…or something like that.

It’s all gone a bit crazy since the Twettle post got picked up by Wired magazine, suddenly there were hordes of journalists and bloggers asking for images of the kettle, some even wanted pictures of me and Ben.

Sadly no one wanted to send a photographer to Sydney to snap me so Ben got all the glory in last weeks Metro (above, click to enlarge), he’s even been interviewed on BBC Radio 1.

Following the conversations on Twitter, it looks like there’s over 1000  mentions and it’s showing as 46,000 results on Google, up from oooh about 50. It’s actually gone as far as this (translation anyone?):

The coverage has brought many questions to the surface – Why do so many people like it?  Why do so many people hate it? How has every publication and blogger managed to spell my name wrong? And who the hell just purchased Twettle.com, .net and .co.uk?

The positive feedback mostly came from tech blogs and Twitter. As expected, there is clearly a demand for this from Twitter users and several retailers have contacted me asking when they can start selling it. The most consistent feedback was about the design (good work Ben!). The best writes ups are:

• Wired
• Gizmodo
• Connected Australia
• Computer Weekly
• Metro

It turns out, the reason people hated it so much was because they didn’t bother to read the original post to understand the rationale. Preferring comments like:

“Not sure if this appliance could attract a lot of subscribers to its Twitter feed”

You don’t say! Well lucky that only the people who own the kettle need to follow it on Twitter, seeing as they will be the ones making tea. Jesus.

One things for sure if you don’t get why and how people use Twitter then you’ll never understand the appeal of this idea. Don’t even try. This wasn’t created for you in mind. But there is another part to this project which you should try and understand, the software.

Let me say this, this project isn’t about a kettle, hell it’s not even about Twitter. Those aren’t important. What this is all about is making a scalable Wi-Fi module with API functionality that is flexible enough to be put into anything.

The tech on this module can talk to any social media site, database or service. It can use SMS, MMS, Email and even trigger phone calls. This is an enabler for any developer to be creative with hardware and make cool stuff off the back of information coming out of the kettle or whatever device is connected.

What this means for manufacturers who place this in their products is that they can create APP STORES for appliances and electronics. Yep that’s right, online and mobile widgets and applications, based around white goods, appliances, even electricity and gas meters. Data mining is also possible so the manufacturers can get details stats on how their products are being used.

Ultimately this gives the tools for devs to run wild and create apps that will sell more of the manufacturers products. Plus this is the part that scales, it’s much more likely for our module to be in more homes than the Twettle.

Admittedly this wouldn’t be the easiest thing to explain to your average Metro reader but should be noted as the part with the biggest potential.

I guess it’s hard for people to think creativity about this but here’s some examples off the top of my head (it’s 2am so this is just a brain dump):

Tea Roulette – (Nothing to do with Chat Roulette and penises) Once the kettle has boiled a service/app could SMS or Email designated workers in your office at random to make the tea.

Energy Tracker- The data from appliances can automatically be sent into a carbon footprint/energy tracking services, allowing users to see their impact on the environment without manually entering your usage.

Data Mining - Services and manufactuers can pull information from Twettles (or any appliance) around the country to produce stats, analytics and graphs about what parts of the country drink the most tea. This information can extracted and mashed-up with Google Maps and social networks. Check out services like TwitterVision for some brain food.

So what’s next? Well due to the publicity we’ve got the funding we needed to get this project underway. More news soon.

Related posts:

1. Introducing The Twettle Project | The Kettle That Tweets!

It’s been a bit crazy over the last week, the Twettle concept that me and Ben put together went worldwide (Wired, PSFK, BBC China, Gizmodo etc) and generated a heap of positive and negative reactions as expected.

In the criticism, many people seemed to have overlooked the potential of a Wi-Fi connected device that can automatically update Twitter (or any social network), there are endless ways to creatively apply those capabilities. And here’s one lovely execution.

Baker Tweet is perfectly described as “a beautiful collision of the social network with good old-fashioned golden bakery goodness”. The device is installed at bakeries, allowing businesses to tell Twitter followers when something hot and fresh has come out of the oven by simply turning the dial and hitting a button.

Bakeries can log into a web interface to change the options available on the dial. This means it can also be extended past baked goods and into real-time stock updates and offers, making it as simple as pressing a button. Very cool.

The idea came from Laura Jordan-Bambach, the Exectutive Creative Director at LBi and was designed by Poke. The first Baker Tweet is currently installed at the Albion Cafe bakery which is across the road from the Poke offices. You can see their Twitter page here.

