After chatting with my fellow sprinter Kirsty Thom today about her startup, Sojurn, I was about to email her some thoughts and suggestions. But in the spirit of sharing (and hopefully of continuing my luck of getting onto Idealog!) I thought I'd blog it instead. Sorry Kirsty!

Firstly, a bit of background. Sojurn is an upside down CRM, where you control which companies get access to your address, email and other personal details. A great idea I'm sure you'd agree!

But Kirsty faces the same problems all startups face. Going from not much to something isn't easy. Advertisers like having your data, and they wouldnt give it up easily. So here's my suggestions:

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Filed under - Ecentre Sprint

There will also be a new “My Google Drive” area for various folders in Google Drive. There will be other Drive-specific tools as well.

But here’s the real key: there will also be native syncing software that you install on your various computers and mobile devices. Yes, like Dropbox.

 

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Filed under - Ecentre Sprint

The contemporary shanzhai are rebellious, individualistic, underground, and self-empowered innovators. They are rebellious in the sense that the shanzhai are celebrated for their copycat products; they are the producers of the notorious knock-offs of the iPhone and so forth. They individualistic in the sense that they have a visceral dislike for the large companies; many of the shanzhai themselves used to be employees of large companies (both US and Asian) who departed because they were frustrated at the inefficiency of their former employers. They are underground in the sense that once a shanzhai “goes legit” and starts doing business through traditional retail channels, they are no longer considered to be in the fraternity of the shanzai. They are self-empowered in the sense that they are universally tiny operations, bootstrapped on minimal capital, and they run with the attitude of “if you can do it, then I can as well”.

...

My personal favorite shanzhai story is of the chap who owns a house that I’m extraordinarily envious of. His house has three floors: on the top, is his bedroom; on the middle floor is a complete SMT manufacturing line; on the bottom floor is a retail outlet, selling the products produced a floor above and designed two floors above.

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Filed under - Ecentre Sprint

I'm a left-wing, pinko, greenie-type at heart, but i still like an occasional dollop of right wing economics in my blogging diet. So I came across this gem from The Daily Reckoning's right-of-right Bill Bonner, when talking about the malaise apparently affecting the western world, and attributing it to the decline in marginal utility across most sectors:

Take education, for example. A little of it goes a long way. When a person learns to read and write, the whole world of ideas and information opens up to him. Whether more inputs of formal education actually pay off or not is open to question. Clearly, beyond some point, they don’t. Americans spend twice as much per student as they did 40 years ago. The educational attainment results are about the same. Which suggests that the marginal utility of investment in the education industry declined to zero 4 decades ago.

 

Most the world’s great ideas…great books…and great inventions were produced by people who spent relatively little time in formal school settings. But now, every goofball and half-wit is expected to have a college degree. What do you expect? A college degree isn’t really worth very much.

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Filed under - Ecentre Sprint

Health care and education, in my view, are next up for fundamental software-based transformation. My venture capital firm is backing aggressive start-ups in both of these gigantic and critical industries. We believe both of these industries, which historically have been highly resistant to entrepreneurial change, are primed for tipping by great new software-centric entrepreneurs.

Marc Andreessen, Director of Facebook, eBay and HP

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Filed under - Ecentre Sprint

You might have noticed that in the last few blog posts there's been a lot of talk about e-learning, and not a lot about online storage.

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Filed under - Ecentre Sprint

When Sabrina asked for feedback on the Sprint program this week, i said something like.

"Great content, but can't we each view it before the sesssion, and then use the session as a workshop to figure out how each of can apply it".

And then I saw Salman Khan's presentation and realised this was the future of education.

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Filed under - Ecentre Sprint

So i just googled around for e-learning things, not looking for anything in particular. And what I found blew my mind. Here is Salman Khan giving a talk to TED about how education is about to be changed world wide - and for the better.

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Filed under - Ecentre Sprint

Continuing from the thoughts in the predict or control blog, I thought it makes sense to review what we actually have - and whats successful, what isnt, what we can control and what we can only predict.

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Filed under - Ecentre Sprint

How do expert entrenpenurs succeed? Is it by predicting and anticipating the future, a future that no one else sees? Apparently not. Instead of wasting time and resources on "crystal ball gazing" they focus their efforts on what they can control, the present.

That was the gist from last week's lecture. Its a concept so  simple and so powerful, I think it just might change my life.

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Filed under - Ecentre Sprint

Apple has selected Microsoft's Azure and Amazon's AWS to jointly host its iCloud service, The Reg has learned.

