Sigalon's IT Select Soup

GoSquared is partnering with Twilio, Pusher, Geckoboard,RabbitMQ, and Amazon Web Services to kick off London Real-Time this weekend. It’s taking place right now at White Bear Yard.

Talented coders, developers and designers are snapping at the APIs in a competition that will see many of them pulling all-nighters in the space provided by General Assembly.

The focus on this event is to create something from scratch over the weekend, so no long projects or pre-prepared work, all fresh ideas that begin today and hopefully come to fruition by Sunday.

London Real-time opened with some encouraging introductions from the companies supplying the APIs. They are also providing prizes for the winning projects that use their interfaces to come up with something cool. The winners will get either an iPad or Android tablet and there’s a truckload of the usual neat t-shirts and even some socks up for grabs.

Chris Leydon is an evangelist for GoSquared and he is very enthusiastically leading the weekender,

“The best thing about an event like this is the buzz that you get from the people who are coming here and building stuff with the things you love. Personally, all I want is to inspire people with great technology. That’s what London Real-time is all about, its for getting people to build great things.”

To follow the event, keep an eye out for the #ldnrealtime tag on Twitter. Interestingly, as a reminder to participants to spread the word, the hashtag has been stamped onto wristbands (the wristbands also act as ID to get in and out of the event and the participants can use them to get free coffee).

As I left the coders to their computers and networking around a rooftop BBQ, the atmosphere was buzzing with what they might build together. There was some mention of the Olympics and talk about image solutions. The start of any hack weekend is always hard to leave, it’s an exciting time when new connections are made and ideas start to form.

I’ll be heading back on Sunday evening, when the pitching process beings to find out what was created over what is likely to be a sleepless but fun weekend for everyone involved. Check back to find out what happens.

Skyscanner, the flight and travel website, is undermining competitors with its well-designed mobile app, proving that the mobile audience should be a focus for growth.

Skyscanner has seen seven million downloads since it launched its first app for iOS last year and business is growing steadily for the Scottish company. Late last year the company hit five million downloads and users ratings average at four and a half stars across both iOS and Android.

Skyscanner CEO Gareth Williams is very pleased with the current state of growth. “It’s been really fun recently. We’ve been going for quite a while so it’s really good that as we get bigger and bigger in terms of people, there’s a great buzz about what we’re doing.”

Getting a travel business to grow is not easy, the frequency with which users come to a site is habitual and more normally does not happen too often, “One of the things about online travel is that it’s hard to be like Twitter,” explains Williams. “If you use Twitter you use it every day, if you use SkyScanner, typically you might only fly once or twice a year.”

So for a service that is seasonal, depending on the travel habits and more often vacation habits of users, having patience is key to steady expansion. “The biggest factor is that we concentrate on is repeat visitors and we manage to live with doubling each year rather than growing x10. It requires a commitment to a direction rather than a fragmented approach,” says Williams.

“I see a lot of travel businesses that are set up to gain traction within one year. But it’s very difficult in this sector to be profitable in that time. Myself and my co-founders are not from a dot com background, we worked on what we thought flight travel information meant for us and the people we hired share the same vision. Get big instantly can be a blessing on the Web but it can also be a demotivator.”

Focus on mobile

Skyscanner opened an office in Singapore six months ago. All of the available marketing resource there is being put to mobile. Williams feels that the most important focus for user experience is on an app, and that people will also use us a website when it is more appropriate.

“That’s a hard lesson for us as we spent 8 years concentrating on the Web experience, but we learned that people are more inclined to use us if they have the app,” says Williams. “We have discovered that people might use us three times a year on the website but it’s more likely to be 6 times a year if they have the app installed. It’s a different pattern of user, but people are filling time browsing destinations and checking prices on the app.”

The current milestone for downloads is impressive and Williams says that providing a good app is the way to drive future business and even more app users. “We’re really proud we have had more than 7 million installs but we are also proud that the ratings both on iOS and Android. That value, customer loyalty and those ratings are what will drive repeat business.”

Future travel

There’s nearly 4 billion seats flown every year around the world. That’s a lot of opportunity for growth and change. The challenge in the market is to make travel booking as simple as possible while still providing options for customers.

