A group of us have been running a mentorship group here in StartupChile, it makes up for the lack of external mentorship (a sad deficiency in the programme). I think that more startups ought to be in mentorship groups so I’ll write about what we do.

What is it? A group of 6 of us meet once a week (10am, local Starbucks) for about 1.5 hours, we cover how our companies have progressed since the last meet, discuss problems and set new goals. We’re accountable to each other and know that our peers are smart enough to call us out if we’re fibbing.

Early goals? Emily and I used to be a part of a similar group back in the UK – having peers who’d hold us accountable was super-useful whilst we figured out which things were hard (which typically we might try to ignore) and worked through to solutions. We missed that structure here in StartupChile so we built our own.

Outcomes? We’ve witnessed one company choose to fold and reinvent itself, another start to question its market, another to collapse the bigger ambitions and to take on a more manageable sub-task during Year 1 and for me I’d realised my earlier Customer Discovery process was weak (which I’m now addressing lest I get a drubbing from my peers). These changes occurred in the last couple of weeks (all pretty dramatic and darned sensible). We’ve been running for 7 or so weeks and we’ll continue for as long as we’re still resident here – the meetings carry great value for all in attendance.

Structure? Each person gets 5 minutes (timed on a phone with a loud audio alert) to talk through their progress in the last week and to mention where they’re at with last week’s goals. Once we’ve done everyone (30 minutes) we move on to problems, we share questions and issues and ask for feedback. This is meant to last for 5 minutes (we use the countdown alert again) but if the problem is interesting then we’ll run on (maybe to 10 minutes), often a lot of learning can occur as we try to solve each other’s problems. Finally we set a new goal for next week, we run through the group setting one or two achievable goals. Mine for next week is to have a better grasp of the competitive landscape in the run up to StartupChile’s Demo Day.

Typically we run for 1-1.5 hours. Someone (normally me) has to be the Chairman to make sure things keep moving. You need firm Chairman lest one or two people take over the meeting and turn it into a bore.

How to start one? Find 3-6 other companies who are roughly at the same stage and doing related things (e.g. companies doing early stage hardware, public software and r&d around baby-care might mix but companies doing only web-related stuff at an alpha/beta stage are probably a better match). Agree to meet each week at a set time. Agree on a Chairman. Agree to Chatham House Rules (“what is said in the room stays in the room”) and let people state when things have to be kept completely private within the group.

After the first few meetings fix the group (anyone who rarely attends gets kicked) so the group can trust whoever is present and not expect the surprise of new people. If the group loses people over time (we’ve lost a couple due to the natural evolution of startups) then invite a few others in with consent from the group. Keep meeting. Keep pushing each other to make smarter decisions. Don’t hold off of the hard questions. Make yourself accountable.

The main goal is to build a team that’s stronger than the sum of its parts. Working in isolation means you get to avoid the hard questions and perhaps avoid taking account of your progress – there’s nowhere to hide when your peers are waiting for your weekly progress report.

A similar goal seems to be behind the new NReduce startup collaboration project and the weekly dinners at YCombinator are well known. Being accountable to your peers works.

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Ian applies Artificial Intelligence as an Artificial Intelligence Researcher for companies (Mor Consulting), co-founded the StrongSteam A.I. datamining toolkit, co-authored SocialTies, programs Python, writes The Screencasting Handbook and is also a sea-side dweller and consumer of fine coffees.

It has been a pretty nutty couple of weeks. PyCon a week back was ace, we signed up some clients and partners for StrongSteam and got offered investment. David Kim was good enough to interview me so I got to demo our OCR for text recognition and image recognition APIs via some mobile demos – check out the second video on David’s Enthought post.

Last night we got featured on Jason Calacanis’ and Tyler Crowley‘s This Week In Startups (@twistartups), via StartupChile. This was a bit nuts. I pitched earlier in the week for James (@jameskennedy) and Tyler’s (@looglalanguage) BizCamp pitch contest, we won the ‘best 4′ competition and that gave us a pass to be featured on the show. A competition was run yesterday here for 20 other companies to pitch to get a 5th place on the show. Once the show started I was up second.

