The Adidas World Cup Football

I thought this product was appropriate to show while the World Cup is on (some graphical and presentation elements removed), as it is a couple of people talking about the Adidas football that is available for sale. This is the actual one you see on the TV used by the players in Germany.



The product was entered directly into the system along with some details about what it is. There are comments from users at the bottom, a list of anyone whol blogged about it, and also a list of people who have recommended it. All this activity has actually propagated the football to be the 8th most buzziest product at the moment on Crowdstorm (based on 40 alpha testers).

Now - anyone going to spend the £120 and send me one :-)

Web 2 & Blogger Party - tonight in London

A good friend of Crowdstorm called Roger Kondrat is running a really cool event tonight in London to get some of the UK bloggers and web 2 entrepreneurs together under one roof. (I know it is very short notice but hopefully the people I've spoken to about it already will see this as a gentle reminder :-) )

It will also give you a chance to meet and great people best positioned to help meet your current needs e.g. recruitment, investment, business advice, hosting, services...

Where & When?
From 19:00 at La Casa Del Habano 100 Wardour Street London W1F 0TN

How?
You can get an invite to the event by emailing Roger directly

You can also check out more details here of the Web 2 & Blogger Party

Watch out for the horse!

Ok, so while technically this isn't a post about social shopping, Crowdstorm, or web 2.0 - I just found this in Wimbledon Village the other day and thought it really amusing.

When was the last time you saw a pelican crossing for horses?

Philip Wilkinson interviewed by E-Consultancy

I recently did a good interview for an excellent company here in the UK called E-Consultancy who are one of the leading hubs for online marketing and web 2.0 right now. In it I explain what Crowdstorm is and where we are going with all this Social Shopping angle.

Read the Philip Wilkinson interview

Please feel free to comment and agree / disagree - I'm keen on a good debate from time to time :-)

What's this - a shopping blog widget?

Er... yes, yes it is! On our list of 101 features, we are building a range of shopping widgets and tools that can be put on any website or blog to let people interact with the Crowdstorm proposition from anywhere.



In this example, your users can play around with the sliding bars such as no.comments or no. recommendations, and it will spit out relevant matching products to explore.

We'll also make these available in the "widgets" section of our "buzz" area.

There's a whole variety of things we can do with buzz and widgets and at some point we even want to open up the API's to let you freely build your own tools.

Buzz-tastic!

To join or not to join - what was the question again!!??

A great post by Roger Kondrat earlier on whether you should start your own business with your own great idea or join another company who has one early on. You can read it here

It reminds me of an old saying I stuck on my wall years ago:
"It’s not how many ideas you have but how many you make happen."

Starting a business is really difficult and I would never recommend doing it on your own. So if you can round up a team of co-founders or find other people starting a business you believe in (easier said than done)- join forces. Chris and I help each other when we're down and need an extra boost to keep going, and once you have a founding team then things become a whole lot easier.

Lastly, try not to think about the money aspect. Get involved with a business you are passionate about because you really believe in it and that it can change the landscape. Your passion for it will result in perservance and success after which the money will fall into place.

CSS & XHTML

Well we've been having fun over the last few weeks trying to code up the site in XHTML and CSS, based on our very cool graphic designs.

As I haven't coded front-end web work for over 4 years now, it has fallen into Chris's hands once more. Now, this is not his favourite type of work in the whole world and I know he'd rather be coding the Crowdstorm API or enhancing our search results, but what can you do eh..

So while he's doing that, I'm drumming up a bit of marketing buzz while making sure we're setup correctly on all the accountancy and legal aspects (very dull!).

Right now I think we're a couple of weeks away from putting the whole thing live now and getting people to actually use it! I know I keep saying it but SOOON.

I think I'm going to read my CSS for dummies book now and see if I can give Chris a hand...