You might think all this is pointless but it’s right what Laura says “It’s hard for small businesses to differentiate themselves online these days.” Thanks to Baker Tweet, the Albion Café rose to #2 in Google under the keyword search “fresh bread London” and has over 1800 followers on Twitter. Good stuff.

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2. Twitter Now Bigger Than Myspace In The UK – Still Only 5% Of My 20-30 Year Old Friends Use It

The following post is a blow-by-blow account of our mission to design and manufacture a socially networked kettle that can update to Twitter/Facebook. It’s a bit lengthy, for those of you who can’t be bothered to read it all and just want to look at the pictures, head to the bottom

How it started

Six months ago myself and good friend Ben Perman (3D designer @Beyond) were out in Clapham, trying to get drunk in the wonderful chain bar Vodka Revolution on the high street. Unfortunately our attempts were disrupted by a barman who had never served a drink or given the correct change to anyone in his entire life before that day.

During the 40 minute wait for the creation of 3 drinks and a shot, we began a conversation about how we could make some Google-style moneyz, or at least enough to buy a boat and a few steak dinners. After several ridiculous (and slightly illegal) ideas, I suggested to Ben that we needed to exploit some trends while we had the chance, number one on the list – Twitter.

Sadly like 95% of my friends, Ben did not use Twitter. This presented quite a challenge considering I was asking him to put his time and money into an idea based around a service he barely knew. If I could sell the concept to Ben, then surely I could win over the Twitter massive?

One of my strongest predictions for the near future is that we’ll start using devices and services that automatically contribute to our ‘life stream’ more and more. Whether it’s updating your Foursquare account whenever you use your Oyster Card or the TV remote that updates Twitter to tell followers what you’re watching – it’s clear that we’re going to need help constantly telling others what we’re doing.

But how could we jump on this bandwagon? I started to like the sound of Twittering hardware, if we could cheaply and effectively produce the tech that enabled any manufacturers device to seamlessly ‘talk’ to open APIs (i.e Twitter, Facebook and more) then we would be onto something.

However making a circuit board with some fancy firmware wasn’t very exciting, both me and Ben come from creative backgrounds and wanted to get our teeth stuck into this a bit more. This technology needed to come to life within a working product. Something we could design, play with and eventually sell in shops.

The bit where we decide to make it a kettle.

We needed to move quickly and decide on a product, a Google search revealed the tweeting toilet (yes, really), toaster and washing machine hacks. While this showed that others were thinking about the same sort of stuff, no one had productized it yet which was a good sign.

What blatant Firebox-bait could we produce that would go down well with the main Twitter demographic (not teens). There was only one answer to this question.

Tea.

Yes tea, the cornerstone of British culture. We would bring tea making into the future, tea 2.0, by creating… a tweeting kettle. This would be the perfect shell for our fancy circuit board technology.

The kettle would connect to the local wi-fi network and automatically tweet when it had boiled. Pretty simple. For example:

It could also do some other fun stuff like tweet the energy usage and tea/coffee drinking statistics. You could even make it boil remotely:

One of my favourite ideas was setting up a Twitter profile especially for the kettle. Office workers could follow their kitchen kettle and be alerted when it had boiled via SMS/Tweetdeck. (Imagine how useful SMS feature will be once our technology gets into washing machines and ovens).

Now I’d like to pretend that the naming process was more complex than it was but basically it was a choice between Twittle and Twettle. It was tough but the Twittle.com domain had already been taken so…..behold! The Twettle was born! (although we refer to it as Twattle in private)

Ben was nodding his head in agreement at the whole thing, but I had the feeling that he wasn’t sure why the hell someone would want with a twittering kettle. It was time to blind him with some statistics.

It’s no secret that micro-blogging updates are generally mundane. A recent study analysed 400,000 messages on Jaiku (Twitter competitor) and found the top 5 most frequent postings are “working,” “home,” “work,” “lunch,” and “sleeping.”

The same applies on Twitter, the pressure to constantly update your feed means that you can’t always dish out pearls of wisdom and conversation starters. It’s about the little things that make up your day right? The Twettle would fit right in.

Age is just as important, the bulk of Twitter users are between 25 – 44 according to Comscore, so more disposable income to purchase our novelty product. Oh and over 165,000,000 cups of tea are consumed in the UK every. single. day. Ben was sold.