Check out the video below at 0:19:00 to 0:32:00 to see me pitch and then at 1:05:00 to 1:07:30 to see the three judges decide that StrongSteam was ‘best bet for investment’. Being judged was fun. Focusing on giving our users what they need from our API is more our focus for now.

A few days before I was submitting the second month of reimbursement paperwork for our StartupChile placement. Emily has written a long piece on this already.

Below you can see my pile of paperwork – for each transaction (few big purchases, some contractors, some travel) I have a full audit trail that starts at the receipt and ends, via banks and credit cards, to a bank account in my name, with proof that I own that bank account. For contractors I include a full contract too. This proof is required, this is the ‘price’ of giving up 0% equity under a government scheme. It took 8 hours including my meeting with my account executive. They haven’t reimbursed this round yet, assuming they don’t reject anything (which is far from guaranteed) then this only costs 8 hours (last month cost 2 days). If they reject stuff then maybe I’ll invest a total of 10-16 hours.

Something that’s painfully obvious from yesterday’s pitching and today’s BizCamp is that pretty much all of us here lack t-shirts with our name, logo & strap-line. I could really have done with t-shirts at PyCon, I pitched to 100+ of the 2,300 delegates but got on stage in front of them all once – if someone had seem our name and noticed ‘AI’ or ‘computer vision’ then I bet they’d have come over for a chat. Lesson learned.

I’m also going to give a shout out back to Moo in the UK for their cool little business cards. So many people here don’t have any cards yet, this is such a mistake. Everyone needs cards, I’ve used Moo for years, I’d vote you go via them and get the mini cards and  a plastic case (they’re robust, mine is >2 years old and is still fine).

Finally – Vivek Wadhwa kicked a bunch of us up the arse two nights ago and again last night talking about self-mentorship (given that there is no formal mentorship out here). I’m going to be organising a group who want to self mentor such that we can meet regularly (maybe every week), set goals, be held accountable and basically focus on getting ready for demo day in 2 month’s time. It’ll be an interesting experiment.

For now this is nearly the end of a crazy 2 months. Tonight I’m going to get a take-out Chinese and settle in front of a movie.

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Ian applies Artificial Intelligence as an Artificial Intelligence Researcher for companies (Mor Consulting), co-founded the StrongSteam A.I. datamining toolkit, co-authored SocialTies, programs Python, writes The Screencasting Handbook and is also a sea-side dweller and consumer of fine coffees.

This Thursday at 7pm our StrongSteam will run a friendly pub meet around:

• Data mining
• Artificial Intelligence (AI)
• Robots
• Hackerspaces

The goal is to bring people together from StartupChile and the local community who are interested in the above subjects. The meeting is just a pub meetup, if there’s demand then I’ll organise speakers for the next one.

The locations is Bar Lastarria, 70 Lastarria, Santiago (map). Here’s a photo:

Confirmed attendees include:

• Junar
• RobotsChile (local hackerspace)
• howsociable.com
• backyardbrains.com (the neuroscience guys)
• loogla.com
• credii.com
• Sqmos.com
• veryseriousgames.com

Here’s the official announce.

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Ian applies Artificial Intelligence as an Artificial Intelligence Researcher for companies (Mor Consulting), co-founded the StrongSteam A.I. datamining toolkit, co-authored SocialTies, programs Python, writes The Screencasting Handbook and is also a sea-side dweller and consumer of fine coffees.

I’d better log our first few days before the crazyness of signing up to the programme kicks off on Monday. Emily (my fiancée) is also blogging for her TinyEars StartupChile project.

We arrived safely on Wednesday after 18 hours of travel – BA treated us well (reasonably comfy seats and reasonable food). We were hustled into a taxi at the airport (at a rather pricey £45) but got delivered quickly to our rather nice apartments in swanky Providence.

