I have a trek bike - a 4200 or something like that. It has a drum brake on the back wheel which has been getting more spongy and less effective. Almost to the point of being useless and given the state of my front brake pads, it’s something I had put on my list of things to fix. I hate that list.

Being a good citizen and signed-up member of the movement towards self-sustainability, I cycle to work and on Friday I went over to my bike to ride home and found that it had been tampered with.

The back brake had been adjusted. And suddenly it worked perfectly again.

I was, as you may imagine, rather surprised by this. And during my cycle home into the setting sun, I had a smile on my face and I secretly thanked my anonymous and selfless bike fixer.

Thank you whoever you are.

Filed under: Public Relations by Giles Palmer

I have mixed feelings about Google. They have made billions of people’s lives easier with their search engine and they truly are an innovative company which is just so impressive for such a big organisation. On the downside, their business model works as a network effect (many searchers=more ad potential = more advertisers) so now they have critical mass, and an amazing brand to go with it, it’s going to be extremely difficult for others, both big and small to get a foot into the online information business, which in the long run is a bad thing.

On the whole though for me the name Google is bathed in an overall sense of awe. When they launch a new product, they just do such a damn good job. And this is a company that is just over 10 years old. It’s not as if we are talking about decades of corporate learning here, unlike other super performing organisation like say Toyota or Apple.

So to Chrome - their new browser. Another amazing entrance from Google. Lovely and clean. It barely takes up any screen real estate, and there are some other nice design touches like the animations on file downloading and the incognito guy. BUT the best part about it for me and in particular for Brandwatch is it’s so goddamn fast. We did some side by side tests with IE7 and Firefox3 and Chrome is 50% faster at loading our app than either of the others. And 50 is a lot of %s.

The reason, it appears, is how Chrome deals with Javascript. We use a lot of Javascript in our UI to make it as nice to use as possible and firefox in particular is not that fast at rendering it. Chrome is. It’s my new browser of choice. Google has done it again - horray! boo! horray!!

Filed under: Browsers, Search, Software development by Giles Palmer

One piece of work we did for the latest release of Brandwatch was to add a ‘normalise’ option to our graphs. It was at times difficult to know, by looking at a graph, which variations in a brand’s number of mentions (or in its sentiment) where really meaningful. Quite often variations may be unrelated to the brand: it may be that more posts in general were produced on that day, or that our spider crawled better, etc. So when graphing several brands, it made sense to correlate the brands’ statistics in order to infer which variations were really important - which is roughly what normalisation does.
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Filed under: Research by Fabrice Retkowsky

We are releasing version 3.7 of Brandwatch this week. In fact we release new functionality and enhancements every other week, as part of minor releases. But this week’s update wraps up nicely the last four month’s work - and it is a nice time to look back and see the changes Brandwatch has been through.
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Filed under: Brand Matching, Quality, Research, Software development, Technology by Fabrice Retkowsky