Of particular consistency is Ray Nolan, you can set your watch to the seminar where he arrogantly blazes through the HostelWorld story. It’s a great story admittedly, the second time, it’s still pretty good, the third time it starts to loose it’s sheen.

We don’t really hear too much about coping with failure in Worky or other ventures, i.e. why he’s had a few flops since. It’s all about the feel good startup vibe to get attendees handing over the ticket prices.

Dining out on startups

There are quite a few examples of people speaking that really belong in Barcamps i.e. free events where people can talk about something that interests them. Handing over cash to hear amateurs or former entrepreneurs spinning the same old stories over and over again is not something I’m doing anymore. Ticket prices are starting to get exorbitant for these events and the crowd generally consists of ooh-ers and aah-ers rather than people who actually own companies.

Also the title of entrepreneur really belongs to people who are running companies and I’d rather hear from those currently running successful companies. Former Entrepreneurs  and “Entrepreneurs in residence” aren’t really entrepreneurs anymore. They’ve left the game and from what I see, they seem to be making their cash out of fool-hardy startups. From the looks of it, they seem to move the focus to the sponsored ego massaging that are these summits.

Mobile Maasai in Kenya

I liked the recent Fred Wilson post on building better social graphs and it got me thinking about where mobile is going. This line in particular “For Microsoft it was open source and the Internet. For Google, it appears that it may be social. For Facebook, it appears that it may be mobile”.

Fred’s interpretation on what-kills-what is interesting. We’ve a telecoms/Mobile technology startup in this office describing the 100 Mbps connections that’ll eventually be available to our phones and the impact this will have on our lives. Our phones know when we get out of bed, when we’re travelling, where we are, where we’ve been, what we’ve bought (mobile wallet technology) and importantly for Facebook, who we talk to.

So this hurts Facebook how? Facebook have been making efforts to get us to catagorise our friends. While they excel at getting people to join and connect with eachother, they have so far failed to encourage people to create groups or subsets to share information with. The example that gets bandied about is the drunken pic of someone on a stag night getting spread about to co-workers.

Mobile phone contacts and email contacts have this information though, who do I call during work hours, who do I hang out with on a Saturday. This data is largely untapped.

The Facebook experiment has been very successful at getting people to publish their lives, if anything it shows most people are happy to share most of their information. The only issue is that I don’t like sharing my data with everyone and my mobile already knows.

Facial Recognition

Well Executed:

• Xbox asks you if you want to personalise your xbox experience.

• You get access to free videos and trailers that are tailored to your tastes (I like COD so I get cool war backgrounds when I enter the room).
• I get price reductions because it knows I like buying certain avatar items or indie games.
• I get to shoot people with real faces.

Bad Execution:

• Xbox never tells you or fuzzes over privacy issues…

• Starts capturing data like when I enter or leave a room
• Releases shitty games that involve some rubbish avatar riding a horse
• Use it as an excuse to push it’s already hugely overpriced rubbish onto me more frequently

For some reason I think  Microsoft are certain to make a mess here. I’m sure some people like the Wii, but I’ve only seen people putting it into a corner a week after purchase and never use it again. It’s gaming candyfloss. Xbox has been squandering opportunities at every turn, overcharging for indie games and videos, overcharging for online, slow release dates for games on live. They’ve had such opportunities to make something huge out of the space they’re in, I doubt a new gimmick is going to help their blinker view.

Scenario:

Tried to easy_install Scrappy – a web scraper for python

Get the “Unable to find VCVarsall.bat” despite the fact I install the piece of shite Visual Studio 2010 express edition and can compile from the command prompt.

Have to install the individual packages. Great.

Now I need to find a C comiler. How about MinGW. Great. After an hour of dicking around with that I’m getting:

“error: command ‘gcc’ failed with exit status 1″

So having to compile my own packages is a pain in the tits, not only that the problems with MinGW on a 64-bit platform are pretty harsh.

The solution….

There are hundreds of “fixes” on the interweb for this. Forget it. Install python win 32 version. Solves all the pain. Do it, pull off the plaster. Easy_install will work fine again. Not run into any issues since.

Google App Engine (GAE) (terrible acronym), is Google’s cloud offering for developers. It looks like it was designed to support developers who can’t afford a VPS or who want to test out some simple apps. It has some pretty sweet cloud monitoring services, can scale like Amazons EC2, is free for a decent amount of data and bandwidth and looks fairly well supported from the Google groups I’ve been reading.

It uses Google’s Big Table, which is a NoSQL-style solution. That said I’ve only really used it in a relational context, Django and Grails both come with plugins so I haven’t had stretch the brain skills too far.

So I’ve deployed some stuff using both Grails and Django. Not any major projects mind, just simple CRUD apps.