We’ve had three nights of parties now, first with Jon and Anna (so lovely to catch up!), then lunch with Emily’s madrina Johanna (@J_Angulo) and on to meet our padrino Fernando (@fdelsolar), and finally two Phase 1 leaving dos last night. Pisco and rum seem to flow from all bottles. We seem to have found a nice Pale Ale too and London Pride has been sighted in bottles. We got to meet Fernando of SQMOS, the data guys of Junar and Tom of Rentalita (Tom’s Santiago tumblr) along with a whole bunch of others, some of whom are shortly off to travel South America.

Yesterday we climbed San Cristobel (photo) and met a Llama (pronounced ‘yama’). Today we had a nice run along the river at Tobalaba and Kyran has pointed out some other running sites.

Tonight we have another dinner, Sunday we chill (a touch, and prepare a demo), then Mon-Thurs are sign-up days, government ID card days, bank days and demo days all rolled into one lump. The week after we ‘officially’ start on our projects (even if we have launched StrongSteam to our first users already!).

Wifi tip – in the business district there are lots of StarBucks, these have free wifi when you buy coffee.

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Ian applies Artificial Intelligence as an Artificial Intelligence Researcher for companies (Mor Consulting), co-founded the StrongSteam A.I. datamining toolkit, co-authored SocialTies, programs Python, writes The Screencasting Handbook and is also a sea-side dweller and consumer of fine coffees.

This is a quick update – we’re flying tomorrow to Santiago for 6 months of the StartupChile project ($40k funding, no equity, hundreds of projects flying in from all over the world). If you’re interested in taking 6 months to build your own project I’d suggest you take a look at applying to the next round.

Kyran Dale and I are flying out to build our StrongSteam AI and data mining toolkit (its a cloud API with local language bindings). We have our first client and we launched the alpha API to our first testers a couple of days back. Once we’re in Santiago we’ll add some more testers, expand the API and deliver our first project, then after March we can really ramp up the creation of data mining APIs for people to play with. We’re excited to be in talks with a few people about releasing the alpha at a couple of hackday events, it’ll be really interesting to see what people do with our optical character recognition, image matching, face detection and image manipulation tools. If you’re interested in trying out the Python API then do sign-up to the mailing list on the homepage.

Emily (my fiancée) is also heading out with her TinyEars iPad app, she’ll build a child-friendly app that’ll help kids learn to read out loud by using speech recognition to spot errors in their speech. She’ll be looking for testers with iPad 2s and young kids who are learning to read, do get in touch if you’re interested in the testing.

We had a fab sendoff at the Northern Lights a few days back, cheers to all who came along

Finally – I’m a bit honoured to have been selected as a teacher at PyCon in the US in March, I’m running a half-day tutorial on High Performance Computing based on my tutorial at EuroPython. We’re using a bunch of these ideas in StrongSteam, it’ll be great to run the tutorial again.

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Ian applies Artificial Intelligence as an Artificial Intelligence Researcher for companies (Mor Consulting), co-founded the StrongSteam A.I. datamining toolkit, co-authored SocialTies, programs Python, writes The Screencasting Handbook and is also a sea-side dweller and consumer of fine coffees.

Earlier in the year through Matt Weston a group of us met, funded by the Innovation and Growth Team, to start a peer-group for a set of four (wait for it…) new businesses. The group was successful – and for several of us it led to the realisation that our plans at the time weren’t right. Emily and I were working on SocialTies as our project and trying to find a business hidden in the app, we decided against it and looked to other ideas.

Here’s what we’re working on. I hope it’ll encourage a few other folk to think about building new businesses.

The IGT funding dried up and so we now meet informally, our projects are:

• Chris has the t-shirt brand MightyHumble (twitter)
• Jacky has her recruitment-training firm Rise with Precruitment
• Jo and Will are building Bookish for selling crafted books and literature
• Emily is building the TinyEars iPad speech-recognition educational platform out of RadicalRobot
• With Kyran Dale I’m working on our StrongSteam AI and data mining web API out of Mor Consulting

I mentioned that I’d do a little write-up before we leave the country, Chris sent me this blurb about MightyHumble:

mighty humble is a small organic clothing company that believes in creativity, good design and responsible business.  We collaborate with hand picked creative talent to produce unique products using the most ethical and environmental sound materials, manufacturing and suppliers we can find. Our 100% cotton t-shirts are ethically made, certified organic by the Soil Association and manufactured solely using sustainable energy generated from wind power. We envisage our collection as wearable art which enables us to bring the work of some incredible talented people to a wider audience.  For mighty humble business is not just about turning a profit.  Experience has taught us that there’s more too it than that!  We believe a business can (and should) be a creative, fun and positive force.

