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Mid morning (approximately 5am) Matt wrote a nice little routine that we will be using once the main Dr Hue site is up and running. In layman’s terms if you follow Dr Hue on twitter then we’ll look at your profile pic, take the average picture and send your link to the site which will display products to you based on your colour.

It’s pretty nifty… or as the developer put it:

• Gathered a bunch of little snips of code to talk to Bit.ly (From JWards), Twitter (some guy called Tijs Verkoyen)
• Wrote a little widgit based on stuff in the PHP documentation to work out image average colour
• Wrote a little widgit to log already-seen friends so we don’t bother people with multiple direct messages
• Glued it all together so that:
  • Requests a list of Followers from Twitter
  • Checks for new Followers in that list
  • For each of the new Followers, we grab their Twitter profile pic…
  • …average its colour…
  • …then fire off a DM using the same Twitter module with a friendly message and a (hopefully) relevant link!

Development:

Histograms, nested sets and saturation: It’s not easy conversation over in developer land. Suffice to say – it’s all good, it’s all progress and all starting to fall into place. It’s always a nice feeling when the site finally get’s it’s skin.

Design:

The site design team are mopping up the last pieces of the jigsaw, filling in the gaps and relying on more and more matchsticks to keep the creatives coming.

Marketing:

Blogger outreach: The DrHue Blog is up and blog.drhue.com. As you can see the first post is a little treat for those who simply adore colour – the chance to win a free mystery gift in your favourite colour simply by blogging / tweeting about Dr Hue (his is for real – you can actually win!).

Apparently, this screen-shot is showing how our code is isolating the object in the image and then pulling out key colours for use by our search tool! Honest!!!

Everyone’s far too busy for in-depth interviews, and so tired they’re incapable of proper conversation anyway (we’re all waiting for our “4th wind”… The Prodigy are helping). So, here’s a quick round of one-word updates from a few key figures to the question how’s it going?

Dave – running the technical team – “OK”

Robbie – writing the business plan – “Slowly”

Will – photshopping some colurful stuff – “Splendidly”

Nick – Skinning Dr Hue’s blog for our marketing campaign – “Notbad”  (he didn’t really get the concept)

John – Controlling the stereo – “Louder”

Rob – Writing this – “Meh.”

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One thing to note is that the office ran out of milk 2 hours ago. Black tea and coffee all round. And we have no idea how early the shop opens.

Oh and, a little treat is also being prepared as part of a blogger outreach campaign – more on that in the next post, but keep your eyes peeled for the chance to get involved!

Biggest news after 4 hours of the most manic work any of us has ever done is… wait for it… the Dr Hue holding page is now up! You can go there now and sign up for updates.

Actually, that’s not much news at all is it? (Sorry – I’m knackered!) The REAL news is what each of our teams have been up to. (Oh, and that the eBay auction is now up to $250). Here’s a summary from the teams!

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Design

Excellent progress here. Obviously with a proposition like “shop by colour” the biggest task is going to be navigation of the site. The plan is to make it really easy for people to choose a colour (either by clicking, or uploading a ’swatch’ image to sample), and then make it easy for people to refine that search, bringing them closer to the colour of product they want… then people can worry about what type of product they want!

He's getting more helpful by the minute... (Clicky for bigger)

There’s also a lot of work going on with pens and paper as to the way that search results are displayed and refined, and the secondary navigation (i.e. by properties other than colour!) Should have more pretty pictures of that stuff soon!

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Tech

The techy dudes have progressed at an amazing rate on 4 fronts:

• Data import. John’s been working like a madman at this. He’s now pulling very close to to 13,000 products to our database…
• …which Ed’s built and nearly finished creating Search for, and has all the relevant fields for our colour information…
• …which is a TOUGH nut to crack! Rich is doing that and it’s looking really cool. He’s doing some amazing magic with OpenCV, paving the way to match our search results with…
• …colours derived from people’s uploaded photos, which Dan is sorting out with some JavaScript / AJAX and PHP awesomeness!!!

This is an amazing achievement, but, unfortunately at this stage the guys have no idea if they can pull these 4 streams together, and then skin them with the design templates in time for our midday deadline… which is in 9 hours! (Whiskey bottle status update; down to 2/3 full!)

