed his first factory as well as blueprints and prototype, he managed to develop a successful process for slicing and wrapping the bread. However sales were slow at first as suspicious consumers were slow to accept a pre-sliced bread, but soon everyone wanted sliced bread. By 1933, only five years after its introduction, American bakeries were turning out more sliced than unsliced bread.

Below are a few of his many patent application drawings.

Facebook backs down over controversial privacy policy

Intellectual Property topics can come from all sorts of unexpected places. The headline above was the lead story facing me as I picked up my local free Metro newspaper this morning.

Firstly, I was surprised to see the social networking phenomenon making it to the forefront of ‘old media’, and secondly, surprised to see Facebook backing down in the face of user complaints so quickly.

The last major U-Turn from Facebook I am aware of was in November 2007 when they removed their online tracking of purchases after more than 50,000 Facebook members signed a petition objecting to the program. Facebook Retreats on Online Tracking.

This time the response from the company has been much more swift, and this evening when I logged into Facebook I was confronted with the message below:

Terms of Use Update: Over the past few days, we have received a lot of feedback about the new terms we posted two weeks ago. Because of this response, we have decided to return to our previous Terms of Use while we resolve the issues that people have raised. For more information, visit the Facebook Blog. If you want to share your thoughts on what should be in the new terms, check out our group Facebook Bill of Rights and Responsibilities.

Bobbie Johnson in the Guardian explains the background to this latest crisis facing Facebook:

Facebook has backed down on controversial changes to its terms of service that angered users and caused protests across the social networking site.

Two weeks ago the site altered its terms of service so that it continued to retain a copy of all a user’s messages, actions and updates – even if they left the network. Until the change, Facebook’s policy was to delete all traces of a user if they chose to quit the site.

After the potential scope of the new legal wording became clear, thousands of outraged Facebook users and privacy campaigners lobbied for the world’s largest social network to revert to its old terms of service.

On Monday it seemed these calls were falling on deaf ears after Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg defended the changes in a blogpost, and suggested that users should trust the site with their data.

However, just 24 hours later the company decided to back down. In a message to users last night, Facebook said it would be reverting to its previous terms and conditions for the time being.

The Gift of Inner Success book launch

Tuesday evening in the Business & IP Centre was the launch of The Gift of Inner Success the latest book from the British Library’s partner business coach, Rasheed Ogunlaru.

The fact that the event had been hastily re-scheduled from the snow hit previous Tuesday and yet was a full house, indicates just how popular the charismatic Rasheed is becoming.

As he says on his blog of the evening,  “The event was an evening of inspiration, celebration, connection and was attended by a rich range of spirit souls. “

Rasheed kindly gave a copy to the Centre, and using my recently acquired speed reading technique (of which, more in a later blog post) I managed to whistle through it on the way into work the next day.

The theme of the book is about how we need to give ourselves the mental space (a difficult challenge given the daily demands on ourselves) in order to listen to our hearts. Rasheed is a great believer in allowing yourself to trust yourself to let your heart rule your head.

British Library Entrepreneurship Training Day

Last week was a pretty hectic one for me.

It began with an all day Entrepreneurship Training Day on Monday 9 February. The day introduced postgraduate students to the Library’s collections, and the ways we can support entrepreneurs. Although the students were a bit reticent in the early part of the day they gradually warmed up, and we ended up with a fascinating closing session. The title was “Street smarts and book smarts – are business people and entrepreneurs really talking the same language as entrepreneurship scholars?  How can academia actually help business in the current economic climate whilst still producing high quality peer reviewed outputs?”.

I was privileged to chair contributions from Dr Tristram Hooley (Senior Manager: Stakeholders and Networks, Vitae), Simon Butt (Director of Communications, NCGE - National Council for Graduate Entrepreneurship) and Dr Jim Gazzard (Enterprise & Technology Executive, Royal Veterinary College). In addition we were joined at the eleventh hour by the British Library’s partner business coach, Rasheed Ogunlaru. The students, who were evenly split between those who were planning to start their own business and those who were studying entrepreneurship, came up with some excellent questions

One questioner was met with an unexpectedly strong response from the panel. He wanted to know why he should move from his safe and secure research job, with guaranteed funding for the next three years, to the risks and uncertainty of starting his own business. The panellists asked him how he could be so sure of his future employment with government cuts in education funding expected almost any day now. For many people entrepreneurship is the safer option, as they are their own boss and more in control of their destiny.

Find out your favourite blogger’s Myers-Briggs personality type with Typealyzer

 

Thanks to Karen Loasby* and her Favourite Tipples from FreePint from 22nd January 2009 for highlighting Typealyzer.

The (currently beta) service is a text a text classifier that analyses any blog and assigns a Myers-Briggs personality to it based on writing style.

“Typealyzer.com is developed by the happy people @ prfekt.se. Illustrations are made by Sol at Accented. Please also visit our Typealyzer group at Google!. If you want API access for R&D, try free text classification or use psychographic analysis for commercial purposes - please visit PRfekt at uClassify!

How does it work? For a long period of time, we have been training our system to recognize texts that characterize the different types. The system, typealyzer, can now by itself find features that distinguishes one type from another. When all features, words and sentences, are statistically analysed, Typealyzer is able to guess which personality type the text represents.“

I have tested it on a some of my favourite blogs (and mine of course) and come up with some interesting results.

