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:
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:
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.
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.
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 othersnow 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.
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! @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.
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.
Having hacked away with Natty Narwahl for a few weeks I’m regressing to the 10.10 distribution provided by Dell here. Installation took 20 minutes, it allowed me to use the previous ext4 partition (I had to edit it using the advanced configuration and set the ext4 partition’s mount point from blank to ‘/’). I formatted the partition too for good measure. I made sure to reload the package list (via Synaptics) and let it fetch updates.
Running ‘uname -a’ reports that this is 32 bit: “Linux ian-Latitude-E6420 2.6.35-30-generic-pae #54-Ubuntu SMP Tue Jun 7 20:28:33 UTC 2011 i686 GNU/Linux”
Next I followed the instructions here to get access to sound and the touchpad (on the fresh install the ‘pad worked but had no side-scroll, now it has side-scroll). I used my previous instructions to get the edgers version of the NVIDIA drivers (not the ones on the Dell site), Optimus was already disabled and the NVIDIA drivers ‘just worked’. I had to install the Dell sound driver but then it also ‘just worked’. Flash with sound seems to have worked out of the box too.
Wifi was a pain – the Dell links didn’t work but downloading this (in Synaptic – the pae version) via this for my Broadcom BCM 5800 (ID: 0a5c:5800) gave me wifi on a reboot. I’ve also upgraded Firefox 3 to 5 via this.
Suspend and hibernate seem to be stable (unlike before with the 11.04 install – it randomly got stuck and lost my desktop). Rather pleasingly although I was getting a gig of Dropbox over Wifi and compiling new sources the battery tool reported 6 hours of battery life (which seemed true-ish, maybe 4 hours would have been right, though I did have the screen on darkest as it was very late in the night). This beats the max 2 hours I got before with 11.04.
Overall regressing to the 10.10 build from Dell seems to be the right move. Update two weeks later – using the Dell image is definitely the right thing to do, everything ‘just works’ like it is supposed to. I get 4-6 hours battery life using the NVIDIA graphics card as my primary display.
Update – I’ve uploaded a modified script that disables the touchpad for a fraction of a second when you’re typing. This is necessary as the ALPS touchpad identifies itself as a PS/2 mouse rather than a trackpad due to proprietary drivers. The script is in my github repo as Dell_E6420_Touchpad_AutoDisabler. It contains minor fixes from Philip Aston’s excellent version here.
Update (Nov 2011) – Having used 10.10 for 2 months I’ve got some problems that I’ll list.
About 1 in 20 lid closes do not cause the suspend behaviour to start. The result is that the laptop stays ‘on’ with the lid shut. After an hour it tries to go into (I guess) hibernate, for some reason it gets stuck. Next it gets hot, the fans run on full and after a while it is cooking at 80 degrees in my laptop bag, merrily eating the battery. If I get it in time I can open the screen – the backlight is on but nothing responds and I have to force power-off (holding the power button for 5 seconds). If I don’t get it in time it just kills the battery. Upon a reboot it boots a fresh session and everything is fine, sans all the previous session info (this hasn’t yet led to corruption)
About once a month the machine freezes during use. It has happened just after a clean boot (after logging in, before doing anything). It has happened after days of use and many suspends. The behaviour is a total system lock, the screen doesn’t update, no mouse etc. A force power off is required.
The in-built camera normally works with Skype, sometimes it fails to start and a reboot is required. The picture is grainy and doesn’t cope with low lighting conditions (I haven’t tried this on Windows). Using an older Logitech QuickCam Pro 9000 I get a bright, clear picture even in low light conditions for Skype.
Power usage with the NVIDIA card on (Optimus off), using VirtualBox, with wifi and a bright screen is about 3 hours.
It is hard to know if this is a hardware fault (the BIOS-based self diagnostics which run for 30 mins report no problems) or a software fault. I’m inclined to think it is 10.10 and/or the Dell changes. I’m planning on trying 11.10 next in the hope that the SandyBridge chipset is better supported.
My take-home message so far is that if the manufacturer doesn’t support your OS (Dell only partially support Ubuntu), don’t buy from them. I believe HP might have been a better purchase.
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.
