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James Scott launched the Northern Ireland Technology Blog in December 2008 and is providing another useful resource for technology companies and startups. The site includes news items, profiles on companies, information for startups, details about the vibrant local “grassroots†tech community and information for students as well as a calendar of upcoming events. The news … Continue reading “Northern Ireland Tech Blog launches…”
James Scott launched the Northern Ireland Technology Blog in December 2008 and is providing another useful resource for technology companies and startups.
The site includes news items, profiles on companies, information for startups, details about the vibrant local “grassroots†tech community and information for students as well as a calendar of upcoming events.
The news provided is tech- and province-focussed with information about the whole technology sector in the six counties.
Giles Bowkett wrote When you build a system where you get points for the number of people who agree with you, you are building a popularity contest for ideas. However, your popularity contest for ideas will not be dominated by the people with the best ideas, but the people with the most time to spend … Continue reading “Is crowdsourcing fundamentally flawed?”
Giles Bowkett wrote
When you build a system where you get points for the number of people who agree with you, you are building a popularity contest for ideas. However, your popularity contest for ideas will not be dominated by the people with the best ideas, but the people with the most time to spend on your web site.
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Even if you didn’t know about the long tail, you’d look for the best ideas on Hacker News (for example) not in its top 10 but in its bottom 1000, because any reasonable person would expect this effect – that people who waste their own time have, in effect, more votes than people who value it – to elevate bad but popular ideas and irretrievably sink independent thinking. And you would be right. TechCrunch is frequently in HN’s top ten.
It also speaks poorly for crowdsourced ideas. People who put a lot of time into these things need to be ranked by authority in some way, but how do you verify the authority, how do you independently value someone’s time? And how do you tell that one person spending five minutes on a subject is worth considerably more than another spending five days? It’s the same effect, I think, that has made Sourceforge almost useless – projects get ranked by releases and activity which means little in a world where all projects are treated equal regardless of actual quality.
Then again, this is a world where a fart noise application makes someone a years salary in two weeks.
…over Christmas Eve and Christmas day, more than 58,000 people purchased a copy of iFart, netting him over $40,000 dollars in just two days.
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It was initially released on December 12th…
In the two weeks following its release, it’s been downloaded 113,865 times, netting the creators $78,908 in the process. 78 grand is higher than the average income per capita for every country in the world – and this guy surpassed that in two weeks.
I guess this is why I had a meeting last week entitled “A Better iFart App” which was, in part, ironic and in part, totally serious. Someone out there is sitting on a goldmine idea which will net him or her thousands upon thousands times more than the actual monetary input (in terms of developer hours). It won’t see the iFund VC fund, it won’t enable someone to retire but it will mean that someone can spend two weeks building something and then spend the rest of the year trying to think of an interesting followup.
Crowds are stupid. Farts are funny. And because of this, we may find ourselves constantly disappointed by the world.
I was very happy to see Andy post this on Twitter just a few minutes ago as we’d been sitting on it for so long, working out numbers and trying to figure out how to pay for things. The Good: The rent and rates are affordable and the room itself is great for the purposes. … Continue reading “CoWorkingBelfast has a home at last…”
I was very happy to see Andy post this on Twitter just a few minutes ago as we’d been sitting on it for so long, working out numbers and trying to figure out how to pay for things.
The Good: The rent and rates are affordable and the room itself is great for the purposes. The café below is also not bad and the food seems pretty healthy. The room itself is very nice, has heaps of natural light and is in a popular part of the city. I think the atmosphere in the room will be very enjoyable for dynamic, ‘agile’ companies. It’s not going to suit everyone – and that’s fine – CoWorking isn’t meant for everyone.
The Bad: We’re realistic. This is a temporary home – it’s going to take us a couple of years to build to the point where we have enough people and momentum to take CWB to the ‘next level’. The vision for CoWorkingBelfast has always been ‘an entire building’ so we’ll start here and see where we go. There’s no parking though – which is a pain and an expense but that’s going to bite you anywhere in the city. You should be using public transport anyway.
The Ugly: We’ve still got a heap of paperwork to do and we could do with a reasonable solicitor to help us through some of the muddle. Nightmare. Anyone got much experience with non-profits and want me to owe them a favour?
From a post on Enterprise Ireland’s forum “We’re a small software consultancy in business since Q3 2006; we’ve recently lost our main customer (they’ve pulled out of Ireland), upon whom we were dependent for about 90% of our revenue; we’re a small team made up exclusively of engineers; in advance of winding the operation up, … Continue reading “Save your business.”
From a post on Enterprise Ireland’s forum
“We’re a small software consultancy in business since Q3 2006; we’ve recently lost our main customer (they’ve pulled out of Ireland), upon whom we were dependent for about 90% of our revenue; we’re a small team made up exclusively of engineers; in advance of winding the operation up, I would like to explore our options with regard to getting new business; we have deep familiarity with many technologies, mainly in the enterprise computing area and I think it would be a shame to go back to the day jobs, considering we have a very strong team and can compete on cost and results with just about any comparable firm, but alas we have no sales function to speak of.”
Contrast this with a famous Joel Spolsky quote:
Watching non-programmers trying to run software companies is like watching someone who doesn’t know how to surf trying to surf.
“It’s ok! I have great advisors standing on the shore telling me what to do!” they say, and then fall off the board, again and again. The standard cry of the MBA who believes that management is a generic function.
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The cult of the MBA likes to believe that you can run organizations that do things that you don’t understand.”
Now, I’m not promoting the use of the MBA as any yardstick of competency but I can both agree and disagree with Joel in the same quote based on the first paragraph from the Enterprise Ireland forum.
