icancanu

With the might of our friendships
And our many projects to do
The future is sharing -
Or rather, Icancanu!

“Get a little help from your friends!”

Looking forward to 2012. It’s time to give a little help to your friends! ~ dave@ Icancanu.com

Which route is better for a social media engagement tool: an iPhone app or an HTML5 page? Write an answer on Quora

Which route is better for a social media engagement tool: an iPhone app or an HTML5 page?

How to WIN a 3G+WiFi Amazon Kindle - with a little help from your friends

Help us grow icancanu for a chance to WIN the fabulous new 3G+WiFi Amazon Kindle.

Icancanu is all about friends helping each other, and the more friends connected, the more likely someone will be able to help you. So help us to help you, by inviting all your friends to join. And the user with the most new friends by the end of the year wins the 3G Amazon Kindle. It’s that simple.

Thanks for all your support so far!

Dave, Pete and Tony
 

So, how to be a winner (with a little help from your friends)

For a chance to win an Amazon Kindle, all you have to do is connect to as many friends as possible via icancanu.

The user with the most friends at midnight on New Year’s Eve wins*. It couldn’t be easier. And to help you out, here are some of the ways to invite friends to icancanu.com:

1. Log-in to icancanu.com and invite people from the home page using the “Invite a Friend” link at the top of the page.

2. Send your friends to http://www.icancanu.com and, once they’ve registered, click “add as friend” in their profile (you can find them by typing their name in the search field on the right).

3. Set up a group such as “People I’m going to share my Amazon Kindle with” and invite people to join your group. Once they have registered, they automatically become your friends.

4. Repeat all of the above until midnight on New Year’s Eve.


*Conditions Apply

So good luck. Get clicking and hopefully I’ll be sending you out an Amazon Kindle. The winner will be announced in the January 2011 edition of the icancanu newsletter.

If you have any further questions or suggestions, drop me a line, or you can enter your thoughts into our feedback form at the link below:

http://www.icancanu.com/feedback

That’s it for December, keep posting those favours!

Thanks for making the world a better place.

Dave, Peter & Tony and the rest of the icancanu team.

www.icancanu.com

November newsletter

Dear friend,

Welcome to your first icancanu newsletter. Each month we will try to give you, and our other faithful users an update on what’s been happening with icancanu.

The story so far…
Well, the icancanu website officially opened its doors for beta testing in September with focus groups in Canada and the UK. Pete hosted a beer and sushi evening at his place in Toronto while Tony and myself hosted a beer and pizza night at the offices of Jestico+Whiles Architects in London. Approximately 20 friends joined us to learn how icancanu can help in everyday activities. We explained how to connect with friends, request and offer favours and ultimately help one another. In return the participants gave us some great recommendations!

If you have any further questions or suggestions, drop me a line, or you can enter your thoughts into our feedback form at the link below:
http://www.icancanu.com/feedback

Did you know?
Within icancanu users can create “Groups” such as “My Babysitting Group”. Groups are a great way to connect with friends for specific activities and request or offer favours of one another. For instance, I just set up the group “Architectural Answers” and invited all my architect friends from around the globe. So if I need any help or advice I can call upon the wealth of knowledge of this group.

Here’s how it works:

1. Go to myIcancanu - http://www.icancanu.com/users/profile
2. Click on the “Groups” tab
3. Click on the “Create” button
4. Name and Describe the group
5. Invite Friends

It’s that simple. Once you have set up your group you can post favour requests that only these people will see. How cool is that? 

New members
Users have signed up to the site from all corners of the globe - UK, Romania, the United States, Canada, France, Georgia, Germany, Hong Kong, Australia and China!

What next for icancanu?
Here’s a selection of the things we’re working on:

• Facebook App
  Very soon you will be able to ask and offer favours from Facebook. You’ll also be able to see icancanu updates on your Facebook Wall.
• AskIcancanu
  If you need advice or help, why not ask your icancanu friends?
• Pass it on
  OK, so maybe you can’t help, but you know a friend who can? Well, guess what… just pass it on!
• Attach Media
  You can make a hat look like a tap? Well maybe you’d like to show your friends that you can with a photo!
• Romanian Language Version
  We’re excited to announce the imminent launch of a Romanian version of icancanu. Radu, Vlad, Marius and Mihai are busy translating the site. So if you want to try your hand at some Romanian, select “Change Language” from the header at the top of your icancanu web page.

By David Stanley
www.icancanu.com 

Tony just became a backer for the Glif on Kickstarter.

The Glif, which is an phone accessory is the brainchild of Dan Provost & Thomas Gerhardt. They asked for pledges from the public to help them manufacture their product, so for $20 Tony is supporting this venture and in return a Glif will be posted to him as soon as one is available. Sweet! Originally the goal was to raise $10,000 for the manufacturing process. However, I just checked the site today and apparently they have had pledges to date of $134,417! 

Kickstarter itself is an amazing site. Kickstarter is a great example of how people are helping people to realise their dreams and ideas. Because of connectivity individuals today have the capacity to take ideas further than they would have been able to have in the past.  Connectivity is King! Connectivity through sites such as Kickstarter allow individuals to support, test and nurture ideas that might never have see the light of day through conventional routes. 

This whole process of communal interaction reminds me of a talk by Matt Ridley on TED.com entitled “When Ideas Have Sex”. One of his premises was that there was no single individual on the planet that knows how to make a pencil. No single individual is familiar with all the processes to make a pencil from mining graphite to felling trees to machining the timber.

For this reason I am really excited about the PROJECTS phase of icancanu. Projects will be a way in which individuals and businesses will be able to tap in the many skills and resources that they unwittingly have at their disposal to realise their dreams! Best not tell you too much… before it rolls off the presses. 

By David Stanley
www.icancanu.com 

I remember a book that I read many years ago entitled “Amusing Ourselves to Death”. The author, Neil Postman, suggested that the world was better reflected by Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World” rather than George Orwell’s “1984”. At the time of it’s publication in 1985, Postman viewed the entertainment value of television as contemporary society’s “soma” - or means by which the consumers’ rights were exchanged for entertainment. In his view it was not the state that controlled individual rights, but our addiction to entertainment. It was also interesting to note that this new kingdom of the couch potato was preceded (in the US) by a long period of rational argument owing to the insatiable appetite for print typography. Apparently the US was a massive consumer of German and English literature.

In spite of Postman’s revelations, it is interesting to note that only 4 years later a new technological revolution arrived to jolt us out of our comfy couches. Just as soon as we had become familiar and comfortable with our remote controls British engineer Tim Berners-Lee proposed the World Wide Web that would soon replace our remote control with a computer mouse!

Now once again we are witnessing a transformation in the way that we communicate with each other through digital media. Now individuals have the opportunity to communicate in a vast amount of ways - from sms, voice, text, email and apps. And with the recent release of the Xbox Kinect individuals will soon be able to interact in completely new ways!

Now, because we can connect in the here and the now we can always know when our friends need help and leave the comfy of our couches to give them a hand!