Slowly but surely we’re getting there with our social-discovery app for conferences. We aim to have SocialTies in the UK iPhone App Store in the next few weeks. I demoed it to several hundred folk at EuroPython a few weeks back and it was rather well received.
Currently the Android BETA is linked from the homepage, Emily is working on the iPhone version and we figure it is time to make it public (albeit just in the UK at first). Once we’ve had the initial round of feedback we’ll open it up to US and European users (I have to do some server-side plumbing for that to work yet). We’ll also put the Android v1 into the Android App Store shortly.
It is definitely just-out-of-beta, having said that we get good feedback and we’ve got users waiting for the iPhone release. If you’re curious, visit the site and add your email to the announce mailing list, we’ll let you know when the iPhone version is published.
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 this year I switched back to my long-running artificial intelligence and CUDA high performance computing consultancy work through Mor Consulting. Having sold ProCasts earlier in the year and moved entirely away from screencasting (leaving ShowMeDo in Kyran’s capable hands) I wanted to get back to the nitty gritty of low level algorithms and implementations.
My A.I.Cookbook project is coming along, albeit very slowly over the last few months. I’m looking forward to starting a few new projects in the Cookbook, the OCR project against the OpenPlaque images needs finishing first (I see more prizes ahead there…).
Emily and I have some joint A.I./mobile projects to publish this year and I’m always on the look-out for interesting parallel, high performance computing and artificial intelligence problems – if you have a problem in this area please do get in touch.
Lee Tucknott did the design for Mor Consulting and has provided a design for the A.I.Cookbook (which I’ve yet to get implemented), if you need a beautiful design do go see his work.
And now, to push on with Social Ties, our first A.I./mobile product for January which’ll help you find interesting people at events…
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.
Over the last couple of months I’ve been building up a social microprinter (inspired by Tom Taylor‘s implementation and Matt Webb‘s original idea). Here’s the current version – Arduino+WiShield+CBM231+off-site server (powered partly by BenOSteen’s Python driver):
The goal is to build a social microprinter – a printer that’d live in a social environment (currently The Skiff co-working office in Brighton) which would help bring people a little bit closer. Currently it prints tweets (for ‘theskiff’) and shows events, later it’ll show recent Gowalla check-ins and maybe some local news headlines or the weather (but there’s got to be better stuff to show, right?…ideas on a postcard please).
My original intent was to build a device that could be stuck on the wall in a cafe, it would show tweets on a screen (probably under the cafe’s or Brighton’s hashtag) and let non-Internet folk post their own messages back. Doing this nicely would have needed a screen, machine, wall space etc – using a receipt printer seemed like an easy way to prototype the idea.
Jumping forward, here’s an early version – this is a CBM231 connected to my Ubuntu laptop via a USB->RS232 lead (note – this lead is good, the cheap ones on eBay can be bad – see below). Here I’m using BenOSteen’s Python driver to send tweets via serial to the printer.
This device has done the rounds, here it is on display at BuildBrighton’s talk to the British Computer Society:
Here it is in use at Likemind Brighton showing international #likemind tweets as other groups meet around the world on Friday morning (note – unicode converted to ‘?’ as I haven’t figured out if/how to get international characters out of the printer yet!):
It ran during the weekend of Barcamp Brighton and printed out barcampy stuff, I added some notes about local cafes and a job ad for one of the companies:
The goal all along was to build an independent controller (so removing the laptop from the equation). For this I coupled an Arduino with a WiShield 1.0. The WiShield libraries are easy enough to work with, after an hour’s experimentation I got WPA2 working (it takes 25 seconds to negotiate the connection on each attempt), we use WPA2 at home and in The Skiff.
Coupling the Arduino to the printer was easy enough, I have been trying (and so far failing) to get a Max233 chip acting as a voltage level converter so for now I’m using a pre-built RS232 Level Shifter. This converts the Arduino’s 0V/5V TTL to +12V/-12V RS232 levels (powered from the Aruino’s 5V out). To output text I’m using Roo Reynold’s Aduino sketch, this handily includes some control codes to cut the receipt after printing.
Next I wanted live data. At first I simply put a short plain text file on a web site, used the WiShield to fetch it and Roo’s code to print it. Now I’m using a hacked version of Ben’s code to write tweets (including bold and underline control codes) to a text file which is stored online (microprinter.ianozsvald.com), this ready-to-print file is grabbed over the WiShield, printed and then cut. The online file is updated every 2 minutes.
