Blogs
A Genius At Work...
I find it fascinating to get a glimpse behind the scenes at the workspace of great people - so enjoyed this blog post with pictures of Albert Einstein's desk from Life magazine in 1955.
It's too easy to fall into the 'revision timetable' problem of very tidy people, where more time is spent on preparing for the activity and clearing up after it than is spent on the activity itself.
Creation is a messy process, and we shouldn't be ashamed of that. So celebrate a messy desk, a sloppy intray - but only if you've doing something great in amongst it all. :)
Three Stories from Steve Jobs
Steve Jobs is held up as an icon of entrepreneurship, and in this video he talks about 3 key events that have shaped his life:
1. Dropping out of college.
He talks about his adoption, and his parents determination to send him to college. But he didn't find college to be worth the fees they were forced to pay - so he left after 6 months. He was very poor, but this gave him the freedom to explore what he wanted to learn and do - and he ended up learning the skills he would later need to create Apple.
2. Getting fired from Apple
He'd hired a manager to run the business with him, but their visions diverged - and the board of directors sided with the manager. So at the age of 30, Steve was fired from the company he founded.
This was when he founded Pixar, and a company called NXT (which eventually was bought by Apple, and its technology formed the basis for Apple's rennaiscance).
He says "Sometimes life is going to hit you in the head with a brick, but don't lose faith. I'm convinced the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to love what you do. The only way to do great work is to love what you do - if you haven't found what you love keep looking and don't settle"
3. Facing Death
Remembering that you are going to die is the best way he knows of focusing on what is really important. Everything else falls away in the face of death. Steve talks about being diognosed with cancer and being told to get his affairs in order and being prepared to die. Against the odds he was cured of the cancer - but the feeling of having limited time, and being determined not to waste it, has stayed with him.
The speech was given to thousands of students on their commencement day at Stanford University, and it's a very inspiring talk from one of the world's most successful entrepreneurs.
Again a hat-tip to GigaOm for another great recommendation.
Solving the 3 problems of online business models
Online business models face new twists on the evergreen challenges that all business face - how to win customers, support customers in using the product or service, and how to keep the customers you've won.
Joshua Porter from Bokardo Social Web Design has prepared the fantastic presentation above, with some ideas on solving the three challenges he identifies:
1. The Signup Problem
Can you imagine if a real-world shop made you signup before letting you buy anything - making you fill out your name, address, email etc? Well online businesses have to put this extra stage in the way of potential customers - and it's one of the biggest drop-out points. How can this be improved?
2. The First Time Use Problem
People are trying out your product or service, but don't know what to do. How can you help them understand it, and get involved with it, before they give up and don't come back?
3. The Ongoing Engagement Problem
How do you keep users involved and active - and how do you build enough traction in a community based site (ie the chicken/egg problem of whoch comes first lots of users, or a valuable site?).
The presentation is mainly aimed at social web services, but applies to all online businesses. It really is well worth viewing the presentation at least twice to soak up all the information and ideas.
Monetising Start-Ups - Optimise your sales funnel
After an extremely busy end to 2009, I've managed to use the first few days of 2010 to catch up on reading - and one of the first articles I've read contained the slideshow above.
Tony Wright is the founder of RescueTime a software business that helps business people track and analyse their use of time for better productivity.
He's clearly learned a lot in his entrepreneurial career, because I think the presentation is absolutely spot on in identifying the important things for a startup to focus on - and explaining why they are important. The presentation is based around software or web businesses, but the principles apply to any business.
You can read his full blog post here, or here are his key points:
You should look at your business as a funnel (which, incidentally, is how every salesguy on the planet looks at their sales pipeline).
What’s at the top of this funnel varies on what type of business you have. Maybe it’s page views from organic SEO and SEM. Maybe it’s warm leads from a bank of cold-calling lead-gen folks. And maybe your conversion event is a software purchase (like ours is). Maybe it’s an ad-click. Maybe it’s an account signup. But trust me, you have a funnel.