My opinion on em…

Grails is pretty tough to get going, uses some old JPA implementation which causes it to lose some of it’s niceness. I deployed an app after a day of struggling. A friend of mine was researching this implementation too and gave up after 2 days of farting about. It’s finicky and trying to find compatible implementations is painful.

Django is not walk in the park either. Google seems to be keener as there’s a large volume of python support about for the GAE. Setting up the SDK and deploying takes 3-4 hours to figure out, there’s also a few hairy bugs involving URLs but for a free server it’s probably worth it. Running the appcfg.py to deploy is a dream. Simple but effective.

So to sum up:

Grails is pretty poor on GAE, stay away for now

Django is easier, well worth a few hours to experiment at least. You’ll still be scratching your head when you’re reading Google’s help files from 2007 (some of that stuff is really out of date).

We’re using it for now so will report on any major mishaps! Been hearing GAE will support vanilla SQL databases soon…

30+ years of top level industry experience and how can I possibly compete? I still don’t know but I can tell you how we’ve been dragged from side to side…

So we started in January, originally we thought, Christ sell something online. Straight onto the boards.ie entrepreneur forums to see how it’s done. There’s tons to read, articles that’ll make you think and people that’ll inspire you. So what to sell? We started with jocksandsocks.com. Pretty much because it had a funny name.

This led to us to sliding around infront of underwear suppliers, during a terribly cold winter,  in industrial parks around Dublin. We started building a picture of how that market works by talking to the wholesalers. People thought it was interesting (not an indicator of anything) and we figured it was worth a shot. Then we started seeing that it mostly involved selling male tongs and looking at lots of balls. This didn’t really appeal to us. Not that we’re faint hearted but we just didn’t really care too much about the world of underwear, us with our high falutin backgrounds in investment banking and electical engineering.

I think the next big idea was Triathalon supplies. Brian had organised Triathalons before so had an idea of costs and demand.  We then went around calling up various manufacturers in China to see how much they’d charge for a swim cap. I think Brian still gets call from sales agents at 3 in the morning. It seemed like we’d a few deals arranged straight away, I think we stopped with that plan because after doing some maths, we figured we could just about make half a yearly dole salary out of it. Better than nothing but not by much!

I really wanted to break into software, after being a developer on horrible and boring bank projects for years, I’d a nice bit of experience. Brian was also keen, although we were more keen just to start making cash really (still not attained).

Our first ideas revolved around social media efforts. We really just got into twitter at the time and were blown away by the business application of it. Especially in Ireland where we seem 2 years behind most technologies and ruled by a select few. An honest, proactive approach by business could change the landscape (we thought).

I think the main one was a local deal finder. We looked fairly extensively at Yelp, BrightKite, Gowalla, Foursquare etc. to see if there was something we could build. We were thinking small business, although we can see now this is horrifically tough area to start in without having a big market. So we were thinking of a social media deal finder, we discussed coupons, vouchers (there’s a difference!), marketing, directories, apps. Lots and lots of discussions/arguments/compromises made.

We then went to an incubation center who kinda thought the idea wasn’t terrible but asked us to do market research. This was tough enough, but we went out to the myriad of shops and bars in Cork to build surveys. It felt pretty good to have that beginning research under the belt. Every time we talked to someone, we uncovered something new. We did start figuring out some simple facts though…

1. People don’t have time for your product. If its saving/making money for them. They’ll use it. If not, PFO.
2. They like buzz, think social media is cool and all but ain’t gonna pay until you prove it.
3. Most don’t even have websites.

So not much you can do there right! (Maybe there is but we can’t live on fresh air).

Rubicon in Cork liked the fact we were trying. Cold calling is starting to become a skill! And they saw we weren’t idiots (I think) so they took us on. We pitched a social media integration tool, something to manage profiles for small business. Very Postling like. Seemed to work, so we got offices and mentors, a start really (although our mentor does not exist yet, although the business doesn’t either so maybe we’re too early stage). Everything seems to lead onto something else with us, so we’re starting to get a bit cocky.

Since then we’ve been researching tons. Will people buy this tool? Who’ll buy it? Why would they want it?

We’ve started moving through the digital media agencies in Dublin to find out what they need. Seems like nothing but I’m continually surprised by how the project is shaping up. We’re casting the net a bit wider to London next to see how they react. We’re subscribing to Steve Blank’s “Four steps to the Epiphany” model. Mainly because his blog rocks but more importantly, because we’ve no money. We’re pretty slow, slower than we’d expected. But I like to sum up our attitude in one way:

If you bang your head against a brick wall, eventually there are 2 outcomes. Either the walls gonna fall down, or your head’ll break.

Currently the heads a little tender and the wall’s dusting a bit, but somethings gotta give.