Design and Build

Now the fun part – design and build. My job was to figure out how it would work and who would make it, Bens task was to design based on the specs.

Neither of us had ever designed a product before, but Ben is a pretty badass 3D visualiser, he can make programs like Vectorworks dance and has designed stores for big brands in places like Westfield so I knew it wouldn’t end up looking like The Homer.

Common sense applied, we knew that using chrome would make the kettle expensive to produce so we went for good old plastic. It would also need some status lights for data, power, etc, like the ones on a router. The Wi-Fi module would be placed into the coreless base.

Ben cracked on with the design while I tried to find someone to make it. After some dead end Skype calls to China, I came across the guys at AB Integration based in Elephant & Castle in London. They were extremely knowledgeable and friendly, I knew straight off that they were the right company to make the tech.

I wanted the kettle to be really simple to set up, no CDs, USB or downloads. This is pretty difficult with Wi-Fi devices because a world of open, password-free wireless networks doesn’t exist, meaning that it won’t be able to ‘talk’ to you out of the box. How do you get around this?

My initial idea was to power up the kettle then connect to its IP address over Wi-Fi using your PC and router. This would then take you into a set up page (stored in the kettle memory) where you could set things like the WEP key for your network, Twitter username and password etc.

However, AB Integration pointed out this wasn’t possible, a device must be connected to a network before you can access it via IP. The way around this was building a USB port into it, meaning it would also need installation software.

This put a spanner in the works, what use was this technology that allows any device to speak to the internet if it required everything to have a USB attachment? A kettle can be easily be taken to a PC and hooked up, but what if this technology was in larger items like washing machines and fridges?

Aha! But what if we put a small input screen on the base allowing the user to select their network and, if necessary, enter a WEP key. That way the technology could live on any device and it would allow manufacturers to utilise screens they already had (like the ones of microwaves and washing machines). Plus you could also use it to indicate whether you’re having tea or coffee and the boil temperature can change to the optimal settings. Apparently coffee is best with water at 92 – 96C.

AB Integration sent us a dozen different screens to choose from, some only cost £2-3, which doesn’t seem like much…until you manufacturer 10,000 units. I would have loved to get a iPod style rollerwheel on there but the price would have soared.

The physical components that do all the work (i.e talk to Twitter) inside the kettle comes to the size of a box of matches. Pretty amazing.

I moved onto to designing the user interface which is accessed once you connect to the kettle via Wi-Fi. It would have the basic stuff like Twitter Connect (username, password), custom message for when the kettle has boiled, stats etc. I also wanted to integrate Facebook Connect.

I was also very keen to have some sort of open API for the Twettle so that developers could have fun making mobile and web applications around it. Imagine web apps that could show what parts of the country were making the most tea or how much electricity is being used (or saved) by making tea with the Twettle.

After a few revisions, Ben finished the design for the Twettle (images below).  I’m sure you’ll agree it’s a bloody lovely kettle.

AB Integration put us in contact with the ever friendly (and highly recommended) Jonathan Cheung at JC Engineering Solutions to build and prototype the kettle itself.

The Cost

This is the part where everything fell apart.  We assumed that we could get a prototype made and beginning manufacturing within 3 months for less than 8k, oh how wrong we were.

I’ve started several online projects before and it’s never cost me more than a few hundred quid to get going, even if you want to launch your own start-up it can often be done out of a bedroom investing nothing more than your time and money for crate loads of Coca-Cola. But making your own physical product is expensive, like really, really expensive.

The prototype alone would cost a few thousand, but that wasn’t the problem, it’s things like CE Marking, Tooling, Testing, Package Design.. that suddenly added more and more zeros. The time to market also increased, just getting the CE Certification can take up to two months, all in all this would be on the market within 9 months. I immediately started to respect what James Dyson had achieved.

We had to honestly ask ourselves how much people would be willing to pay for the Twettle, £75 seemed like a good price. Keeps it within the novelty gift zone and can be afforded by Twitter lovers. But once we worked out the quantity we would need to order to get the price down to £75 per unit, we were short of around half a million pounds.

Our other option was to order less units but bump the retail price up, this would make each unit £180 which is a bit of a risk because who spends that much on a new kettle when they’ve already got one?

Me and Ben had a long hard think, we needed investment and partnerships. We have some connections to gadget shops and a pretty sound online marketing strategy (spam Twitter). But we laid the idea to rest and carried on with our dull Twettle-free lives. Until I remembered reading about…

Kickstarter.com | Crowdsourced Funding

If you haven’t heard of Kickstarter, you should defo check it out because it’s a brilliant little idea. The site offers an online platform for anyone to raise funding from interested individuals. You keep 100% ownership of your project and idea.

