Scaling games

Scalability is something I’ve been thinking about recently. What works at one level may not work at another. Foursquare is a prominent example of this. As a social service, it should benefit from network effects. The more people participating, the more information between interconnected nodes of people and places. Yet the major draw of Foursquare [...]

Recommended Reading – 25th July 2010

The second and final group of links from the past month I recommend you click on is below: Northern Planner has ten great pieces of advice on how to plan if you live outside of London. The points are good advice in general, and transferable to many other things Adam Rifkin uses a metaphor of [...]

Recommended reading – 24th July 2010

I’ve been a bit neglectful of this blog over the past month or two. Come September, this should change. I haven’t written a “recommended reading” post for over a month, so I will rectify that by posting two this weekend, featuring the very best of the various articles and blogs I’ve read over the past [...]

The disrupters in the crowd

Last weekend I went to the Latitude festival, in Suffolk. It’s billed as a family-friendly arts festival (it has comedy, theatre, film, literary and poetry stages in addition to music) and the programme was fantastic. While I personally had a great time (The National, Laura Marling and Rodrigo y Gabriela being my musical highlights), the [...]

Five big things in media

We at Essential were having an internal discussion yesterday, over what we think the five major things to happen to media and communications will be over the next 12 months within the UK. We all know that trends are notoriously difficult to discern and predict, since they are gradual rather than binary. Something like Digital [...]

Spreading birthday cheer

Yesterday was my birthday. Among the birthday messages I received was an email from Stick Sports. This is an online game that I hadn’t thought about for a while, let alone played. Yet they used the information I provided in my sign-up, to send me a message. This in turn has reminded me of the [...]

MRS Mobile Insights Conference

The first Mobile Insights Conference, hosted by the Market Research Society, took place in London this week. I was in attendance. I’ve mentioned my thoughts on the word insight several times in the past. Did I take away many insights from the day? No. Were the talks useful? In parts. Was it worth attending? Yes [...]