The final tweak was to add a button to the printer. Using the Arduino’s demo button sketch I hooked up a big thumb-sized button. The Arduino’s main loop is looking for a combination of ‘at least 5 seconds have passed since the last print’ and ‘button pressed’, then it’ll kick off the web request for new data. Once this request returns it prints out the text.
I look for the pattern “————–” (14 dashes) to start and end the message, before this we get HTTP headers (from the WiShield) that I didn’t want to print.
Here’s the finished hardware:
This is a WiShield 1.0. The button (shown just out of shot top-left) is connected 3.3V->button, button->Pin 6 AND Ground (via a 15k resistor). For the printer I’m using Pin 8 for tx (blue lead on the RS232 level converter) and Ground, the level converter is powered by the 5V out.
Here’s the connector:
The connector is overly-connected in this image. I think all you actually need is Pin 2 from the RS232 Level Converter to Pin 3 on the 25 pin connector along with Pin 5 (GND) to Pin 7 (GND on 25 pin connector). With yellow wires I’ve shorted Pins 4&5 and 8&20 but I think this is overkill (they’re used for bus control but they’re probably ignored in this configuration). Here’s a full pinout.
During all the hacking our faithful cat Mia has attempted to assist whenever she could. Here she’s taken ownership of the bag used to transport the early versions:
Along the way I also acquired an Epson TM T88 II receipt printer, it is ‘just another serial printer’ but takes different control codes (and it looks like it might have a smaller character set than the CBM 231). As yet I’ve only tried printing plain ASCII, I’d like to investigate further and build a library that supports this printer too.
Note on buying leads from eBay! be aware that if you buy cheap leads from eBay (e.g. £2 silver/blue leads) then you might end up with a pack of 5 (because if you buy 5 and one breaks, you’ve got 4 more that work, right?), you might have 5 dead-on-arrival leads. You could then report the problem and the nice people could then ship you a replacement set, but then you might discover that you’ve got another 5 DOA leads. You have been warned.
If you’re buying your first microprinter do try to buy a working serial lead with it (it’ll probably be a 9 pin to 25 pin converter lead) – if you get the wrong lead (null modem vs straight serial – I forget which you need!) then you won’t get anything (the bane of my first few week’s of testing). Buy a printer+lead that’s known to work and you won’t go wrong.
Spend the £8 per lead and buy from Amazon if you don’t want to waste hours wondering why your printer is just printing out reams of ‘?’ rubbish:
If you want to build your own then the first best source of info is the microprinter wiki. Roo Reynolds has Arduino drivers (which I hacked a bit for my implementation) that don’t depend on external data sources.
You’ll find my Python server source and Arduino sketch (which assumes you’ve got a WiShield 1.0) here: social_microprinter. Note that the code is horribly hacky, it was written over many short sessions when I could steal an hour or two from other projects.
It could do with being straightened out and commented and a few nice new features would include Gowalla check-in notifications, event RSS reading and weather printing.
Many thanks to my fellow hackers at BuildBrighton for help debugging my early serial problems and to Barney for the lend of his RS232 Shifter (I’ll soon get this Max233 working, promise!).
Here’s the finished, installed unit on the work bench at BuildBrighton in The Skiff (just by the social kitchen space). Once it is a bit more robust it’ll move to the front of the building:
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.
On Wednesday night I jumped on a train up to London to visit the London Financial Python User Group to give a short demo of pyCUDA. I’m using CUDA heavily for my physics consultancy and I figured the finance guys would be interested in 10-1000* speed-ups for their calculations.
To introduce pyCUDA I used P. Narayanan’s GPUs: For Graphics and Beyond PDF presentation (the first 13 pages), his explanation and diagrams are very clear.
To put CUDA in context against regular CPUs I used the recent Peak MHz graph and the main power/speed/transistor count graph in The Free Lunch is Over: A Fundamental Turn to Concurrency in Software. The main point here is that we’ve topped out at 2-3GHz CPUs and now we have to parallelise our code. Doing so on CPUs means we get 4, 8, 16 (and soon 24 then 32) cores to play with…but with CUDA if the problem is mathematics based we have 480 cores to use!