“People are becoming more demanding,” says Williams. “They want to see every single flight, they need to know the best time to fly and they want to be able to search on their intentions rather than translating it into what the machine wants to know, like airport codes.

“This touches on things like Siri and semantics, but it also about connecting flight and transport data into what is happening in the real world. Whether it’s flights or geotagging to beaches around the world. The intentions behind travel will be the next big thing for where loyalty for a travel brand will come from.”

Surprisingly, Skyscanner also provides alternatives for people who are concerned about their carbon footprint. As an alternative to getting on a plane, people who prefer to remain grounded can compare options for train travel and Williams is interested in the idea of promoting telecommuting as a possible option depending on the reason for travel.

Skyscanner is working on some very exciting developments for search and discovery in this field. Soon it hopes to provide a more human way of providing the information we would like to have at our fingertips. As the company’s mobile stats are so healthy, it will not be a surprise to hear from them again soon with even more innovation.

The black-hat hacking group known as TeaMp0ison has been trying to wind up Mi6′s Anti-Terrorist hotline staff with a prank call.

According to a report on ZDnet the recording was announced in a tweet by the group and a YouTube video with a recording of the call plays out a conversation with TeaMp0ison member TriCk.

TriCk calls Mi6 Anti-Terrorism Command – #TeaMp0isoN- youtube.com/watch?v=PEBQox… -

— TriCk (@_TeaMp0isoN) April 11, 2012

TeaMp0ison is known for attempts to access private data owned by members of the UK government and hacking the UN to release emails and passwords.

The latest attack appears to be more of a prank than an attempt to take down a site or find information to spread on the Web. In the call, TriCk draws attention to the case of Ryan Cleary, the 19 year old in the UK who was recently jailed for breaching bail conditions.

Among other charges, Cleary stands accused of hacking the website of the UK’s Serious Organised Crime Agency as part of the Lulsec group and will reappear before a judge in May.

According to ZDnet, police confirmed that an investigation is under way and a spokesperson for the London police said “We are aware of an issue whereby telephone conversations relating to the anti-terror hotline have been recorded.”

It’s not hard to recall calls to any number you can think of, though it is usual discretion to state that you are recording in more normal situations. In contrast, Anonymous has been known to intercept calls between the FBI and Scotland Yard.

The contents of this call appear to be more about mocking the police and wasting their time rather than any serious threat and the Anti-Terrorist line staff appear to take the prank call with some grace.

The Anti-Terrorist Hotline is a facility where the public can report things that they think may be a cause for concern.

It’s hard to say if this challenge was a marketing ploy on the part of TriCk and TeaMp0ison to attract attention, but you can bet that their activity will now be monitored in similar ways to Anonymous and Lulzsec.

In an interesting post on the Marketing Week Live blog today, Tim Ocock of Steely Eye Digital Media has unearthed an oddity in adverts on public transport in London. There are of course billboards and transport posters that carry URLs and QR codes for the mobile curious, but it seems that once an advert link it opened, it might not work on your mobile.

As few people are likely to shoot a QR code with their laptop while they are in transit, it begs the question, if so much money is thrown at advertising around the capital, how could this have been missed?

With wifi coming to the London Underground and Overland train systems and of course the odd bit of 3G signal that works on buses, it would be a mistake for marketers to miss the opportunity for commuters to engage with their brands. Ocock says that they are just not mobile friendly.

When Ocock says ‘mobile friendly’, he defines this as, “Light page weight for fast loading, without Flash or other incompatible media, optimised for the small screen, not requiring pinch and zoom to be able to read the text.” The ABCs of mobile you would think, making sure that there is mobile optimisation for a site when it is placed in front of an audience in transit makes sense.

As Ocock rightly points out, “We can’t imagine the designers of these ads really expect people to write down the URLs to check later at home. Even when QR codes are used they are rarely practical to scan on a busy Tube concourse – but you would think that anyone putting a QR code on their ad, as some of the afore mentioned culprits do, would be expecting visitors to be browsing on their phones.”

This nugget of curious information is a part of further research by Steely Eye. The firm also has an app called “Works on Mobile” for iOS and Android that helps to identify where bad mobile advertising exists.

Though the practice of mobile marketing linked to physical advertising is in it’s fledgling form, there are things that would make the process a bit easier. Not putting QR codes in strange places and at least having a mobile site to go to would be a good start.