Great stuff! Our first £5 App night ran smoothly, we had 22 people listening to our two £5 App talks. We’ve been planning this for exactly a month now and it was great to see it run so well. It seems that the free beer was a hit and the building itself lent itself beautifully to the event

John spoke for 30 minutes on Chrss (html slides) and fielded questions on TurboGears. I spoke on ShowMeDo (html slides)- the latter half of my talk was a reflection on our experiences aimed at others who want to build their own £5 App.

Matthew kicked off an interesting thread – should you run lots of £5 Apps in parallel or just concentrate on the one? Kyran and I say Stick With The One That Works lest you split your time too many ways and you become ineffective. Matthew suggested building lots of apps and letting time work in your favour – one of them is bound to win out. Interesting thoughts…anyone care to comment?

Great to see John, Jane, Richard, Simon, Matt, Kev, Colin, Kyran, Manuela, Dan, Emmet and the usual suspects. Thanks to Danny and Ben at HoboInternet for the great venue. ShardCore brought along 4 pieces of neat geek art, you’ll see them in the photos (to come).

Danny and I got talking in the pub about running a workshop on this – more of an interactive session (and less presentational) where those-that-have-done-it can talk to those-that-want-to-do-it. More on this once we’ve had a think about it.

Pictures and presentations to follow. Two more events are planned, a fourth is tentative, we’re open to suggestions for speakers. Note – the slides for both presentations were made with the excellent and free S5.

[Update - John has photos and Danny has a whole stack in Flickr.]

[Update - Jane has a whole set of photos over at Flickr.]

We have a new release of ShowMeDo on-line! We’re receiving some amazing feedback on our market-test with offers of new videos ranging from language tuition through knitting and on to car servicing. We’d love for these new videos to compliment our current 10 videos.

Our 10 videos are free to access (and always will be), we’ll be adding more of our own over the coming weeks. Our first video had Kyran filming me making a perfect cup of coffee, shortly I’ll be filming Kyran make Excellent Tea. These go alongside our other short tuition pieces on the Python programming language, IPython, ScummVM (with Flight of the Amazon Queen) and one on using HyperCam to make your own videos.

Kyran and I would love to receive your feedback, would you take a look and get in contact?

I’m seeing an increase in on-line services that let users earn money from their efforts. Many people like the idea of supplementing their incomes by doing something that they enjoy. Some examples:

• eBay – become a retailer selling whatever you choose
• Professional blogging – e.g. ProBlogger, write about what you enjoy and earn money through sponsorship, Google Adsense and affiliate programmes (e.g. Amazon’s)
• iStockPhoto – submit your own photos and take a cut of sales of your images
• eLance – offer yourself as a freelancer, from software development to brochure design

Umair Haque links to a good example – a woman’s new career as The Virtual Rockefeller (via this), buying and developing real-estate inside the Second Life game (reportedly for a very nice salary).

Kyran and I are aiming to give our users the option of earning money from their knowledge inside ShowMeDo. More on that in the future.

Two good entrepreneurial articles, first Paul Graham’s How To Make Wealth, previously only available in Hackers and Painters is now on-line.

If you wanted to get rich, how would you do it? I think your best bet would be to start or join a startup. That’s been a reliable way to get rich for hundreds of years. The word “startup” dates from the 1960s, but what happens in one is very similar to the venture-backed trading voyages of the Middle Ages.

Up second, Ian Landsman writes an interesting piece on 4 Rules for the Practical Entrepreneur. I’m not sure I agree with all of Ian’s points, perhaps I’m not the practical entrepreneur that he discusses, but the advice is good. Preferring B2B over B2C sounds rather like a personal preference (and has its own challenges, as mentioned in the comments), but each to his own.

I’d like to say a huge thank-you to John to helping ShowMeDo take a step forward, we’ve now got a daemonised TurboGears server that runs 24/7 (woot!).

There’s nothing to see yet (really, there’s just a blank page) as I haven’t yet put up any content or the real server…but we’re getting there. Fingers crossed we’ll have the demo site up before Christmas.

Here’s a nice post by a VC taking a look at two ways of building a new business – either start well-funded by VCs or start as a one-man-band in a garage (or a two-man-band from sofas for Kyran and I).

“We don’t have a preference for one way or the other, but I will say that there is something particularly special about the companies that are created via the evolution approach.

They seem more “authentic”, to borrow a word from David Beisel.”

He frames the point as Intelligent Design vs Darwinian Evolution so the post’s comments get a little interesting.

In an earlier post I alluded to a government-awarded grant that Kyran and I had used to evaluate a business idea. I hadn’t applied for a government grant before and it was a bit daunting – perhaps explaining the experience will be of benefit to other UK entrepreneurs.

Back in April I worked with the Sussex Innovation Centre to evaluate an idea dubbed BookAnExpert – a proposed website that would let anyone trade their knowledge with anyone who wanted to buy their time. The idea stemmed from my frustrations when trying to find someone for advice on web-API programming. I was working as a programming consultant in a web start-up and I wanted to buy the time of an experienced eBay API coder to ask a few hours of questions.