This small software consultancy has found itself up the creek without a paddle because they didn’t have someone smart in the ways of business at the helm. They may have had the best programmers they could source but their business is going down the toilet because they didn’t think of the business eventualities. They maybe didn’t think that their client would depart the country and this highlights two things to me:
This is why the person running a company, even a software company, needs to be a business person. She can be a programmer as well but she needs to understand the business world and take the unpredictability of business into account. It’s not the just the cult of the MBA who expects people to run organisations they don’t understand, Joel is taking for granted that the person running the software company is a programmer and therefore can understand business as well. While that may be great for him with his established pedigree, it’s not going to be the case for every person. Some people are lucky enough to be able to see with both sets of eyes: that of a programmer and a director. Some can’t. If you can’t you need to recognise this and stop running the company.
I was told a story a couple of years ago about a business that was kept running via multiple handouts from the directors and it wasn’t until the directors themselves were bankrupted that they thought to involve the workers in their own destiny. He was honest with the workers. He had no money left. And with only days to payday, he had to shut up shop unless they could do something. And do something is what they did. They worked on getting new customers, convinced them to pay within seven days and, most importantly, kept every promise they made.
Joel is fond of telling us that a great company needs great infrastructure and that the programmers may find themselves in the minority in a software company. Management is part of that infrastructure. Experienced programmers have been telling me over the last year that programming isn’t hard but you’ll hear an analogue from experienced business managers.
A software company certainly needs competent programmers – individuals who can work together to create a compelling product right from the sketch on the back of a napkin through to the version 1.0 and bug fixes. Without them you have no product. But without someone with a bit of business ken, you’ve no market.
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.
DHH writes that it doesn’t have to be all or nothing with a startup: Startup mythology demands that to create something great, you need superhuman sacrifices. You need to work for no pay, you need to put in 120 hours/week, you need to preferably sleep under the desk and live off pizza as a sole … Continue reading “Start Small.”
DHH writes that it doesn’t have to be all or nothing with a startup:
Startup mythology demands that to create something great, you need superhuman sacrifices. You need to work for no pay, you need to put in 120 hours/week, you need to preferably sleep under the desk and live off pizza as a sole form of nutrient. As a result, you need to abandon your family and risk life without insurance.
So don’t despair, just start small. Reserve a couple of nights per week, a Sunday morning here, and a day from vacation time there. It’s never been cheaper or faster to build a web startup, it’s never been more possible to do it as a side-business.
A while ago I ragged on Robert Scoble (almost silently because, let’s face it, who read my tripe?) because he was talking about marketing and startups and worked at Microsoft. See the oxymoron there? Working at arguably the most powerful corporation in the world (yeah, they know the backdoor codes for every copy of Windows) … Continue reading “Armchair CEO on FastCompany.tv”
A while ago I ragged on Robert Scoble (almost silently because, let’s face it, who read my tripe?) because he was talking about marketing and startups and worked at Microsoft. See the oxymoron there? Working at arguably the most powerful corporation in the world (yeah, they know the backdoor codes for every copy of Windows) and giving advice about marketing and startups – one thing that Microsoft has legions of people working on and the other hasn’t been a feature of Microsoft since the seventies. I remember disagreeing with Robert (from the comfort of my chair) at the time with an indignant “What the hell does he know! but I have to accept that the guy is an expert at what he does. And defining the ‘what he does’ becomes important.
When Robert left Microsoft to go to a short gig at Podtech, he said that working for a startup was exciting. Fair enough, Robert, this still isn’t what most of us were doing from day to day. We were running our own startups.
So, not long after, Robert moves to FastCompany.tv as the Managing Director and that’s his first real experience of a startup. He’s got an established brand (no matter what you may think of Fast Company), he’s got some funding, he’s got the A-list blogger hype machine and he pulls in some old pals to help him. He has advantages that most startups never have (yeah, start again by being a nobody, having a 300 sq ft office, 5 employees who have just been laid off from the last bit of work, £10 000 in your personal savings and no clients – you have enough money to pay salaries and taxes for one month and that’s your nest egg gone – now tell me it’s hard work).
So he gives it a go with all of this.
And it’s a disaster.
I’ve yet to finish a Scoble video because halfway through I just click off. Is this attention deficit on my part? I guess I can take the blame?
Tyme White writes about the recent stink with Fast Company, Loren Feldman and Shel Israel:
“The core problem, in my opinion, is that Fast Company picked the wrong people to accomplish their goals. These people are probably “good†people (nice, kind, considerate, etc.) but they aren’t placed in positions where their strengths would benefit the company. There isn’t a system in place to overcome their weakened positions. It is my opinion if people were placed in positions they were more qualified to fill, these issues would not have happened in the first place and now that they have, they would be mitigated.”
What’s my take? I’m broadly in agreement with Tyme. Robert Scoble is an A-list blogger and he has enough interest from the net to make someone a shedload of money. But why put a ‘producer’ in a ‘manager’ position if not just for the kudos. The recent hubbub with Shel Israel just highlights how Robert isn’t a hiring manager (and Shel doesn’t have a thick enough skin yet to take the criticism that being a public figure buys you.). You want to be an internet sensation, you have to be able to take the hits too. Robert has, for the most part, weathered most hits but it seems inevitable to me that his idle boast of ignoring 17000 people on Twitter is going to bite him in the ass at some point in the future. You can’t manage a company and fulfill the ‘legend’ of Robert Scoble. Not just because there isn’t enough time but because only one person can fulfill that legend and he’s not a manager (yet).
Of course, I’m a classic armchair CEO pointing out the discrepancies in someone else’s work and I’m 100% sure that my own little companies bring in a small percentage of the revenue required to keep FastCompany.tv ticking over so there may be something I’m missing. I know my brand sucks.