I studied Picasso, ALOT at high school. I love his quotes as well. Here is a story from 37signals about Picasso.

Legend has it that Pablo Picasso was sketching in the park when a bold woman approached him.

“It’s you — Picasso, the great artist! Oh, you must sketch my portrait! I insist.”

So Picasso agreed to sketch her. After studying her for a moment, he used a single pencil stroke to create her portrait. He handed the women his work of art.

“It’s perfect!” she gushed. “You managed to capture my essence with one stroke, in one moment. Thank you! How much do I owe you?”

“Five thousand dollars,” the artist replied.

“B-b-but, what?” the woman sputtered. “How could you want so much money for this picture? It only took you a second to draw it!”

To which Picasso responded, “Madame, it took me my entire life.”

Myspace just announced a huge staff cutback. And they are getting their asses kicked by Facebook on the web.

I think they should focus on mobile and taking advantage of social network services.

The Facts

Facebook is a much better platform. To even get close to the Facebook platform would require a monster development job, and that’s just to match Facebook. I haven’t got involved in any mobile social networks yet and there is a huge market for this. Both Myspace and Facebook are bollocks on mobile phones.

What would I do

In Asia, they are mobile crazy. Socially they are far more developed with mobile than we are in the UK and the US. They take advantage of social networking services which hasn’t really been tapped into yet.

More an more social activity is happening on mobile, I think it might overtake the laptop, depending on mobile tech development, its certainly getting there.

There aren’t any great social networking tools that i have seen or used. The lucky boy or girl who nails it with a social network on mobile that combines geo-location with real life events, shopping, socialising and news will be on the right track.

Myspace could totally nail this, I don’t think they will though.

Looking to send out a newsletter, send your new blog posts to readers by email or set up an auto responder to new users?

You have to try Mailchimp. Let me take you through the genius inside it.

Design

Designing  is easy and you don’t have to be a designer or know how to code. They provide templates that are brilliant. It can scan your own site and match the theme of your site to your newsletter, magic!?

There is a ton of customisation going on in this app. You can customise different parts of the template, the header, main body and the footer. You can customise each stage of your sign up form, from the email addy, first name, last name to the thank you for signing up message, therefore adding a personal touch is easy and I love this. You can even design the sign up form to look like your site style!

They have a new feature in their lab called Pictaculous. You can take a picture of a cool colour and they will email you the hex colors, suggested color themes from Kuler and COLOURlovers, and attach an Adobe color palette file!!

Personalisation

A neat element to Mailchimp is the ability to easily add merge tags, if you don’t know what they are you can learn more here.  Basically, after someone signs up to your list with their full name, you can personalise a standard email with their name at the start, without having to type it yourself.

Stats

Other useful tools include being able to add Google Analytics and you can also track email open rates and see where people are clicking which helps to add more value next time.

API

You can use their API for several things:

With the List Management Functions, you can subscribe users to your lists, unsubscribe them, or even update their profiles from your own server. You can also get info about your lists, such as how many unsubscribes you have, and how many emails have been cleaned from your lists.

Mailchimp will allow you to create, update, and even reuse campaigns for what we hope is the ultimate flexibility in campaign management. Once you have them ready, we also have several functions to allow you to send your campaigns whenever you please.

With the Campaign Functions, you can grab all the stats for your campaigns (opens, clicks, etc) as well as bounces and unsubs (this can be really handy if you need to update your internal databases).

Lists

Mailchimp lets you add people and it manages the list for you. The coolest feature is the list segmentation, allowing you to send targeted, relevant email campaigns to sub-groups within your list. Your segmenting criteria can be based on demographics like ZIP code, gender, and job title. You can also group segments by behavioral data such as open-and-click habits.

Newsletters

I use Mailchimp for the Eventzi newsletter so that our super keen Eventzi users can get the newest information and tips. They deserve to be first because they trust us to send them content with value and they gave us their permission, i really appreciate that.

Recently, I met someone and exchanged cards with them. They added me to their list without asking me, that’s not cool. You wasted my time when I opened the email. If you agree with me that people should get permission before sending us information, you should read permisson marketing by Seth Godin.

