BarcampBelfast 2008 is planned for Saturday 21st June, 9am - 5pm. Last year I had other commitments and couldn’t make it but I intend to turn up this year. Mac-Sys did sponsor it last year and will be doing so again. I think we need more of these events.

There’s already a set of speakers lined up but they’re looking out for more if you’re interested. I would like to speak on something but fear that my areas of knowledge are sufficiently shallow that there’d be nothing I could really teach anyone, especially when faced with the people speaking there.

The subjects do tend to be tech-heavy but that’s the problem. The subjects I know well enough to talk about (or could brush up on) would be of little relevance to the audience (unless people really want to know about OSPF or MLTs…I know I don’t!) and I’m sure no-one wants to hear about my epic failure at becoming a programmer (it’s code night tonight in Bangor, oh yes…)

Make the effort to turn up.

Dear Colleague

You are invited to attend a Frameworks Entrepreneur workshop to be held at Northern Ireland Science Park, with a presentation on:

“The Venture Capital Process”

By Peter Stafford of A&L Goodbody

Programme Overview:

Raising money in today’s environment is no easy task — but it can be done if you focus on the right priorities and avoid common deal-killers. In this workshop, Peter Stafford from A&L Goodbody will provide you with a framework that will prepare you for raising capital from venture capital funds.

Benefits of Attending:

• An overview of venture funds and venture financings;
• Identifying the best approaches in dealing with investors;
• How the venture capital process works;
• Common terms used in transactions and what they mean.

Who should attend:

Founders, CEOs, and managers who are seeking venture funding, as well as scientists and technology experts considering a business start-up in need of venture financing.

About the Presenter:

Peter Stafford is a partner in the Belfast office of A&L Goodbody, Ireland’s leading law firm. He specialises in corporate finance work including public and private company acquisitions and disposals, management buy outs, private equity transactions and commercial contracts. Peter regularly works for venture capitalists, business angels and investee companies and is “particularly highly rated as a deal lawyer in the jurisdiction” (Legal Week, July 2006).

Confirmed Panelists

• Peter Stafford, Partner A&L Goodbody
• Alan Mawson, Executive Chairman Clarendon Fund Managers
• Sarah Bearder, CTO Datactics

DATE FOR YOUR DIARY

“How to land a whale: how does a small start-up land a big client?”

By Linkubator

Join us on Thursday 15th May for a panel discussion featuring several savvy entrepreneurs of Northern Irish companies that have successfully sold to, and worked with, some of the largest companies around. Learn how they’ve been able to get the attention of big companies, how they’ve closed the big deals, how they’ve made the most of big company relationships, and how they’ve been able to avoid the pitfalls. And since some customer relationships or partnering arrangements with big companies can turn into acquisitions, our panelists will also address “next chapter” issues in relationships with big companies. See you there!

The workshop will be led by John McKee, CEO of Linkubator, a business development organisation working with CEOs and senior teams in creating successful strategic growth for companies.

About NISP’s Frameworks Entrepreneur Workshops

NISP offers ongoing educational opportunities for entrepreneurs building and growing innovative Hitech, Biotech or Cleantech companies and offers member companies the opportunity to provide expert content to a responsive, interactive audience.

Many of today’s business founders and future entrepreneurs have scientific and technical backgrounds but have had limited experience in industry, so they often lack exposure to critical information which is essential to leading a start-up. To fill this gap, NISP offers InnovaNET Entrepreneur Workshops to provide these bright leaders with the vocabulary, foundations and framework around which they can build awareness of the many disciplines they will oversee as “C” level managers”.

‘Perry’ wrote (on the RogueAmoeba blog post “Code Signing and You”):

“…the case for Code Signing on a Mac - in the service of its administrator/owner - is very compelling. In a sense, the Mac is living on borrowed time - viruses and worms and other nasty bit-critters will surely come our way, and going to an all-signed environment is one the most potent weapons we have to keep your systems from being overrun. I realize this capability *could* eventually be abused in various ways, and I trust you’ll all keep Apple honest about it. But it can also be a powerful force *for* you.

Oh, and to put that to rest: I do work for Apple, and I designed and implemented Code Signing in Leopard. If you think it’s going to usher in a black wave of OS fascism, you have every right to blame me - it was, pretty much, my idea.”

Like some, I see code-signing as a necessary neutral. It’s neither good nor evil but it could be used for evil purposes (where evil is really just a shade of ‘not good’).

