Flexpansion

Ver 1.42: Smileys added, also fast typing now catered for

Dr Tim Willis — Sun, 06 May 2012 17:08:57 +0000

By popular demand, we’ve now added smileys – just long-press the Return key to access (there’s no smiley logo on there just yet but will be shortly). We’re also working on slide-and-select which will be out soon so you can access them with a single keystroke.

The other big improvement is for the fast typists out there! We now follow you and expand your input even if you enter letters lightning-fast. If you fancy some word salad, just randomly hammer away at letters and the Space bar and see what comes out.

More additions soon!

Get the latest version here!

New learning mechanism released in Ver 1.32

Development Team — Thu, 22 Mar 2012 14:33:10 +0000

Our learning mechanism is now easier to use. Following feedback from users that they want Flexpansion to learn most of the new words they type, we have switched the default to ‘learn’ when you long-press Space, so you can just carry on typing straight away. If you don’t want to learn a word, just tap the Flexpansion Menu button to unlearn it again. You can always remove words from the personal dictionary editor later if you want, or just long-press when the learned word next appears and choose ‘Forget word’.

We’ve also fixed some minor bugs and we’ll be adding more upgrades soon!

Our Press Kit is now available, just in time for Mobile World Congress in Barcelona!

Dr Tim Willis — Tue, 28 Feb 2012 00:42:51 +0000

Please click on the Media link at the bottom of any page, or here.

The kit contains articles about our product and company background, as well as logos, screenshots, our new flyer and previous advert and article in Edinburgh Student newspaper.

Please distribute!

Our video, “Introducing Flexpansion”, is now up

Dr Tim Willis — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 21:26:40 +0000

It took a bit longer than planned, but our video is now online, introducing the product and explaining how it works. There are plenty more features, planned additions, and a couple of things to improve on, but this tells you all you need to get started saving time and effort typing text on your mobile: Watch it here and please share! We also did a version without music – what do you think? Which one should we keep? Thanks,

Flexpansion Team

Great Social Media & Linkedin Marketing Tips

Dr Tim Willis — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 19:12:08 +0000

I attended a very informative event last week with loads of great advice from two speakers on using social media to promote your business, tips on both what and what not to do, hosted by Edinburgh University’s Business School E-Club jointly with the Internet Marketing MeetUp group.

I took brief notes using our very own Flexpansion® on an Alcatel phone (£90 from O2 last week including ten quid credit, excellent value). Once again I was genuinely reminded what a fantastic product we have. Anyhow, here they are, somewhat scrambled by me filling in the gaps 3 days later where I forgot to keep writing; augmented / distorted / trivialised by my own reflections in square brackets :-) A far more comprehensive and competent report by the wonderful Nicola Osborne is at http://bit.ly/z2HiCl .

Colin Gilchrist, The Social Tailor

The four key areas are: Surveying, Training, Planning, Analysing.
Survey which networks prospective clients or customers are using, how much, what are their favourites, how do they interact? You need to strike an appropriate tone. [Even things like wearing a suit in your Linkedin pic not a gorilla costume like you do on Facebook. In a cape. Likewise not being too formal back on FB. Both should be obvious but I imagine some people get it wrong. The biggest no-no on that front is the generic silhouette that says you were either too lazy / busy to find a camera, or every one you tried shattered in horror and you're barred region-wide from photo-me booths.]

 Build up a stock of content ready to use when you go for it. Your blog is the hub – it needs to be authentic & interesting [How am I doing? :-] . Use your whole team, i.e. don’t just leave it to the one person supposedly responsible for social media. Survey everybody and find out which networks they’re most familiar with. The strategy is to have an ongoing voice. Tell everybody whenever you’ve got an advert out. A local voice is good especially, people listen to it more (i.e. local business community etc. are mutually supportive and also may know you).

Crisis management: One company’s server went down all day and they didn’t think to use Twitter to reassure people it wasn’t anything major, so rumours took hold that they’d gone under. Their single tweet: “We have issues” can’t have helped. Mr Match; Mr Petrol.

Colin’s main recommendation is lots of planning and ‘here’s-one-I-prepared-earlier’ solutions. First, brainstorm all the possible things that could go wrong, buy up all the search terms, AdWords etc. (and presumably URL’s), prepare videos and activate them when needed so that people are all guided there. Obviously you’ll have tweets and statements ready for your homepage too. [Who knows what juicy damage-limitation videos are sitting right now behind military-standard encryption in electronic corporate vaults. This strategy is more suited to bigger companies with time, money, and dodgy CEO's. Personally I'm investing in cat-juggling.com and crossing my fingers. I'm not taking a penny under fifty k.]

