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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Write-ups for £5 App and WidgetyGoodness
I’m working with Rosie and a few others on the new Project Brighton idea to review and encourage geek activity in Brighton.
To kick-off my involvement I have reviewed our £5 App Xmas Special and Ivan’s WidgetyGoodness. Earlier Rosie reviewed Mikel’s OpenStreetMap Brighton launch.
My review for WidgetyGoodness was a difficult one – I had some issues with the conference but at the same time I didn’t want to be negative – Ivan+team did a great job of bringing a new conference to the area.
How do you write-up your thoughts without wishing to offend? I did my best to be clear about my position and background as the preface to the review and I’m glad that Will weighed in with his own thoughts.
What else will happen at ProjectBrighton? We’re brain-storming later in the week. One driving theme is to encourage more geeks to work in Brighton so we have more opportunities right here on our door-step. More on this when we’ve had a think.
BadBehaviour – super-quick response for bug in open source spam-blocker software
I’m darn impressed at Michael Hampton’s quick response to a bug in his excellent anti-spam BadBehaviour plug-in:
“Within the past two days users have found themselves blocked from their own sites while using recent versions of Bad Behavior. A third party blacklist which Bad Behavior queries recently began sending false positives for any IP address queried, causing everyone using Bad Behavior to be blocked. This issue is fixed in Bad Behavior 2.0.11.”
I wouldn’t expect a commercial outfit to apologise, explain the issue and release a bug-fix in two days – let alone an unpaid sw author who does it for the love of it. I pinged Michael a PayPal donation by way of thanks, as did a few others. Roll on the gift economy.
If your MediaWiki (that’s the one behind WikiPedia) suffers from spam then I strongly recommend BadBehaviour.
£5 App is “Rock n’ Roll”
Hot damn – we’ve just been reviewed by ex-pat Automatic Romantic and our £5 App meets get a stunning write-up:
“Then again, I look at their Flickr stream and the general feeling of lash-up : Projecting onto a whiteboard in a room that looks like it’s either in the throes of serious refurbishment or spiraling down into dereliction (and taking some beautiful antique plaster ceiling roses with it), the beer drinking and eating cake out of foil, the hair, the art, the air of bonhomie and the realization comes to me that it’s not making do at all, it’s Rock n’ Roll.” [Ian’s emphasis]
John and I were raising beers to each other last night off of this and we’ll be dining out on it for some time to come.
Related – old friend Simon Hammond is mulling the idea of exporting £5 Apps to Birmingham. I say go for it!
Take the meme and run with it, embrace quick experiments, low cost-of-failure, fail-fast approaches to testing business (and non-business) ideas…just Get On With It. See where it takes you and have a ball on the way (oh, and link back here and let us know how you fare!).
Do join us for a Xmas Special on Tuesday 4th December with a pro-consumer talk followed by Shardcore on the highs and lows of dot-com-boom Beenz.com.
£5 App Xmas Special – Tues Dec 4th @ Quadrant (1 week early & different venue!)
Dear all, this is a quick pre-announce that the fandabbydosious Xmas Special for the £5 App will be on Tuesday 4th December (about 3 weeks time) at The Quadrant pub in the centre of town.
John has arranged private use of the newly refurbished upstairs room for us. I’ll also arrange some sponsored (free!) beer and the pub has agreed to do us a bit of a deal on beer for later. This xmas special will be popular so mark yourself as Attending (we do have limited nbrs).
Resident Artist Shardcore will be speaking on ‘The £50 Million App’ or ‘how he and Martin blew tons of cash during the dot-com boom on various start-ups including beenz.com. Martin is a past co-worker of shardcore, he also spoke on ‘The $30 Apps – life as a Mac Indie‘ a few months back.
Note that ShardCore’s art (a regular feature of our talks) is available for public view at the Tin Drum (Kemptown).
