Speakers at next Facebook Garage (12th November)

This month at the garage, I'll be taking a look at the FaceBook Fund winners, and what this means for the future of Facebook. Also on:

*Why your Apps have broken! Tom Gallagher with what we really need to know on why our apps keep breaking.

* Adknowledge John Cole is back with news on their new engagement applicaitons

*Ned Walley from Zong talks about their mobile payment system and how it can be integrated with applications

* Emmett Kilduf from CMyPitch talks about their new social network connecting angels and entrepreneurs

*The Power of Social Media - Streisan Chapman from Bebo explores the effect Social Media has.

* What's New - the latest on the Platform with Iskandar Najmuddin from Nudge

* Mat Clayton from Wakari shows us Friendscore, a new application for Experian which has some very cool features to see how much time people spend on Facebook

Plus the usual Pizza, Beer and networking!

Tickets on sale now at: novembergarage.eventbrite.com

BBC's 'The Box' Flash Game Competition

The Facebook Developer Garage London is helping the BBC to find a fun flash game as part of their 'The Box' project, tracking a BBC branded shipping container as it travels around the world, transporting goods by sea, road and rail, to educate about globalisation. Any individual can submit a flash game they've created, with the final winner being voted on by the public. The winning game will be available for the public to play on bbc.co.uk/thebox - and if you turn the game into a social network application, will link to this as well. Although the BBC isn't allowed to actively promote developers it has agreed to place your name alongside the winning game on the site to acknowledge your efforts which should be a great showcase for your work. Journalists from the BBC will be coming to the next garage on 12th November to tell us more about the Box project, when we'll be releasing more details on how to enter the competition.

You can buy tickets for the garage at novembergarage.eventbrite.com and can see the Facebook event here.

MySpace upping the fight against Facebook

Techcrunch reported today on the new MySpace Profile 2.0, introducing a slicker layout, flash drag and drop profile editor (removing any requirement for HTML/Javascript knowledge), and granular privacy control. 

This is a great move by MySpace. One of the key reasons for the shift over to Facebook for a lot of people has been its cleaner look and granular privacy. With these changes, MySpace manages to address a lot of these issues, whilst still maintaining its unique differences; much bigger profile customisation with bespoke designs, music etc. Will this keep users from shifting over? Time will tell, but it's definitely a shift in the right direction, and the granular privacy will make more users comfortable with adding friends from their 'real' social graph (including work mates) whilst still maintaining the more outgoing parts of their profile (compared to the more professional looking Facebook) for other friends. 

Combined with the more open nature of the site and the continuing focus on music they are moving towards being a truly viable alternative to Facebook for a wide age-range. However, as a 'primary' social network (i.e. one that is aiming to own your whole social graph, as opposed to a niche section of it), they're going to have to work very, very hard to both hold users and attract more in order to prevent users from shifting to Facebook purely out of social pressure. In the US, they currently hold an advantage over Facebook by just having more users, although in some countries (e.g the UK) they are significantly behind. 

If Facebook continue their world-dominating growth and manage a full coup of the world's social graph, then one scenario could be pushing even more heavily into the music focus, aiming to be a 'secondary' social network where users manage their online music activity, connecting to bands and other fans, discovering, listing and buying new music (on top of their primary social network activity somewhere else). This is similar to the role LinkedIn plays for many people (who use it to manage their business connections, on top of a main social network like Facebook). In many ways this would take MySpace back to its roots (a MySpace executive once admitted to me that they were completely surprised when Facebook blew out of the woodwork, not even realising that social networks could be used to harness your REAL friends - in the early days there just weren't enough users to make this feasible, so a majority of online soc net activity was meeting new people). It's unlikely that this is scenario A in MySpace's business plan, but was no doubt in the back of their mind when they launched the new MySpace music service. 

Amazing New York Street Art

This is really amazing, I wanted to share it with you. He talks for a few seconds how his first piece spread virally online after people took some photos and videos, so its slightly relevant... cheers to Oli Barrett for tweeting about it.

