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Through a flurry of tweets today, @dressjunkie has organised a Tweetsupper for 10 people for this Saturday night. We have the two of us (@cimota, @dressjunkie) and @theronster, @karenquinn, @goblin and his wife, @goodonpaper and a friend and @pauljholden and his wife. This is especially relevant considering that an ex-colleague of mine described Twitter as … Continue reading “TweetSupper”
Through a flurry of tweets today, @dressjunkie has organised a Tweetsupper for 10 people for this Saturday night. We have the two of us (@cimota, @dressjunkie) and @theronster, @karenquinn, @goblin and his wife, @goodonpaper and a friend and @pauljholden and his wife.
This is especially relevant considering that an ex-colleague of mine described Twitter as a place for sad geeks to hide behind iApps. Yeah, he’s right. But so fucking what?
Looking forward to seeing everyone on Saturday night.
Tomorrow night brings us the Digital Island Meetup (née TechLudd) where a heap of interested techophiles will descend on Ten Square in Belfast around 7:30 pm and spend the evening talking about subjects like social technology, open source, raising venture capital, web 2.0 and, of course, digital content. If you’re remotely interested in the subjects … Continue reading “Digital Island Meetup: Wednesday 7:30 pm: TenSquare, Belfast”
Tomorrow night brings us the Digital Island Meetup (née TechLudd) where a heap of interested techophiles will descend on Ten Square in Belfast around 7:30 pm and spend the evening talking about subjects like social technology, open source, raising venture capital, web 2.0 and, of course, digital content.
If you’re remotely interested in the subjects listed on the link above, then get yourself registered to attend. It’s free, it’s in Belfast (not far from the train stations and main bus routes) and it’s going to have a lot of people talking about interesting things to each other. There’s also still some spaces for the Open Demo slots.
I’ll be there to talk about the Digital Circle and also to chat about iPhone app development especially with regard to the Infurious Comic Reader application. Pop along and say Hi!
I first read the term in Charles Stross’ Accelerando ( which is quite good though horribly dated now ) and it reminded me of one of the first group activities we had on board the ship; the emergency drill. In theory you move without fuss or panic to the muster stations and don your life-jacket. … Continue reading “Venture Altruists”
I first read the term in Charles Stross’ Accelerando ( which is quite good though horribly dated now ) and it reminded me of one of the first group activities we had on board the ship; the emergency drill.
In theory you move without fuss or panic to the muster stations and don your life-jacket. The person behind you is meant to check you’ve put the damn thing on correctly (because if not you’ll vanish beneath the waves when you hit the water leaving an otherwise perfectly functional life-jacket bobbing about up top. You then do it for them. The network of trust this created means you get a benefit from helping others.
In my TA days, this was called the Buddy-Buddy system. Keeping your squad alive meant they’d be around to save your neck later (and presumably not just by drawing fire as an additional target).
There’s a lot to be said for the concept of the venture altruist ( or the altrupreneur ) especially when you consider the enthusiasm shown at the local Open Coffee Club meetings in Belfast. BOCC is still in the state of talking about stuff and not yet really at the state of doing stuff. I’d like to change that by encouraging everyone to consider being a venture altruist fir a while.
Altrupreneurs share. It’s not about being there first, it’s not about NDAs, it’s not even about waiting until you are ready. It’s about throwing something interesting into the melting pot.
Ideas are almost worthless without implementation – I don’t recall where I got this from but a ideas and implementations can be ranked from $1 to $1000. Take the values and multiply them. A $1000 idea if given a $1 implementation doesn’t make anyone happy. A $1 idea can also disappoint even if given a $1000 implementation. You really need to give a $1000 idea a $1000 implementation to see real results ( though this leaves plenty if room for $100 ideas and $100 implementations).
Altrupreneurs, the people you might find at any Open Coffee meeting, will be willing to do more than just listen and give opinions. Their contacts and expertise is worth a lot more than a cheque from a venture capitalist They’re the people to ask about hosting space for your startup, the people who’ll loan you a desk while you bootstrap your company, who aren’t afraid to pick up the tab or who will work to find sponsorship for a crazy pitch they just heard.
