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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Hacking stuff – MAKE: magazine
I’d been futilely waiting to see one of these in Borders, then stumbled across a link on Amazon. I knew that Tim O’Reilly (founder of the insanely good O’Reilly computer-manual empire) had wanted to make a magazine aimed at techno-tinkerers and hackers and I really wanted a look.
Seeing as it was only £6 at Amazon I dived in and bought a copy. I’m not disappointed. It’s an A5 format glossy print magazine, thick and brimming with lots of hackery articles. There’s a bit on sleep hacking, a guy working on home fusion reaction (from the fringe), welding for beginners, modifying you car’s sound system with an iPod, converting a supermarket trolley into a go-kart, portable GPS married with a wi-fi router and an absolute ton of other articles (see article list here). The geek in me smiles.
Volume 4 has just come out, I’ll have to make another purchase…
Paul Graham – two new articles
Paul Graham has written a couple of new high-tech entrepreneur articles: Ideas for Startups and What I Did this Summer. The first is about ‘how to have an entrepreneurial idea’ and the second about their first year running their newly formed young-persons incubator fund (this year they had 18-28 year olds involved).
The ‘Y Combinator’ incubation fund’s activities this summer are interesting – he thinks 3 or 4 of the 10 start-ups they’ve funded will succeed. That’s a good number – the oft quoted figure is that 10% of companies get past the idea stage and of those only 10% survive to year two (so an overall success rate of 1%). Take that 1% figure with a pinch of salt – this seems to be applied to all start-ups, from market traders through to biotech, so I choose to mostly ignore it (it’s too general).
He might be talking rubbish, but I think his ideas are sound – his articles are good and his book has some interesting extra essays. Be aware that his essays centre on the high-tech industry so perhaps don’t translate to other fields.
Entrepreneuring and Serenity
Wow, now it’s been a full month since I last posted. Time flies when you’re busy. I’m glad to say that I’ve finished the Government (DTI) entrepreneurship grant that I’ve been working on since April – and not only did the DTI like the report, they’ve also paid promptly. I’ll say more on that later, for now I’m glad to have my evenings and weekends back. Entrepreneuring outside of a full-time job sure sucks away the months.
I took the chance to go see Serenity last week. I’m glad I went – the film was very fine. So fine in fact that I’ll go again and I’ll happily pay Hollywood a second time. I can’t think when was the last time I voluntarily gave Hollywood my money a second time. Serenity is cool.
It has already made the IMDB Top 250 Movies of All Time (at position 139 as I write this, beaten by Indy Jones and the Last Crusade). I’m still blown away when I look at the breakdown of age/sex ranges for votes on the film – the demographic “Females aged 18-29” beats everyone else with a solid score of 9/10. Women loving sci-fi this much? I’m just a boy, I don’t understand.
I’ll finish on a quote from the Captain:
Y’all got on this boat for different reasons, but y’all comin’ to the same place. So now I’m asking more of you than I have before. Maybe everything. Sure as I know anything, I know this: In a year or maybe ten, perhaps even on this very ground, they’ll swing back to the belief that they can make people better; and I don’t hold to that. I aim to misbehave.
Brighton Bloggers
I’ve made it onto the Brighton Bloggers site, and I’ve no idea how. Anyone want to own up to submitting me? The tag-lines for the two entries around me read “Diary of a booze hound” and “Therapy is expensive. Blogging is cheap. You do the math.”. Am I the only entrepreneurial geek in the village?
Update: I was added by Richard Dallaway, he remembered me from a past conversation. Mystery solved!
Etsy Time-machine
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!
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Oreilly High Performance Python by Micha Gorelick & Ian Ozsvald AI Consulting
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