Picking a Company or Product Name

So, you have an idea for a business or product. How do you come up with a name? Here's a few tips.

1. Pick a word you like and look it up in a foreign language.

There are many online dictionaries for this. Look for something memorable, that has an obvious hook and no obvious pronunciation problems. Start with the basic principles you are after, get a thesaurus involved and get translating.

2. Try accessing the pantheon.

Have a look at www.godchecker.com, search for words that you like and find the name of some obscure God that matches the characteristic that you want. By way of example, Dubiaku, "The only mortal to outwit Death" ( although clearly that's a terrible name ).

3. Check the name.

For UK company names, always check Companies House ( or your local equivalent) . Names may be available but they may be dissolved and could have died because of debt reasons etc. Probably best to avoid those.

4. Check the domain.

Always check for the domains as soon as you have an idea, do a quick DNS lookup to see if it is registered, I always use a whois lookup (like www.dnsstuff.com). Don't check with a hosting company, that can lead to the domain getting squatted. No point having a cool name if you can't get the domain. As soon as you decide on a name, register at least the .com and .co.uk (or local equivalent) RIGHT AWAY!

5. Go mad.

The name doesn't have to make sense. In many ways memorable is better than appropriate e.g. Google, Orange. Although it doesn't always work ( Boo, Monday etc ). Crazy names can make for strong branding possibilities but you have to make sure that your target market can cope with that. It has to be said, the number of nonsense names available drops every day. Try to make sure the name is pronouncable.

6. Watch for double meanings.

Albatross could be a great name, a bird that stays flying for a long time, but it also hangs round your neck! :-) Also, make sure the name doesn't mean anything rude or inappropriate in any foreign language. Tomorrow the world! But not if your product name means 'jobby' in Korea.

Caution : Optimism ahead

It's good to be optimistic. And I love people with great drive and belief. But there is, unfortunately, a limit on how far a wave of optimism can take you up the beach before sucking you back into the shark-infested depths.

My problem, as has often been pointed out, is that I see reasons why things might be difficult far brighter than why they might work. That's not to say I can't be optimistic, positive even, but I tend not to get carried into shore by the wave alone. I prefer a Mulberry.

I've seen a number of situations where optimism has got the better of people.

It's tricky, but there is a balance. Yes, of course, be optimistic, believe. But plan on the basis that things won't go quite as well as you'd hoped. It is catastrophically easy to move forward on the basis of assumed success. I've been playing chess like that for years. Attack, attack, oops*. This is not, I stress not, negative. "What ifs" are a great exercise to go through. If you need to have multiple plans, then do that. Don't have a single plan that goes a bit Arnhem at the end if you don't get your way. Planning for worst cases is not negative or any admission of presumed defeat. It just makes sense. At no point during the war (or since) did anyone accuse Churchill of negativity despite extensive plans being drawn up on what would be done in the event of a German invasion. It's just common sense/realism/preparedness. Not negativity.

Those who cry "negativity" are generally objecting to their bubble of Walter Mitty-esque optimism being burst. Hands off ears. Listen. There will be a way.

There is always a way.

This post has been brought to you by Wikipedia and World War Two.

* - those interested in miltary history may also like to read the story of the Battle of Midway, a more finely balanced positive versus negative strategy you won't see... a great lesson in the role of luck too. I'll try not to mention Apollo 8 again.

How to Write Better PowerPoint Presentations

Everyone moans about it, but you can't get away from it. People use PowerPoint a lot. And, for the most part, the issue isn't with the tool itself. It is far more to do with how people use it. I've been suffering this for too many years now, so this is a small attempt to make my life better my hopefully sitting through a few less dismal presentation attempts.

Don’t get too carried away. This isn’t the panacea you seek. This post isn't called "How to Write Good PowerPoint Presentations" deliberately. I can't make them good. Only you can.

It won’t ensure you have good content and it won’t make you a good presenter, but it will get you started on the right road and it will definitely stop you inflicting ‘death by bullet point’ pain on your next audience. And it might help you make them listen.

OK, first some basics, paradoxically, in bullet-point form.

• Less is more
• Only ever use 1 transition type, although no transitions at all is probably still better
• NEVER (and I can't stress this enough) use sound effects
• Clipart sucks, don’t use it
• If you are nervous and have to read, read off paper NOT the slides
• Base your presentation on how long you have got, not how much you think you have to say
• Good coverage of the important stuff is better than bad coverage of everything
• PowerPoint can do lots of things, just because you’ve found some of them out, doesn’t mean you have to use them all.
• Always allow questions during the presentation, don’t shut people off by doing the “ask me at the end” routine. If you're not good enough to cope with interruptions then, well, you know...