So why do people bother giving others money? The project owner offers incentives for different amounts of funding, for example if someone wants to launch their own money, donating $50 will get you at the premiere, $500 will get your name in the credits and $4000 will get you a part in the movie itself. You can keep contributors updated by text, pictures and videos.

Here’s an example of a slightly more noble project:

Working in mobile marketing you learn lots about incentivising so I’ve got some good ideas of the sorts of things you need to offer people to get involved (money, cake, Twettles).

Kickstarter is in private beta at the moment which means I have to ask special permission to get my project on there. We’ll be looking for around 35-40k worth of funding. Soon as that happens I’ll let you know.

About The Designer

Ben Perman works at a small London based retail design agency called Me, Him and Her as a 3D Designer.

Ben works with brands such as Duck and Cover, Ben Sherman, Penguin, G-Star, Luke and Farah on a wide range of projects, from full retail concepts implemented globally to trade shows, shop in shop concessions, and P.O.S.

Portfolio

Download Link Ben Perman Portfolio PDF (689)

Ben is always interested in hearing about freelance opportunities. To get in touch with Ben benperman164@gmail.com or on LinkedIn

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1. Twettle Fever…
2. Tweeting Too Hard – A Place To Shame Self-Absorbed Tweets
3. Spare Time Project! The InstaBAM! iPhone App – Find Instagram Photos Around The World

Is it me or does Twitter just feel like another way of big brands and companies pumping out the crap in their email newsletter?

Even though I don’t follow brands I do send them a lot of ‘@’ messages, whether it’s a question, feedback, or mostly when I’m pissed off at their service/product. What I’ve noticed is that out of 50 big brand messages I’ve had 2 replies, one was a week later by Dell and the other was 2 days later by First Direct (although they ignored my reply after that).

Is it too much to expect such a easy way to communicate with a brand to be rewarding?

What’s your experience?

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UPDATE 11.30pm GMT : It has now topped $4 million in 36 hours

Twitter and Facebook proving they can actually be used to save the world.

The American Red Cross have been raising money for the earthquake disaster in Haiti and the tweet above has just been put out by the State Department member Jared Cohen.

The New York Times have just said that Facebook is reporting 1500 status updates PER minute containing the word Haiti.

I much prefer Social Media being used for this rather than trying to complain or communicate with a brand (who don’t care).

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Have you ever wanted to send a parcel to someone but didn’t know their address? You’d probably be like most people and just ask for it, but what if you only knew their Twitter username or email address? (cue Psycho shower scene music)

SendSocial allows you to send parcels without the recipient disclosing their address. It works by letting the recipient know via Twitter or email that someone wants to send them something. They then have the choice to either accept or decline, if they accept, SendSocial will request their details and address.

The sender is then given a barcode to print out which the courier (fulfilled by MyHermes) scans on pickup to identify where it needs to delivered. This keeps the receipients address hidden.

One of the benefits of SendSocial is that it’s very competitively priced – parcels start at £3.99 for up to 2kg, rising £7.99 for one weighing between 5kg and 10kg. That’s quite a big saving off Royal Mail, I can see this being great for cheap eBay deliveries.

It’s a really interesting service, I’m eager to see how it’s used not only for businesses but for stalkers that can now send flowers and pants to their Twitter idols.

[Via @_Antonella_ & Telegraph]

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Orange UK customers can now upload their pictures to their Twitter stream by simply sending them to 86444.

The service is run through a photo site called Snapshot which is run by Orange, and it all works pretty seemlessly too. I tried it out today and you just send your first MMS and get a SMS back which links you to a Twitter authorisation page.

After you fill in your username and password you’re ready to go. Orange send you an SMS confirmation with the link to your picture after every upload.

I know sites like TwitPic already have MMS functionality but the way it works on Orange with its SMS confirmations is quite nice.

[Via Techcrunch]

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Blogger and Twitter user Phil Hancox had tweeted in the early hours of the morning that he had broken his kettle and was in a bit of distress about no longer being able to make tea. See below:

Upon walking up in the morning Phil had these two replies from Stylish Goods directing him to their store:

Great bit of targeting by Stylish Goods. Not only did they address Phil’s need of a urgent tea fix by mentioning super-fast delivery times but also added incentive with the 5% discount.