So when trying to figure out what the hell to work on as an entrepreneur, go worship at the alter of the funnel. That means:
* Measure the hell out of everything. If you don’t know many many new visitors are coming to your site, what percentage of them do something, what percentage of THOSE people, click signup, what subset of THOSE people actually successfully signup, and what percentage of THOSE people are paying you a month later, the first thing you should do is work on metrics. Don’t go overboard, but know your funnel.
* Work your way UP the funnel, not down (if you have the financial luxury to do so). Most entrepreneurs ask “how do I get people to come to my site so it can grow?” The answer most often is down the funnel: the product isn’t providing enough value, communicating clearly enough, engendering enough passion, or causing people to want to tell their friends.
* Seek the low hanging fruit in the funnel. That means that you should seek out where people are escaping your funnel. If you get tons of visitors but no one clicks on anything (high bounce rate, low time on site), chances are your value prop is confusing or isn’t very compelling. You might need to improve the product, but chances are you just have to improve how you talk about it.
* Seek leverage. The lower you attack the funnel, the more it helps. If you do something to improve your retention that will help you forever. If you do something that gives you a boost in acquisition (like a SuperBowl ad), the value will be short-lived (unless you have a true viral loop).
The full blog is well worth a read, and I urge you to step through the slides above.
Hat tip to GigaOm for recommending the article.
Open Atrium at the World Bank
The World Bank has rolled out use of Open Atrium to manage its internal communications on projects and respond to disasters.
The Washington DC based company that created Open Atrium, Development Seed, has blogged about the news (with a few screenshots) here: http://developmentseed.org/blog/2009/sep/08/custom-open-atrium-intranet-...
Open Atrium is an open source project management system, similar in many ways to online apps like Huddle or BaseCamp. It's built on Drupal, the leading open source content management framework.
The power of Open Atrium is that it is highly customisable through the use of 'features' - a kind of drupal module that can easily be implemented separately within different parts of the site. So, for example, you can have a Chat feature, and only enable it on some projects. Meanwhile other projects can have a documentation area. More features are being made available all the time, and features can also be created for your particular needs.
Pilot Internet is ready to customise and deploy Open Atrium for clients - providing a project management system that can be deployed quickly and cost effectively.
We use it for our own project management, and if you're already a client you'll have used it when you accessed your project area.
If you need to co-ordinate teams of people working on projects, then Open Atrium can help. Ask us for a demo account on our test installation.
Dries Buytaert: The State of Drupal
DrupalCon Paris is underway now, with Dries Buytaert cutting a Cat5 cable instead of a ribbon to officially open proceedings.
He's now speaking in his role as the project founder and lead about the 'state of drupal'.
And first, the subject of the code freeze for Drupal 7 - he's describing the waves of drupal development work, and how it builds up towards code freeze into a patch frenzy - and how developers complain.
He shows a quote:
Paul Saffo: "People overestimate short-term benefits of innovation, but under-estimate long term benefits".
He talks about Gartner's 'hype cycle' which starts with an innovation trigger, early adopters, then positive hype, peak of inflated expectations, negative hype, trough of disillusionment, slope of enlightenment, then settles into a plateau of productivity.
He says that drupal 6 has settled nicely into the plataeu of productivity.
He says that Drupal7 needs to be at the height of the curve of inflated expectations before code freeze (which prevents new features from being added). The question is, is it there?
Dries outlines some of the changes made. One of the highlights of this is that Fields API is now in core (essentially CCK. Tacxonomy terms and node bodies are now fields. JQueryUI is in core. There are new themes, and much much more.
Dries says the code is going to freeze - but some things are half-baked like Fields API, Usability improvements, test coverage - and more importantly performance has degraded.
So - code freeze is extended one week to next Monday to allow people to work on D7 udring DrupalCon Paris. The second phase is named 'code slush', which is time limited to 5 weeks. No new features or functionality will be allowed - except 10 carefully chosen exceptions. Important API changes for existing features will be allowed. Usability, testing, documentation and performance improvement changes will be allowed. The API and Schema freeze will be on Oct 15th.