We understand that Apple has barred Microsoft and Amazon from discussing what would otherwise be a high-profile deal, especially for Microsoft's fledgling Azure cloud service.

But Reg sources close to Microsoft this week confirmed rumours circulating in June that Apple's iCloud is running on Azure and Amazon. Customers' data is being striped between the pair. iCloud was released as a beta in August and is expected by the end of this year.

Apple and Amazon did not respond to our requests to comment, while Microsoft told us: "At this time, we don't have any comment around whether Apple is a Windows Azure customer."

According to our sources, Microsoft insiders see the iCloud deal as a validation of Azure. So far, Microsoft has pushed Azure using the marketing 101 playbook. Redmond has flagged up the start-ups and websites it has attracted in an attempt to prove to other devs that Azure is "cool". It is also promoting those corporate customers who've floated onboard to prove its cloud is being taken seriously by business users.

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Filed under - Ecentre Sprint

In the ongoing patent war between Apple and Samsung, Samsung has just unleashed its most ferocious weapon - Stanley Kubrick.

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Filed under - Ecentre Sprint

Summaries below of what various peops have had to say about our offering:

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Filed under - Ecentre Sprint

But, every time the “suicide” specter reared its head, I turned away and stayed the course. And every time, I would be vindicated. Arguments were worked out, problems solved, revenue generated, traction gained, buzz created. So I’ve struggled on, and every day we’ve continued to win the most important battle for any company: existence. Even more, we’ve been able to grow all the metrics that matter: users, revenue, and team.

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Filed under - Ecentre Sprint

New Zealand has the chance to boost its economic growth by becoming the data-storage hub of the Pacific, says the company planning the country's second international internet link.

Pacific Fibre chief executive Mark Rushworth said New Zealand should follow the lead of Iceland, which is setting itself up as a key data site between Britain and the United States.

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Filed under - Ecentre Sprint

As a world expert in the key enabling technology for file syncronisation, and with decades of experience with large scale enterprise computing systems, I'm uniquely placed to take advantage of the dramatic growth in cloud computing which we're only just beginning to witness.

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Filed under - Ecentre Sprint

For about a decade the computer has been the hub for our digitial media. Photos, music, video as well as contacts, emails and calendars were all on the computer. Sometime we'd use them by putting songs onto an mp3 player, or we'd burn photos to a CD, or we'd email files to ourselves or a friend or colleague.

More recently we'd use dropbbox or facebook to share files, but still, the computer is the hub. If we want access to all our files we need the computer.

But now we're entering an age where most of out computing will be done on multiple, mobile devices. Many of us will have a smart phone, a tablet, a laptop and perhaps also a work computer and a home media centre.

But how to get access to all of our digital media from all of those devices? To manually copy data as needed would be chaotic, at best. Whats needed is a service which automatically syncronises data across all of your devices, and also houses that data in the web where it can be accessed even if you don't have your own device at hand.

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Filed under - Ecentre Sprint

Thinking about products as 2-3 minute interactive demonstrations with Q&A has shown me how boring some of my earlier ideas have been, without a thought given to provoking an emotional response....

The important selling moment is made in the split second when an aesthetically appealing package opens the visitors mind to the beauty of your prototype. Whatever I submit to the application process and package by September has to evoke raw emotions to have any hope of opening up a visitor’s mind for a few seconds, let alone a few minute demo.

A great article about what startup founders need to do to get their message across...

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Filed under - Ecentre Sprint

"iCloud stores your content and wirelessly pushes it to all of your devices... Its all automatic and there's nothing more to learn" - Steve Jobs.

This is exactly what we want Shmego to be.

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Filed under - Ecentre Sprint

To continue the discussion of where and how we could sell our cloud storage product, what about mass market consumers? On the surface of it this proposition looks shaky - Google, Apple, Microsoft and Facebook all desperately want to dominate this area. But, can this consolidation will itself be a source of opportunity? Lets see...

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Filed under - Ecentre Sprint

Had a good long chat to Mike today about where the potential lies for our cloud storage and sync platform.

One possible segment we discussed is that of small to medium enterprises.

I think that many companies want to have their data available from anywhere and many seem to wisht they didnt have to run their own servers. The obvious solution, of course, is a cloud based file server and associated services.

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Filed under - Ecentre Sprint

I've spent a bunch of time talking to entrepreneurs who are building companies in and around the cloud storage space. It's not a space I like very much because I don't think we'll be using files in the cloud. Now Dropbox is a brilliant company and an amazing service and they are doing very well, but will we need a service like Dropbox when everything is in the cloud? I don't think so.

