elt bot

Building an ELT ‘Bot’

As the sun set over Hackney  on Friday, the week was winding down as usual for the ELTjam London team. In-boxes were being zeroed; our weekly newsletter was being compiled; tasks were being moved to ‘done’ on the company Kanban board.

The team often ends the week with a bottle of craft ale or two, but the box of 24 beers from Hackney Wick’s Crate Brewery and a 3-litre box of wine suggested that this was to be a different kind of Friday night. At 6pm, we turned off our computers and gathered around the table for the start of our first ever hackathon. It would be the start of a process that, in less than 24 hours, would lead us to create Amé, an ELT ‘bot’.

80/20 principle in ELT publishing

Applying the Pareto Principle to ELT Publishing

The acronym MVP, or Minimum Viable Product, seems to be popping up in conversations with ELT publishers all over the place right now; and that’s odd, because up until about 2013, I’d never heard a publisher mention it. For those of you unfamiliar with the term, an MVP is a tactic used in product development to gauge customer interest in a new product or product feature. The idea is that you don’t build the whole thing; you just build enough to see whether people might be interested in what you’re proposing. What many people seem to actually be doing with their MVP is applying the Pareto Principle. Otherwise known as the 80–20 rule

Developing our own MVP – Flovoco

On my first day at ELTjam, I was pitched at. Tim, Laurie and Nick (the ELTjam founders) sat me down and tried to sell me their product ideas. This week, we take the first step towards testing whether one of these ideas can become a viable ELT product. Today sees the launch of the flovo.co landing page, our own MVP, a little litmus test. But how did we get to this point and why have we made a webpage before the app is ready?

Introducing: Accelerate Cambridge

ELTjam met with Simon Stockley, Deputy Director of Accelerate Cambridge and Hanadi Jabado, entrepreneur and Director of Accelerate Cambridge to talk about Accelerate Cambridge’s approach to entrepreneurship and how the startup weekend format would benefit someone looking to develop their business ideas.