It’s all about trust again. When we first heard of Intel’s Palladium, there was an uproar. When we heard about processor serial numbers on the Intel platform, there was an uproar (despite the fact they had been quietly present for years on PowerPC).

The other commenters on the blog put forward scenarios where corporations will use this facility for evil and point to Apple’s DRM’ed music (using FairPlay) and also Apple’s odd restrictions within DVD Player.app on Mac OS X as an example of how the company is ‘evil’.

Of course it’s bollocks.

It took FairPlay to get the media owners (record labels) to start to play ball. Now we have DRM-free music available from multiple sources. Similar Apple’s DVD Player is compliant with the law because they want to avoid litigation. You can get round it by using other DVD-playing applications but Apple plays it safe. They’re not interfering with other third party apps.

It may be blind and stupid faith but I know enough people within Apple and I’ve read enough accounts of people working there that I trust them to do the right thing. Individual end users do need help in discovering which applications are bad and which are good and Apple, in order to reduce the amount of legwork required, is bound to have a review process where they solicit information from users of iPhone applications. This will have the dual effect of speeding up the eventual distribution of applications and also making sure there’s a peer review process.

I’d like to hear more from Perry on this debate as individual security on computing devices is important to me from the point of view of working in the IT business. There’s always a considerable difference in working with Macs and PCs - the latter is always slower in my experience (considering that my day job gives me a Core Duo machine running XP and my home machine is a Core Duo machine running Leopard) due to the need to perpetually run AV and firewall software and if not running them, due to the amount of malware that has been picked up.

Not enough people hear the reasons for design decisions and this is an Apple fault. They don’t make individuals publicly known. Every time there has been an outcry, I’ve always managed to speak to someone within Apple and they’ve given me the reasons for this and that. And yeah, in the wake of their spin doctoring I’ve always agreed.

For the average end user there needs to be a helping hand, an additional way to reduce the contact they have with malware. It’s something that will piss off some people who for political reasons want to have 100% access to their devices but I’m confident that the jailbreaking crowd will cater for them adequately.

So, there’s three categories of applications which can be installed onto the iPhone without Jailbreak.

1. Payfer Apps - you write your application, sign it, give it to Apple and they host it on the App Store and you get 70% of all proceeds.
2. Free Apps - you write the application, sign it, give it to Apple and they host it on the App Store for free.
3. Source - you write the application, give the code to someone else, they sign it themselves and then they can install on their own iPhone via XCode

The last method changes things. It’s no longer just a case of just releasing source code, there’s the signing too. You’re attaching your identity to the code. A bit more than just running ports or apt.

But it does mean that for the select few who can install apps (been accepted into the Beta program, paid their $99, uploaded their CSR, downloaded their certificate), there’s a method of swapping test code and with a bit of luck a community will build.

For my part, I’d like to play with Kalimba on my iPhone!

Let’s say you’re a developer producing applications. Your livelihood depends on applications sold and you really want to get the best penetration for them.

How much would you pay for:
a) no need to set up a web shopping cart
b) no need to pay for bandwidth and hosting
c) greatly reduced need for marketing
d) reduced need to ‘package’ an app
e) listing on a web store that will be in front of about 7 million customers at launch.

Apple wants thirty percent (though they’ll host your free app for free). For this thirty percent, they’ll approve, list, maintain a reviews database, process payments and send you the income monthly.

Some people think this smacks of greed but I’d counter that it smacks of reality. If you’ve spent a lot of time working in software but not in the retail side then you have probably very little experience of the costs. We are agreed that Apple is a publicly traded corporation and therefore needs to turn a profit. We’re going to have to agree that the App Store will be a hot trick for software distribution.

So let’s look at the competition. Who else hosts software for download like this?

The obvious candidate is Handango.

From Electronista:

Small developers who sell less than $250,000 in gross revenue will see exactly half of their income stripped from each sale — up from 40 percent, Handango reportedly says. More profitable firms will see even more money siphoned away, with all businesses selling between $250,000 and $1 million supplying 60 percent of their revenue and all larger outlets conceding 70 percent. The notice will be made public within a few days and should see the new distribution agreement take effect by March 15th, the alleged source indicates.

Handango makes Apple’s 30% seem like a bargain.

On the other hand, Mobihand gives developers 80%. What do we get for that extra 10%? I’m guessing we get placement on the device itself. Mobihand claims to have the lowest rates in the industry for application hosting.