The 10 exceptions are: Imagefield, Field translations, converting profile module to field API, convert taxonomy terms to fields API, overlays, edit anywhere, shortcuts, dashboard, plugin manager, RDF/RDFa.
Then the last phase is 'strictly polish' - small usability, testing, documentation and performance changes only. This is time limited to 4 weeks.
The final phase is bugs and release blockers only. After this, Drupal 7 will be released when it's ready - hopefully early 2010.
He shows a quote from Joseph Schumpeter who says that Radical innovation drives creative destruction.
Dries says that everything goes from being an innovation to simply a service - even computer hardware is doing this. It starts as an innovation, then is available as a bespoke product, then as a general product, then as a service. That's when innovations mature.
Dries says he likes this. Drupal distributions are the way to go. He says install profiles are becoming modules. Plugin manager will also be in core - allowing easy module installationa nd upgrading. It's also worth looking at Features.
He says richness and reach equal success. Drupal has richness, but not yet reach. Distributions will achieve that reach. He believes drupal is a framework AND a product, and wants to develop both.
For drupal 8 he wants to consider make more of a distinction between the two in the codebase - so you could just install the 'framework' if you want.
He says that we need to move from simply innovation driven development to market or user driven development. Drupal 7 usability is a good example of this.
Quote: "If you're not afraid, you're not doing the right thing." But the result is some pain.
The usability created friction between designers and developers - but this shows it's achieving something - and changing drupal. Drupal is growing up, and this is part of the reality of growing up. We have no choice but to grow up.
We have to reach out to new people and learn how to interact with them.
We need to increase the reach - its our biggest challenge and biggest opportunity.
There's some discussion/argument in the questions about how the process of the usability changes was handled.
There's a question about the upgrade path, and whether it'll be easy. Dries says there'll be a data upgrade path - but API's will break - so custom modules need to be updated.
In other announcements:
NowPublic has been acquired by Examiner. An ironic new drupal adopter is the Java.net community of Java developers!
And that's the end of Dries' presentation - now on with DrupalCon!
Early = Wrong
There's been a string of Web 2.0 companies biting the dust in the recession, and as with all business failure it's well worth examining what went wrong to learn some valuable lessons.
In the case of Lookery, which has just announced it's closure, the founder himself has taken that step back to a analyse what happened, and has written up his thoughts in a very open and honest blog post: http://blog.lookery.com/2009/08/21/couldery-shouldery/
The whole thing is worth a read, but it's the last lesson he mentions that leapt out from the page for me:
Coulda-Shoulda #3. Once we sold the ad network, I fell into a bad old habit — persuading my team to build something before the market was ready for it.... This is the fourth blog post that I can find from a Lookery exec in which the primary theme is early = wrong.
It's such a common mistake of entrepreneurs (including me), that I wanted to say a bit more about it.
If you launch a new idea onto the market, it is very very hard work. You have to educate people about why your idea is a good one, how it works, and how it can help them. You have to establish your ideas value in the marketplace. You have to drive demand to something new.
If you launch a business that capitalises on an existing idea, all this work is done for you, and you can focus your resources on harnessing existing demand.
Many people think Google was the first search engine because it's the most successful. It wasn't. It was 7th to launch. Can you name the first? No. It doesn't exist anymore.
Was the Dyson the first vacuum cleaner? Did Richard Branson invent the aeroplane? Did Donald Trump invent buildings?
Even Bill Gates didn't invent the operating system, the word processor, the web browser, etc.
These highly successful billionaires didn't invent anything, and weren't first to market with their idea.
The 'First Mover Advantage' is a myth. It's the 'First Mover Curse' in reality.
If you really really want to launch something brand new - at least make sure your business is extremely well capitalised, because you'll burn through a hell of a lot of money before you make it succeed.
Better to stand on shoulders of giants, and build a successful business by improving what the market has already learned to want.
Simple and Fair Investor Term Sheets
FFI Plain Preferred Term Sheet -
Techcrunch today highlights the publication of the template term sheet (shown above) from The Funded Founder Institute.
