Emot.io

Emot.io at #OpenTech 2011

Nick — Mon, 23 May 2011 11:22:22 +0000

On Saturday I had the awesome opportunity to give a presentation about emot.io at OpenTech, which in itself was one of the most stimulating conferences I’ve been to. The panel I was on was around the theme of Quantified Self/Self Hacking, and featured three big brains in the form of:

Adriana Lukas: Media Thinker and organiser of the London Quantified Self meetup

Jon Cousins: Founder of Moodscope, a platform for measuring, tracking and sharing your mood

Krishna Kotecha: Creator of Choice by Choice, an app for tracking your personal goals and improving habits.

It was a fun session, and I hope the audience got a decent introduction to some of the ways that personal tracking and data analysis will help improve people’s lives in the coming years.

Anyhoo, here are my slides from my talk:

Emot.io at OpenTech '11

View more presentations from Nick Smith.

Widget outage 21/4/11

Nick — Thu, 21 Apr 2011 09:57:24 +0000

This morning you may have had/are having trouble loading our widget. This is related to an outage at Amazon Web Services, and we’re certainly not the only ones affected. Thanks for being patient, we’ll be up and running again soon. Hopefully.

UPDATE 24/4/11: Our hosting provider appears to have resolved most of the issues arising from the Amazon EC2 outage that has been affecting swathes of the Internet in recent days, and our widget is up and running again. We’ll be looking into ways of working around issues like this in the future.

How to install v0.1 of the emot.io widget

Nick — Mon, 18 Apr 2011 13:58:05 +0000

As we begin to test v0.1 of our emotional rating widget (got to find a snappier name for that), here are some instructions for configuring the widget on a site.

Note: In order to test this early version on your own site, please drop us a line through this form and we will do our best to set you up with a unique embed code as quickly as possible.

Embedding emot.io

The emot.io widget uses a smattering of Javascript to get things going. Embed the following code somewhere between the and tags of your site or page, replacing “YOUR-PARTNER-ID-HERE” on line 5 with your unique code we provide you with.

Once you’ve done that, paste the following code in the spot(s) you want to display a widget.

The widget will do its best to detect the item of content it’s associated with, however if more than one widget is displayed on a page, you will need to give it some help by adding a contentID. Like so.

Disclaimer

This is an early alpha release and won’t be perfect. You should know that this version does not render in IE, Opera, or some older versions of Firefox. We’re working on this. The plugin is incompatible with some sites that don’t readily accept Javascript (e.g Posterous). Tumblr seems fine though if you want to try it there.

Feedback

We’re looking for as many ideas and bits of feedback as possible. Mosey on over to our feedback forum if you have something to share with us, or drop us a line via twitter, email, or if you bump into me at an event. I’d love to know more about where you think this could go.

Software Engineering internship at Emot.io, London

Nick — Mon, 14 Feb 2011 12:23:00 +0000

Fancy an internship at an early-stage consumer web startup? We’re looking for a smart Software Engineering intern to help us build our platform. The following position would suit a recent graduate or student looking for a role with a high degree of responsibility.

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Emot.io is a platform for expressing emotion on the web. We’re out to destroy ‘Like’ buttons and boring star rating systems, and give people a way to express their actual feelings about things online. We’re currently working on the first version of our rating engine, and are looking for a super-smart software engineering intern to come and help us build stuff. Our team is small and you will have a high degree of responsibility from day one.

We’re looking for candidates with some (or all) of the following qualities:

Proven ability to deploy awesome web apps. Something cool you’ve released > CS degree.
Practical knowledge of Ruby on Rails ± JQuery ± Javascript ± HTML/CSS.
A passion for keeping code simple, secure and stable.
Attention to detail, common sense.
A good eye for current trends in web design
An interest in data visualisation. Extra points if you’ve helped to actually create some interesting data viz projects in the past.
Good organisational skills.
An intense hatred of ‘Like’ buttons.

If you’re smart, passionate and can code, we can find something interesting for you to do.

Additional things to know:

- By default this is an unpaid role, though we can cover your travel + lunch expenses

- The length of the internship/level of commitment is completely open and down to your circumstances. Let us know a ballpark figure for how many hours would work for you when applying.

What you’ll get out of this:

- You’ll potentially get to have your code deployed on an exciting range of partner sites we’re lining up (= names to drop on a CV)

- You’ll have some degree of freedom in choosing which part of our platform to work on. If there’s a particular language you’re keen to work with we can try and accommodate if it makes sense

- You won’t be forced to use a particular IDE or OS – whatever works for you

- Being a startup, there’s always room for exceptional talent. If you’re extraordinary, we’ll fight to keep you with us as long as possible, which may involve cash, stock, begging, or a combination of the three.

- Mentorship from two startuppers who’ve been through five startups in three different countries

To apply:

- Send a hello to nick(at)emot(dot)io
- Include a brief CV/what you’re up to
- Also include links to current and past projects. Remember, Something cool you’ve released > CS degree.

How people really feel about the Royal Wedding

Nick — Mon, 07 Feb 2011 13:36:11 +0000

The Royal Wedding has newspaper editors in a fizz, but how do people really feel about the news that Kate and Wills are going to tie the knot? Well, a few months ago when the news was announced, emot.io did a quick survey to find out. ~~We meticulously interviewed members of the public~~ I tweeted a short survey and asked people to sum up their feelings towards the wedding announcement as a single emotion. It wasn’t big or clever, but the results of the survey speak volumes – hardly anybody cares about the wedding.

Whilst unlikely to spoil the happy couple’s big day, the poll suggests that ~~the general public~~ my followers are not quite as pumped up about the prospect of the future King and Queen getting hitched as the media are making out.

Oh well, at least we all get a day off.

First post

Nick — Sat, 20 Nov 2010 17:37:17 +0000

Feeling excited, nervous and inspired all at the same time…