I’ve been looking at houses. Totally depressing experience. Back when I bought my first house, it cost me ???79K - for a two bedroom converted church in a rural area in the middle of a field bounced by rivers on two sides. These days I’m finding it hard to find anything under ???130K that isn’t in a ghetto. What happened to the market?

Being in the market for houses is incredibly distracting. I’m looking for somewhere in a rural area, ideally near the coast. Obviously it needs to be in a broadband-enabled area (which thankfully is just about everywhere).

Turns out we’re in the middle of a housing boom in Northern Ireland. A building society revealed that prices in the province rose significantly in the first quarter of 2006, jumping by 17.6 per cent, three and a half times greater than the British average increase for the period. Northern Ireland had been the cheapest part of Britain to buy property, but it is now more expensive than Scotland and the north of England, seeing average house prices of ???129,321.
This conflicts with another report which reports that overall average price of residential property for Northern Ireland for the fourth quarter of 2005 is ???145,987. That’s even more depressing. A mortgage of 130K (at 4%) means payments of ???700 a month for 25 years. No wonder I know some first time buyers who are taking 100% mortgages over 40 years rather than 25. A friend of mine can’t buy near her parents because their house cost them 6K but the house three doors down now costs a whopping ???195,000.

BUGGER

On other news, we may be about to hit a bit of a slowdown in development which we hope will not cause a release slip. Just kidding

This long article comes on the heels of the last one and is based upon a CNN Money article about mistakes small businesses make. Here’s some of my take on it.

1. Too Little Cash
Being under-capitalised is a pain. I’ve seen this in my day job. There’s jobs we simply couldn’t take on because we needed to extend insane credit terms to big businesses. Being a small business with shallow pockets meant we simply couldn’t do it. So - we walk away. And that’s not even touching on the idea that we have to make enough money to pay people, including the pound-of-flesh due to the VAT man. Buy what is essential. Listen to the second thoughts you will get when signing a cheque. Hold off on online banking for the same reason. It’s too easy to spend money!

2. Thinking Small
To some degree this is inevitable. If you have two engineers and you have work enough for 4 engineers coming in each week, then your guys are always going to be behind. Likewise, if building a service, you have to consider some sort of scalabilty. It would be terrible if the reason you missed out on the $million IPO was because you skimped on the server and were only able to handle 100 people.

3. Skimping on Tech
The article makes a big deal out of laptops, Treos, blackberries and wireless. I’d suggest that you seriously look at laptops (especially cost effective Macs that can boot any OS) and leave the Treos and Blackberries out for the time being. They’re an unnecessary cost in terms of up-front cost as well as subscription and IT resource costs. Consider going Bedouin (a bit like Infurious which in many cases puts the ‘bed’ in Bedouin). Get them laptops. Or a desktop with a monster screen. Leave the Treos and Blackberries to the sales guys that you’ll be hiring much later. And get a reliable email server. I’d suggest you outsource that! Small businesses have no business running their own mail server these days unless it’s actually a core function of their business (i.e. they make mail server software related stuff).

4. Underestimating the importance of sales
Remember those sales guys? This is where I say that you have to back them up except when they start to demand Blackberries and other macguffins (because I know that they will blame the Blackberry for losing the vital email that lost you the deal that would pay salaries for 6 months). Cut through the crap. Have a simple and solid infrastructure and make sure the printer works all the time. Sales people are impatient. And as long as the product you’re making makes more than you spend to make it, then you should do okay. In small businesses, cash is king. Make sure you have enough to cover everything. That means sometimes using your sales people as credit controllers and telling them to get the money in rather than just getting the sales in.

5. Losing Focus
It’s very simple. Have a vision. Follow it. Review it after some time. Does it make sense to realign the company along one product. Do you rebrand the entire company? Do you treat yourself as a product company or a portfolio company? Make sure you talk among your team about what happens when YMG come along and make a big offer for your little company. Make sure you talk about what happens if, after two years, YMG has NOT come along with the big offer and you’re still pulling 80 hour weeks for minimum wage.

