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”.

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.

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?

Jens Alfke’s latest blog post rambles about a couple of things but finishes on something that I really empathised with:

Apple engineer: …and the layout needs to take into account ligatures and contextual forms, where adjacent letters change glyphs depending on neighboring characters, or even merge into a single glyph.

Sun engineer: C’mon, is this important? How many people need advanced typographic features like that, anyway?

Apple engineer: [after a pause] Well, there are over 900 million of them in India alone, and another 200 million or so in the Arabic world.

Sometimes it feels like I’ve been bashing my head off a brick wall for, well, years. Motivating people to not do ‘half-a-job’ is actually hard.

Yesterday I almost had a stand up argument with a guy in my team in $BIG_COMPANY on the definition of ‘complete documentation’. I want documentation that can be read and understood by novices and managers. He wants it to be opaque enough so that you require understanding in order to work with it. In the end we sat down and he demonstrated it to me and I tried it. Within about 5 minutes we hit the first stumbling block in his documentation. He asked if I had the database interfaces set up. I replied “The what, the who and the where?”. So we need to add a piece about database interfaces. Then we needed to add another piece about how to log into the server. Then how to run an update. Then how to publish the updates. Then how to check the updates have been completed. In all, the additional bits were more than twice the original document and spawned two more wiki pages. In the end he agreed with me, the documentation was half done but the journey was a lot harder than it should have been.

Writing technical documentation is not an art. Writing it for non-technical users in order to help them learn is not an art. It just requires removing assumptions.

When building my second office in Mac-Sys, we had a square room to modify and the original assumption was to put a single wall, parallel to one of the other walls, in. By questioning the assumptions (that a single wall, parallel to another wall was the only way to go) we put in a ’shaped’ wall which provided us with nearly 50% more wall space in a room where wall space was a premium (for shelving, storage, desks, etc).

If you’re in a job you don’t like and your choices are (or seem to be)
a. leave
b. suffer
Then you really should be looking for c.. I can’t tell you what c. is for you but when I was in Nortel it was as a simple as bringing in a laptop to work with me and increasing my productivity (and reducing my frustration with Windows NT). There may be ways you can change your work day in order to improve your work life. Would working part time from home make a difference? Would time-shifting your work day by an hour help? (I much prefer working from 07:30-16:00 as it removes a LOT of traffic from my commute).

Remove your assumptions and consider new ways.

There is always a c.

Michael Arrington wrote on TechCrunch about the twice-shy entrepreneur.

In the article he writes more about the difference between entrepreneurs from Bubble 1.0 who watched everything disappear down the pan…

The intense pressure entrepreneurs were under to get revenue at any cost led them to make decisions that, with hindsight, were blatantly foolish. And when the market crashed on April 14, 2000, those same entrepreneurs had to lay off most or all of their employees after making those decisions. And face outright humiliation on FuckedCompany, the site that chronicled the downfall of the Internet bubble.

It left a bit of a scar.

…and current entrepreneurs who may not carry the same sort of baggage.

But what if you were not directly affected by the Bubble? I was in Nortel and yes, the bubble was responsible for thousands of layoffs but I took voluntary redundancy in 2003, much later than the bubble. Nortel was still in it’s death spiral (which hasn’t changed, the curve just got asymptotic).

Setting up MacSys took blood, money, sweat, tears and friends. It used them up pretty much in equal quantity. The sacrifices I made are not sacrifices I would make again lightly. That’s why, even though I have a successful, profitable business under my belt, I’m still ultra-conservative.

But I’m interested in how to break out of this rut. My SO thinks I could do so much more with Mac-Sys. I’d like to do heaps more with Infurious (as well as with wow4kids, macheads, ukwifi) but time is definitely limited.

Winston Churchill - Success is going from failure to failure without losing your enthusiasm

This is what I’m concerned about. I have heaps of energy for ideas but I’m currently too busy worrying to actually go through with any of them (plus the holding down a day job that I’m loathing doesn’t help).

