Online Pawn Broker – Borro

Has the bank refused you for a credit card? Can’t get someone to tide you over until payday? Find it really difficult to walk into a pawn brokers in case someone spots you? Well this might be a great way of getting cash now and worrying about how you’ll pay it back, if at all, later.

The site launched back last year and offers short term personal loans with a valuable item held as a guarantee. Gold, jewellery, even cars with a resale value over £25,000 are all acceptable pawning items. The item is checked into Borro’s site and valued. A courrier comes to collect it and then on receipt and accurate valuation, Borro dumps 40% of the object’s resale value into your bank account. Should they take the plunge, the borrower couriers their item to Borro, receiving their loan via bank transfer or postal order. The interest rate is “4% simple interest per month” (a whopping 53.8%APR), and for loans of less than £1000 charges are 6% “simple interest per month” (an eye watering 85.0%APR) but you are expected to pay the loan back in 6 months to get your item back, so it would be unfair to compare this to a longer term method of lending, such as a bank loan. Unless you fail to pay, that is!

This sitebrings a  shady and poorly marketed industry into a more modern and acceptable arena. It will be interesting to see at this time of credit crisis crunching capers whether it becomes a viable method to borrow over a short term.

Source: Borro

Brilliant Flickr Tool

I love it when I find things like this. The Multicolr Search Lab allows you filter images from Flickr that have a Creative Commons license by the domiant colours. I’ve used tools like this before where you can pick one colour but this one lets you pick up to 10! Arghh I am in love. At least for the next day or two until I get bored.

Aside from being available for Flickr, it’s also available for Alamy stock phototgraphy.

AOL’s probably going to sell Bebo

I’m not really that surprised though.

Design Student? Run run as fast as you can!

As the recession bites it seems that senior industry figures who have experienced working through a recession, unlike anyone born in the late 70s or 80s, are willing to dispense lots of advice. The latest bit? If you’re a design student you’re wasting your time as there aren’t enough jobs.

Ian Cochrane, managing director of management consultancy Ticegroup, is quoted in Design Week as saying “‘Look for jobs in industries that have vacancies – I mean, if you want to design restaurants, it is good to have worked in one or two”. I have to admit this made me smirk, I used to be aghast at the quality of candidates we’d receive CVs from directly or, worse still, from recruitment agencies.

Many of the design candidates I see for Acknowledgement come out of university with a portfolio that would put GCSE students to shame and a CV with more spelling and gramatical mistakes than this blog (and that’s saying something!)

They don’t spend time researching our company, the clients we work with or have a critical view of our past work. In addition many couldn’t effectively communicate their own creative process. What many of them do for three years, or more, at University baffles me (but doesn’t keep me awake at night).

Occasionally you’d come across gems: they we the polor oppositie of everything above and seemed to have a passion for doing a great job. We would hire those ones, or at least try to as they’d also get snapped up by the competition.

So I think it’s very wise to advise design students, as Cochrane has, to seek alternative routes to employment but what about those currently studying a design course with their sights set on working for a digital agency? I think there is still a market out there for great digital talent and here are my (non-designer) tips for standing out:

• Be a good designer. Sounds daft but if you can’t create digital media akin to the stuff you see major brands turning out then maybe this isn’t your industry!
• Have an online portfolio that demonstrates you understand the full breadth of digital work. So aside from webpage designs, include banners, widgets, sites that are focused around typography, email designs, ecommerce designs, interstitial pages, rollovers, video players.. anything that goes beyond just a website/banner design will stand out.
• Your portfolio should contain lots of real world brands even if you haven’t actually worked on them.
• Show you can use Flash and also have a good understanding of ActionScript – you wouldn’t believe how much more desirable you become
• Have a critical view on digital design. Be prepared to criqitue the work of others constructivly and suggest how you would make improvements for the benefit of the client and end user. It’s often easy to forget that as a digital designer you’re working to please three groups: the place you work, the business that’s appointed them and the end users of said business.
• Become immersed in social media: twitter, myspace, linkedin, last,fm.. any of it. Use it often, do it well. Make it part of your portfolio. Try to use the same username across everything you want an employer to find but at the same time, watch out for those pics of you trashed at a friend’s house part on flickr also with the same username!
• Make sure your spelling is perfect. So many design student CVs I’ve reviewed have spelling mistakes so those who can spell, use apostrophies and know the difference between ‘your’ and ‘you’re’ really stand out!
• Ask for feedback if you get turned away and tell them you want some honesty. Usually people I’ve turned away never ask why but when they do I try to be as constructive as possible. I imagine many other people would do the same.

I can’t draw for toffee and I’ve never opened an adobe application apart from PDF viewer. I can, however, count on one hand the number of entry level digital designers who’ve done just half of the above. They really do stand out!

Anyway, careers advice over. I’m off to get myself a geography tecacher styled cardigan.

Caffine Packed Crisps

Isn’t this world caffined-up enough? Daily I see huge queues outside places like Starbucks and little coffee shops of people desperate for their morning fix.

“I can’t operate if I don’t have my coffee”, “I don’t wake up until I have my coffee”, “Without coffee I don’t function”. Sorry but I think it’s all bollocks but then I don’t drink hot drinks so don’t buy into this mentality. And don’t then get me started on the coffee purists. Is instant coffee REALLY that different from stuff you pay three quid for at a chain? I’m yet to be convinced.

Anyway, this product from Japan (where else) comes from Frito Lay, the international version of our Walkers crisps. These corn crisps come in two – interesting – flavours, Caramel Macchiatto and Green Tea Latte. Each pack rams the equivalent of two cups of coffee’s worth of caffeine. Kind of put a bag of Cheese & Onion to shame, don’t they?