Norma Corlette Linkedin Expert

Norma is MD of Cognisance, a Linkedin group with over 1,000 members – key decision makers, formed with Adam Gordon.
She gave a wealth of tips on using Linkedin and I’m in two minds about sharing them here as I’ll just be levelling the playing field again, only higher. Against my better judgement then, here are some of them:
There are 120m people on Linkedin. People get headhunted on it and can double their salary.
Use multiple ways of contacting people and being found – some may be confident using email but not Twitter etc.

‘Free as a currency’ – The Open Source model applied here to knowledge on marketing – a bit of a culture shock for those not used to it. Norma and Adam give away their guide to Linkedin [which is excellent] if you ask nicely. Result: 28k people now know about them and they are authorities on the subject – the go-to folks. (Also others will do some of their marketing for them, like I am now, by passing on the tip).

 Professional profiling: How to be top of your sector. Norma demonstrated how she came up second for a People Search on ‘Board Director’. Second after the woman who showed her how. [I wondered if this works if you're logged on as someone else - I actually get different results, maybe I'm not doing the same thing. Adding the word 'Scotland' brings Norma up in third place; possibly because she and the two above her all share connections with me. I am impressed however that they arrive ABOVE the next 6 people, all of whom I'm 1st-connected to.]

Anyhow, it turns out that the early metatag-stuffing technique that worked for webpages 15 years ago, which search engines long since got wise to, still works on Linkedin if you do it in a way that can be justified. Back then you’d fill the metatags field, which was invisible to readers but not search engines, with your preferred phrases; sometimes you’d vary them slightly, but at times simply repeating the same thing 100 times actually worked. So on Linkedin, fill your profile with ‘board’ and ‘director’ in every role where they’re applicable. Obviously mine’d be Computational Linguist, Language Engineer, Linguistics Expert, Entrepreneur etc..

Give a narrative of what you do in each role – many people just put the job title and leave you to fill in the rest by guesswork. I guess the approach needs to be much more as if you were filling in a C.V. – skills, achievements etc.. Pay most attention to the Current Position section. Most importantly, keep updating the Summary once a week – the bit that appears below your name.  You can see what people are searching on when finding you and track how many times you’re appearing in searches. The most informative kind of searches cost £10 a month but you can still get useful info and graphs for free.

Norma suggests you devote a weekend to overhauling your Linkedin profile completely. Well, it’s high on my to-do list now.

Q&A
How do you get Likes on Facebook? Colin has tips on this, again, try asking him nicely!
 The blog is less work to keep on top of than some of the other methods. [It is?!]
One question was about whether to repeat content the questioner had written for a newspaper blog site, on their own site. Colin suggested that it’s best just to link to it from your blog, but also do a tweet.
Be a thought leader, people will come to you i.e. on Linkedin etc. don’t pursue direct sales, make links then wait. [This is Inbound Marketing isn't it?].
Comparison with Google pay per click: blogging gets much better Return On Investment. [Depends on how long you take writing it and what value you put on your time though.]  You can do very highly targeted ads on Facebook.
Be aware you can’t directly run competitions on FB, it’s against the T&C, so you’ll have to link to an external site.

Finally, Colin agreed with something I’ve heard widely – it’s not seen as ‘authentic’ to oursource your social media use. Luckily for me, I used my Computational Linguistics skills to create the Blogbot 3000™ which wrote 95% of this for me :-) Hmm, that might work as a product… What could go wrong? Aaand we’re back to the cat-juggling.

One question I forgot to ask and would be interested in people’s views on: What should you do with the occasional, apparently random requests to link, which don’t look like spam? Probably contact them and ask why you should accept, but then you’re opening a whole long, possible time-consuming conversation which may end in you accepting them out of politeness. Does this somehow endorse them in the eyes of your other contacts whom they might then go on to try and link with? I’m wondering what non-legit motivation someone might have to seek these contacts – possibly to build credibility I suppose. My inclination is, I’m afraid, to be sceptical of someone whose one chance to impress me is a generic Linkedin request rather than an (albeit highly-telegraphic due to restrictions) explanation of why I should. Maybe they just got the wrong person but wouldn’t someone ask, if they weren’t sure?

I hope my notes and comments are useful, please get in touch with any questions or comments. And sorry for the lousy formatting – I’m still getting used to this but I’ll have a play with the settings soon.

