*The work:

1. You write a blog post telling the world what you’d do with your 99% off.  Make sure you have a link back to www.bview.co.uk.
2. Send an email to competition@bview.com and give us a link to said posting.
3. All entries have to be received by midnight GMT on Saturday, April 25, 2009.
4. I’m going to shortlist my top 10 favourites, and then the lovely attendees of Social Media Camp London will vote on the winner, which will be announced by 8pm Sunday, April 26, 2009 GMT.
5. You can enter as many times as you like (if you have multiple blogs, then go for it!).
6. People from anywhere in the world can enter, but the prize will be awarded in pounds sterling.

So that’s it.  Now it’s time for you to get your creative hats on (I know I’ve been singing, “If I had a million dollars” in my head while writing this)! To get you started, us folk at the BView office have come up with what we’d do with the savings. You’re lucky our boss won’t let us enter, but hopefully they will inspire you to think of some great ideas.  Good luck, and I look forward to reading your entries!

Dan (the developer)

If I had 99% off anything, I imagine I would take a trip down to the picturesque village of Bray. With no wallet to burden me and a crisp £5 note in my freshly ironed shirt pocket, I would walk purposefully into The Fat Duck with my girlfriend and ask for the finest table (Norovirus be damned). After enjoying one of the finest meals in the world, I would personally hand Mr Blumenthal the £5 note and ask him to bill the rest to BView.

fat duck for a fiver

Huw (the developer)

I would like to invest £375 in the UK stock market; strategically selecting shares in struggling companies within the financial sector (such banking and insurance based companies).  Following this, I would spend £100 on premium bonds, and squander the remaining £25 on a new jumper (NOTE: I may purchase 2 jumpers, depending on the price per-jumper).

jumper

Colin (the product guy)

I’d take my wife away for a week in cornwall. Just a bit of a break from the norm, just a little something to break the monotony of all that child care that has gotten to be a little bit out of control. It would be cool to to be in France but what about a beach that soothes, that reignites romance? A bargain for a fiver.

Simon (the community guy)

With 99% off I’d have to go for a Canon EOS 40D to replace my beaten up and practically ancient 350D. It would be a shame having to replace it if i won (I’ve had it for so long) but something tells me I’d get over it….

Kat (the web designer)

I have a problem: I love goats, especially baby ones, and so I’ve made up a character named safetygoat, who, sporting a fetching red lifejacket, has become my little mascot.  I had this idea that I could make plastic replicas of them, but minimum quantities means it’s expensive (and I’d end up with hundreds, maybe even thousands of the little guys).  So, I’ve been making them on my own by making a silicon mould and pouring polyeurathane and then painting the result.  You can see the adventures of safetygoat here.

safetygoat with a lump of sulfur

They’re pretty cute, but they’re not exactly the most refined looking toy. So, with my £495 (with a fiver of my own cash) I’d like to make proper vinyl safetygoats.   I’d get them properly made in some third world country, and I would get loads of them, so anyone who wanted their very own safetygoat could have one! It would be a dream come true!

We can’t win (unfortunately), so now it’s your turn!

So get out there and write your entries

Love it or hate it, there’s no avoiding it. The football season is underway again. The Premier league kicks off tomorrow afternoon, and then it’s the beautiful game, non-stop for nine months (at last).

From Arsenal to Yeovil, we’ve got all 92 English league teams, and the twelve members of the Scottish Premier listed on BView, so lets have your feedback. Which ground is most accommodating, which has the best atmosphere, and which will leave you feeling ripped off?

The current standings see FA Cup winners Portsmouth topping the BView ratings, Joel P reckons Fratton Park has a great atmosphere and excellent fans (if you can get a ticket). Close behind are Hartlepool United , Yeovil Town , and the mighty Arsenal. Manchester United and Chelsea just about sneak into the top 10.

Let’s hear what you’ve got to say, find the clubs you’ve visited and leave your review.

At BView we’ve got three Arsenal fans (myself included), a Spurs fan (there’s no hope for some people), and even a Manchester United fan. As we quite like our football we’ve setup a BView fantasy football league on the official Barclays Premier League site. We’re always looking for healthy competition, so we’re inviting you to setup a team and join our league. Just register on the site, choose a team name, and select your winning eleven (or let the site pick a random team for you). Once your team’s created, all you need to do is click on the “Join League” option and enter our league code (1029829-183770). We’ll come up with a prize for the overall league winner at the end of the season (unless you’re a Spurs fan). Bring it on.

If football really isn’t your thing, don’t forget that BView still wants to give you cake, or if Amazon vouchers are more your thing, check out the August rewards scheme.

Get in touch if you’ve got any questions.

