A scalable business or activity refers to one that requires little additional effort or cost for each unit of output it generates. Example: Making software is a scalable business (building it requires lots of effort up front; distributing a million copies over the Web is relatively painless). Venture capitalists crave scalable businesses. They crave them so much that the term now has become more annoying than the media’s obsession with Lindsay Lohan.

 

From Forbes

http://www.cs.ucl.ac.uk/events/events_listing/london_hopper_2013/

I’ll be talking about ‘Being Passionate and Working on Things that Matter’.

In addition, I was recently featured as part of an EU project called 100 Mirrors, highlighting some of the top 100 ‘enterprising’ women in Europe:

http://www.100mirrors.eu/portal/en/100-women/by-country/uk/item/31-kate-ho.html

The data was compiled in a few ways:

• The demographic data came from Yahoo Clues using the search term ‘shakespeare’
• The film adaptations number came from Listal.com using the phrase ‘shakespeare adaptations’
• The popular plays data was acquired through a php script co-written by myself and a colleague (Chris Reilly). It cycled through all the play’s names and grabbed the number of overall results from Google
• The phrase completion data was a combination of playing with Google Autocomplete and Google search results

The hack itself took just under 5 hours. At least 1 of those hours was trying to work out what infographic package to use (I’ve never used any before) and understanding what makes an interesting infographic.

• working on something which I care about
• working with people that I trust
• having great friends and family that are incredibly supportive
• achieving my childhood ambition
• get to play games and call it ‘research’

Interface3 has just crossed another milestone. Through these last few years, we’ve worked hard and kept going. I aim to have the same commitment and standards for the next few years. 

Find your company’s One Thing. 

Your One Thing falls at the intersection of 3 truths:

The one thing you and your team are most passionate about.

The one thing you and your team have a realistic shot at being the best in the world at.

A huge untapped market opportunity.

Save the date!

Ianthe and Mark’s wedding won’t be until Summer 2013 (it seems so long away!) and it since it’s going to my first wedding as a bridesmaid! Congratulations to them both!

• Cross Creative San Francisco Trip
• Digital Media and Learning (DML)
• Games Developers Conference (GDC)
• South by South West (SxSW)

It was probably one of most memorable trips of my entire life.

There are some great photos by Carole Dunlop from TRC on the XCreative trip.

I also came back with a ton of ideas for Interface3. All this got pulled into a strategic plan that we’re adding to, modifying and executing. Watch out for news!

This ‘thing’ was created because I would say ‘yes’ too much – to a fixing something, or to buying something or to organising some event. I’m just really bad for agreeing to do stuff.

So for this week, unless its to do with business, its going to be a ‘no’. Gulit-free no …

I made this:

http://www.interface3.com/EIF/

Its basically a mashup between Microsoft Pivot and the Edinburgh International Festival Programme.

Here is an account of why I did this:

For me, I really wanted to do something that could be used for this year’s festival. And since the only programme for 2011 available was Edinburgh International Festival, and it was complete (and in an excel spreadsheet), I decided to try and get it tidied up and visualise the whole programme in a much more interactive way in Microsoft Pivot.

Since I needed to use a windows machine and my little netbook wasn’t quite big enough for me, I moved my desktop machine to have a little retro 1990s-style portable office.

It took a little while because there just needed to be some thinking behind how best to present the data and which categories to pick. Once done, it wasn’t too bad. (And because the hack was relatively straightforward, I did actually get some decent sleep in).

The result is a silverlight app that allows you to sort via pictures. Best thing is, its ready to be deployed on the web, meaning that anyone who wants to visit the EIF this year, can look through shows on the web. I just need to find somewhere to host it.