I’ve spent a lot of time in the past talking about “Going Bedouin”, an idea of working that I adore and which I have tried to do for several years, while working for a large telecoms company and also while working for my own company. I feel it helped the company pay for my productivity because as I embraced the flexibility to work from home, the company also received the benefits of me being available possibly 24×7 because I didn’t begrudge the call at 2 am (unlike the call at 2 am I got last night which I certainly did begrudge). It meant I was happy to help people out and most importantly I didn’t feel the need to demand extra money for the privilege.

Chris Brogan’s blog has an interesting post on how to become a digital nomad which is as much a marketing term as “Bedouin”.

1. Smartphone
   

   It’s important to stay in contact if you’re going to be Bedouin. This means choosing your technology carefully. It’s no longer good enough to carry a pager and mobile phone. The expectation now is that you’ll get your email too and with the release of the iPhone comes the first mature implementation of a browser in a handheld device. It’s relegated my laptop for a lot of the day to the laptop bag.

2. Online apps
   

   While I recognise that online apps do provide a lot of power and sometimes a lot more potential for collaboration, I’m still very much a fan of rich clients. I don’t want to use primitive web app user interfaces which haven’t really changed recently. For what they offer, it’s a lowest common denominator model. It works, but it ain’t pretty.

3. Centralising
   

   This makes a lot of sense and I’d clarify by saying that as well as centralising some of your services it’s worth considering outsourcing those which don’t add value. Get everyone accounts on the same domain with the same reliable provider and keep these production services separate from your development servers and off your own machines. The economies of scale make it worthwhile.

4. Online/Offline Storage
   

   Just do backups. Don’t mess around with your data. That’s one of the beauties of laptops and PDAs, for the most part they have insuffient storage for keeping all of your data. My laptop has a 160 GB drive in it which is a tenth of what I need for storage. My iPhone has 8 GB of storage which really isn’t enough for anything other than current email. And the odd movie. Keep regular backups and consider keeping your data in the cloud - so you can access it from anywhere.

5. Messaging/Presence management
   

   If you’re not using instant messenger applications in business then you’re behind the times. I have no doubts that Skype and iChat will make it onto the iPhone which will make my phone the hub of my communications network rather than my laptop. I don’t believe for a second that Twitter and similar wanky apps are going to to be the core of the semantic web. They’re missing everything to do with context. I don’t wast to know only a short message about someone. I want to know where they are, how they are and whether they want to meet for coffee. FaceBook or Google would seem to be the contenders here for writing the meta-app which will fulfill your context needs. I just don’t really want content delivered as a side order to a main course of advertising.

6. Plan your gear
   

   This means not only making sure the kit you have is the right kit, but making sure you invest in ways and means to keep that gear running. I get a full day out of my always-on, incredibly busy iPhone. That means, if I’m planning ahead, always making sure I have at least got an iPod connection cable handy for a quick juice-up if I’m running low. For laptops you have to consider most have a battery life of 2-3 hours with some stretching it out to 5. So that’s more bulk to lug about. You’ll also have to get less shy about using power points in coffee shops and airports. The staff in the places I have been have never objected to me plugging in. Scope them out and make a beeline for them if they are free. Power is a more valuable commodity to a mobile worker than WiFi. Think about that.

For me it’s a waiting game. I’m waiting to see what will be possible with the iPhone when the SDK is released as I’m filled with ideas on how to manage this, how to add to what is already out there. I’m less and less keen on FaceBook and their constant barrages of crap but they are in the best position to start providing an implementation of the “digital shadow” (as PJ called it.

Today, we were looking up domain names for a new venture which would provide content to mobile devices which would be aimed at those with touch screens. We played about with touch* and then the meme moved to iterations of finger*

[13:33:01] (aidan) Sounds a bit rude.
[13:33:17] (mj) Because you’re 12 years old.
[13:33:38] (aidan) As are most comic readers.
[13:33:50] (mj) Everyone is 12 years old on the internet
[13:34:09] (mj) which is why Aqua’s buttons were said to PULSE and not THROB
[13:35:30] (aidan)