Treat the crazy pitch like your buddy and help him check his lifejacket so he can keep his head above water.
LaunchPad CoWorking An interview with Jerome Chang, founder of Blankspaces: Spike: You’re also using a for-profit business model (as is LaunchPad Coworking). How did you decide on this model? Did you take any heat for it? Jerome: I’m all for pushing collaboration and communities — if profit is what it takes to generate more participants … Continue reading “CoWorking: profit or non-profit”
LaunchPad CoWorking
An interview with Jerome Chang, founder of Blankspaces:
Spike: You’re also using a for-profit business model (as is LaunchPad Coworking). How did you decide on this model? Did you take any heat for it?
Jerome: I’m all for pushing collaboration and communities — if profit is what it takes to generate more participants and advance the cultural movement, then profit it is. Between the time and effort, money, and liability, we should be rewarded for that contribution and exposure. Besides, I didn’t know about coworking at all until I’d already started construction, so I was not “influenced†by the altruism.
I’m becoming more and more convinced that a Co-Working site needs to be a ‘company’ as opposed to a ‘charity’.
I’ve seen lots of non-profits fall by the wayside due to the founders needing to move on and it’s hard to find people with the right mentality to take over. I’ve seen non-profits founder because without the extra edge of needing to make a profit (and reaping benefits thereof) the good will can vanish.
I’m well aware that people working at a non-profit can draw salaries and that the non-profit moniker has been used in order to attract attention while the ‘workers’ draw insanely large salaries. I guess I’m not comfortable hiding behind the tax benefits of a non-profit while engaged in something that is creating things ‘for profit’.
But let’s run with the current school of thought. That CoWorkingBelfast will be a non-profit organisation.
That said – if I have anything to do with it, CoWorkingBelfast will have to be a shining light and not just a damp squib. I want it to be excellent, a model place to work and not just a set of desks in a dreary room above a bank. It has to make enough money to survive and prosper and not just be a half-empty space which has to resort to arcane marketing schemes disguised as trade shows in order to generate a bit of coin.
Part of the Co-Working Belfast ethos should, in my opinion, to create ‘industry culture’ in Northern Ireland. That’s got to be more than just creating a web portal (and how many of those have sprung up in the last year or so) but the creation of a lasting legacy, a tradition of fostering creativity in the technology sector. CoWorking is not about technology itself – it’s about connecting people where they were not previously connected.
Part of the culture of CoWorking Belfast should not only be the opportunities and connections which are brought about by proximity but also the potential for fostering tomorrow’s industry (you know, the people who will be paying taxes when you and I are in a home for the elderly). I have a plan which consists of nothing more than a couple of pledges, a holding page on a web site and a monthly bill which I’ll work to find sponsorship for – which will be wholly dedicated to finding people with energy, be they young in body or just young in mind, and giving them a place to work and express their creativity as well as providing mentoring (by using and abusing the people housed in the CoWorking building) – more on this later.
Through this meandering post I’m convincing myself that CoWorkingBelfast can be a no-profit. What do you think?
Microfinance see Microcredit. –noun the lending of very small amounts of money at low interest, esp. to a start-up company or self-employed person. The problem with Microfinance and Microcredit is that, at the end of the day, someone ends up owing someone else money. And that’s a shaky way to get started in anything. The … Continue reading “Coworking Microsupport”
Microfinance
see Microcredit. –noun
the lending of very small amounts of money at low interest, esp. to a start-up company or self-employed person.
The problem with Microfinance and Microcredit is that, at the end of the day, someone ends up owing someone else money. And that’s a shaky way to get started in anything.
The concept of Microfinance for small businesses in return for equity in the business has already been successfully applied via Paul Graham’s Ycombinator.
Y Combinator does seed funding for startups. Seed funding is the earliest stage of venture funding. It pays your expenses while you’re getting started.