If you’re interested in the general use of CUDA and GPUs then check out the excellent gpgpu.org.
You may wonder about real-world performance with CUDA. Without naming names I can say that I’m now delivering a 115* speed-up on a particularly gnarly problem (I mentioned during the talk that I’d reached 80* – I’ve managed to improve that in the last 2 days). On an earlier problem when I knew far less about CUDA I delivered a 100* speed-up for the same company.
It was grand to meet a lot of new faces at the group, a few people I’ve met before at PyCons (hi Ben! Giles!). Making a contact with Didrik of Enthought was rather grand too. I hope to visit again.
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 couple of weeks ago I sold ProCasts.co.uk, the screencasting business I built over the last two years. Some of you know that I moved away from the business back at Christmas and left it idle (a rather silly thing to do), here are some notes on how I sold it and how you could sell your business. This is my first business sale, some valuable lessons were learned.
I listed the business on flippa.com a month back, flippa specialises in matching buyers and sellers of domain names and small businesses. Since ProCasts was, after 8 months of inactivity, essentially a website that generated leads with a client list – I figured a listing on flippa would find some interested parties. I didn’t sell The Screencasting Handbook, I’m still happily developing the Handbook’s sales.
The new owners are Tintisha Technologies, a Leicester based video production company who wanted to expand their screencasting brand. Rich of Tintisha discovered the ProCasts sale through flippa by (happy!) accident, made a couple of bids at the end of the auction and came out on top. We completed the handover last week.
The reason for selling ProCasts was simple – I’d moved away from screencasting back at Christmas as I’d decided to return to my historic trade of artificial intelligence research and data science. I knew that a few of ProCasts’ competitors might be interested in the site and that a listing on flippa with money sent through escrow.com would make for a clean, safe sale.
I listed the site as an “Established lead generating screencasting site” with a two week auction. Flippa works differently to eBay – it uses an open auction (though private sales are possible) with a rolling end-time (if a bid is placed within 4 hours of the end of the auction the end time is advanced by another 4 hours).
Take a look at the listing to see the details that I included, I added:
Full business and site description
Details of past clients and warm leads
Bank statements to prove income
Verified Google Analytics traffic data
A Transfer Agreement listing all assets/processes for the sale
I made a point of responding to all questions (lots came via the private email channel) and updating the listing with new information. Fortuitously a couple of older leads came back with requests for work during the auction so these ‘very warm leads’ got a mention in the comments too.
At the end of the day the site sold for $4,002 (£2,500), minus the sale fee (£100) and escrow.com’s fees I took away £2,400. Not bad for a site that was otherwise of no value to me but obviously not an ‘interesting exit’.
Here are some of the takehome lessons:
If you’re selling a business, a pure consultancy (with no consultants) isn’t super interesting to buyers, only to existing market players
Building a consultancy in a super-small niche (when I started I had 4 US competitors and 0 in the UK) means few buyers when you decide to exit (in fairness – I didn’t build the business to sell it, I know better for next time)
Design your business with an exit in mind – recurring or passive income has real value to a buyer, make sure you can be removed from the business without damaging it
A two week auction was fine but four weeks would have made more sense
Soliciting private bids from competitors should have been done sooner rather than later
Adding a product or recurring income stream to the business would have added a lot of value (I decided to keep The Screencasting Handbook as an experimental platform)
BusinessesForSale is an alternative site, I didn’t know about it when I started, their companies tend to have higher value (flippa isn’t really for consultancy businesses, just simple web businesses)
What next?
Some of you know that I’ve been working in the field of artificial intelligence research for industry over the last 10 years (as both senior programmer, product designer and pure r&d bod) in my Mor Consulting. This role is evolving and I’m turning into a “Data Scientist” (the new shiny term for A.I. researchers!).
I’m also building some new IP by way of web services using A.I. technologies, these are designed with an exit in mind (I’m learning!). If you’re curious about using A.I. in industry see my new A.I.Cookbook.
I’m also continuing to develop The Screencasting Handbook, it is a useful experimental platform and I still very much enjoy teaching the art of screencasting.
If you have any questions, ask away.
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.
