Adrian Melrose

Many of you will have watched me launch AoB at the end of last year whilst at Dreamforce in San Francisco. Shortly thereafter, it dawned on me that I desperately needed a talented team to help me implement the ideas and solutions that I develop for clients. The overall team needed to offer “a formidable blend of business strategy, creative flair and programming expertise”.

Several months later, I’m extremely proud and excited to announce the launch of The First 65.

My co-founders are James Kindred and Chris Waters of Condiment fame. I have so enjoyed working with James and Chris (as a client of Condiment’s) and have been immensely impressed by their grasp of where the web is taking us. It was a natural extension to joint-venture with them on The First 65.

To complement James and Chris’ extreme creativity, vision, client service and down-to-earth approach we’re wildly excited to announce the appointment of three superbly talented people. Tom Crinson, Nina Christensen and Anders Fisher all of whom join Chris, James and I today. We’ll be working out of the Condiment offices in Ipswich. The First 65 will operate alongside Condiment who will continue to operate as a separate brand and business. Obviously the skills of the two businesses will intersect across many future clients.

Tom will head up the development team - we’ve rescued Tom from the toils of a London commute! Tom runs the Ipswich Ruby Group and there’s no surprise that The First 65 have chosen Ruby as our development cornerstone - we are on the road to becoming a Force.com accredited development house. (For an explanation on the what and why of Force.com, please read my AoB post here.) Tom is joined by a right hand man, Anders, an equally talented developer.

Nina is no stranger to the Suffolk Digital scene too and she will assume the responsibility of account, product and project management. Nina joins us from Notcutts, where she was the E-Commerce manager. Before that, Nina was a client account manager at Jamie Riddell’s agency Cheeze.

We’re not launching with anything traditional, I’m afraid: no glitsy website etc. We’ve worked hard on our elevator pitch though and we have a place to announce things (blog.first65.com)  and naturally we have a twitter account (twitter.com/First65) and two facebook pages facebook.com/First65 and facebook.com/fcommerce , so please follow us there. You’ll get to know what we do when we start showcasing our client and product work (think 37signals) . Right now we’re noses down working for some really exciting brands - we’ll let you know when we’ve got something to show you!

A quick post from my hotel room in San Francisco. I am a delegate at Dreamforce. Right now I should be putting together a post for AoB’s blog on what I learnt yesterday on day 2 but there’s too much to distill! It will have to wait until I can digest it all. There’s a lot of disruption happening in the Cloud and the scale of the event stands testimony to its adoption worldwide. (there are 30,000 delegates here this week)

In the meantime I thought I’d share this photo with you! Last night we were privileged to see the great Stevie Wonder in concert joined by the Black Eyed Peas Will.I.Am. Something I will always remember.

Tonight, President Bill Clinton speaks to us in is keynote and then there’s Marc Benioff to look forward to this morning - he’s announcing two new clouds in the Salesforce.com cloud suite. You can register to watch the keynotes live at See you all later!

Do yourself a favour and please watch just the first 4 minutes of this and then read what I have to say about Digital Tomorrow Today’s Course that I am attending.



The YouTube above I saw live a few weeks back at the jam packed Royal Fesitival Hall. Benioff (Salesforce.com’s CEO) asked us whether there was any reason why Software for the Enterprise shouldn’t be more like Facebook.

What staggered me is the statistic he opened with:

”To reach 50 million users:

Radio took 38 years;

TV took 13 years

Internet took 4 years

Facebook did it in 5 months. “

Those that follow me on twitter will have seen the pleasure I have had ditching O2 and moving my iPhone to Vodafone. The difference has been monumental and not only is the signal better in Suffolk but my day in London last week proved the same.



Because we live on a farm in a house with thick oak beams, the signal can be patchy indoors so I excitedly purchased a SureSignal box from Vodafone. It plugs into a broadband router and transmits an awesomely strong 3G signal. It worked first time after setting it up online: a process requiring your postcode and mobile phone number.  I complimented @vodafoneuk in this tweet

But I had spoken to soon…When I started playing with my iPhone’s location based services whilst the phone was picking up the SureSignal at home, Googlemaps told me I was in Hammersmith when I was actually in Woodbridge, Suffolk (100 miles apart!). Then I moved onto my Iphone foursquare app and first checked into the Fulham Palace Garden Centre (see left pane of above screenshot), then I unplugged my SureSignal box and rebooted it. Less than a minute later, foursquare and my iphone (corroborated by googlemaps) told me I was in Islington, London and that’s when I checked into the Scolt Head Pub, a minute later. Then feeling spooked (because co-incidentally we actually used to live at the corner of de Beauvoir road), I then unplugged the SureSignal box and was relieved to find that my iPhone located me back at home in Woodbridge allowing me to check into Seckford Hall.

The only possible explanation: I recall the iPhone 2G used information from GSM base stations to define approximate location (through a triangulation process) But i thought this was a workaround until a GPS chip was intalled into the iPhone 3G. Even if this is the case, I would have thought that when the Vodafone SureSignal install procedure asked for the location postcode it may have been to overcome this very problem. I’d be interested in any Android Vodafone users letting us know their experience to work out whether this is a SureSignal problem unique to iPhone.

Is this bug that important? Firstly, isn’t it ironic that Vodafone’s SureSignal (clearly a revolutionary differentiator)  flies in the face of its own recent hook-up with foursquare. Vodafone is aware the issue (According to this forum post), and is working to fix this bug, but, in the meantime,  it will cause a lot of confusion and frustration. The provision of location based services are on the increase. If you read the forum post, Vodafone doesn’t think its a major problem, but the customer points out that the weather forecast his iPhone serves-up is inaccurate by 150 miles. I geotag my tweets and now that my wife is on twitter I’d hate her to think I’m somewhere I’m not!

I’ll bring this post to @vodafoneuk’s attention in the morning and see what the response is.

Update 1 - Thanks to James Hargrave (see his comment below) after I tweeted for help (don’t you love twitter?!)  he’s not experiencing the same issue with SureSignal on his iPhone or Android. This may be due to the fact that he has listed his home access points on http://www.skyhookwireless.com/ -  (which may be a workaround for me, until Vodafone cures the bug). More testing today and I’ll update this post.