Jo describeds Bookish as:

the home of unique literary gifts, typographic loveliness and beautiful bookish things – for readers, writers, dreamers, thinkers and bibliophiles everywhere

Jackie says:

Sales Precruitment is all about helping MDs of growing digital and technology companies prepare for recruiting their first (and additional) sales person.  Setting realistic targets, putting measurements in place, interviewing and induction, these are just a few of the things we can help with.  All this is done face to face at present but 2012 is the year I work out how to offer some of this support online… wish me luck!!

From January Emily, Kyran and myself are off to Chile for the StartupChile project, we’re taking TinyEars and StrongSteam as our 6 month projects. A part of our requirement for StartupChile is that we help build the entrepreneurial community – given our work building OpenCoffeeSussex, SheSays, FivePoundApp and GirlGeekDinners we figure we’re well placed to help bring interesting folk together. The opportunity to network with several hundred other folk who have jumped country to found new businesses is simply too good to pass up (along with living in a growing, upbeat country with a strong economy, a new language to learn and some Tango to practice).

For our StrongSteam we’re after alpha testers – we want non-AI developers (particularly web and mobile devs) who want access to image recognition, OCR, data mining and clustering tools. Emily is after collaborators and testers – particularly people with kids and iPad 2s.

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Ian applies Artificial Intelligence as an Artificial Intelligence Researcher for companies (Mor Consulting), co-founded the StrongSteam A.I. datamining toolkit, co-authored SocialTies, programs Python, writes The Screencasting Handbook and is also a sea-side dweller and consumer of fine coffees.

A few of you who know me have caught more than a whiff of my increasingly sour mood over the state of many of our ‘developed’ economies. Between the bailouts of Greece, Ireland and Portugal, Italy about ready for a bail-out, Spain with 22% unemployment who might also need a bail-out (but…the EU packages can’t cover both countries needing a bail-out [scroll down to 'the tower of terror' diagram] – hence the jittery bond markets), Portuguese and Hungarian debt marked at junk status, Belgian‘s credit rating cut (after their embarrassing bail-out for Dexia which had passed #hoho all the stress tests earlier in the year) it is hard to be positive. The Economist and others now cover serious discussion about a possible end to the Euro.

The Economist also notes that there’s a reasonable chance we’re falling back into recession. It seems that end of Jan and Feb for Italy’s next round of bond auctions could make for very interesting events.

In the US Thanksgiving has been given over Black Friday (to get companies back in ‘the black’), this year the event aced all previous years with the deployment of pepperspray and guns by ‘competitive shoppers’ (such a wonderful euphemism! they can camp overnight and use weapons in the name of shopping but Occupy protesters can do neither in the name of protest). This video showing fights breaking out as shoppers try to win $2 waffle toasters brings it home. Still, at least the Super Committee figured out a way to get past the $15 trillion (and growing) debt pile. Oh, no, they didn’t, they just finger pointed and handed the problem back.

In the USA the losers are the private citizens, the winners are the companies. Over the last 50 years corporate profits are up and personal salary (as a percentage of GDP) is down (the key graphic) – if you run a big company you’ll be sitting pretty, everyone else has to work longer and harder just to stand still.

But it isn’t all grim. Interesting conversations are popping up questioning the basis for our financial systems, it is nice to see people try to plot new ways through to stronger economies or point out our too-relaxed view on recent changes. This begs the question – what happens when we can chart the progression of money (because maybe it is signed a la bitcoin), maybe we can penalise money for sitting still (e.g. letting it expire/evaporate)? The idea of enabling both the creation and destruction of money (in the first article) sounds novel, we rarely see money destroyed as a stabilising act (as in – removed from the system entirely) with our established currencies.  Might this force money to do ‘work’ rather than sit in someone’s bank account?