MobiHand will pay to Content Provider 80% of Net Receipts occurring at www.mobihand.com and 60% of Net Receipts at all other channels.

So, Mobihand will charge you 20-40% of the cost of your software for hosting the sale depending on how and where they bought it.

Even at 30%, Apple’s deal is no strings, no nonsense and is going to have the advantage that every piece of software you see there will work on your iPhone.

And it’s shitloads better than Handango.

At some point last night, Apple’s development servers fell over and died. These servers can hold 40 000+ concurrent download streams but there were so many people downloading the new iPhone SDK that the whole server became unresponsive. After several hours of trying, I finally got a connection at 11 pm and left the SDK and iTunes videos to download overnight, which they did. At the same time, I watched the video of the introduction of the SDK and demos from AOL, Saleforce and EA. As it drew to a close, so did my eyes.

• This morning I installed the SDK and started to read what teh internets was saying about the day before. There are guys from Apple on Twitter providing links and snippets of info to help people get started. And of course, teh internets have spoken.

  Jason at 37signals sounds off on his vision for the iPhone.

  “What we saw today was the beginning of two-decades of mobile domination by Apple. What Microsoft and Windows was to the desktop, Apple and Touch will be to mobile.”

  Steve Job’s Fortune interview (which I covered here yesterday) talks about how bad it feels to not be able to capture market share even though you might have a much better product. The iPod shows that it’s possible to capture a market by crafting a good product. Apple’s history has been full of examples of how to lose a market in the past so it’s nice to see them taking the lead for once.

• TUAW reports that iPlayer is actually working for the iPhone. Content is limited but I’d encourage everyone with an iPhone to give it a go.
  

  “A limited selection of shows from the iPlayer have been made available to UK residents on their iPhones. … At the moment only the BBC-produced ‘Whistleblower’ documentary seems to be working from the iPlayer website, with content being streamed-only via the iPhone’s built-in QuickTime player “

• Apple has posted the video of the SDK Roadmap here so if you have a spare hour or so, give it a go.
• From the iPhone Human Interface Guidelines
  

  Only one iPhone application can run at a time, and third-party applications never run in the background. This means that when users switch to another application, answer the phone, or check their email, the application they were using quits.

  This is a serious consideration when you’re managing things like editing documents or wanting to save progress in a game. There has to be some continuation - do you ‘journal’ progress? Are there spare cycles in the CPU to do a quick save every second?

• We had a bit of an emergency meeting in the wee small hours this morning over IM regarding the futures of our software development efforts and we’re going to publish that news in a few days.

According to Macrumors, the iPhone SDK will be announced on March 6th.

“Please join us to learn about the iPhone software roadmap, including the iPhone SDK and some exciting new enterprise features,” Apple said in an invitation sent to reporters.

Are we to assume Apple has licensed ActiveSync?

Are we going to see a demo of SAP’s iPhone client?

What about Sling? iChat? iPlayer? Over-the-air Calendar syncing? Push email? PDF Reader? File Manager? Skype?

Pop on over to eirepreneur:

Gareth Coen and colleague Diane Roberts were inspired by the Enterprise Ireland bash during Paddy’s Valley to offer a similar event here in Ireland. Gareth, based in Silicon Valley, and Diane, based in Dublin, recently started a consultancy firm with the goal of helping bridge the gap between Valley and Irish tech start-ups.

If you want to know more, and save money, read on.

I remain sceptical about this approach, still likening it to trying to make Ireland into Hollywood by shipping a couple of casting agents over here but if you’re in charge of a tech startup and you’re running the kind of tech that would benefit greatly from a step onto the first rung of the ladder then you should register immediately using the secret code provided and enjoy.

Wil Shipley is planning to start something new.

Golden Braeburn is an attempt by Wil to change the way that Mac ISVs (Independent Software Vendors) work. In essence, you get screwed by shopping cart hosting companies, you get screwed by merchant account holders, you get screwed by card processing companies, you get screwed when you try to build your own shopping cart and trying to keep current.

In essence, you get screwed.

So, Golden Braeburn is about unscrewing you.

Cool. Let’s see what happens.

[I so have to create a company with an breed of Apple in the name. I’m such a fanboy.]

NiMUG are having another meeting!.

They’re also looking for some Professional Mac users who might want to show off a demo of what they do with their Macs. Or why they use the tools they do.

Anyone fancy a few minutes of free advertising?