James Skinner
Tuesday 19 July 2011
Although personally I’ve a mere 6 years under my belt at SiftGroups, we’re approaching our 15th anniversary this summer. The foundation of the business was around bringing together groups of people with a common purpose. Starting with accountants, we soon added HR professionals, training experts, CRM buyers and SMEs to our portfolio of groups, long before people talked of social networking, connecting with people or engaging in collaborative activities online.
Social media, then. Today’s...
Friday 1 July 2011
You won’t have escaped the media coverage of Google Plus that’s been floating around over the last few days. Rather than regurgitate it here, I thought about one of the questions I’d read elsewhere:
“Would you actually leave Facebook?”
Part of the draw of Facebook for me is the ubiquity. The sheer momentum of the thing means its easy to assume that any given person is on there somewhere, waiting for you to make contact, renew their acquaintance, send a like their way. Closer inspection,...
Monday 21 February 2011
Before joining SiftGroups in 2005, James worked with technical documentation and data in the aerospace and manufacturing industry dealing with the online delivery of huge volumes of critical information. James joined SiftGroups as a pre-sales consultant before taking on responsibility for the Professional Services team in 2007 and the wider SiftGroups business unit in 2009.
Thursday 11 March 2010
Give us the widgets
“We’ve got to have a Twitter widget” – one of the key phrases used by web teams in 2008 and 2009. Prior to that, the best thing since sliced bread was having a Google map on your Contact Us page, or perhaps a nice AJAX-powered dynamic postcode lookup gadget. The truth is, some popular new technical tools are here to stay and others will fall by the wayside. The challenge for any organisation looking to take advantage of these emerging tools is the sheer pace at which they...
Wednesday 2 December 2009
I'm often asked how the Sift business came about, sometimes by clients and regularly by colleagues. So I asked our CEO, Ben Heald, to give me the details and I'm pleased to share them here.
The Sift Story
"The origins of Sift lie in the two key founders Andrew Gray and I. Andrew was running CompuServe in the UK, whilst I’d trained as an accountant with KPMG and had entrepreneurial leanings. I knew Andrew as I’d studied psychology at Bristol University with his wife Katharine, and...
Monday 30 November 2009
Back in August, as his News Corporation company reported huge financial losses, media mogul Rupert Murdoch announced his bold strategy for shaking up the newspaper industry: charging for content. It wasn't a new idea, of course; businesses of all types have tried charging internet users in many ways for many products, some sucessfully and others not.
Today, Johnston Press has become one of the first to adopt Murdoch's proposed charging strategy for a number of its local titles. One...
Tuesday 24 November 2009
Anthony Lau, founder of Cyclehoop, emerged victorious after presenting to a panel of top class business talent and an audience of 150 entrepreneurs at the exciting conclusion to The Pitch 2009, having dealt with a grilling from judges Tim Campbell, winner of The Apprentice 2005; former TV Dragon Doug Richard; Pimlico Plumbers founder Charlie Mullins and Helen Stevenson, chief marketing officer at Yell.
Anthony's prize, a total of £50,000 worth of business support, includes strategic...
Thursday 5 November 2009
Perhaps inspired by the adoption of Drupal by The White House, the Tories this week have announced a lean, mean approach to Government IT projects should they come to power, and will place emphasis on smaller, open-source, user-friendly projects in an attempt to chop some £4bn from current IT budgets.
Two thoughts on this:
1. Open Source doesn't mean lower implementation costs
Well, not necessarily, anyway. The Conservative Technology Forum issued a warning to consultancies and major...