Auto-responders

We will be using the auto-responder tool to automagically send a “welcome & get started” email to new users that have just signed up. I just finished the design and it kicks ass! Once it is set up, i can leave it and let it do its thing!

Blog by email

On the Eventzi Blog and soon to happen on this blog, you will see a little envelope. If you click on it you will be able to get new blog posts sent by email. This is a great tool and i trust Mailchimp to deliver it.

Pricing

You get 100 subscribers and 600 emails to send for free each month then you have to upgrade, either monthly or pay as you go. See the pricing here.

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I hope this helps, let me know what you think in the comments.

Ever wondered about Yoga? I’m fascinated about yoga, it helped Manchester United legend Ryan Giggs to overcome hamstring tears, pretty cool if you, like me, thought it was just a set of mad poses.

I went to the app store to check out what yoga apps they had. There were a few to choose from, but I never got to number 3, I quickly scanned the reviews then compared the top 2.

The app store has a problem and developers have a huge problem. If they aren’t recommended or at the top, how do they get their apps used?!

I think they should insert a genius bar for apps. Just after writing this I saw Techcrunch write about it too, which just highlights the problem. The thing that got me is that the app store is still pretty new and immature. What happens when 1 million apps are in the app store!?

What do you think?

Seth just posted this brilliant rant and it touched a nerve with me.

It brought back memories of when i was at University and hes bang on with what he is ranting about.

You have to buy books for each class that are like a slab of bullshit, they contain standard information about the topic and have the most boring case studies inside.

I asked my tutor why we had to buy these £50 marketing books and he said its because “everything you need for this class is in the book”. DUDE ITS COSTS 50 FUCKING POUNDS!

Can you imagine a marketer, a man or woman in a position of education, building a class around a standard book! Let me tell you what happens. Its creates boring classes that people don’t go to and students who end up being ok, good or drop-outs. Universities should be encouraging people to think differently and to be better than last years batch. The only thing that is worse than ok or good is accepting thats what you are.

I actually asked why there is nothing about Google in the book and why we arent being taught about them. He said “there are good examples in the book”. Tutor, you are lazy, boring and are letting yourself and your students down, id go as far as saying you are a thief.

In one class I had to create a report, based on a case study of Amazon from 10 years ago!! We had to create a marketing strategy for the company without using the past as a guide. Ok check list:

• Cant use any knowledge of Amazon from last 10 years.
• Have to create a strategy without using what they actually did, even if its what i think they should have done.
• They cant sell different media.
• They cant buy an offline business.

Surely the tutor could have created an up to date case study, its their job right?

Surely they could have taken the key notes for us, applied it to a modern business and charged us £1-5 pounds, saving us a fortune??

Another point about marketing books is that they don’t encourage originality. Thats the problem with the tutor, the author and the students. I didnt hear the words, “you have to be remarkable” at university.

Be remarkable, dont follow like sheep, do what others are afraid to do, try things and realise failing means you are closer to success, which is nice! Follow Seth Godin! His ideas about being remarkable are genius.

We had an interesting comment on a post i put together over at Eventzi. A top dude at an online event management tool tried to slaughter me publicly, claiming my post was “unalloyed plagiarism”.

To anyone who wonders what that means, technically he’s claiming its stolen, copied, pasted, then published word for word on the Eventzi Blog.

When I was at University, I was surrounded by serial copy and pasters, I know someone who got a top grade and a job at a top accounting firm on £35k per year. He didn’t know shit. That also scares me. I chose not to take content and throw it in as my own. Originality is my thing and i achieved a few awards, doing it my way!

I have a few thoughts on this.

First of all, grow a set. If you were that pissed off, email me and speak to me like an adult and have a conversation. Don’t leave a petty comment to try and kill my startup. I’m working hard to help event hosts and the name of the game for me, is to share great content and provide value. The company has a post about promoting events on Facebook and some ideas are similar. Popular website www.dictionary.com confirmed, that a similar idea, tip or advice isn’t plagiarism.

I update my posts at Eventzi every week, adding bits and pieces to make it clearer for international users and to make the translation clean and useful, there are only so many ways you can say, “get your friends to say they are attending your event even if they aren’t”. I think people should hustle and ask everyone and anyone to do this. Its not a secret.