We make small investments (rarely more than $20,000) in return for small stakes in the companies we fund (usually 2-10%).
What happens at Y Combinator? The most important thing we do is work with startups on their ideas. We’re hackers ourselves, and we’ve spent a lot of time figuring out how to make things people want. So we can usually see fairly quickly the direction in which a small idea should be expanded, or the point at which to begin attacking a large but vague one.
This seems to me to be a different slant on the pre-Bubble concept of ‘code for pizza’. I knew a couple of smart guys back pre-2000 who worked full time for companies in return for pizza and promises while in receipt of unemployment benefit – they were doing the right thing after all – making a real concerted effort to get off the unemployment line by trying to be employable. None of them are gazillionaires right now (which shows the benefits of contracts over promises).
While Northern Ireland has had the concept of the incubator for years (the first one I visited was the Fujitsu/University of Ulster funded incubator where I met the guys who were ‘Osarius’ who have now all moved on to bigger and better things), it was definitely in a larger scale. There were desks, offices, stationery. That’s not the sector I’m interested in.
With the work being done for the co-working space in Northern Ireland, it is my intent to fund a desk or two and provide some desktop computers (intel iMacs) in order to foster some idea of Microsupport for potential startup companies. It’s not about funding their pizza or foozball lifestyles because people who want to get things done will find a way – this is operational expenditure. The hard part for this sector is the capital expenditure. By providing up to date hardware and taking advantage of the bountiful free time that ‘young people’ have, I think there could be an excellent environment created in the co-working space to foster new and cool innovations coming out of Belfast. David Rice wrote that the co-working initiative is designed to espouse this single concept:
Bringing silicon valley thinking to Belfast by creating a cutting edge work space for digital and creative workers.
It’s my aim that one of the rooms in the upstairs be allocated to ‘incubation’ for a few potential movers and shakers out there who need that extra bit of support to get started. I don’t care whether they want to become movie makers, software engineers, web developers or digital artists – as long as they don’t just sit around surfing the web, it’s got to be better than nothing. I’ve not really talked about this with David, Andy or anyone else central to CoworkingBelfast so they may throw their hands up and tell me to piss off – but this is the concept. Most of the individuals involved in CoWorking Belfast are young men who probably would have loved to have a co-working space available to them especially with some up to date hardware starting up.
What would Co-Working Belfast get out of it? Another raison d’etre. Karma. Kudos. Reputation. And the feeling of doing the right thing. Maybe if they’re a success they’ll help fund the next iteration of CoWorking Belfast or whatever the new fad of the day is.
There are other similar methods of support out there which have a similar model but are not the same and therefore I think this brings a certain uniqueness. For example, Google’s Summer of Code provides a $5000 stipend for student developers for summer (around 3 months) of work on open source projects. Google funds around 400 students each summer this way (putting the bill at around $2 million) but then they are Google and have infinite money. There are also business incubation services in Northern Ireland available through InvestNI but the pitch is for the slightly later stage when the individuals know what they’re doing and need the incubation from hatchling to maturity.
To extend the metaphor, I’m talking about supporting the egg itself – until the egg cracks. It’s never been easier to start up a business and become the next Twitter, Youtube, Big Word Project or 37Signals and it is these kinds of business that we should be fostering. I think that the people involved in starting the co-working space in Belfast are best qualified to determine who uses the ‘hatchery’.
The co-working space itself won’t make Belfast like Silicon Valley by it’s presence, but by it’s vision.
The Belfast Open Coffee Club met tonight and managed to pull in more people than ever – twenty or so – and I was both pleased and disappointed that there are just too many smart, interesting people in the room and not enough time to talk to them all. If I didn’t say hello to … Continue reading “Belfast OpenCoffeeClub”
The Belfast Open Coffee Club met tonight and managed to pull in more people than ever – twenty or so – and I was both pleased and disappointed that there are just too many smart, interesting people in the room and not enough time to talk to them all. If I didn’t say hello to you directly, then I apologise. There were some people I wanted to grill mercilessly but I didn’t even get a chance to say Hello. You know who you are.
