Matt Collins

130 assorted programmers, designers and business folk; 6 eager teams; one crazily ambitious goal.

I recently spent some time comparing current e-commerce platforms (a.k.a. shopping carts).

Here’s a great slide deck from Dave McClure on startup metrics.

I’ve been working on a new service lately, called ReceiptFarm.

I’ve been researching some new business ideas lately and it struck me how rarely people seem to discuss quick and cheap ways of testing the critical assumptions upon which business models are based.

Making Stuff Happen in 48 Hours The last couple of days I was involved in another “build a website in 48 hours” event.

John Buckman, founder and CEO of Magnatune.com (and founder of BookMooch), gave a really interesting talk on how to be successful as an Internet entrepreneur at Loic Le Meur’s recent LeWeb08 conference in Paris.

This weekend I was lucky enough to be part of the second Social Innovation Camp.

This is a great slideshow (with audio) on how to use metrics to drive the development of your web app.

Greg Sterling over on Search Engine Land shared some interesting findings the other day from a Yahoo study into consumers’ behaviour when choosing local services and providers.

One of the more successful UK hyperlocal sites so far, UpMyStreet, has had a makeover.

Can Sales of Desktop Apps Predict Successful Web Apps?

photo credit: Peter Ito The Guardian’s Oliver Luft reported on Wednesday that the Trinity Mirror-owned Liverpool Echo has launched a map-based news service where they are geotagging news stories and allowing for postcode-based searches.

photo credit: Mr.

This data has been out for a few months now, but for anyone whose business depends on advertising, it’s worth a second look.

Greg Sterling has an interesting post on his Screenwerk blog on the challenges of selling SEM to small local businesses.

MapQuest recently launched a new local service called MapQuest Local that more or less follows the Localmouth pattern.

According to their own press release, HelloMetro has been awarded a trademark from the US patent office for use of the term ‘Hyperlocal’.

photo credit: wit Here’s a nice article on selling expensive, niche software.

photo credit: mattbuck4950 Out-Law had an interesting article yesterday about how Ryanair is taking a Dutch fare comparison website to court in Ireland for screenscraping.

photo credit: alexliivet It’s time to put your thinking cap on.

I just came across these guys: http://www.brownbook.net/ They’re a sort of open yellow pages where anyone can add, edit or review businesses.

photo credit: Ed Yourdon Newspapers as we know them are dying.

photo credit: Urbankudos “Nine out of 10 say rules should govern social sites” According to Bobby Johnson in yesterday’s Guardian (Facebook Information Should be Regulated, Survey Says), “89% of those surveyed by the Press Complaints Commission said there…

photo credit: Tony the Misfit TechCrunch ran an interesting post-mortem article yesterday by the founder of Meetro, a location-aware instant messaging platform, that recently closed its doors.

I’ve just been catching up with TechCrunch, and read that FatDoor, a social network for neighbours, has closed down.

photo credit: sowri Here’s a neat idea… these guys are selling words from a dictionary.

photo credit: alexanderdrachmann I was recently helping a friend out with his Rails project and we were trying to figure out the best way to handle queries in a RESTful Rails app, i.e. returning a subset of items meeting certain conditions.

Credit: Robert Scoble So you’ve got a great idea for a killer Web startup but you’re not a techie yourself?

I had the pleasure of attending Social Innovation Camp this weekend.

photo credit: Seth Thomas Rasmussen Do you collect tips and tricks?

HireGuru is a new site I’ve been working on.

I’ve just revamped mulogy.com and finally moved this blog to a private WordPress installation.

I’ve been working away on a new site designed to help people connect with other local people.

Here’s a post about Outside.in recently switching from PHP to Rails.

Here’s another little problem I was just hitting and the solution in case it happens to help someone else out there.

Today I decided to get my head around REST and, more specifically, whether and how I should use it in my Rails development projects.

I spent this last weekend with a group of 30 or so web developers, designers and entrepreneurs that I’d never met before as part of something called London Startup Weekend.

Half way through discussing my online takeaway idea with a friend, what should show up on Dragons’ Den, but two guys with a different online menu idea!

Is it just me, or is PayPal’s European customer service laughably bad?

Alright, it’s time to talk about a new idea I’ve been looking at and have been putting through some initial market testing.

It’s really very simple, but this one took me a while to figure out, so I thought I’d post it in case it helps someone else.

OK, I’m a bit late with this post, but for completeness, here are the short-list and winners of the Localmouth Best Local Limericks Awards 2007: 50 Top Limericks Winning Limericks Enjoy!

Yes, it was time for another round of CSS fun and some delving into istockphoto.

Fancy a bit of fun?

Localmouth was feeling a bit empty.

localmouth now has a new logo!

The localmouth site now has an updated look, incorporating the new logo.

As I write, my web hosting account has been suspended for “abuse” for a little over 3 hours and counting.

Right, 67 minutes after I reported that I’d fixed the problem, my sites were back online.In total my sites were down for 5 hours.