I have hundreds of users who use Eventzi because its fresh, open and honest with great support. That is why that comment is still there and wont be deleted by us. Its a reminder of what not to do when other companies share ideas similar to ours.

I blog to help people in the events industry, i give advice to our users on how to use Social Networks, Search Engine Optimisation and Design. I use ideas that are shared by Seth Godin and tips I hear from Andrew Warner’s Mixergy interviews. I see what event companies do and how they do things differently, i use ideas from online companies, offline companies and share it. I even used an example of when i was younger and wanted my mates to all come out and play football.

I’m not shocked the link wasn’t to the company website. I’m not shocked there wasn’t a reply to the comment i left.

Lastly, its a shame because the company is very good and has helped a lot of users. I respect the founders a lot. What matters to me is my users. I care about their ability to be better event hosts by using our tools.

To all of you who have subscribed via RSS and email, I’m sorry for the lack of updates. I have been re-designing the blog and moving it to the self hosted version of Wordpress. By the way Wordpress 2.8 rocks.

Ok so here, you will get some new design work i have finished, web news and tips along with some cool tools to help you make your users brilliant!

Where have I been since April?

Eventzi launched and took over, i had to spend my time writing posts over there and really understanding what the modern event host is needing. I also worked on the designs and features for Eventzi V2, these new features will help our users kick butt!

About the new design

Its much more flexible and has SEO super powers!

I have bought and installed Thesis because it rocks. The Search Engine Optimization is powerful, its well worth the money! Get Thesis here.

I have added a few key plugins to optimise my blog:

Twitter is the most powerful tool in the world for a new business.

Here’s some resources on how to use Twitter:

Checkout http://hootsuite.com – This will let you manage all of twitter, twitter search, your messages, stats on how many clicks your tweet links get and allows you to autofollow people who follow you. Within the search section you can set up a keyword, say “eventzi” (blatent plug for my site) and see who is talking about you, then you can follow them and get involved in a conversation with them. It is the most valuable tool i’ve used so far.

On the Iphone, the best app is TwitterFon. You get to see message replies (@eventzi…), direct messages (DM) and you can search for keywords too, on your mobile. And obviously you can send out tweets.

An awesome help site is called http://www.twitip.com If youwant to learn even more about twitter, check that out.

To get more followes, here’s a mega tip – Learn how to use the retweet (RT) function. Why? Well if you expose other people/buinesses/tools you are adding value to their business and theres more chance they will return the favour and give you some value back by promoting you. Its works and its powerful.

Dont just talk about yourself all day, its boring and nobody cares.

Check out my page at http://twitter.com/eventzi and see the different ways i use it,

Go on, get stuck in.

I look at lots and lots of different web applications and pick little bits from them to create a new idea. I use go2web20.net mainly, its the best directory online and you can see lots of ideas.

However this is how i would build a new startup. Id pick out a tried and trusted business, improve on it and add features from another business.

So you might have an events listing site that can bring in information from blogs and twitter about that particularly event. Now you can see what people are saying about it. Wicked!!

New features that i will add to Eventzi are all based on proven ideas that can help event hosts sell more tickets!

Eventzi

We have officially launched Eventzi and I’m excited!! The last year has been insane but its all been worth it and i have some wonderful customers who the site will really help. We will build on this and launch some crazy features after we have a steady list of users.  Eventzi already has customers from over Europe and the US, its amazing!

Web Start-up E-Book

I’m going to be writing an e-book that’s sort of – Getting Real / Boostrappers Bible / How To – all in one. Im going to insert all the great content that people need to know if they want to start a web business.

Startup Wiki

I will be creating a Wiki that includes links and some great tools to help you as well as listing tons of free tools and people to follow, all broken down so its all simple.

Why?

I was given shocking advice from people who didn’t know how to setup a web business, but there was nobody else, so I stopped working on what has become Eventzi in 2006.

I kept reading about how i should move fast or be last. I couldn’t move fast, i didn’t have anyone or anything really. How can you move fast when you don’t know what to do or people to help you build something online. My first quote for Eventzi was £40′000, i spent less than 10% of that.

Its about time someone did this and worked hard to encourage people to go for it. Especially in Scotland.

This e-book collection thing I’m working on should seriously help anyone who is in similar shoes,