Whenever I tell people about Thunderbolt, one of the first questions they ask is “why don’t you make money from it?” It’s a reasonable question; last year, Thunderbolt had over 3 million page views from over 600,000 unique visitors. Sure, it’s not anywhere near the numbers that the big sites get, but it’s enough to [...]
When I founded Thunderbolt over nine years ago, the web was a very different place. There was no Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Flickr or even Wikipedia. Nine years is a huge amount of time on the web and most sites don’t manage to last half of that, especially smaller ones. So how did we manage to [...]
When I was in Edinburgh last May, I met Philip Roberts, who handled the development for the games website SquareGo at the time. It was the first time that I’d talked to someone who does a similar job to what I do at Thunderbolt and it was incredibly interesting. Over a few drinks, we chatted [...]
As part of our final year at university, we each have to create a program and write our dissertation on it. My project is well under way and as I’ll be writing more about it over the coming months, I thought I’d introduce and explain it. In short, I’ve chosen to create an online stock [...]
White Stuff is probably one of the best kept secrets on the high street, having gone from a small skiwear retailer to a very profitable upmarket outfitter. They have dozens of shops across the country, but don’t advertise and avoid opening stores in any shopping centres. Their quirky marketing – they used mannequins with squirrel [...]
I love music, but I’ve hardly seen any bands live. Why? Because I never have any idea when artists are playing. Concert information has traditionally been very fragmented, with no central, dedicated service providing a single overview of what’s going on. Few artist websites provide an RSS feed and Last.fm‘s events section does a poor [...]