Collab.ie Homepage

This week’s Tuesday Push is for Collab.ie, a site which aims to enable “collaboration by helping people with ideas meet people with skills”. Collab.ie is brought to us by SmartCube, the people behind SwiftStore.

So, how does it work?

Say you have a great idea but you don’t have the tech skills to implement it, you could come to Collab.ie and post an general outline of the project and ask for someone with the right skills to collaborate with you on it. Similarly, if you have a product but no idea how to market it, you could find someone here to help you get on track.

Now, at first this just sounds like another job / CV site, but (and I’m guessing here) there are other ways to collaborate other than just being paid straightforward salaries. Some people will no doubt offer advice for free. Others may even lend a hand on a small part of a project in their spare time. Others still might want a stake in the final company or product in return. I guess this whole aspect won’t become clear until more people are using the service.

Something that does stick out to me though is that a lot of the collaboration seems to take place behind closed doors.  This makes sense for privacy reasons obviously, but also discourages people from joining in to collaborate. For instance, I wouldn’t spend my time on a message board giving advice to someone about SEO or SEM if someone else has already given them the same advice earlier in the thread. If the public’s responses to a Collab.ie posting are hidden from each other, they might be less inclined to take part in the first place. This is a little bit catch-22, so I’m not sure what the answer here should be.

I decided to try using the site and came up against some behaviour that was a little unexpected. When I hit the “Add a Project” button, rather than being asked to put in the details of my project, I was asked to login, with the usual “forgot password” link. However, I wasn’t given the option to register on the same screen, other than the link in the top right hand corner. Ideally, I’d have liked to see a form where I could post my project and add my login or registration details in at the end.

Apart from that though, the site seems pretty clear and functional to me. The latest projects list and the tag cloud give you a couple of quick ways into the content. All the expected links (Twitter, RSS) and pages (How, About, Contact) are easy to find. Overall, Lee Munroe has done a nice job on the design.

Any tool that can help move people and their ideas forward is very welcome, especially in current climate. A free tool like Collab.ie even more so.

Finetuna.com Homepage

It’s Tuesday Push time again and this week we’re talking about another nice product from Spoiltchild Design. Anyone who works with a designer will be familiar with the constant stream of back and forward emails and attachments to get the final draft of an image or layout approved.

Finetuna.com helps speed up this problem by allowing you to make notes directly on an image either taken from an URL or uploaded from your computer and add simple hand drawn instructions, such as arrows to show where to move things to, or boxes around elements of the image.

For a simple demonstration of how it works, I decided to “finetuna” the Finetuna.com homepage.

Using Finetuna.com to make comments about Finetuna.com

As you can see I’ve been able to add some text notes and some very simple hand drawn instructions. It was quick and easy to do, but not without its own problems.

I was going to share the URL for my notes with you, but just after I finished I decided I wanted to look at the homepage again in another tab, so I CTRL-clicked the Finetuna logo, but instead of loading the homepage in a new tab it loaded it in the same one. When I clicked the back button my notes and drawings were gone but the image was still there. (See http://www.finetuna.com/hx86vv)

I haven’t seen a way to change the shape (width) of a note speech bubble, meaning long notes become very tall. I also think it would make sense to be able to change whether the speech bubble pointer was on the left or the right. Finally, when I write a new note (in Chrome at least) and click outside the input bubble by mistake, when I click inside it again I can’t actually input any text. It’s not a big problem, but the numbering of your notes increments, meaning it looks like a note is missing.

Overall, I think this tool is incredibly useful. It would definitely have saved us some time on new designs for pages on RevaHealth.com. There are some bugs to fix, which I’m sure the Spoiltchild Design team are already working away on, and I would share the privacy concerns voiced by Dave Concannon, but I will certainly be recommending it to other people in our office when it comes to our next design mock-ups.

P.S. As with almost everything Spoiltchild do, it looks great and has some really nice little touches. I particularly liked the “fold” dotted line  image on the homepage.

P.P.S. To the guys at Spoiltchild, if you can’t read my notes about the homepage in the screenshot above, I’d be happy to email them to you.

However when the mist starts to descend over the Wicklow hills and you realize that you are lost there is great comfort in knowing that a well trained, well equipped and organized group of rescuers are willing to brave the elements to bring you down safely. It is the organisation of volunteer rescue teams that Decisions For Heroes focuses on.

What is Decisions For Heroes?

Decisions for heroes is a rescue team management web application that aims to save lives by making volunteer rescue teams more efficient and enable them to share vital knowledge between groups. Rescue teams using Decisions For Heroes are provided with a simple web interface where they can log all their training and rescue activities along with details of their team members. It then provides analysis, such as heat maps of the number of incidents in an area, that enable the team to plan how best to meet the unique challenges of their local area.

What is fantastic about the goals of the product is its genuine life saving potential. I love the fact that web 2.0 technology has allowed a small Irish company to make such a big difference to a vital worldwide service. 10 years ago this just wouldn’t have been possible.

How Well Does It Work?

The product itself is fairly simple and it only took me about 10 minutes for me to get to grips with it. I think that the Byte Surgery team have done an excellent job in providing an intuitive user experience and it looks like they have stripped out any unnecessary features so it is very focused. What is left is clear, concise and blindingly fast.

