Entrepreneurial Geekiness
Entrepreneurial Geekiness
Ian is a London-based independent Chief Data Scientist who coaches teams, teaches and creates data products. More about Ian here.
Ian is a London-based independent Chief Data Scientist who coaches teams, teaches and creates data products.
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£5 App & My first ProjectBrighton post
2008’s first £5 App will be held on 12th February with Rupert Loman (founder of EuroGamer) talking on how he built the company from humble beginnings. As usual please sign-up on Upcoming so we know how much beer to buy and cake to bake.
I’m also happy to say I’ve written my first article on ProjectBrighton discussing last night’s Cafà Scientifique talk in Kempown. The neuroscience talk was great and the turnout was amazing – close to 100 people!
Brighton Python User Group – Feb 20th
John and I have decided to organise a Python pub meeting here in Brighton, the date is the somewhat-distant Feb 20th.
Why? We want to figure out how many Python programmers are down here and find out what people are working on.
Personally I’m also interested in receiving some feedback on which Python topics we ought to be covering inside ShowMeDo and knowing who else knows TurboGears (and Django too). Sign-up on Upcoming and come drink with us!
Installing IE6 on Ubuntu Gutsy (7.10)
I wanted to test ShowMeDo‘s rendering on IE6. My Windows XP box uses IE7 and I figured my Ubuntu box could run IE6 via Wine…it turns out to be just a simple install step. I was up and running within 5 minutes.
First – install wine. Second, get the ies4linux installer and run it using their last instructions (their step 4):
wget http://www.tatanka.com.br/ies4linux/downloads/ies4linux-latest.tar.gz
tar zxvf ies4linux-latest.tar.gz
cd ies4linux-*
./ies4linux
I had to run ./ies4linux three times to complete the installation, I chose IE6 with Flash. The installer visits microsoft.com to fetch the right versions of everything. It was installed (after the 3rd attempt) as an icon on my desktop and available via the command line: /home/ian/bin/ie6
I then used IE6 to visit windowsupdate.microsoft.com and it identified two updates, both ‘complete’ but upon returning to WindowsUpdate it flags one of them as still being required. My version of IE6 running on Ubuntu 7.10 is ‘Version: 6.0.2800.1106’.
Ian is a Chief Interim Data Scientist via his Mor Consulting. Sign-up for Data Science tutorials in London and to hear about his data science thoughts and jobs. He lives in London, is walked by his high energy Springer Spaniel and is a consumer of fine coffees.
Subscription sites – ScreenCastsOnline.com
I’m doing research on community-sites that have a paying subscription element as a part of our re-think for ShowMeDo. I found some nice data on ScreenCastsOnline and I figured I’d share it.
Don McAllister (UK) is the voice behind ScreenCastsOnline – he provides weekly screencasts to teach viewers about Mac software and web sites.
Don was interviewed by Robert Scoble in December 2006, he mentions that:
- He started in August 2005 to help family members learn the Mac
- He went full-time in March 2006
- In December 2006 he had 1,000 paying members
- He has 11-12k free listeners subscribing each week
Does anyone know of more recent information on the growth of Don’s site? I’d be particularly interested in more recent paying-subscriber figures so I could get an idea of how these things can grow.
According to the Extras page the subscription is $25 for 6 months. For that you get access to high-definition versions of the screencasts and the full back-catalog (costing $20 as a one-time setup fee). Casual followers get access to 3/4 of the content in a lower-definition format.
Don promises 1 new episode every week, the content is typically about Mac software or related websites. Episodes appear to be 30 minutes long. Apparently 21-25k screencasts are downloaded weekly (March 2007) – this is about 3* our own (according to our mostPopular page).
Christmas special – Don is offering a 10% reduction in the subscription during December.
Which sites do you subscribe (£/$) to?
We’re planning a move to a paid-subscription model inside ShowMeDo – we’d like to keep all the content freely available and start adding pro-features that enhance a user’s learning experience. Having never promoted a subscription model before I’m looking for feedback…
Here’s the question – which services do you pay to subscribe to on a monthly basis? Leave me a comment and I can do some research on how other companies get this right (and, ugh, wrong – see Experts Exchange below).
Currently I use 37signal’s BaseCamp free plan for project management, maybe I’ll pay for that when we have more to manage.
I also pay for my Yahoo email – the account came via BT back in the days of old, they were going to cut it off if I didn’t pay or [gasp] dial-in once every 3 months under the terms of my old contract (such a stupid plan – now I dislike yahoo and bt, before I just didn’t like bt).
I used to use Experts-Exchange (wikipedia) – they let you ask questions for free (though they’ve hidden the free option behind layers of pay-to-subscribe links now). You can ask a limited number of questions as a free user and more as a paying user.
You hand over ‘points’ in a very-inflationary system to the person who answers your question successfully. The system used to be successful but that seems to be broken by horrid forced-subscription options. Roughly the service costs $8 per month for users with larger plans for corporates.
HotOrNot has a unique subscriber model – it is free to join, if you want to talk to someone then one of you has to be a member (faq item 54).
In interviews I’ve heard them say that is usually the guy who pays to talk to the girls. You pay when the service looks like it has something useful for you (you rate each other before talking, rating is free, therefore you know the other person is a person and not an empty shill profile), you can stop paying as soon as you’ve had enough. I’ve never tried it.
Dating sites do something similar – I used to subscribe to The Guardian’s Soulmates – I paid a monthly fee for the option to talk to single girls, they have to be paying too to talk back. You don’t have a way of finding out if the other profile is an empty shill profile (a practice that less reputable dating sites routinely follow), otherwise the model is similar. Costs are roughly £15 a month (and yes – it worked for me :-).
There’s also a nice timely report on slashdot about ‘making a buck online without advertising‘ which details Consumer Reports’ approach to only having a subscriber model – no ads and no free plans. It seems that they do very nicely out of this.
Finally Tim O’Reilly has talked about the move from a ‘bookshelf model’ to ‘all you can eat’ for subscribers:
“With Safari, we’ve increasingly moved from a “bookshelf†model (in which you put books on a bookshelf and can only swap at month end) to an all you can eat model, because we’ve discovered that people consume about the same amount of content regardless of how much you make available.”
So – what do you pay to subscribe to? If you can point me in the right direction to services you like then I can see what might give our users extra value – and bonus points if you can point me at novel subscription methods (like HotOrNot) whilst you’re at it.
Read my book
Oreilly High Performance Python by Micha Gorelick & Ian Ozsvald AI Consulting
Mor Consulting Ltd. is an A.I. focused consultancy offering strategic research and development owned by Ian Ozsvald, based in London (UK).
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