Source: Japan Frito-Lay

Facebook & chums beat porn in the UK

Old news, as apparently the BBC covered this last week, but still it’s worth mentioning as it’s gone against a trend that I have grown up with: the most popular stuff on the internet is porn.

Hitwise reported something that in the UK social networking websites are now more popular than adult sites. It adds this happened in the US mid-2007 but since then there hasnn’t been a clear and outright leader.

It’s quite interesting to see that as we start to embrace the internet as a daily part of our lives, rather than a source of.. ahem.. entertainment or something we use at work, how the online norms I’ve lived with in the past 15 years are now being challenged.

Source: hitwise

France gifts every 18 year old with a newspaper subscription

Turning 18 in the UK means you can now legally do a lot of the stuff you’ve been doing since you were 12 (drinking, smoking, watching dirty films, etc) but France are going to mark this milestone with something a little more special, a newspaper subscription. Aside from this being a nice, if novel, gift from President Sarkozy, it’s also something that’s being put in place by the state to ensure the longevity of the press industry.

The majority of people turning 18 in western Europe will have grown up with the internet being a significant part of their daily lives so this feels a little like the state trying to get people to watch black and white TVs when there really isn’t any need. Especially as I assume most French newspapers will be online. I started to think this level of protectionism was silly and unnecessary, then I remembered RBS and Lloyds bank!

Source: Google

Deborah Meaden on Twitter having a go at Alistair Darling?

Something Tom showed me today which really made me chuckle. Hee hee har har type stuff. Apparently Deborah Meaden of Dragons Den fame is on Twitter. So is Alistair Darling. And it appears they don’t really get on…

@deborahmeaden Debs – Word to the wise, careful what you say about Sterling as the anti-terror bills are pretty wide-ranging if you get me
@AlistairDarling Alistair, I’m recession proof so no need worry about me.
@deborahmeaden If you say so.. You’re shorting Sterling? A contrarian indicator IMO. You know what they said about the shoe shine boy
@AlistairDarling Alistar, please don’t lecture me on business. I have done very well on shorting sterling, next you say buy blue chips.
@deborahmeaden Whatever babe I did try to warn you. Jack wants you to pop into the Ministry of Free Thinking tomorrow for ‘re-education’.
@AlistairDarling Alistair,please treat me with respect my name is not “Babe” Address me properly or not at all.

I’m tempted to ask an ex-colleague who happens to be Deborah sister if this twitter is the real deal but it’s blatently not, right?

Internet Population Is 1 Billion. Crikey!

Comscore have reported that there are now 1 billion people online. It also looks like the UK might, just maybe, overtake Germany in the online population table in the not too distant future. The most connected countries (internet population) are:

1. China: 179.7 million
2. United States: 163.3 million
3. Japan: 60.0 million
4. Germany: 37.0 million
5. United Kingdom: 36.7 million
6. France: 34.0 million
7. India: 32.1 million
8. Russia: 29.0 million
9. Brazil: 27.7 million
10. South Korea: 27.3 million
11. Canada: 21.8 million
12. Italy: 20.8 million
13. Spain: 17.9 million
14. Mexico: 12.5 million
15. Netherlands: 11.8 million

Interestingly but unsurprisingly, Asian Pacific represents the largest share of the internet population with Europe a big chunk behind:

• Asia Pacific: 416 million (41.3%)
• Europe: 283 million (28.0%)
• North America: 185 million (18.4%)
• Latin America: 75 million (7.4%)
• Middle East & Africa: 49 million (4.8%)

Source: Techcrunch

Speed Pitching at MyLongLunch

Yesterday I had the pleasure of attending a MyLongLunch event but unlike my previous visits to these events, I was actually presenting. If you don’t know what a MyLongLunch event is (and no, it’s not some sort of Ready Steady Cook thing) it’s a networking event for people working in the recruitment advertising industry and those who are trying to court them. Roughly 15 media publications (websites, newspapers, magazines) meet 15+ recruitment advertising agencies and get 10 minutes to talk about their business and what’s cool about it. It’s such a great idea as the media publications attending would never get the chance to pitch to this manay agencies in one day otherwise. The events take place in a pub, so though there’s a real and genuine opportunity to do business, the fact it’s in a relaxed atmosphere takes the edge off things.

Those representing the media rock up with laptops, handouts, bags, sweets, CDs, books, pens, memory cards, tins of mints – anything that might help the agency remember who they are on Friday morning – and set themselevs up at a table. The agencies are then all seated with a media representative who then has just 10 minutes to try and tell them why their publication is the perfect solution. I’ve never been speed dating but I imagine this is just what it’s like. We went representing Boring Student. Though the site hasn’t launched yet we felt that we had a very interesting propositiong for people attending this Graduate themed event. All of the other media there were very much focused at those alread in university or graduates but we were able to present a case that focused on people who don’t quite know whether University is even right for them. It presented lots of opportunity. The only problem was that 10 minutes never seemed to be enough. Jamie Leonard (@jamieasleonard), the MD of MyLongLunch and time keeper, always seemed to shout out just as we got to the interesting bit.

Aside from being a great chance to meet lots of new people it’s also a great way to hone your presentational skills. Meeting in excess of 15 different businesses in a few hours ment that by the end of it I found the presentation we started with was about 10% of the presentation we finsihed with.

If you get the chance to attend one of these events, do. www.mylonglunch.com/events

picture source: flickr – lwr