There is no website where you can find a rated, reputable person who would sell their time and knowledge by the hour. There are websites (e.g. RentACoder) when you can hire programmers for jobs, but none of these support short-term Q&A sessions. Since the service didn’t exist, I wondered if we should make one.

Mike Herd (Executive Director at the Innovation Centre) suggested we apply for the DTI’s Grant for Investigating an Innovative Idea (more details at Business Link). The scheme offers a grant of 75% of the cost of hiring consultants who can advise on an innovative idea.

The money is refunded retrospectively if the DTI agree that the work is up-to-scratch. This involved some risk as hiring the staff we wanted at SInC would cost several thousand pounds – we judged that the opportunity to learn and network would be worth far more than the risk of not receiving the refund.

Paul Jordan acted as mentor and a financial guide over the following months and Melanie Page provided market research and evaluation advice. Over the course of several months I learned a lot from my involvement with SInC – they helped shape our idea and and our approach to testing the market.

Ultimately I saw that the idea was unlikely to succeed – the pool of expertise required would take far too long (and probably cost a lot) to build. Before undertaking the grant I believed that we’d figure a way of making it work – possibly we’d have been in for an expensive lesson had we gone ahead with the site. The DTI were understanding – it seems a lot of ideas are canned or changed after one of these Grants. They liked the work and the refund was paid within a month.

In hindsight, was it worth it? I’d say yes – personally I learned a lot of new skills (principally to do with financial and market analysis) and the experience has shaped our thinking towards our new idea – ShowMeDo. I’ll talk more about that over the coming weeks.

I’d like to recommend the Sussex Innovation Centre to any entrepreneurs within reach of Brighton and thank Mike, Paul and Melanie for their help both during and since the Grant.

Etsy have come up with a cool toy – more fun to play with than useful though. The timemachine plays an interactive Flash animation of the most recent additions of hand-made goods on the site by its independent sellers.

The items fly past from most to least recently added, like you’re flying through a cloud of product. Moving the mouse changes where you fly and if you click on a product then a tag (like an airline luggage tag) appears with details. All very swish and it catches your eye. I’m not sure that it adds a lot of value to the site, though I guess they’ll get mentioned by other blogs – and since they’re not marketing themselves they’ll need this kind of coverage to get their word out.

Whilst it loads (it takes a few seconds) it reports that it is ‘charging the flux capacitor’. The geeks shall inherit the Earth!

The Business Experiment is rather novel. Take a distributed bunch of people communicating through an internet site, assume that they’re all reasonably intelligent but not necessarily skilled in any one business disciple, assume The Wisdom of Crowds and see if anything coherent comes out. Boot-strapped and open to volunteers. I like. I wouldn’t throw any money at it, but I like.

And how about a peer-to-peer production site, for the sale of hand-made items? Etsy.com lets you open a store to list your hand-made items, you conduct business privately between yourself and the buyer (so you PayPal each other or send cheques or something), and then you can rate your seller (so no one gets to cheat).

Since there are no credit card transactions the site has a lower overhead and it can charge substantially less than eBay. Neat. Kyran and I have toyed with such a business model, it’s cool to see someone actually doing it ‘in the flesh’.

These came via here and here, with the second linking to The Atomizing Hand a very cool (though rather long) Spring 2005 powerpoint on the economics of peer production.

OkCupid – well, I’ve only just joined so I don’t know if it really rocks – but first impressions are good. First off – you don’t pay – they’ve got a slightly less cynical business model in mind. Second – you develop an online profile based on user-submitted questions – so nothing is predetermined. It looks like everyone is a real user too, rather than the pretty stooges that can be found in other sites.

So, you sign-up and start to answer questions, and 10 minutes later you can do a search. It seems to understand that London is 50 miles from Brighton (and it’s a US site, so that’s not bad) and the matches it comes up with are ok – so far a mix of people with roughly the right interests as me and between here and London. The questions are real easy – just multiple choice, and you can submit your own. The matches are calculated by collating the intersecting set of your and their answers from the pool of random questions you answer. The more questions you answer, the better your profile.

The creators are pretty open – they list a lot of details in the FAQ including thoughts on their business model, advertising (which is how they make their money), privacy, even the programming languages they use behind the site. The give a real simple overview of the profiling/matching techniques they use which covers some sensible-looking math.

Rather nice to see a dating site that doesn’t depend on paying up-front, though I have to wonder if their advertising-only model really brings in enough money. Since they must serve up a lot of photos, that’s a lot of bandwidth…

Now what happens if you could mix something like the Australian GetALife social/activity site, with a dating site like OkCupid – mostly for free, perhaps with company-sponsorship or maybe you’d donate to the site when you did fun activities or had good dates. It is clear that most dating sites are rubbish, heck even Paul Graham has written about improving the online dating experience.

And oddly, these guys aren’t marketing themselves, it all seems to be word-of-mouth (and growing nicely by the look of things). I came across it whilst reading Jacqueline Passey’s blog.

And continuing the theme – here’s Captain Capitalism, an economics bloke (what’s with the dating-friendly online economists?) who’s very open about his dating too. Perhaps a bit too open in his latest post, but heck, good luck chum. Ah, reading the comments a bit more,

“Date with Knock Out Russian Babe went well”

Lucky boy.