16:30 – Co-Working Belfast
A 20 minute walkaround the site puts some reality on the bones of what we’ve been thinking about. I’m liking what I saw in our review of the site (and I’ll post the recording video of our walkaround if people want to see it to get a feel for the site – it’s a 5 minute 58 MB .mp4 file and I’ve added a Youtube embed below which will give you a BlairWitch-esque view of the building). I’m pleased that we’ve got enough people to actually make this a going concern but the serious questions about what kind of support we will get from Belfast City Council and InvestNI are still unanswered.
That said – it’s not a site like some of the others we’ve seen – which have artistic ceilings and look more like art studios than workplaces. It’s going to be grassroots, it’s basic but it’s sustainable and provides what I’d consider to be a basis for future movement.
19:00 – OpenCoffee Club
There were too may clusters of people talking to allow me to cover them all here but the ones which I witnessed were:
As 21:00 came, I had to leave due to family commitments but it was extremely encouraging to see so many people there and I’m sure that if circumstances has been different, we’d have seen half a dozen more.
Roll on next time!
Tomorrow evening, Belfast Open Coffee Club will be meeting at Charlies (the green umbrella shape in the middle of the Google Map link there). I’m speculating that topics will include: OpenCoffee BBQ on the 16th, iPhone 3G and O2’s information flow, game development, Ruby on Rails (and whether it scales), the FailWhale, Digital Circle and … Continue reading “BOCC Tomorrow”
Tomorrow evening, Belfast Open Coffee Club will be meeting at Charlies (the green umbrella shape in the middle of the Google Map link there).
I’m speculating that topics will include: OpenCoffee BBQ on the 16th, iPhone 3G and O2’s information flow, game development, Ruby on Rails (and whether it scales), the FailWhale, Digital Circle and a whole heap on Co-Working. Topics that I don’t think will get a lot of airplay would include Big Brother, the US election nonsense and Starbucks closing an additional 500 sites in the US.
It would be swell if you could make it.
And, Today is my birthday. Happy birthday to me.
Mike Elgan at ComputerWorld gives software developers the chills worldwide as he describes ‘virtual sticky notes’: Researchers at a variety of labs, at both universities and private companies, are working on technology that enables people to create messages and associate them with a specific location. Those pursuing leadership in this technology include Microsoft, Siemens, Cornell … Continue reading “Virtual Notes”
Mike Elgan at ComputerWorld gives software developers the chills worldwide as he describes ‘virtual sticky notes’:
Researchers at a variety of labs, at both universities and private companies, are working on technology that enables people to create messages and associate them with a specific location. Those pursuing leadership in this technology include Microsoft, Siemens, Cornell University, the University of Edinburgh and now in the news this week: Duke University.
…
“Virtual sticky notes” are messages and other content that people can’t read unless they’re standing in the right spot. The idea is that a phone’s GPS determines the location for both poster and readers. The concept turns the physical world into a kind of 3-D Internet.
It’s not just the big companies, there are half a dozen lone developers and micro-ISVs who are working on something similar.
The moment I heard about the Core Location possibilities in the iPhone, the moment I realised how big this was going to be. Location-Services are going to be the hit technology of the next eighteen months. And if you don’t believe me, well…you’re an idiot. Geeks have been lusting after a reliable match-up between virtual space (cyberspace, whatever) and meatspace (the real world) for decades (I first read about it in 1993 in a roleplaying game so you can appreciate how long geeks have been wanting this). Now we have devices with GPS and internet capabilities that will allow that to happen.
Mike describes some scenarios such as writing a restaurant review after stepping out of a restaurant and posting it to the the ‘Virtual Note’ server which can be retrieved by the next person who stands there and opens the ‘Virtual Note’ application.