Latest Facebook Garage: Video Report

The videos of all the individual speakers will be available at FacebookGarage.co.uk soon (we're just moving the site over to a new server).

Techcrunch/FOWA pitch: What I learned.

Thanks to Marc Berry for the awesome photo

On Thursday afternoon at the Future of Web Apps (FOWA), I had the amazing opportunity to pitch the iPlatform on-stage to Ryan Carson, Mike Butcher, Jason Calacanis and Brent Hoberman. A huge thank you to Mike at Techcrunch UK and Ryan to organising the event, which included four other start-ups (chosen by Mike and Ryan from a host of start-ups who submitted video pitches to Techcrunch UK). 

We had 60 seconds (60!) to pitch, after which the judges had the opportunity to ask a question each, then they marked us out of 10. It was a pretty fast and furious format, so fitting in everything I wanted to say was difficult. 

So, how did it go? I'd say medium. It was my first public pitch (to a packed conference room), but I'd say my general level of calm and presentation was fine. However the feedback from the judges on the content of the pitch was mixed, and this is where I learnt the most important lessons. It's often said that you should talk about the benefits of the product and not the features. Before Thursday, I had assumed that this was more a matter of how you framed what you were saying; however I learnt that this is about the fundamental content of your pitch, not just how you get it across. In the sixty seconds I had, I talked about what the product was and how it did it, and our basic revenue model. This just didn't get the excitement or value of the product across.

Luckily I did get a chance to redeem myself (unintentionally) during the questions, when in response to a question from Brent I shared how I originally came up with the idea of the iPlatform. I'd been doing some research for Chelsea Football Club at the beginning of the year. Chelsea have their own community site ('the shed') which has around 10,000 users, actively engaged with each other discussing the club, creating a significant amount of email sign ups and traffic to their website. My research into fan activity within social networks found around 60,000 Chelsea fans actively engaged in unofficial groups within Facebook alone, similar numbers in MySpace, and around 80,000 in Bebo - almost twenty times the amount of users across the three social networks, compared to Chelsea's own site. This wasn't because the shed has a high barrier to entry; far from it (it's just email and password, no profile information is required). The only real reason was that the groups were on the social networks where the fans were already spending their time, and where they based their online social activity. It was this research which planted the seed of the idea for the iPlatform in my head, and it was this story which really showed the huge benefit of the iPlatform (to distribute a community site to all the major social networks), as well as clearly differentiating it from tools such as Facebook Connect, which allow you to take your social graph data to an external site. Next time, this story will be the core of any pitch I do. 

The second interesting lesson is that when you're talking about your revenue model, show how it's scalable. It was fine for us to say that we charge for our product, but the main question from the judges was how this was going to scale (which unfortunately I didn't have the time to answer), as opposed to having a long sales process for every implementation. There are some aspects to this which I can't talk about publicly, but I should have communicated that although we can work directly with the end-clients, our core market is interactive agencies who can use it as a tool for multiple clients, essentially outsourcing a large part of our sales process to our customers. 

So - well done to ERepublik, who got the highest marks from the judges, and a big thank you to everyone who came along and cheered for me (especially the wonderful Zuzanna from Huddle)! 

Google's most amazing innovation yet: Google Goggles

This has got to be Google's best innovation yet. They've designed a simple system to prevent you sending those drunken, unfortunate emails to people that you really regret in the cold morning light - Google Goggles. 

When you enable Mail Goggles, it will check that you're really sure you want to send that late night Friday email. And what better way to check than by making you solve a few simple math problems after you click send to verify you're in the right state of mind?

By default, Mail Goggles is only active late night on the weekend as that is the time you're most likely to need it. Once enabled, you can adjust when it's active in the General settings

Now if only this worked across my phone, Facebook and mac mail...

The iPlatform Techcrunch/FOWA 60-second video pitch