Once the BBQ was over, a few of us headed over to a great bar in Soho to continue to our evening’s entertainment. We finally called it a night sometime in the early hours of Saturday. I’d have to say that the next days hangover was definitely worth it.

I’ve added a few pictures of some of the BView staff to our Flickr page.

There was a fire in the hole…. By that, I’m just talking about firefox’s London release party last night, which was held in the basement of the Shooting Star tavern.

Who knows what prompted Meg, one of our java developers, to make such an event a “girls night out”, but nevertheless, Mags (another java developer working for Xbridge), Meg and I excluded our nerdy male colleagues in order to… well, hang out with lots of nerdy males.

It turns out that Meg had heard about it from a guy named Rob (aka delineator) who we both randomly follow on twitter. Really nice New Zealander guy… One of those people who try to know face-to-face their twitter followers but thought Meg and I would be alright (saw the safetygoat, and made an exception of me). He is an avid Ruby developer and was nice enough to tell a few java folk what it’s all about.

There weren’t a lot of people there, which meant more swag for us. We had hats, tattoos, stickers, bracelets, but sadly (for meg) no mugs. I think I actually spoke to pretty much everyone who was there. They also had a big monitor displaying the (more than) a million lines of code that make up firefox 3 in the back. Gervase Markham, who was our very nice host, did a little presentation about how many people have downloaded firefox 3 in the first 24 hours. There was talk of burning plastic…pretty crazy stuff! I had to hush Meg a bit from her “USA! USA!” heckling, but besides that, it was nice and relaxed. It turns out Gerv works for the non-for-profit foundation for firefox, but they also own a branch that makes money. Not really sure how all that works, so after a few minutes of explanations, I went to the bar to have another drink to help me absorb my new knowledge. Poor Gerv, I was quizzing him on things about firefox for mac, but he had no answers for me.

This is how it went:
Me: Is there any way of sending different code to mac firefox versus pc firefox for css? The mac is rendering some things 1px off.
Gerv: I hadn’t heard of issues with rendering differently on the two firefox… you’re right, javascript would be messy. Why don’t you submit it as a bug?

Me: Have they done anything in firefox 3 for mac for it eating up memory when you have 25 browser windows open?
Gerv: Anything would run slow if you had 25 browser windows open!!
Me: Safari doesn’t.
Gerv: Err….I don’t use a mac. I don’t know.

Poor guy. He did the best he could, and I was just one of those annoying people with very specific problems.

Most people were very nice, and and am just a lowly “half developer” being a UI coder (I do the layout, they do the logic), most people were nice enough to speak slowly on the complicated bits, and change the subject when my eyes glazed over. Except this one Asian guy. His first question to me was, “what platform do you use?” or something along those lines. When I told him I was a UI developer, and just beginning at it as well, he snobbily informed me that he made “at least 3 times as much as me” and basically began insulting me to my face. You have to save face in front of nerds (who knows what they will do to you once you reveal your weaknesses) … so I made a hasty retreat back to the safety of nicer people.

Margaret was such a Bview champion there. Everytime I went back to talk with her, she was trying to explain to people how BView worked. She really put meg and I to shame. Definitely need to give that girl some cards to give out to people when she’s hyping it up.

All in all, it was a proper nerd fest, and a great way to celebrate the new browser! Yay Firefox!

In addition to talking about BView and tools we can add we also talked about PR, the changing role of PR and what PR means to businesses at either end of the size spectrum.

Jonathan Hopkins was with us and his general views on PR are captured well on this post on his blog. In summary: the Internet has/is changing the function of PR and those that work within the industry from an external, arms length agency to a day-to-day advisory role. This is scary for large businesses but awesome for small businesses where PR can be done more easily and more directly using sites like BView where businesses can connect and talk directly with customers. Another interesting point made was that working with the platforms now that will facilitate engagement in the future is far better than trying to work on those platforms in the future i.e. get in early and be part of the team that helps build the platforms people use.

Oh, and the food was good especially the Prawns and the Lamb Sula. The Leaf has always been a favourite haunt of ours and they have treated us well.

We’ll be having another get together soon and if you’d like to come a long and get to know us a bit better or add some ideas to the mix then contact me via private message.

I went to the Mashups/Being Digital conference yesterday. Here are some basics about conferences:

1. Wear a T-shirt with you brand on it. It’s the cheapest advertising you’??ll get.
2. So you attended and none of your colleagues
   did? Try and tell everyone what you learned ,what happened, and any
   trends you picked up on. If possible, get any presentation materials
   afterwards to share around. If this fails then go to slide share as it
   may have been posted there by the speaker independent of the organisers.
3. If you fast discover that the speaker/debate
   is a waste of time then cut you losses and find someone to speak to
   outside of the auditorium.