Listening Not Reading
Why are you doing a presentation? Whatever it is for, you are probably trying to communicate something. You want your audience to learn something, remember something; go away educated, opinion changed. To do this you need to engage them, they need to be listening to you. What you don’t want them to do is read. Your slides are not there for them to read while you idly burble to the side, clicking in time with the nods. If the audience is reading ahead of you then they’re not listening to you. Too many words on your slides gives too much opportunity to read. Less text, more listening. The slides are a backdrop, an aid to what you are saying.

In particular, try not to hand out your slides before you present. Your audience will read very far ahead and be further disengaged when you speak.

Strong Images
I’ve already said that clipart is bad. But use of good quality images is strongly encouraged. This is not as difficult as it may seem. There are many great resources of FREE high quality imagery online. All you need to do is to think conceptually and translate what you are trying to say into a suitable image. Many images are keyworded on concepts, so you just need to search for ‘strong’, ‘weak’, ‘fast’. It’s easy because the photographer will already have dome the concept -> image mapping for you.

High quality imaging does two key things. It makes the presentation engaging and visually interesting. It also transfers some of the feeling of quality across to what you are saying. This is the flip-side of sad old clip-art making you look cheap and unimaginative. Maybe you are, but you maybe want to hide that.

For free stock images have a look at: www.morguefile.com, www.sxc.hu.

One word of warning, these images can be quite large when downloaded so don’t go embedding them full size into the presentation thinking that just because they are resized on the screen they are small on disk. Get good with resizing but don’t go crazy and ruin the quality by over compressing. Resize to around 300-400 pixels wide. That’s plenty. Don’t email 10Mb files to people and blame me afterward.

The same applies to screenshots. Don't Alt-Print Scrn and then Ctrl-V into Powerpoint. They are raw bitmaps, they are HUGE. People who do that are muppets. You hear me? Muppets. Stop it. Now. If you can't "Save As..." JPG then ask your kids. They like The Muppets too.

Humour
Humour is a good thing, but only if you can carry it off, you want the audience to be laughing with you, not at you. Before you think about using humour, ask a close friend or confidante a simple question "Am I funny? No, seriously, am I?" (beware of "Funny how? Funny like a clown?" responses). You need to be sure of the answer. Lots of people think they are funny and they are simply just painful. Self-awareness if a powerful aide.

Template
Use a template that constrains the available space, this will stop you adding too many words without you noticing. This can be acheived by having a thick bold header or wide left margin. Make the design clean and unfussy. You don't need the date in the footer. Most people you are presenting to know what day it is. Don't put your name on every slide, you'd like to think people might know who you are.

Two Versions
If you want to be doing this right you should probably think about two versions of the presentation. One to present with and one to print out for your audience. Don't constrain the display version of your presentation using that the excuse you have to print it out too. If you get the 5 stage process right, your print version is simply the intermediate phase before you fluff. So, there isn't any additional work with providing two alternate versions of the same presentation.

Scott’s Simple Five Stage Process

Plan -> Frame -> Splurge -> Bullet -> Fluff

1 Plan
What are you trying to achieve? Before you begin, ask yourself this simple question “what am I trying to achieve from this presentation?” or complete the sentence “at this end of the presentation I would like to the audience to…”

2 Frame
Write a heading for each slide you want to have. Make it flow. Have a beginning, middle and end. You are telling a story.

You should know roughly how long you have. So decide on the time you have per slide. You need to factor in time for discussion/questions as you go.

Very quickly, create a slide for each of your table of contents, putting the heading at the top of each.

3 Splurge
On each slide, type in everything you might want to say in association with that slide. Just type it in as you might say it, although if you keep the prose good at this stage it will be useful.

4 Bullet
Go through the presentation, copy your text into the notes section and summarise each slide content as a set of bullets. (You could type the original text straight into the notes section if you prefer).

5 Fluff
Now you have to make a final pass through the presentation removing all the bullets and replacing them with something more interesting.

How, you may ask, do you do that?

Let's look at the structure of a standard presentation. Each slide is a topic or section of information. Bullets, usually, breakdown this topic into smaller sections defining the sequence of information. The sequence/flow of the information is the important thing - not how it is presented.

Here are a couple of alternative strategies:

Visual Bullets
Just because we are aiming to avoid bullets, it doesn't mean that we can't use the basic concept and make it look differently. Let's take a slide that would normally have 7 bullets. This can be alternatively arranged to look like this:

And you can bring this to life by making each block appear/slide-in/whatever.

Hexagons are just one way to do this, take yourself back to school and work out other nice patterns. Get a dictionary and look up the word 'tessellate'.

Multiple Slides
For some unknown reason people tend to cram lots of stuff onto one slide rather than use more slides. This is perhaps related to saving paper on the printed version. But if we're going to have two versions, this limitation is pointless. So, imagine our same 7 bullets in a topic. Why not an intro slide with the topic on it and then a slide each for each bullet? Each slide could have a striking image and very few words on it. OK, so a 10 slide presentation with 5 bullets per slide becomes a 50 slide presentation, but so what? Do you get charged by the slide? No. This doesn't change the overall length ot the speed at which you present, it just gives you a better, more engaging, layout.