The event started on the Friday (7.5.2010) where I managed to arrive about an hour late, incredibly hungover and struggling to keep my eyelids open. The pitches were varied enough, some good, some bad.

Without being too critical, actually fuck that it’s my blog, some of the pitches were so Mickey Mouse they were  borderline hilarious.

Example of how not to pitch:

“I want to build a Web 2.0, user interaction based social network in the cloud to invoke community marketing in a web 2.0 framework, using the cloud and amazon web services, to promote interaction and accentuate the community level social media potential offered by the web and the web 2.0 cloud based computing platform”

Huh?

Hopefully it was nerves but some people seemed to think it was a buzz word platform, I imagine the thoughts resembled “Hmm, if I mention techie stuff to techie people maybe they’ll want to build things for me”.

Saturday I arrived late too and joined a team of 2 others, Peter and Mike. We came up with a sharing site (clichéd I know) but I did really like some aspects of it. What we decided on was a rental site for non-business people.

What I liked about the concept as it developed:

• Provide insurance and booking services to people with “stuff” who just want to rent occasionally.
• Easy setup and management of bookings and finances.
• Provide a facility for customers to search on a site for rentals.
• Protection for both parties concerned.

What I didn’t like:

• Carbon credit side, dunno where the idea was going there.
• Partnering with charities and google??
• Outshouted on the above but it was fun to see other peoples slants on things

GeoDealio won in the end. The idea was exactly what Brian and I set up originally to do, twitter based advertising for local businesses with a proximity filter thingy. We went off the idea because we though layar was too close to that already. Not saying it’s a bad idea though and fair play to them. They won an xbox too.

Classometer came third in the competition. I thought this was the strongest and fair play to the lads for getting this built. It wasn’t a world changing piece of software but it looked like it was doing a good job of what it was trying to do. As I normally post, disruptive software is rare and there’s a huge market out there for things like this. I wouldn’t be surprised if this was the start of a suite of stuff the guys could build so I hope this is a start-off point for them.

Food was good, people were sound and varied. Would recommend it, also don’t bother buying tickets! Nobody even checked mine, perfect sneaking opportunity for poorer punters like myself!

My buddy Nick was at an English startup day and has a post that might be of interest..

2 Hour mashup

I was feeling a bit inspired from 37Signals founder http://www.omnisio.com/startupschool08/david-heinemeier-hansson-at-startup-school-08 talking here about ideas and concepts about running a business that are pretty golden.

These are:

1) You will not create the next Facebook/Youtube/Myspace, Christ you won’t even make the next DoneDeal.ie or Daft.ie.

2) You’ll probably be poor while you do it. It’s tough to get customers onboard.

3) Businesses are a better market than consumers.

4) Stick to doing small things well.

There are tons of train-wreck companies around, once you start digging you’ll find failed social networks, search engines, CMS systems and every other category of product around. Thing is you don’t have to be a world changer to survive.

All you gotta do is make a problem go away.

Well until I get it repaired.

What i wanted to comment on is a couple of strange things I noticed when I wanted to get it fixed.

a) Xbox have a straight forward number to contact them for repairs.

b) They have an indian call center which actually works.

After months of pulling my hair out over frustration with Barclays terrible “Oh I can’t authorise that sir” and “I’m sorry I cannot help you, let me put you onto department B”, they seem to have gotten it to work. The person on the line actually seemed to care what I was talking about and although I had to pay for the fix (my xbox is older than some of the people playing it right now), it was a pretty simple and efficient process.

I’ve also been reading some developer propaganda that developing for Bing and other Microsoft products is like working for a well funded startup. I’ve also seen some impressive stuff they’re doing with maps and docs.com so I think Microsoft have moved out of the “Bill SUX” catagory and into the old dog that is learning new tricks place.

Sure he may smell a little and he tends to get things wrong, but he keeps fighting and is starting to give the young pups a run for their money.

People need to filter through the web wasteland, pull out things that are particularly related to them. These sites are specific views on the web setup by the tech community and used by a subset of net users.

What biased silicon valley VCs tend to neglect is that a world of users out there exist that don’t have a clue what Digg/Reddit are. They see those symbols and get confused as to their meaning and don’t see the point. What sharing through your social graph facilitates is a sharing of interests, what this does is it opens the local community. A more trustworthy and concise group of people that can now express themselves amongst their friends without owning a blog or owning accounts across 20 sites.

See a nice pair of shoes, listen to a cool song, find a funny picture, it’s shared. Brilliant for people, it’s expression 2.0. Facebook are trying to liberate the web from geeky communities and bring it to everyone. I don’t doubt this will benefit the Zuck but it’s an evolution. Digg and Reddit communities won’t be killed but at least now I can share something funny without breaking it over the heads of people in my social graph.