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”.

It has been a few days now since I downloaded the most recent beta build of Apples iPhone SDK. I would love to say how much of a change there has been and how much more stable it feels, but not so.

It has to be said, that when developing using a beta release of anything, it’s best to use a dedicated machine. Well, taking this advice on board, I installed the original iSDK on my main machine and it worked fine, rather limited, but worked.

The latest beta release arrived with much anticipation. Feeling and expecting this version to be just as stable, it went on my main machine. Oops. A large number of basic functions had stopped working. Then the crashes started happening, just couldn’t figure what went wrong. It just got to the point that I have to wipe my hard drive and reinstall Leopard and the original version of the iSDK.

Two hours later and my problem iPhone app now works without any hitches. Now to clean up the code and find a development machine to work on.

From iPhoneDevelopment by Jeff LaMarche:

Third rule: insulate your team from corporate silliness to the fullest extent of your power. Nothing will make these people leave your employ faster than making them sit in unproductive, boring meetings that don’t directly further the project. The kind of person you want, wants to be sitting in front of a Mac furiously coding away. Anything you make them do that’s not that, is counterproductive and damaging to your project.

Seems obvious.

A new version of the iPhone SDK was released today and the strange thing here is, I’m getting about 1 - 1.5Mb/sec download, so the whole process was about 20ish minutes. Others closer to the source in the states were seeing download speeds as low as 90Kb/per second.

Well the new version has the Interface Builder application, needed to create user interfaces for the phone. Will be interesting to see how this pans out. Looking forward to any improved frameworks as a number of key headers are missing from the original beta release.

More updates soon.

‘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 how am I meant to deal with the light blue blobs. I can’t ‘edit’ that text in any sensible fashion when what I really want to do is remove the space just after the * character. I end up just typing the whole thing which removes the point of autocomplete.

For the hard of thinking….

According to iLounge, Apple today sent out a mass e-mail with helpful development links and a more detailed message regarding their status.

“We have many more requests than we can serve during this initial beta period,” explains the follow-up e-mail, “so we must limit the Program at this time. We plan to expand it during the beta period, and we will contact you regarding your enrollment status at the appropriate time. We appreciate your patience.”

Okay? We done crying about it?

Probably one of the most anticipated software releases from Apple happened on Thursday 6th March. Apple released their beta version of the iPhone SDK, software development kit.

Steve Jobs, along with Phil Schiller and Scott Forstall, showed what we can expect with the new version 2.0 iPhone/iTouch firmware to be released in June. Phil Schiller kicked it all off by going through the enterprise additions to the iPhone. Here we see practically everything the was missing and then some. This as far as I can tell is going to make a reasonable sized dent in the Blackbury RIM market.

The real interesting bit of the presentation, well at least for me, was the presentation given by Scott. Here he gave a fairly detailed review of the SDK, I'll cover that in more detail in a later blog post. Let's just say that it was fantastic. Along with Scott was a few companies that were given a two week pre release of the SDK and asked what could be done with it. The results was really amazing.

First up was an Scott himself. Here he showed of a space shooter game in 3D using OpenGL|ES. The movement was very smooth and the shooting action solid enough to be enjoyable. One of the interesting points he made was the fact that it was also using OpenAL for sound. This gives a full 3D sound spectrum.

Electronic Arts was next up showing their iPhone version of Spore. Travis Boatman was responsible for this one.

In Spore you control a micro organism from the early dawn of life in the big soup bowl. You have to control your spore and help keep it safe and grow. The neat aspect of this game is the control mechanism. Spore uses the iPhones 3D axis accelerometers to control movement. At certain points in the game you have the ability to add custom parts to your spore to help it evolve. There are a total of 18 levels in this game and to think that all this was programmed in 2 weeks on an unknown software platform. This looks to be one great looking small game.

Salesforce.com represented the vertical markets. Chuck Dietrich showed what they had managed to accomplish in less than the two week period.

Salesforce are looking to bring their 63,000 plus applications to the iPhone. Chuck showed one of their sales applications. This Sales Force Automation application is used to store sales persons contacts, sales records, target levels, and a whole slew of other sales and marketing information.

Rizwan Sattar from AOL showed of their instant messenger for the iPhone. You have complete access it your buddy lists, check who is online/offline and set your profile. One of the neat features is the ability to change your buddy icon using the image picker built in the iPhone, or even take a picture with the built in camera.

Epocrates was something I wasn't expecting, actually I've never heard of the product in my life, but according to Glenn Keighley, over half a million health care professionals and 1 in 4 physicians in the US use it. Epocrates is a drug encyclopedia containing over 3,300 of the most popular prescribed drugs in the US. This database can be searched and photos available showing what the drug looks like. It can even show the doctor how mixing different drugs can effect the patient.

Last but not least was Sega with an iPhone version of Super Monkey Ball. Ethan Einhorn showed a very playable version of the game using the same control mechanism as EA's Spore above. The big difference here is it's a full 3D visual experience.

According to Ethan, he was totally surprised as to the power of the iPhone and he stated that it wasn't a cell phone game but a console game. They even flew in a graphic artist to help scale up the visuals because of the shear power of the device.

Steve Jobs finished up the presentation by describing how they are going to handle the distribution of iPhone Apps. The only way to get your app in front of every customer will be through their 'App Store'.

Apple will take care of hosting, distribution credit card handling and providing free update service. For this they will be take a 70/30 percent split, which for the most art seems quite reasonable. Other blog posts seem to find this a bit of a take on, but for what your getting I think its a good deal. If however your providing freeware or shareware applications then these will be hosted free of charge.

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.