Warning
If you get good at this process you could find yourself in demand. People will turn up with many a dog's dinner and ask you to "Do your thing". You might like this at first. But ultimately it will become a pain. Just give people one of your existing presentations and tell them to copy it. Getting good at Powerpoint is one thing, spending all your time doing it is a cross no one should have to bear.

Conclusion
I could go on. But there is surely only so much someone will read on a subject as dull as Powerpoint. And yet, I bet right now, all over the world 10's of thousands are standing up in front of several tired people with bullets/clip-art, with "introduction -> problem -> solution -> conclusion -> thank you" drivel. It can be so much more than that.

Imagine yourself strutting in front of this wowing people as you move from one jaw-dropping slide to the next screaming "Are you not entertained?" like Russell Crowe in Gladiator. No? Well, how about people just stay awake or to the end? That'll do.

PhotoBlog : London

Been a while since I've done a photo blog post.
So, I went to London for 6 days. It was disappointingly very dull in the weather department. Still, I had set myself a single goal of doing some night shooting as more practice before the forthcoming Sucata Split Run and, in particular, getting a night shot of Tower Bridge. Which I did. So that was good. I also wanted to try blogging images straight from Picasa. Which I did. So that was good.


Tower Bridge by Night

Belsize Park Tube Platform

A Shop Window on Haverstock Hill

Phone Boxes at the bottom of South End Road

Floccinaucinihilipilification

Who knew I'd find a valid(ish) reason to use that word. Hopefully I've not stretched it too far.*

For a good few years now I've been giving most of photography away online for free. I now have well over 300K downloads from two sites alone. People often say to me "you should charge for those, if you got £1 a time..." etc. And my answer is always the same. They're not 'worth' anything.

Which is a poor answer. They are 'worth' something, just not money. I dabbled in selling images on stock sites and you find that it is a whole different (and challenging) world. To even qualify for sale images have to be of a very high standard and, to get noticed at all, you need to upload a ferocious amount. Filed under "too much effort - not enough time".

So, floccinaucinihilipilification: according to the Oxford English Dictionary "the action or habit of estimating as worthless".

There are countless free resources on the web. Some aim to monetize at some point in the future, but most are simply provided entirely free with no intentions of future wealth.

No obvious value can be put on these. But, to some extent, they fuel a large part of the life of the Internet. Look at it the other way, what if they didn't exist? What would happen if no one gave away their photos/services/information for free.

As as example, check out these three searches. These show where my photos have been used on three large content websites:

• associatedcontent.com
• about.com
• suite101.com

This is just a small glimpse. Free stuff permeates the entire Internet in this way.

What would these writers have done without access to free content? Would they have bought images? I get many emails of thanks for providing good quality free photos. Many people say that their work would be difficult/impossible without such resources. Whether it is freelance writers/designers, charities etc they all need free resources to function.

Another example is the LazyWebTools page refresher, something I built for myself to keep up with football scores. I put it online for free and am amazed at how much it is used. Before long it was driving insurance sales, being used in a Florida newsroom and used extensively by the Washington DC fire department (to name but a few, we'll ignore the hip-hop gang DoS attacks).

So, can we estimate the value of these 'worthless' resources? Do we have to? Can we assume that these free resources will always exist and therefore considering their worth is pointless?

I have a feeling that people will always be happy to exist in the underworld below the paid resources. Whatever the individual motivation, the free internet will always exist and therefore questions about its value are moot. But it's worth should not be underestimated. I'm sure you could pay an analyst some money to work out the value to the various industries. I doubt they ever do much for free.

In case you're wondering why I give away stuff for free. I've maybe got a better answer (although it may not make sense to everyone). Soon to appear on a T-Shirt:

"Will work for cheapies"

* look out for next week's post on antidisestablishmentarianism

Knicky Knicky Nine Doors

I was awoken at 1am by my doorbell. Except that it wasn't my doorbell. It was one the noises my doorbell can make, just not the usual one. I've seen this before, you can make my doorbell go off with the remote for the car. Such is the way with wireless doorbells.

As I was failing to get back to sleep, made me think that this opens up whole new possibilities for a modern-day version of "tap door run".*

I don't think it could take much to rig something up so you could drive along a row of houses and ring any wireless doorbells from a passing car. Children of c21, I challenge you!**

Obviously, being able to activate the bell remotely opens up all new world of comedic possibility. I urge you to read "La Cantatrice Chauve" - you'll see what I mean.***

* or whatever they called it in your location/era - that's what it was called in Wester Hailes in the 70's - of course, I never partook... I just heard about it. It seems to be called Knock Knock Ginger in some places... how odd. Or the even more bizarre "Knicky Knicky Nine Doors". I prefer our more literal name.
** you'll need to find an irresponsible adult to drive the car, obviously.
*** maybe