This line of thinking has a lot of merit, but I think the critical change won't be the change in type of data, but the change of mentality as we shift to the cloud as our primary storage...

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Filed under - Ecentre Sprint

Here's my Business Model Canvas, fresh from this mornings presentation.

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Filed under - Ecentre Sprint

On Thursday the ECentre through a party celebrating 10 years of helping startups.

It was great to get to know my fellow Sprinters. At the ecentre everyone's pretty focused on the task at hand, but in a social environment you get to chat about more random stuff.

Sir Steve Tindal gave a speech, and I was interested to hear him talking about the startups he's invested in which have done well, and how he was encouraging the other investors there to back some startups.

This seems intriguing, given the dramatic economic circumstances facing the developed world today. I've heard this referred to as a "growth crisis", since all of the big issues (US debt, unemployment, bailout, PIIGS debt) can have their causes traced to a lack of growth since about 2000.

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Filed under - Ecentre Sprint

Well thats the first week of Sprint, roll on the second! The lectures were good, if perhaps focusing on issues which are on the horizon a bit. Looking forward to getting stuck into some customer validation. The ecentre had its 10 year birthday bash on Thursday at the Takapuna Boat Club. We were all there and it was great to mix it up with the top investors in the area...

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Filed under - Ecentre Sprint

In a small room at the University of British Columbia, students wearing headphones are listening to noise. No, it's not an indie band's shred solo blasting through an iPod. The students are participating in an experiment at the school's Psychophysics and Cognitive Neuroscience Lab, and the noise consists of random static generated by a computer. The question at hand: how badly does a scratchy cacophony interfere with thought?
The researchers are finding, in fact, that the noise improves the workings of the students' brains..

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Filed under - Miscellany

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Filed under - Miscellany

In the second instalment of Patently Absurd, we discover that the geniuses at IBM have figured out how to remember what type of bag shoppers want. Those geniuses at IBM can't stop innovating!

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Filed under - Patently Absurd

It was almost Christmas, I was living in London and had just started dating my wife-to-be. We'd booked a week travelling through Spain and Morocco for the the Christmas period and were looking forward to a wonderful adventure.

I had been leading a team developing a project for Argos (like the The Warehouse) and it was going into UAT (User Acceptance Testing) in early December. We were almost out of budget but the app had been thoroughly tested so we were confident it would go smoothly. And we were so wrong…

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Filed under - On Software

In the latest absurdity to come from the US Patent Office, a company successfully received a patent for holding a "list of things" in a database. That means anyone else who holds a list in a database needs to license their technology. ie any list of anything.

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Filed under - Patently Absurd

Enterprise architects, particularly the "astronaut" kind, often like to talk about "layers" of software. As in, the business layer, the persistence layer and the presentation layer. Sometimes they get fancy and have auditing layers, security layers and all sorts of other layers.

The thing is, this implies that you can structure your big, complex systems with a very simple geometry, ie of a series of horizontal layers. But thats just absurdly naive, it never works out that way.

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Filed under - On Software

Its bad enough that people in the corporate environment - and i mean real people , with hopes, dreams, talents and ambitions - get reduced to being nothing more then a 'resource'. We occupy a column in MS Project alongside projectors, white boards and meeting rooms.

But i've just realised a disturbing new trend. We're not even individual 'resources' anymore. I just overheard someone in the kitchen say "...but there's not enough resource", referring to software developers. Note that the singular was deliberate and, now i think of it, its become common usage. Using a singular to refer to a collective indicates that each element of the collective is individually irrelevant and indistinguishable from the others. Its like saying "we need more sand" - you're obviously not interested in which particular grains of sand you get. But the reality is that no software project ever needs "more resource". "More resource" means putting anyone on any job. It means favouring skill (or the appearance of skill) over talent. It means inefficiency. "More resource" is what gets projects into trouble. What gets projects out of trouble is the opposite, ie the right person for the right job

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Filed under - On Software

I was just having yet another read of yet another programmer's opinion on how to handle exceptions, ie whether API writers should throw checked exceptions, or just unchecked. -

I've been in a dilemma about this for years and keep hoping that some day someone will figure out a satisfactory answer.

There's certainly no shortage of opinions, but none that i've seen actually translate into programming practise which, when applied to real world scenarios, gives a good result. So here's my take...

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Filed under - On Software

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Filed under - Blogs

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Filed under - Blogs

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Filed under - Blogs