I visited Internet World at Earls Court yesterday. I'm not madly keen on exhibitions, but I am keen to keep current and understand what's important to people. The things that I noticed were...

1) Everyone is peddalling the same stuff. The show is split up into areas, which means that as you move from stand to stand you get the same message repeated until you leave that area.

2) No-one has really worked out their unique selling point (USP). These are the people that have massive marketing budgets, but they are saying the same things that I believe about my company.

3) I learnt more about what's important to people by chatting to the person behind me in the queues that I did from most of the speakers. I got honest opinions and great feedback which is really valuable to me.

I was left with two thoughts:

 - there's people put there selling websites that start from £45k which have less functionality, are less useable and have less compelling design than the websites that I produce for £10k. Their overheads add no value to the website.

 - it took till about 9:00 in the evening to have the irony pointed out to me that I'd travelled up on the train to see the interent...

I’ve been trying to find a way to keep abreast of technology, learn  from others about new developments and generally have an excuse to play about with some stuff the I wouldn’t usually find the time to look at. Having not found an existing group that suits me, I thought that I’d try to see whether I could get a group of people together for a day to investigate a topic, brainstorm and discuss it possibly leading to actually building something.

From my point of view, it has to be:
- Fun and relaxed
- Interesting
- Teach me something
- Open and non competitive
- Fairly contained (i.e. up to a day long) unless otherwise decided

As a vision, it might be that at the end of the day we could have produced a “mini product”, however this might be a bit ambitions.

The sort of topics I’d like to look at are

• Silverlight
• Augmented reality
• Twitter and its API (and other social networking stuff maybe)
• Mobile apps – probably IPhone
• JQuery
• Real time search
• Cloud computing opportunities

So, what I've done is invite a few people round to my office. I'm a bit uncertain about how it's going to work as I don't want to spend lots and lots of time doing something that doesn't add any value to anyone, and I also want it to be fairly free and flexible. At the moment the outline plan is:

• Meet at the shed at 10:00 on the end of January
• 10 mins introduction and discussing what you want from the day
• 2 hours investigation, brainstorming
• Pizza for lunch
• Decide if we want to spend the afternoon actually implementing what we’ve talked about (if we’re bored, then it’s fine to finish here)

I'm quite excited as the people that I've invited are all people that I respect and admire. Some have different skills - most, though not all - are microsoft based and they range from a business focus to designers to geeks like me.

If there's any topics you think we should look at, please comment...

What-Am-I-Doing started off a a way of accurately billing my customers - giving me a way that I know what to bill, and they are happy to pay becaus the work has been done and the value added. I do occasionally have bad days, and reduce the invoice because what I've achieved has not reflected the time spent, but generally what's fair is fair. It is, however, important to recard the time accurately, and then to make the decision about discounting once. Otherwise you end up discounting when you record the time and then discouting again when you do the invoice.

Anyway, that's not what this article is supposed to be about. I wanted to talk about the charts that I have added to What-Am-I-Doing.  I've added two pie charts and two bar charts. One pie chart shows the project split across a day, week or month, and the other shows the type or project.

This is the chart for last month. It has started being addictive - I'm lucky that I work for myself, and generally my target is to spend 50% of my time on customer paid work, not too much on admin and the remainder on learning, trying things, self development and internal projects. This graph enable me to manage this really effectively. I can view it on a day by day basis and maintain that balance, or if I'm, really busy then towards the end of the month I can see where I am and allow myself some exploration time - guilt free!

The bar / column charts allow me to look at the product life cycle for projects. The project below was a disaster (from my point of view - the customer was happy!)

What happend was that the project took the right amount of time between March July, then the customer, who had fooled us into believing that she had certain competencies and that she was looking at what we were doing all along (through phone calls, emails and meetings) then changed, and we had to spend August and September retraining.