Finally, this brings me to the question of what one should be doing as a freelancer/small business owner. In a companion post (to come out by Monday) I’ll mention that we’re off to StartupChile for 6 months. For me I’m energised at the idea that in Santiago I can meet several hundred other company founders who have all decided to jump country (from all over the world) to expand their networks, help the locals boot-strap a tech ecosystem and build their companies. Taking risks and changing things around seems like a basic requirement for survival and growth in what’ll become a tougher economic environment (talk of a lost decade or two for the Western economies is now quite common).

Prior to applying to StartupChile I’d already started to build StrongSteam, our new AI/data mining product, with my old co-founder from ShowMeDo (our last big project). The goal is help folk create interesting data mining applications and to make my AI Consultancy more visible (just building and talking on it has increased in-bound work referrals by a factor of 4 in the last few months). Being visible and being fresh is absolutely critical to continued success. A couple of years back I’d realised I was getting stale (‘fat and slow’ as I put it) working for a few known clients. I fired myself for 6 months, built the AICookbook project (now defunct, it served its purpose), co-founded SocialTies and kicked myself into a higher gear.

Some takehomes:

• If you’re not visible enough yet, take some time out and work on open and visible projects
• If you’ve become stale then fire some clients and work on new challenges (preferably public ones)
• Get on stage and talk about what you’ve learned, certainly post blog entries sharing what you’ve learned – being visible is key
• If you’ve got spare time then dive into new projects, don’t wait to become stale (a mistake I made that cost me 6 months!)
• Join local groups – we’ve got OpenCoffeeSussex here, plenty of tech groups, HackerNewsLondon an hour’s train ride away – meet new people and collaborate
• Build alliances with companies you like to work with, help them, partner with them

I figure that’s enough with the ranting, noting it down  is cathartic. Now, back to building StrongSteam.

Hat-tip to @umairh as being the main person to open my eyes to the need to question how the world works over the last bunch of years. I’m much obliged to you. @johnrobb‘s resilient community work is also rather interesting.

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Ian applies Artificial Intelligence as an Artificial Intelligence Researcher for companies (Mor Consulting), co-founded the StrongSteam A.I. datamining toolkit, co-authored SocialTies, programs Python, writes The Screencasting Handbook and is also a sea-side dweller and consumer of fine coffees.

Kyran and I are starting work on a new project – strongsteam offers a web API with artificial intelligence and data mining tools. The goal is to make it easy for you to do things like:

• get the text out of images using optical character recognition
• determine whether two images look the same and if one object (e.g. a certain book or a can of coke) can be found in another
• use natural language processing to analyse, cluster and compare text
• extract text from audio (e.g. to pull out keywords from podcasts)
• use machine learning on text to derive new data

If you’d like to join the closed alpha then visit strongsteam and add your email to the announce list on the homepage.

We’ve started with Python bindings which make it easy to talk to the strongsteam web service. Initially we’ll wrap open source tools that we’ve used along with lots of our own A.I. data mining tools from years of work in my Mor Consulting A.I. consultancy.

At EuroSciPy last week I demo’d using O.C.R. to extract the words from plant labels at Wakehurst Place gardens so you can lookup the plant on Wikipedia once you’ve taken a photo like this one:

Now we’re looking at applying O.C.R. to conference name-badges, this will be a bit of a mash-up from data used in our SocialTies conference app and Lanyrd.com‘s data. Next we’ll look at image matching and some text processing tools.

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Ian applies Artificial Intelligence as an Artificial Intelligence Researcher for companies (Mor Consulting), co-founded the StrongSteam A.I. datamining toolkit, co-authored SocialTies, programs Python, writes The Screencasting Handbook and is also a sea-side dweller and consumer of fine coffees.