OK
In closing, we make a lot of decisions in Infurious because they seem fun. We’re interested in the journey of how to “live the life” as much as we are interested in the actual achievement of the goal. We’re trying new approaches on the development side as well as new approaches in the marketing side. We’re not doing things conventionally as a brief conversation with a professional marketing person (for a big drinks company) discovered. She was horrified at our marketing approach (then again, her ideas revolved mostly around nightly promotions in bars, sponsoring race cars and television advertising). I’m not sure she “got” what we’re doing here. I’m not sure she saw the “fun” side of it! Thanks for the ideas, Anya!

Business 2.0 has an article on how to start your startup.. It’s never been a better time to start a tech startup according to them and the costs for doing it have more than halved compared to Bubble 1.0. They do say that it’s as hard as ever to succeed (though logic would say that lower barriers to entry would mean more entries which would mean more competition which would mean its harder to succeed, but I digress).

The article has links to a series of articles designed to help you go through the process of putting together a business. It briefly explains the pitfalls as well as touching lightly on the fun parts.

Anyway, for some it will be a clip’n’save article especially if you’re early down the road to starting your business

Daniel Jalkut channels John Welch in some harsh criticism of the user interface to Videator, the CoreVideo app from Stone Software.

While I think the UI to Videator (and their previous CoreImage app, Imaginator,) was pony, I have to say that Andrew Stone has some great design ideas. Sure, his UI is based on years of working in the NeXT playground but he’s listening to the Mac crowd. His other apps, the Stone Tools, are in some ways the best of breed. I’ve previously used Create to do a book layout because at the time there was no other page layout software on Mac OS X

I reckon its a hard area to work out. Yes, the Ui is bad, but it’s not as bad as John or Daniel make out.

So what’s the current status of SyncBridge? Barring any major issues, we’ll be conducting another round of testing of a release candidate within the next two weeks. If you’re interested in participating, please mail me and we’ll contact you when we’re ready to go.

Once that round has been completed and we’ve incorporated relevant feedback, we’ll be ready to launch.

Some of you are wondering why SyncBridge is taking so long. After all, we initially thought we would be able to release in April. There are a few reasons, so I thought I’d outline them.

Details

The sync engine that powers SyncBridge has been working well for some time now. Of course, it still needs more exposure to real users, but the guts of it works fine. A reasonable UI is only a recent addition, and a fairly nice UI is what I’m currently working on. Simple things like help files and explanatory text, ways to log-off, storing the password in the keychain, and so forth. All the things that turn it from being a developer tool into a user app.

Real life

This is probably the biggest one. Life has been very demanding for both MJ and myself. I’ve shifted from Australia to Northern Ireland, albeit only for a few months, but it’s still a fairly monumental undertaking. I have three kids, and MJ has two. I’ve had to switch jobs and MJ runs another small business as his day job.

Motivation

It’s hard when you are working on your own. MJ has been a great help in keeping my motivation levels up, but not having anyone to bounce specific code stuff off has been tough. Getting over some troublesome bugs has sometimes been a matter of weeks, simply because I found it hard to face. At one point, I said to MJ “I have no idea how to fix these two bugs. I can’t even face looking at them any more.” I don’t remember exactly what he said, but a few hours later (after weeks of trying) they were fixed.

Time and Discipline

Snatching an hour here and an hour there to work on SyncBridge means that there isn’t the same consistency you get when you work on writing an app full time. If SyncBridge sells well, then I might be able to work on it full time, which would make things much better all round. I’ve been trying to remain disciplined enough to keep good programming principles in mind, while still solving the problem (even knowing that no-one else is looking at my code).

Company Administrivia

The nuts and bolts of setting up a company have been a little problematic for us. Partially geographical, partially fiscal, partially just procratinatorial (if there is such a word). We can’t really sell anything till we are a company

We’re gearing up for release now. Fine-tuning the app. Making it prettified in the web admin GUI. Adding some UI feedback in the app. Building the Production server in the final configuration and taking it out of Debug. And of course planning a release party. Aidan has been an absolute demon in working on this and I don’t spend enough time thanking him.

(I’d also like to thank the Private Beta test teams who put up with crap, bugs and stuff. We owe them heaps too. I will personally shake their hands when we release 1.0.)

I also took SyncBridge to a customer site from demo as well and the feedback was very positive - always best to leave a product demo with a credit card rather than a business card. Things are definitely progressing in that respect.

I’m totally buzzed.

Those words, uttered by Kevin Flynn in TRON more than two decades ago really inspired me.