Decisions For Heroes in action

• Dashboard – Summarise the key activities that have taken place, with short cuts through to reports,etc
• Activities – This is the core input area of the product, where training sessions are scheduled and logged. Incidents are logged according to a timeline of: alert received, arrived on scene, departed scene and time the team stood down. There is a very nice Google Maps mash-up as part of this interface.
• Members – This section lists the details of each of the team members with their qualifications, also lists the incidents that they have attended.
• Analysis – The analysis section is where I think most of the value of this product will be delivered. It is through the reports on Decisions For Heroes that teams get to see where the geographical hot spots in their area are and what they need to be prepared for. It also makes it clear which team members are responding and what resources the team needs.

Byte Surgery have also taken a really nice approach to product features requests. First of all, it is integrated into the product allowing you to request an improvement as you are using a particular feature. In addition, your feature request is then shared with other users in the system, allowing them to contribute, so when the feature is eventually coded it should be well thought out.

Overall I’m extremely impressed with Decisions For Heroes and I think any organised rescue team will see immediate benefits from using it.

The purpose of the Tuesday Push is to “make some noise about ourselves [the small but growing tech community in Ireland] by picking a good example of an Irish Tech Company and highlighting their product(s) every second Tuesday”. It’s a way of increasing the visibility of our sector, one company at a time, and also a way of fostering a community in the industry through honest feedback.

So, let’s get the easy part out of the way. Has being the subject of the Tuesday Push benefited us? Absolutely, but maybe not in the ways that people might have expected. We certainly haven’t gotten any extra (traditional) media or press attention out of it yet, and in terms of extra traffic, we’ve only had around 150 visits to the site or the blog originating from the articles that were written about us (excluding any mentions on Twitter).

We did however get two things that were invaluable to us. Honest feedback, and links to the site.

The feedback was largely positive, but a few people did either run into problems using the site or didn’t like the way some of it worked. This was great to hear, especially because they gave real examples of what their problems or dislikes were. Some of the problems were new to us, others were ongoing issues. We have fixed or are planning to fix all of them. The dislikes were more varied, and often design related (not our strongest area by any stretch of the imagination!). We’ve taken them all on board and we hope that we will get to address as many of these as possible over time.

The push has definitely introduced us to more members of the community than we knew beforehand, which is great, and has also increased awareness of RevaHealth.com and our blog within the community itself, which can only be a good thing.

Links-wise, here are the numbers:

Those numbers might not look very big to some people, but ultimately those links are going to help us get better positions in Google and the other search engines. The links come from 15 different sites, many of which have never linked to us before. Also of interest to us was the number of people who mentioned and linked to our blog. We’re really pleased that people are finding it useful and we’re going to continue writing for it as often as we can.

Being the subject of the Tuesday Push has definitely been a very positive experience for RevaHealth.com. If you have the time to spare to give an upcoming Tuesday Push company a little feedback and a link, they will hopefully learn from it as much as we have and appreciate it as much as we do.

What can we do to help improve the Tuesday Push? First up, tell people you know about it and ask them to take part. Secondly, try and get some media to mention it regularly. Newstalk radio and Innovation in the Irish Times spring to mind.

Loopthing is an online business network that lets companies store all their business information on one profile page. It’s kind of like the Golden Pages, Facebook, Linkedin, Youtube and Flickr all rolled into one. Companies can upload business info, stick up staff photos and media files, create a file depository and list business hours, all in one place. As well as providing this type of information, helpful to customers, Loopthing also allows businesses to network with one another by listing other companies as friends and fans. Phil recently set up RevaHealth on Loopthing, have a look at it here to see how it looks and works.

As the site is currently in beta, loads more features are still to be added, and Loopthing are encouraging users to make their own suggestions that may be encorporated into the site.

Registering to chat on the forums is free and the monthly meetings cost €45 with the next meet-up taking place at the Vina Mara in Galway on Tuesday 31st March.

While members can discuss any books they choose on the forums, a "book of the month" is chosen, this month's being The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga.

At RevaHealth we like reading and we like eating, so Dinetoread sounds good to us!

MyMunster.com, a social networking site for Munster Rugby supporters, is this week’s worthy recipient of the Tuesday Push. And for some reason, it falls on me, Aoife, a girl who knows next to nothing about the sport, to blog about it.

Now, I do know the essential elements about the Munster team. They have Ronan O’Gara to kick the funny-shaped ball. They play at Thomond Park in Limerick. Peter Stringer is really short (I actually just Googled “short rugby Munster” to find out his name, so that’s cheating). Their fans are remakably more, well, enthusiastic than Leinster supporters. And.. that’s about it.

But even I can see that this site is a great place for Munster fans to chat, share pictures and videos and get up-to-the minute news. It’s ridiculously simple to sign up, so simple that I did it, and am now MyMunster’s most clueless member.

One really cool element, and one that marks it as very different to other social networking sites, is the credits system. Members are awarded credits for their activities on the site, like uploading photos and adding friends. These credits can then be used to enter competitions for some excellent prizes, like Heineken Cup rugby tickets and entry to Munster rugby training sessions (where one could ogle Ronan O Gara. I’m just saying!). Not only this, but members can also purchase credits and the money spent goes towards developing the game in the province and fostering the next generation of Munster rugby players. I love this idea as it really illustrates Munster’s passion for and dedication to the sport as well as the fans’ sense of pride in their team.

It would be great to see a similar site for Leinster supporters. Social networking and the credits system could also be a great resource for regional GAA clubs (not that I know anything about GAA either..!)

Very cute. Very clever. Nice one Walter! We expect to see a few Tweeters proudly wearing their follower t-shirts at the Dublin Twestival!