Tate Turbine Ride
Hoping that we can get on this ride after Christmas with my mum and Alison at the Turbine Hall at the Tate.
Will edit this report if we get on it.
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Archive for December 9th, 2006
Mac to Reality
I’ve finally taken the plunge back to my roots and bought a Mac. Okay, the company will be paying for it, but I ordered it and use it and get most of the benefit. It’s very sweet, cool and dare I say it, sexy. It’s quiet, quick, light it gets things to work so much easier.
It’s not all plain sailing as I’m having to learn all the little Mac bits and pieces that I’ve missed in the ten years since I stopped using Macs. I used to use them at university, but moved entirely to PCs in 1995 when my flatmate [Adam Park for those of you who remember him] bought a PC. It was a Pentium 133 with a 1.2Gb hard drive and 256Mb Ram. Can you believe it that I remember that kind of thing?! My camera has more storage capacity than that now . . .
I’m determined not to turn into a Mac geek [like my Inigo colleague Colin], as I know that the reset of the world is PC-based and will continue to be for a long time to come. I’ve been telling our team that we have to design for the real world - those people still limited to Microsoft, Windows and Internet Explorer - but I have seen the light with MacBook, OSX and of course the massively popular and wonderful Firefox.
The new Mac [not given it a name yet] is Intel based, which allows me to run PC applications in a window run by software called Parallels. This allows me to run software [albeit fairly slowly] that I used to use and doesn’t put me just in the Mac camp.
So here’s looking forward to being efficient, flexible and funky in 2007.
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Growth
Inigo has grown a bit in the last eighteen months. In early October 2005 there were two of us full time and one part time. Now there are four full time and one part time.
Turnover from 2004 to 2005 was 42% and 2005 to 2006 was 35%. So things are on the up. We’re not seeking investment, we’ve never been in debt to the bank and most of the growth is from referral and repeat business.
2007 is going to be the year that we really have to grow up. To keep growing at the same rate we’ll need to be even more technology driven, step up our already high levels of design, but most of all more focussed on our customers. Take care of your customers and they take care of you. Sometimes it’s a challenge, but I think it’s worth it.
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Into Africa
It’s time that I wrote a bit about the time that I spent in Africa at the start of the year. Being more precise, I was in Kenya and Tanzania with David Hewitt and Carna Hodge from my church. David Hewitt set up something called The Africa Fund in 2000 and I’ve been helping here and there with publications for fundraising and the website since then. At the end of 2005 the opportunity came up to go on the trip and everything all came together very quickly.
The main purpose of The Africa Fund - TAF for short - is to raise money for organisations that David visits and help them to help themselves. We ‘invest in virtuous circles’ - giving money, mostly to local churches, to support local projects. The money is raised here in Edinburgh and goes to people we know - that’s the difference.
Before going - even before talking to David about going - I got excited about the whole principle of micro-finance. This has done some amazing things to help people set up micro-enterprises [self-employment to you and me] and has been particularly profound in India and Bangladesh. There small amounts of money are lent to people wanting a bicycle so they can ferry people around.
It’s not a new thing in Africa either, but our involvement in running a micro-finance scheme has been relatively recent. In Moshi in northern Tanzania we gave some money for one to be set up. We call them revolving funds. The principle is that money is lent out by a responsible committee and when the loans are repaid more people can benefit from loans.
While travelling around, I was involved in talking to people to find out whether they would find a revolving fund useful. We’ve been able to give money to start new funds in Arusha in Tanzania [part of the Mkonoo offering in March 2006] and Kisumu in Kenya [general offerings]. We hope to extend these to our Uganda contacts in 2007.
Anyway, for the moment, please give us some money! You can give money towards a goat, a bee hive or a revolving fund. I’ve been mostly involved in the revolving fund side of things, so would prefer if you gave towards that, but I do understand the appeal of a goat. Give anytime, but the sooner the better, and invest in a virtuous circle!
Add comment December 9th, 2006