My thoughts on the conference itself?
The conference was subdivided in to rough 1 hour slots covering:
advertising, content, social, local, search, retail, identity. The format was a “speaker”? (or two) would give a presentation-based talk on a specific area which was designed to inspire a debate on the area.
I don’t think this worked. Presentations were cut too short and the debate that followed was frequently very weak. It did’??t always fail:

the identity section worked because: i) the moderator was very good and knew her stuff, ii) the panel (?) also knew their stuff at a technical and business level, iii) the presentation given was educational.

Summary
There was a faux debate around whether there were new rules or old rules for advertising. The essence of this was that context counts. Andrew Gerrard was blatant in his promotion of his own services. Shame on you. Kate Burns probably emerged with her reputation intact if not enhanced.

In the subject of identity and Open ID, Simon Willison gave a good presentation which I found educational (what I know about Open ID is not significantly better although it has helped me understand that it’s not all it is cracked up to be) and Wendy Grossman did a great moderation job truly adding value rather than just asking set piece questions.

On the subject of content the ITN representative essential stated that they were laggards in the technology space and would always be so.

Peter Miles was impressive while the service being offered by Put Place tells me the net top thin client is even more of a reality.

Andrew Grill
moderated the local section well and Tim Warr was a good speaker even if his presentation threw up more questions than direction on future tools.

The social debate was pretty poor and the panel spent a lot of time vaguely raising awareness of their own service while not actually giving any insights. Which reminds me of a post I read on Rob Hinchcliffe’s blog. I let you decide what piece I refer to.

I would rater have seen Loic Le Meur in person than a short video. Yes he is well know, yes he has interesting things to say but this was simply a means of having the conference benefit from his personal brand name.

With the tables and chairs cleared and the projector screens hooked up to the wii, our conference room was transformed into a gaming heaven. At stake: beer sponsored by BView and perhaps more importantly bragging-rights for being the office Wii champ.

Noble contenders over the course of the evening included Martin G/Daniel W at Mariokart but the winner of the evening had to be Jim ‘John Travolta’ Lamb for cutting some shapes on the Dance Dance Revolution dance matt (an open-source version of course!) I think he’s played that game a few times before so we should probably give him a handicap next time.

More BView events coming soon. Suggestions for the next meet-up anyone?

BView games night flickr set.

One day. 100 new music acts. 15 venues across Shoreditch. 5000 (too-cool-for-school) music lovers. Last nights Stag and Dagger micro-festival was, more than anything, a good chance to check out some of the Shoreditch venues I’ve been meaning to go to.

After some debate/exchange of words, a small group of us finally agreed on a plan of attack for which bands we wanted to see, kicking off at the Electricity Showrooms. Feeling uninspired by the DJ and it being way too early to dance like a crazy fool on its famous disco floor, we swiftly moved onto Bar MusicHall to see the excellent reggae band Natty who didn’t disappoint. Apart from the typical slow service at the bar, this venue was more than adequate. We then headed over to The Macbeth to see a very average Australian band Operator Please which we could barely see anyway due to the pub being rammed. The good upstairs terrace was at least some consolation for the otherwise poor venue. Before we knew it the night was drawing to a close so we headed over to Brick Lane for the Filthy Dukes set at the Vibe Bar. No night out in Brick Lane is complete without a salt beef bagel bagel from The Beigal Shop which we devoured on the bus ride home.

So the idea of Stag and Dagger was a nice one, but in reality it just didn’t work out. There were just too many bands to see, not enough time and the transition between sets wasn’t quick enough. Lets hope the organisers pull off something better at Adventures in The Beetroot Field festival in Victoria Park later on this summer.

Later on I headed down to the Royal Festival Hall for much of the same at the first TechCrunch London meetup organised by Mike Butcher. Among some of the people I met was Jonathan Macdonald
sales Director at Blyk, the new mobile network for 16–24s that’s funded by advertising which has reached 100000 members 6 months ahead of shedule. But like all these events though there just isn’t enough time to meet everyone so will hopefully cross paths with some of the other attenders in the near future.

Mike Butchers Techcrunch flickr photos:

Although this event was initiated by Lloyd Davis, a blogger on the Social Media scene, it is a partly self-managed affair where anyone with an interest in social media can contribute to its future development via the wiki. It’s a good example of how offline events can help sustain online relationships. Perhaps in not-too-distant future BView will be able to host their own “offline” events to enhance the “online” community. Suggestions for the 1st BView meet-up anyone??

As always, the value of this kind of event is to see how other people are building/nuturing their communities; exploring potential business opportunities with people working in similar areas and perhaps more importantly spreading awareness of the BView site with REAL people! Definitely worth a visit for anyone interested in these areas.