It would definitely grab my attention and make me visit the site, even if I didn’t make a purchase, that bit of marketing cost Stylish Goods absolutely nothing. I might even remember to use them the next time I need something electrical.

Relevant, timely advertising can make the difference between getting eyeballs on your product (and making a sale) or being ignored completely by the consumer, possibly even annoying them.

There is something quite nice and personal about marketing this way through Twitter, you almost feel the love from the company trying to take your money. Imagine if big companies like Amazon, Nike, Levis etc all had dedicated people finding opportunities to sell products to Twitter users by searching out those in need. I wonder how many more sales conversions they would make compared to traditional online advertising?

Tools such as Tweetdock allow you to target Twitter users based on keywords or location and send them automatic replies. It’s recommended you check the messages before replying to personalise and check for any double meanings.

This is a problem that Stylish Goods has run into after one user tweeted that they had a ‘broken lamp’. Assuming they meant the kind of lamp you have in your living room, Stylish Goods sent a message just like the one Phil got saying they could get a discount if they purchased via their store. However the user was actually referring to LAMP the open source software package.

That shows you it’s a fine line between spamming and being highly targeted on Twitter.

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Hitwise reported last week that Twitter finally got more visits than Myspace for the very first time. Twitter accounted for 2.21% of websites visited in the UK in August. Facebook however received 47.50% of website visits making it the number one visited site.

The funny thing is that as Myspace is crashing out in a big way and Twitter is on the way up, I can’t help but notice the similarities between how my friends have adopted the two services.

Around 3 to 4 years ago when Myspace was hitting it’s peak in the UK I set up an account. After getting my real life friend list to about 20 it became apparent after 18 months that none of my other friends were getting involved and the ones that did initially hadn’t logged on for a long long time. Eventually I just ended up accepting random friend requests but got bored of engaging with people I didn’t know.

Then Facebook came about and within a year I had all my friends on my account and everyone was interacting on regular basis with status updates, comments, photos and wall posts.

Now fast forward to Twitter and I’m seeing the same thing happen as Myspace, friends joining up to see what the fuss is about and not really getting it, then never going back.

Looking at my friend list on Facebook, out of 141 friends 13 have a Twitter account (yes I’ve asked). Out of those 6 haven’t updated for 1 to 3 months.

I’m 27 and my friends who are a couple of years older and younger just don’t see the point of Twitter. This is partly because they already have a microblogging feature with Facebook status updates. My younger friends around 21-23 don’t know anyone that uses it in their demographic.

The whole thing about teens don’t tweet sounds about right to me. Seeing as I don’t know any and neither do my friends.

So when I read stuff like Twitter is probably worth $5-10 Billion I’m kinda like reeeallly? Facebook is worth around $4-6 billion and they have more than 250 million users. I honestly can’t see Twitter getting that many.

Anyway it doesn’t matter how many users you got if hardly any of them are active.

I like Twitter, it is a great way to share information (I use it often for blatant self promotion) but it seems to be lacking something. The great part about Facebook status updates is being able to comment and have a bit of short lived banter with your friends until the next update comes. On Twitter I never really get the same feeling partly because I don’t know most of the people I follow but also because the quality and quantity of the update. I’m pretty sure people take a bit more time in thinking about what they are going to put into their Facebook status as oppose to Twitter.

Businesses love Twitter, the media loves Twitter and so do celebs but what about the general public?

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I worked in conjunction with the extremely talented Designer/Illustrator Leigh Pearce to create some Twitter icons that represent the 3 basic types of update you can do i.e From Web, From Mobile Web and From Txt.

Feel free to use them on your blog or web app.

Download the Set

The set comes in a zip file and contains 3 icons in PNG format. If you decide to share this set on your blog or website please link to this blog post rather than directly to the file.

Click here to download the ZIP (35.1kb): Twitter Icons (803)

If you are using the set for your design work a link back is not required, but always appreciated.

About the Designer

Big thanks goes to Leigh Pearce for creating these icons, hopefully this won’t be the last time we work together. Leigh is a top guy with a great work ethic and sense of humour. If you ever need a character designer be sure to get in touch with him.

Blog and Portfolio

Check out Leigh’s blog, it’s full of work, sketches and animation

Leigh on Flickr

Always interesting to see where the inspiration comes from, check out his Flickr photos

These icons are covered by Creative Commons which means you can’t sell them and stuff.

Click on the icon for more info.

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