The Funded campaigns and spreads information designed to make VC deals fairer for the founders, and there has been growing discussion that the series A term sheet should be standardised. Out of that discussion has actually come some consensus between entrepreneurs and VCs, and you'll find the result here: http://www.docstoc.com/docs/10303638/FFI-Plain-Preferred-Term-Sheet
It's US focused, but the VC deal-structure principles are similar worldwide, so it could be modified for other countries.
Using something like this could save both sides a fortune in professional fees - which'll be a big help in small early stage rounds.
Meanwhile Techcrunch has previously reported that the Y-Combinator incubator has released similar documents suitable for smaller Angel rounds.
The documents are listed here: http://www.ycombinator.com/seriesaa.html
YCombinator StartUp Challenge: The Future of Journalism
How can the media can best evolve for the web? What is going to replace newspapers online? How can content sites make money?
The answers to these questions are highly valued at the moment. Rupert Murdoch believes he can just put content behind a subscription pay wall and people will be happy to pay for it rather than get it free from other sites.
Some sites (like TechCrunch that the link below goes to) make money from advertising and events while giving the content away free.
But many sites make no money at all.
The renowned incubator for startups, YCombinator, has set a challenge to entrepreneurs - come up with the solutions to some of these media challenges and they'll help you get started in business to solve them.
Details of the challenge are reported on TechCrunch here: http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/08/16/y-combinator-starts-seeding-ideas-t....
YCombinator says:
Newspapers and magazines are in trouble. We think they will mostly die, because we think we know what will replace them, and it is too far from their current model for them to reach it in time.
And yet people still need at least some of what they do. You can't have aggregators without content. So what will the content site of the future look like? And how will you make money from it? These questions turn out to be very closely related. Just as they were for print media, initially. The reason newspapers and magazines are dying is that what they do is no longer related to how they make money from it. In fact, most journalists probably don't even realize that the definition of journalism they take for granted was not something that sprang fully-formed from the head of Zeus, but is rather a direct though somewhat atrophied consequence of a very successful 20th century business model.
What would a content site look like if you started from how to make money—as print media once did—instead of taking a particular form of journalism as a given and treating how to make money from it as an afterthought?
(The good news is, we think the writing will actually end up being better.)
Groups applying to work on this idea should include at least one person who can write well and rapidly about any topic, one or more programmers who are good at statistics, data mining, and making sites scale, and someone who's reasonably competent at graphic design. These functions can of course be combined, and in fact it's even better if they are. Ex-Googlers would be particularly well suited to this project.
Find out more details and apply for the challenge here: http://ycombinator.com/rfs1.html
The Social Media Revolution
Here's some food for thought about the power and growth of social media. How can your company use this to its advantage - and avoid the downsides?
Do you know how your company is being talked about on social media sites? What are your competitors doing with social media - and does it give you a competitive advantage.
It's worth watching and then thinking about some of these questions.
A "Full English" Salad
The other day I needed to make a lunch - but found the fridge was a little lacking in supplies. Apart from the jars and juices, there were a couple of eggs, a few slices of bacon, a round lettuce and not much else.
And so, the Full English salad was born - Egg, Bacon, Beans and Fried Bread on salad.
Ok, the beans were flagelot beans from a tin in the store cupboard, and the egg is gently poached rather than fried. Posh people would call the fried bread 'croutons'.
You could have some tomato on there too - sunblushed? Maybe some mushrooms if you have them.
The overall effect was humorous - but very tasty.
Beetroot, Wensleydale and Walnut Salad
Busy today, so needed a quick lunch. Simply: round lettuce, cooked (but not pickled) beetroot, wensleydale and walnuts, drizzled with a little olive oil and served with a hunk of bread. Easy and tasty.
If you have more time roast the beetroot yourself - and toast the walnuts, which really brings out their flavour. This can be a nice starter.
Ok, I'm going back to work!
Quick and Easy Pizza
On a recent trip to Rome, the girlfriend and I vowed to learn to make pizza as deliciously thin, crispy and fresh as those we tasted there.