Quick plug – I’ll be speaking on Tues Nov 20th during Danny’s week of skillswaps on how to Master the Art of Screencasting – attend to learn why you should screencast, how you can do it in 5 minutes without installing any software and where you can host the videos for free afterwards.
£5 app day writeup
Saturday’s £5 App Day went very well – during the day we had over 30 people attending the various talks (a similar turn-out to our regular £5 App evening meetings but without the free beer!).Most attendees were programmers and freelancers, some were ‘business types’ – most from Brighton but a few from out as far as Guildford, London and Birmingham (!).
See some photos (more) – thanks for those we have uploaded them! John was the main organiser with Matt Weston in the background and me on some publicity.
Things I learned during the day:
- Social media: Google’s OpenSocial standard isn’t ready yet (despite the hype)
- Social media: Writing a Facebook application is easy
- Copy-writing: How to write web-copy from the perspective of my target audience
- SEO: How many more in-bound links I need to get on the frontpage of Google for targetted terms
Allan and I opened the day with talks on boot-strapping. My Perils of Boot-strapping is online. My main points were:
- Boot-strapping is a valid (if slow) way to start a new company
- Boot-strapping is inherently low-risk towards money and commitment
- Harmonising with your day-job, so your reputation and experience grow hand-in-hand, is preferable
Allan covered how he created his successful Java software consultancy company (SensibleDevelopment) by growing organically which grew from his fantasy-footy game (EffEffElle). Allan spent time explaining the various ways that new companies can get funding and support in Brighton – his presentation (forthcoming) lists all of the possibilities. If you want to ask questions about this – join us on the BrightonDigital mail list.
Sadly Raj couldn’t attend through illness. He had a good talk lined up on ‘growth after boot-strapping’ including statistics from his Kwiqq.com – he has uploaded the presentation which is pretty self-contained.
Next John and Neil discussed ‘how to grow a £5 App’ covering: inspiration, ease of coding, language choice, source control, unit tests and having fun.
After lunch Premasagar and Madhava discussed Dharmafly which is their ethical web consultancy. The did a fab presentation (with Annesley) on how they built a Facebook application (including RSS feed) in several days and how they used this as a way to further broadcast their new ThoughtsOf.PRSarkar. The ThoughtsOf site is a WordPress site with some simple theming, they used the dated post-ahead feature to build a set of posts which are published each week.
Jon Markwell (Inuda) continued the theme of social media and discussed Google’s new OpenSocial. Importantly he explained why it isn’t ready for use yet – I found this talk to be extremely useful as I’d only heard the hype and not the sober inside story. Jon also talked us through Facebook’s new advertising platform and showed how he’d created a Brighton-targetted advertising solution for Inuda.
Paul Silver and David Rosam gave a short presentation on the key points of search engine optimisation. Following the presentation they used their SEO Analysis Tool (the ‘site clinic’) to give us feedback on a couple of our sites. I have a print-out of my results and I’ll use the analysis to guide my own SEO for ShowMeDo. Do contact Paul and David (WebPositioningCentre.co.uk) if you’d like expert SEO advice and implementation.
To cap off a brilliant day Ellen de Vries gave us an excellent and very interactive talk on writing copy for the web. We had to work in groups to first explain our own websites ‘to our mum’ – i.e. using plain language and clear concepts. We worked through several more exercises and ended up explaining what we do ‘to our clients’ and along the way we all learned some new Copy skills. Thanks Ellen! Do contact Ellen if you’d like custom web-copy or advice.
Naturally at the end of the day we headed off to the pub to unwind. It looks as though several collaborations have begun as a result of the day and the ‘£5 App Meme’ will be travelling to Birmingham (thanks Simon!) to start a new group in Brum. Woot!
Upcoming events: OpenCoffeeSussex meets next Thursday in the Sussex Innovation Centre, Master Screencasting on Tues 20th for the Week of SkillSwaps, the £5 App Christmas Special (title: The £50 Million App) is on December 4th.
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