ideas – ɔimoɈɒ

Ideas are cheap. Enthusiasm is priceless

Back in 2008, Y-Combinator threw out a list of startup ideas they thought would be interesting to see and followed up with a more formal request for startups in a few key areas. A few days ago I recounted a list from May 2009 where a VC listed areas he could see room for innovation. Earlier this year, not long after we got back from WWDC, I posted a forum called Ideas CafÃ© to a group of friends who were on the WWDC trip and populated it with a few ideas that I’d come up with, simply in order to see what could come out of it. I’m not a developer (and likely will never be) but I have plenty of ideas.

Earlier today ReadWriteWeb came up with 6 Awesome Apps Begging to Be Developed.

I know there are developers out there in my community who have said to me, “Yeah, I can write code, but I don’t have an ideas on what to write.” or something similar. There’s a gazillion ideas out there – if you’re not sure about something, ask.

Back in the nineties when I was writing my books, I remember having to sit and pitch the story to a friend of mine who, at hearing the tagline, wasn’t interested. For two minutes I explained the premise and at the end created a fan who not only promoted the book at every turn but wrote an incredible amount of supporting material.

There will be ideas like that out there. Concepts that when you first read them they’ll be kinda wooly. So talk to people about them. Talk to me. Turn up at one of the many OpenCoffeeClub meetings in your region (we have around 6 different OCC geographies in Northern Ireland alone). Maybe someone can give you that two minute pitch to make you insanely enthusiastic?

iPhone developers: demand outstrips supply

Raven Zachary on the Inside iPhone O’Reilly Blog writes: I love talking with entrepreneurs and people passionate about their ideas. It’s one of the things I look forward to most in my week. Unfortunately, we are at a phase in the growth of the iPhone ecosystem where there is a significant gap between individuals with … Continue reading “iPhone developers: demand outstrips supply”

Raven Zachary on the Inside iPhone O’Reilly Blog writes:

I love talking with entrepreneurs and people passionate about their ideas. It’s one of the things I look forward to most in my week. Unfortunately, we are at a phase in the growth of the iPhone ecosystem where there is a significant gap between individuals with the ideas and those who are actually capable of turning the ideas into iPhone applications. This gap is almost entirely financial in nature. The demand for iPhone developers exceeds the supply and I don’t see that changing anytime soon.

This is a good thing. We have a situation where it is realised that while ideas do have merit, they are worthless without execution and unless you have the ability to execute it, or the money to have that execution funded, then your idea has only merit going for it.

This is why I think xCake, though not fully formed, has some amazing potential as a way to increase the iPhone development skills in the province. The problem being that I don’t know anyone locally who has the expertise and the time to do justice to it. Stuart Gibson and I are meeting weekly and setting homeworks to improve our iPhone/Cocoa development knowledge but it’s not something that’s going to happen overnight.

How long does it take to become a Mac/iPhone developer? I’ve seen a lot of iPhone developers out there who have ten years of developing on the Mac and some with more (based on being developers for Mac OS 9 and/or OpenSTEP). It takes time.

Moving ideas to implementation and beyond…

I’ve just penned a long post over at the DigitalCircle blog about taking ideas to the next stage. I’ve covered this before here and here. The post is focussing on some of the initiatives which are out there in the province for doing just that. Again, I’d mentioned this before here and here. I find … Continue reading “Moving ideas to implementation and beyond…”

I’ve just penned a long post over at the DigitalCircle blog about taking ideas to the next stage. I’ve covered this before here and here.

The post is focussing on some of the initiatives which are out there in the province for doing just that. Again, I’d mentioned this before here and here.

I find it both amusing and exciting that there is increased opportunity for people to get their ideas realised. It’s like an XFactor for ideas rather than singers which, on the face of it, might be a better model than a Dragon’s Den (which let’s face it, both are getting very tired). It also smacks of Cambrian House which espoused crowd-sourcing as it’s primary model of innovation and market research. (The problem being that crowds tend to be stupid rather than smart). So while it failed, it wasn’t necessarily all bad.

This all shows that there is a market for helping people with vision get stuff done. And isn’t that what venture capital is meant to be all about. We have a poor VC network in Northern Ireland in terms of both quality and quantity. The very best tend to be entrenched in businesses they understand very well and that, for all the frustration it might cause post-Web 2.0 entrepreneurs is perfectly reasonable as it would be folly to expect an investor to put money into a venture they didn’t understand. That said – unless we start to see VCs with a little experience in the tech world, we’re not going to be able to change things.

On top of the schemes I mention on the DC blog, there’s something else planned for next summer which, at the moment, is still in stealth mode (insofar as not very much has been done for it but there’s energy, ideas and time).

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