This is just a quick post to say that we’ve released the iPhone build of Social Ties to the iTunes app store in the UK. Currently it only supports UK events so we’ve limited it to the UK AppStore, international events will follow later. The latest features include Bookmarking of people you’d like to meet and a Met button to mark the people you’ve already met. As noted today by a couple of users:

Yay now I can know who I should talk to at a conference and everything about them. Thanks @socialtiesapp http://bit.ly/rhka9U – @juliancheal

Very impressed with the new @socialtiesapp for iPhone and Android. One to recommend to @briankelly I think! – @eventamplifier

Yay! @socialtiesapp is out on the iPhone and I’m unexpectedly famous! (see screenshots) – @bensummers

The Android BETA has been linked on our Social Ties homepage for a month, we’ll submit that to the Android AppStore once it is feature-complete to the iPhone build.

Followup updates on @socialtiesapp, you can follow us on @ianozsvald and @fluffyemily. If you want customised A.I. for your own project then talk to me, if you’d like mobile apps then talk to Emily.

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Ian applies Artificial Intelligence as an Artificial Intelligence Researcher for companies (Mor Consulting), co-founded the StrongSteam A.I. datamining toolkit, co-authored SocialTies, programs Python, writes The Screencasting Handbook and is also a sea-side dweller and consumer of fine coffees.

Last Tuesday we had our 23rd £5 App event, given that it is only our second event this year we chose to let people “show and tell” about the things they built this summer. We had 9 speakers, I bought the beer, John baked the cakes.

Shardcore and the Englightenment Machine

Shardcore‘s Enlightenment Machine was installed at the WhiteNight festival a week back, here he explains what’s going on:

£5 App #23 – Shardcore and the Enlightenment Machine from Ian Ozsvald on Vimeo.

Jon and Digestly

Jon‘s Digestly lets you summarise tweets which can then be sent by email to e.g. your mum who wants to hear more about you:

£5 App #23 – Jon and Digestly from Ian Ozsvald on Vimeo.

Ian (me!) and the Social Microprinter

My Social Microprinter is a CBM 231 receipt printer + Arduino + WiShield + remote server, it prints tweets and useful info using a regular shop’s receipt printer via serial:

£5 App #23 – Ian and the Social Microprinter from Ian Ozsvald on Vimeo.

John and the Arduino Doorbell

John’s Arduino-powered door-bell couples a regular remote-control doorbell with lego, wood and a big bell:

£5 App #23 – John and the Arduino Doorbell from Ian Ozsvald on Vimeo.

Seb and Geek Family Fortunes

Seb built a Family Fortunes clone recently (we played it at BarCamp Brighton) using Flash, Nun-chucks and an iPad:

£5 App #23 – Seb and Geek Family Fortunes from Ian Ozsvald on Vimeo.

Emily and SocialTies on the iPhone

Emily is working on an iPhone app with me that we’ve named SocialTies, it helps you find your friends and ‘similar people’ when you’re at an event or conference. It was inspired by the fruitless hours I’ve spent at events wondering if I’ll ever find anyone I know…

£5 App #23 – Emily and SocialTies from Ian Ozsvald on Vimeo.

Kyran and JavaScript Social Graph Visualisations

Kyran and I have been working on some social graph visualisations, Kyran’s interface lets you see where you sit in an event’s social network whilst reading real-time updates from attendees:

£5 App #23 – Kyran and JavaScript Social Graph Visualisations from Ian Ozsvald on Vimeo.

Mike and the Tardis Money Bank

Mike’s Tardis Money Bank was designed to help him and son keep tabs on pocket money. It has gone on to be used by many families since its launch:

£5 App #23 – Mike and the Tardis Bank from Ian Ozsvald on Vimeo.

Jay and Twitter Election Predictions

Jay’s real-time election results predictor read Twitter during the UK elections, the results were interestingly accurate:

£5 App #23 – Jay and using Twitter to Predict Elections from Ian Ozsvald on Vimeo.

If you’re interested in keeping tabs on future events or would like to speak please join our £5 App Google Group.

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Ian applies Artificial Intelligence as an Artificial Intelligence Researcher for companies (Mor Consulting), co-founded the StrongSteam A.I. datamining toolkit, co-authored SocialTies, programs Python, writes The Screencasting Handbook and is also a sea-side dweller and consumer of fine coffees.