Ever stuck for where to go for a late night drink or meal in London?

My friend Emma has the answer for you with her 24 Hour London app (available on iOS and Android). The idea behind the app is to provide people with information about bars, restaurants and clubs that are open late at night with the added bonus of special offers of discounts and even free drinks at some of the establishments listed.

The app is in early stages but is gaining a following and Emma's on a mission to capitalise on that. Londoners, if you're ever out and about at night, then do download the app - it's free and I expect you'll find it useful.

As part of Emma's initial marketing push, she's using Thunderclap to help spread the word about 24 Hour London in January. Thunderclap simply posts a tweet or a status update on your feed at the time and day allotted and that's it. It doesn't ask you to connect your contacts or spam your friends by email. It costs you nothing save for a few moments of your time.

Your assistance will mean more downloads for her and more footfall for the venues she works with and maybe free drinks for you and your friends if you use the app. Plus, you'll probably find out about places near where you live or work that you never knew opened late at night. I'm also really interested to see how this campaign works. I've never tried Thunderclap. If there's any insight from the campaign, I'll share it here in due course.

Click on the link here or the image above, you too can add your voice to the campaign.

Day 21/25 Blogmas

Linkage on a Tuesday

A few things I've been reading and thought were worth sharing...

• A good read here from a Greek tech and food entrepreneur telling his story of idea to execution to early success to failure to learning to pivot to greater success. 

• How a fake food business won an award. A salutary tale of how to game social media via buying 'influencers' and what this means for your online marketing strategy. 

• Why am I being paid less than my male colleagues? TLDR probably because you never asked for more money and didn't negotiate. I've heard this before that women don't tend to negotiate. Men negotiate from their first salary so get ahead early on. It doesn't occur to women to do the same. A lesson in negotiation here for men and women of all ages.

• This next one isn't news to me, but it may be news to you and is one of the reasons why I keep banging on about gender discrimination. Having women on your team makes for a better business:

Companies with three or more corporate directors who are women (in at least four out of five years) outperformed those with no women on the board by 84% on return on sales, 60% on return on invested capital and 46% on return on equity.

Also

A 2009 study in Silicon Valley found that venture-backed companies run by women had annual revenues that were 12% higher, used an average of one third less committed capital and had lower failure rates than those led by men.

There's more in this article about addressing the gender gap in angel investing. 

•  This post from Terence Eden is great looking at user-centred design and creating personas when creating websites, apps and services. Entitled 'Debuffs, Enchantment, Equipment, and Players - an RPG Player's Guide to User Stories. I highly recommend.

Thanks for reading.