Tim

Hi from Flexpansion’s founder

Dr Tim Willis — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 20:38:58 +0000

Hi there, and thanks for reading our stuff.

This is my first post, but we’ll be adding some retrospective ones about past ‘highlights’ :-)

I intend to be as transparent as possible about the experience of inventing a product, starting a company, bringing it to market and beyond, in the hope it’ll be interesting and / or helpful, ideally both. If you’ve got specific things you’d like discussed here, please get in touch and I’ll do my best.

A few words about the product, the company, and me.

Flexpansion is a world first of its kind, to the best of my knowledge – and I’ve had a really good look. The nearest competitor we’ve found to a full, unrestricted flexible abbreviation expansion system working on a mobile device was doing its processing remotely, which meant every keystroke had to be bounced off a server to update its predictions. I didn’t get to try it out (it ran on now-defunct hardware) but the lag must have been an issue. Flexpansion does everything locally, on the device.

I set up the company 3 years ago, while I was still doing the PhD on which it’s based. It’s hard work doing both at once but there was some “then-or-never” funding and I had to seize the opportunity. Since then we’ve raised various grants, loans and investment which have enabled us to develop the product and release it. We’re now in the marketing phase and trying to spread the word as widely as possible. We’ve had great, positive feedback from people who’ve tried Flexpansion (average 4.5 out of 5 stars), and the challenge is getting people to hear about it in a crowded marketplace.

My background is mostly in academia – BA in Linguistics & Phonetics, MSc in Cognitive Science & Natural Language, then a PhD in Informatics at Edinburgh University. I’ve had to learn all about the business side, but I’ve now given a few presentations on commercialising university research, and confidently answering audience questions I’ve realised how much I’ve learned by osmosis about how it all works. Setting up the company I’ve been repeatedly reminded of the quote ‘L’état, c’est moi’, literally ‘I am the state’, (maybe should be ‘I’m in a state’ ;-) which I’d always thought was Napoleon, but a quick search informs me was Louis XIV. I’ve been everything from CEO to tea-boy. I’m the Marketing Dept., Design, Social Media, R&D etc.. A small business in some ways is pretty similar to a giant corporation, only with less comfy seats and cheaper coffee. And a load less security. There are some advantages too – lower burn rate and the ability to turn on a dime if essential.

The main thing is you don’t need to know how to do everything, you just need to know how to find someone who does. And over time I’ve built up a network of experts in programming, business development, finance, marketing etc. and outsourced as much as possible given our financial constraints. Luckily I’ve gained some fantastic supporters and advisors – you all know who you are and I’m very grateful.

Someone on the EPIS incubator programme with me suggested all entrepreneurs become unemployable, because they can never again be told what to do. It’s a chicken-and-egg question which is cause and which effect. It’s a good gag but I don’t think it applies to all of us. If you’re always happy working as part of a team and can passionately argue your case in disagreements, and can accept that you’re not always right, I think the experience should make you much more employable in the future. Having been so personally aligned with a company’s fortunes brings valuable insight to other ventures.

Tim

Flexpansion 1.16 released

Development Team — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 16:00:47 +0000

It can be yours right now – find it on the Android Market.

New in this version:

US and UK English are now available as distinct languages. If you’re upgrading from an older version, your personal dictionary and usage history will be assigned to the UK English option, since that is what all previous versions were based on.

Flexpansion 1.14 released

Development Team — Sat, 17 Dec 2011 12:00:23 +0000

Season’s greetings from the Flexpansion Team! We’ve added some goodies to the app to help you get that festive feeling! Grab it now from the Android Market.

New in this version:

Free festive skin and sound effects

Flexpansion 1.12 released

Development Team — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 18:00:17 +0000

Flexpansion 1.12 is now available on the Android Market. New in this version:

Speech recognition (if supported by device)
Makes keys taller on larger screens
Avoids going into full-screen edit mode on larger screens
Removes obscenities and very rare words from dictionary
Fixes a couple of Market-reported crashes
Cosmetic improvements to Typewriter skin

Flexpansion 1.08 released

Development Team — Fri, 25 Nov 2011 12:00:12 +0000

Version 1.08 is now available on the Android Market and brings some great new customisation options in the form of visual and sound themes. We hope you like them!

New in this version:

Visual themes: Gingerbread, Typewriter, Computer, Red, Blue, Green, Pink
Sound themes: Mechanical, Electric, Model M, Drums, Beep