We'd been lucky enough to stay in a friend's flat in a residential area of the city, so ate at the pizza restaurants the locals eat in, rather than the tourist traps - enjoying fine food at budget prices (along with decent house wine at 3 Euros a litre!)
Now, a couple of weeks later, comes my first experiment. The hard bit to get right is going to be the dough. It has to be really crispy and thin. To start with, these are the measurements I'm trying:
- 350g strong white flour
- 225ml water
- 7g yeast
- bit of salt
- bit of sugar
- 2 tablespoons of olive oil
I chucked all this in the breadmaker and put on the 'dough' setting. When it was finally ready (90 mins later) I took out the dough ball and let it rest for a moment. Then I tore it in half, and wrapped one half in clingfilm and stored it in the fridge for another pizza later in the week.
Next I rolled out the remaining dough on the floured worktop, roughly to the shape of my baking tray, and as thin as I thought possible. I didn't try any of that flashy throwing it up in the air business - that can wait until I become a pizza expert!
For the sauce I softened half an onion and some chopped garlic then chucked in 2 tins of tomatoes, some fresh oregano, roughly chopped capers and a slug of red wine. I reduced this down, and then blitzed it to a smooth paste. Half got spread on the pizza base, and the rest was stored in the fridge for the second pizza later in the week.
For the topping I used spicy pepperoni, chopped fresh chillis, red peppers and mushrooms, and then a generous amount of grated mozarella (this was a budget pizza so it was cheap supermarket own brand basic mozarella - not buffalo mozarella!), and freshly ground black pepper. I know Italian pizzas are usally very light on toppings, but I like a bit more - every bite has to contain the mix of flavours in my view. But I held back from my usual mountain of toppings as much as possible, and kept it fairly basic.
Once all this was assembled I put the baking tray into the oven at 200C for about 15-20 mins, until the cheese was browning (because the aim was for a really crisp base).
It was served with a green salad of cos lettuce, cucumber and avocado - and of course an easy drinking house wine (more on my search for the perfect house wine in another post).
The verdict? It was very tasty indeed - but the base still wasn't crisp enough. Next time I'm going to reduce the water measurement for the dough - and (maybe) go a little easier on the tomato sauce and toppings.
Until then, ciao.
St Geoge's Market, Belfast
The girlfriend and I are in Belfast for the wedding of some friends, and a bit of research reveals that the place to be on a Saturday morning is St. George's Market.
It's open between 9am and 3pm, but after the rest of the shopping the girlfriend requires we only get there after 2pm, so a few things are already packed away.
But we still manage some time browsing the cheeses, olives, bread and more. We pick up a few things for lunch (soda bread, some irish cheese, some delicious pesto and olives) and eat lunch while listening to some of the live music.
We also pick up some more food to make our own dinner that evening. If I visit Belfast again I'll be sure to allow more time here!
More information:
http://www.discovernorthernireland.com/St-Georges-Market-Belfast-P3230
Picture credit: Northern Ireland Tourist Board (I was too busy eating to take pics!)
Stuffed Courgettes
A simple and light dinner this evening - because there's work to do.
Slice the courgettes in two lengthways and scoop out much of the soft flesh with a teaspoon, leaving the rest intact like a boat. Soften some onions in a frying pan and add the chopped up scooped out courgette. Season, and add a tin of chopped tomatoes, a little tomatoe puree, and then some other ingredients of your choice: Tuna and sweetcorn, ham and mushroom, peppers and mushrooms - anything you like.
Reduce this mixture so it's not too liquid, then scoop it back into the courgette boats - which should now be arranged in an oiled baking dish. Then grate some cheese over the top, and pop into the oven for about 15 mins until the cheese is nicely brown and crisp. Serve with chunky bread.
Globe Artichokes and Lemon Butter
As usual a trip to the market unearths some unplanned treasures. Globe artichokes are favourites of mine, and although I really do like more creative recipes like artichoke farci (or stuffed artichokes to you and me), I find it too hard to resist the quick and simple pleasure of plain old lemon butter. It seems to be the perfect match.