I love computer games. Sure - I may not like them as much as this guy or even these guys but I do love games. I especially like games which allow me to kill my friends in fun and creative ways. I’ve organised LAN meets for the last 4 years which have always been “Mac heavy” but we’ve had PC guys there and it’s always been good fun. Admittedly the Mac gaming market is in a little bit of flux right now as some of the best games out there haven’t and won’t be Intel native so performance is going to be a little less (though Halo on my MacBook Pro is flippin’ lovely). As more and more Universal games come out we’re going to see a raft of people wanting to upgrade. My brother is already sold on it

We have a product roadmap here. Some things that we really want to get started on once SyncBridge 1.0 is released. We’re going to need to have more people on board for them which is cool. One of these things is a game. Or, if it works out, a series of games. I have the basics of a game world, we have discussed the first game release and I’m really quite excited by it. Much like SyncBridge, this is software designed by someone who really wants to play it.

The biggest difficulties we see ahead:

   ?????? game engine.

   ?????? me no do grafix.

   ?????? platform support.

   ?????? licensing.
Obviously we want to do a game that will be popular. I’m really only interested in supporting the Mac but it’s entirely likely that the Mac market ain’t big enough for that. My model for this would be early days Bungie which was, in my pinion, the best thing to happen to the Mac games market and if I’d been The Steve, I’d have bought Bungie with some of that War Chest cash rather than leaving it to Redmond. But then I loathe the idea of being an Armchair CEO of someone else’s company. I’m in fanboy mode here.

Engines of Change

This means some tough decisions. I’m not a coder (as I think you have all gathered) and we have a choice - license a game engine or build one. Licensing seems to make more sense and will make us actually a huge heap closer to release. We have to then look at the costs of licensing as well as the development languages and where the engine can be deployed to. This is a tough decision. We considered Unity3D but the lack of multiplayer is a major issue. (the web site talks about networking but is stunningly silent on the actual aspect of multiplayer).

Where are the pikchas

I don’t do graphics but I know how I want it to look. This means getting people who can not only make pretty pictures but who can also read my mind. Graphic designers can do this. Apparently.
For the first game I just want it to be FAST. The textures and background are really important and I want the immersive quality to be such that people complain to us about motion sickness. (mostly because there’s an ex-colleague of mine who gets motion sickness and I will laugh when he tries to play it. Bleargh.

Platform Nine for the 10:30 to Little Thaxton

I’m only interested in Mac gaming but it’s plain to see that if we wanted to do this right, as a networkable game, then we need to include Windows support. And if we’re going to be supporting Windows we’ll need Windows dev guys. And if we go that far, do we look at Linux? What about porting to consoles? To be honest, as I don’t own a console, the idea of writing a game for one doesn’t appeal in the slightest and if I had to choose, I’d probably aim at PSP/Nintendo DS. Which consoles do you choose? XBOX? XBOX 360? PS2? PS3? Wii? That just seems like a huge worm kettle (or whatever the metaphor is). I vote for Mac and we’ll add Windows support if people are nice to us.

Can I see your license, sir?

I don’t want to get obsessive about this. One of the things I loved about Myth II was that it was really LAN party friendly. I personally own about 4 licenses for HALO (3 Mac, 1 PC). I want to make it as approachable as possible - but how to do that and end up with sales that justify the costs of the game engine license? Too hard a question for now.

This has turned into a mad rant. I’ll have a wee think about it and talk more later.

My buddies Neil and Nick cause havoc in the streets of London while showing their own particular (Star Wars) fanatacism.

For those unlucky buggers who are on the private beta, we have yet another download for them. It’s really important to read the release notes and that’s why I’m blogging this as no-one ever seems to read the README.

   ?????? do not use this beta on production data. I’m serious about this. We will wipe the server clean. I’m not joking.

   ?????? the GUI is complete but unpolished. Please provide feedback on usability as well as bug reporting.

   ?????? you’ll have received the password for the encrypted DMG in your email.

   ?????? use the enclosed report form for feedback. Make sure you include approximate times for synchronisation as well as the numbers of items reported by the system.

   ?????? the various bugs reported in the previous beta versions have all been fixed. If you find a re-occurrence of them, please report them again!

   ?????? yes, this could be the first really usable version.

So, from now on, RTFREADME and go get the files.