Whether this is used for private messaging or public messaging, it’s also open to abuse. Rather than phone booths containing cards for illicit services (admittedly I’ve not seen these in Belfast), you might end up with virtual notes which only really occupy virtual space and not meatspace. What’s to stop and unscrupuluous business owner or advertiser from swamping a competitor’s physical location with bad reviews? What’s to stop criminals from leaving an enticing breadcrumb trail that brings our curious geeks into a mugging incident because the criminals know they have some saleable technology with them.
Worse still, we’re talking about virtual overlays of the real world here so places that are heavily visited will become swamped with messages; both personal and commercial, public and private.
This is why exclusivity might be needed. We need to be able to segregate this traffic so that we only see the traffic from the people we subscribe to. This would be, a good goal for Twitter 2.0 (or maybe Google is going mash up Jaiku and Google Maps to give us exactly this for Android?)
There are other avenues of fun – leaving a breadcrumb trail for someone to follow armed with a GPS and your ‘sticky notes’ software. And what if the ‘location’ isn’t enough data. What if you required the GPS location as well as a necessity to point your camera in a certain direction in order to do a fuzzy pattern match from a photo you just received. Sounds like fun.
Now, imagine if the overlay technology was built into glasses.
Mike says this will all be due to three things:
I can believe the first two but there’s no way that Android is currently a major contributor to this – there’s only an unfinished SDK and no shipping phones. We’re going to see compelling applications in this space long before this (considering it takes 6 months to build an application and Android is probably 6 months away from initial release) probably shipping for iPhone and Windows Mobile. Mark my words.
I wouldn’t be surprised if we see something like this already. Socialight already has channels which can accept location-based notes, Loopt already allows you to look through the history of friends locations (though it relies on SMS messages) and this will be something that we see added to other existing social network services.
2008 is beginning to look like the year of the grassroots gathering. Belfast Open Coffee Club (BOCC) has been growing, we just had BarCampBelfast 08 and NiMUG have been having monthly meetings as well. On top of that we’re promised some sort of TechLudd-type meeting towards the end of the year and the XCake people … Continue reading “Someone must stop them…”
2008 is beginning to look like the year of the grassroots gathering.
Belfast Open Coffee Club (BOCC) has been growing, we just had BarCampBelfast 08 and NiMUG have been having monthly meetings as well. On top of that we’re promised some sort of TechLudd-type meeting towards the end of the year and the XCake people will have a meeting by the end of the summer. And lastly, BLUG have woken up.
With all these geeks meeting and greeting, they’re going to gain social skills!
They must be stopped!
John F. Kennedy writes about the recession of the Irish economy Enterprise and entrepreneurship are the antidote for unemployment and recession. Encourage people to use computers and broadband to beat the recession, they can work for anyone from anywhere. They can create businesses based on anything from selling stuff on eBay to using their intelligence … Continue reading “Recession coming, solution = Entrepreneurship”
John F. Kennedy writes about the recession of the Irish economy
Enterprise and entrepreneurship are the antidote for unemployment and recession. Encourage people to use computers and broadband to beat the recession, they can work for anyone from anywhere. They can create businesses based on anything from selling stuff on eBay to using their intelligence to write, provide consultancy services or develop technology. This is the way out. Failure to provide them with the tools is economic sabotage. Let’s hope intelligence prevails.
Yes!
This sort of thinking is what Momentum and the Digital Circle[1] should be working on. It’s not necessarily about supporting the existing economy but by providing grass roots access to technology to take advantage of nascent knowledge workers.
I just don’t see us taking advantage of it. And we’d have to work hard to create value in this ‘credit crunch restricted’ world. That said, while the property market is in the doldrums, there are investors with cash in their portfolios looking for technologies to invest in.
To this end we need strategies like Co-Working Belfast or my as-yet-stillborn New Workspace to provide the most basic substrate for people to find places to work and collaborate. Just getting the space organised would make a big step – the rest is then up to the individuals with experienced mentors providing the introductions. How about a system of half a dozen mini-Ycombinators?
Anyway. You’re a taxpayer. Think about it.
[1] For a laugh, see digitalcircle.org without the www. Anyone see a problem?