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Marketing

Yep, this stream has now started in earnest. It kicked off with a remarkably intense brainstorm, considering it started at neary 1:00AM, and carried on until 2:15!

"Seriously guys, let's do it MY way!"

"OK, cool, let's do it your way."

To cut a long story short, two hours later we had our campaign thought… Dr Hue’s Colourful Personailities. What does this mean? Well, it dropped out of thinking about who would most naturally want to “shop by colour” – i.e. people who are really confident with colours and use them to express themselves… and also thinking about other people who wish they were!

Colourful Personalities

So, this is a social media campaign, designed to celebrate people who are colourful, publicly. These guys are our influencers, and by going after them first, and showing them how easy Dr Hue makes it for you to shop by colour, the idea is that – as aspirational people in the fashion and home furnishings markets (our two key markets), people will copy their behaviour and start to use Dr Hue too. Of course this is where all the super-simple UX design will really come into its own.

Pantone stylee

First Aid for colour shopping!

Pick a colour...

Making a splash

Crosshairs

SO, which is YOUR favourite… let us know in the comments and you might influence the final one. After all, Nick’s got a good few hours left to finish it!

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Also, Ben’s been working on the main man… Dr. Hue himself:

Dr Hue; He does magic science stuff with colours!

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On the development side of things, we’ve hit a few snags – wouldn’t be a proper development run without that, eh?

• Rich is working out how to isolate objects from their backgrounds in product shots, isolating regions of colour. Not easy!
• Ed is debugging some database action.
• And John is wrestling with the affiliate feeds (apparrently listening to Sepultura helps!).

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And finally… HUGE thankyous to Corinna for baking three cakes for the team. I’m off for some more Brownie…

UPDATE: we want as many affiliate product feeds to play with as possible… anyone got some for us?

Can't we just photoshop this?!

However, because of the (totally understandable) wrangling over a name, the creative side of things is playing catch-up – with the dudes still on sketches! So, logo design needs to happen FAST and so does web design. Eeek!

Does anyone know a magic spell to turn web developers into graphic designers?

(On the plus side, we just ordered loads of pizza.)

OK. 4-5pm was a BIG hour!

The branding team have now decided upon a name and we have the domain names registered. ‘Dr Hue’ is the winner, with ‘Killa Colour’ and ‘Hue Choose’ coming in a close joint second place!

Also, Will’s cut a little video from the idea-choosing process earlier today:

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The development team have now reported that feeds from affiliates are starting to come through, we now have Dorothy Perkins and Wallis and are working on a few really big large ones as we speak – we could really do with as many of these as possible, so if you;re reading and can help, please do!

Thanks to the Twitterers for all the ReTweets, @Replies and #24hourstartup hashtags on Twitter so far, and to all the bloggers posting about it!

Oh, and now that the noise and arguing has died down a bit, the webcam now has sound!

The branding guys have been having a bit of fun naming our service. This normally difficult task has been made all the more of a pain in the arse (or more fun, depending on how you look at it!) because the product is still being talked out in terms of how it will work. So, all they’re going on is that it will help people “shop by colour”… which is a bit vague.

One funny thing though – there’s been a lot of debate amongst the lads about whether to use the UK or American spelling of “Colour / color”… we put the question to our growing band of Twitter followers – with one pretty awesome response in particular from @Winn1!

Some rejected names:

• Suits Hue
• Swotcher
• Pizzazz

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John talking to TradeDoubler on the phone!

Then, a quick wander over to the Tech team (tried not to trip over all the Cat 5 cables!). They’ve already started some interesting conversations with TradeDoubler; who I hear are being very helpful – cheers guys! That seems to suggest we’re on a kind of passive-income revenue stream tip… hmmm. More will be revealed when the business plan is being written in the early hours of this morning!

There was also some really fascinating chat about identifying colour pallets from images and object detection stuff too. I hung around until this got so technical I was just smiling like a moron!

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Finally, I stopped by our Ebay auction and saw that we’ve had 18 bids already and are up to $154.00! Cheers to the two bidders who are currently duking it out. Any more for any more?