I simply trim off the stem, and boil them in a large pan for a while, until one of the outer leaves peels easily away. I make the lemon butter very very lemony.
Then I pour a glass of crisp white wine, and enjoy tearing the leaves off and dipping them in the butter, then sucking
If you have more time or less interest in lemon butter than me, here are some stuffed artichoke recipes:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/food_and_drink/recipes/a...
http://www.riverford.co.uk/recipes/recipe.php?recipeid=396&catid=5
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/food_and_drink/recipes/a...
http://www.studentrecipes.com/recipes/chicken/stuffed-artichokes/
http://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/printerfriendly/Whole-Stuffed-Art...
Lamb Chops, Aubergines and Broad Bean Salad
Today's bargain was a big bag of lamb chops for a fiver. Most have gone into the freezer, but the rest are being grilled for tonight's dinner for the girlfriend and I.
The chops were marinated for the afternoon in olive oil, garlic, lemon juice and rosemary, then grilled in my treasured grill pan on a high heat. They ended up a dark colour on the outside, but soft, melting and pink on the inside.
The aubergines I grilled in the pan first and then kept warm in the oven.
For the broadbean salad I got some fresh broad beans and shelled them, then mixed with spring onions, chillis, yellow pepper and a light dressing of olive oil and lemon juice.
Some chunky homemade granary bread was perfect for mopping up all the juices at the end.
And as lamb is one of my favourites this was a special meal - so deserved a special wine. The bottle of Medoc was given to us by my father, and was a subtle, high-tanin wine, perfect for lamb.
A Storecupboard Lunch
It's a nice sunny day today, but there's lots to do and no time to nip out to stock up on treats - yet there's not much in the house.
There's a bit of lollo rosso lettuce and some cucumber, and the last few slices of a loaf of bread - but no real main ingredient.
It's store cupboard time! I dig through the tins and root out some chick peas - aha, humous! But then there's no tahini paste. But there is a tin of flagelot beans. Then I realise there's some marscapone in the fridge that needs using. It's uncoventional, but all this could make some kind of bean pate!
I blend up the beans with some olive oil, garlic, black pepper and lemon juice. Then I stir in the marscapone (it's just creme fraiche essentially). I add some chilli powder and some lime juice to taste.
There's no time to let it set, so here it's more like a kind of humous, but what we don't serve for lunch is put into the fridge and sets into a more pate like consistency for the next day's lunch too (and the day after that!).
Sardines on a sunny day
The girlfriend was out this evening, so I was planning an evening of work - which meant dinner needed to be quick and easy. It also needed to suit the mostly sunny day (okay, there was a lot of rain too, but I like to think the sun had the edge when it was out).
I had to nip to the post office during lunch, so I took the opportunity to call by the market on the way back.
At the fishmongers, I couldn't decide what I fancied... The tuna looked good, but I'd had that quite a bit recently and fancied a change... The Sea Bass was glistening and fresh, but I'm going to cook that for the girlfriend later in the week.
I gave up dithering and went to the greengrocer's stall, where the tomatoes and other salads caught my eye. I stocked up on summer salad ingredients for the week, and plenty of fruit. Then it was back to the fishmongers - and that's when the sardines caught my eye. Perfect. Two of them would be enough for just me, and they set me back 94p. Yes, 94p for the main ingredient!
Back home, and I simply dropped them in a pan with some olive oil on a gentle heat, while I dug out some leftover new potatoes from the fridge. Stirring in some mayonnaise and horseradish brought them to life, and gave them a kick to compete with the strong flavour of the fish. The salad was simply chopped tomatoes, cucumber and a little onion with rosemary leaves (from the plant that's now recovering in the sun on the balcony after being a bit neglected during a recent move), olive oil and balsamic vinegar.
Total cost - less than two quid. Cooking time - six minutes tops. Taste - delicious.
I took it out to the balcony with a glass of Pinotage (more on that another time), and watched the world go by as I enjoyed my summer fast food. Once I was done (and only a cat could have got more of the meat off the bones than me) it was back to work.
Click For RSS Feed