My colleague Steve van Dulken who writes about the world of inventions and how it interacts with business, the media and patents, is ISTJ - The Duty Fulfillers. “The responsible and hardworking type. They are especially attuned to the details of life and are careful about getting the facts right. Conservative by nature they are often reluctant to take any risks whatsoever. The Duty Fulfillers are happy to be let alone and to be able to work int heir own pace. They know what they have to do and how to do it.”

Stephen Bury  (Curator of the Breaking The Rules exhibition and blog) is ISTP - The Mechanics. “The independent and problem-solving type. They are especially attuned to the demands of the moment are masters of responding to challenges that arise spontaneously. They generally prefer to think things out for themselves and often avoid inter-personal conflicts. The Mechanics enjoy working together with other independent and highly skilled people and often like seek fun and action both in their work and personal life. They enjoy adventure and risk such as in driving race cars or working as policemen and firefighters.@

SurprisinglyEuan Semple a leader in the field of Social Computing with thousands of followers on The Obvious blog is also classified as ISTJ - The Duty Fulfillers.

Stephen Abram previous President of SLA and thought leader for Libraries 2.0 through his blog Stephen’s Lighthouse, will be pleased to hear he is INTP - The Thinkers. “The logical and analytical type. They are especially attuned to difficult creative and intellectual challenges and always look for something more complex to dig into. They are great at finding subtle connections between things and imagine far-reaching implications. They enjoy working with complex things using a lot of concepts and imaginative models of reality. Since they are not very good at seeing and understanding the needs of other people, they might come across as arrogant, impatient and insensitive to people that need some time to understand what they are talking about.”

Finally, I am rather pleased to be able to report that this blog also falls into the the INTP category… remembering of course that it is all just a bit of fun.

* Karen Loasby is an Information Architect for the RNIB (Royal National Institute of Blind People) and Contributing Editor of the FUMSI Manage practice area. Karen was previously Information Architecture Team Leader in the BBC’s Future Media & Technology department, managing a team of 16 information architects. She is a regular presenter at information architecture conferences and writes about information architecture and creativity at www.iaplay.com. Karen can be reached at karen.loasby@fumsi.com

Light green is the new black

I can’t claim to have been in the forefront of the environmental movement, although I have just installed a hyper-efficient condensing boiler at great expense (the old one was done for).

So it has come as something of a surprise to discover that various tones of ‘greenness’ have been catagorised and documented.

This knowledge was triggered by a reference to Light Green  - The Eco-chic Emporium.

According to Wikipedia, light greens are just one of three shades of green.

Dark greens, light greens and bright greens

Alex Steffen describes contemporary environmentalists as being split into three groups, “dark”, “light”, and “bright” greens.^[7]

“Light greens” see protecting the environment first and foremost as a personal responsibility. They fall in on the transformational activist end of the spectrum, but light greens do not emphasize environmentalism as a distinct political ideology, or even seek fundamental political reform. Instead they often focus on environmentalism as a lifestyle choice. The motto “Green is the new black” sums up this way of thinking, for many.^[8] Though many environmentalists of all stripes use “lite green” to describe products or practices they believe are greenwashing.

In contrast, “dark greens” believe that environmental problems are an inherent part of industrialized capitalism, and seek radical political change. Dark greens tend to believe that dominant political ideologies (sometimes referred to as industrialism) are corrupt and inevitably lead to consumerism, alienation from nature and resource depletion. Dark greens claim that this is caused by the emphasis on economic growth that exists within all existing ideologies, a tendency referred to as “growth mania”. The dark green brand of environmentalism is associated with ideas of deep ecology, post-materialism, holism, the Gaia hypothesis of James Lovelock and the work of Fritjof Capra as well as support for a reduction in human numbers and/or a relinquishment of technology to reduce humanity’s impact on the biosphere.

More recently, “bright greens” emerged as a group of environmentalists who believe that radical changes are needed in the economic and political operation of society in order to make it sustainable, but that better designs, new technologies and more widely distributed social innovations are the means to make those changes - and that society can neither shop nor protest its way to sustainability.^[9] As Ross Robertson writes, “[B]right green environmentalism is less about the problems and limitations we need to overcome than the “tools, models, and ideas” that already exist for overcoming them. It forgoes the bleakness of protest and dissent for the energizing confidence of constructive solutions.”^[10]

 

As well as being light green, you can also be light black, by adopting an Ecofont.  As reported on SpringWise, Dutch creative agency Spranq has developed a font called the Ecofont that’s designed to extend the life of ink cartridges and toner. This new font has lots of tiny blank circles resulting in a saving of up to 20 percent less ink than standard fonts.

Airport Havens for frequent flyers

As a regular traveller to the United States I often spend many hours waiting for connecting flights at hub airports. My record to date was seven hours in Huston.

But now thanks to Springwise I have discovered AiportHavens, where I can find (thanks to fellow travellers) a nice quiet spot for a some work, a read or even a nap, away from the hustle and bustle.

However, it may not quite be up to the standard required for setting up permanent residence as exemplified by Mehran Karimi Nasseri an Iranian refugee, who lived in the departure lounge of Terminal One in Charles de Gaulle Airport from 8 August 1988 until July 2006. Merhan Karimi Nasseri at Charles de Gaulle airport, France, since 1988.