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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Review: The Island
Hmmm,
After about an hour when our good-boy clone Lincoln Six Echo has escaped into the real world and has a new identity, they could have finished the film with a nicely ambiguous and slightly dark finish (a la Gataca). But ohhhh no, we have to have a Hollywood happy ending which takes another (long) hour.
Why couldn’t the crack-team of ex-Navy Seal assassins shoot straight? Why did Lincoln Six Echo grow new memories of the real world when he was always kept in a confined environment with no outside contact? Why did we have the way-too-obvious product placement? We’ll never know.
Wikipedia has a good entry including notes on controversy (noting the way too prominent product placements) and symbolism. They also link to the fictitious Merrick Biotech website which has been ‘hacked’ by anti-cloning activists (this is all fiction, of course) – including videos. This is a nice bit of marketing I think.
It gets 6.8 over at IMDB and I’ll give it a Thumbs Sideways. I await the day we get a good Sci-Fi flick where the trailers don’t give the entire plot away in 30 seconds and the marketing droids don’t get to sell every scene to the advertisers. Maybe I’ll go watch Kubrick’s 2001 again (but heck, didn’t Bell get some product placement in there as well?).
Site was broken, now fixed
Apologies for the site going a bit wonky over the last few days – all is good again. I bought a bigger hosting package from GoDaddy and in the process they disabled the ‘mod_rewrite’ rule for some reason. This stopped comments, permalinks, categories and posts from working. All is now fixed, sorry for the interruption (Dunc!).
Review: Hackers and Painters (Paul Graham)
Paul Graham has been writing online since before 2000, today he has 45 articles published for free online. New articles now make Slashdot‘s frontpage, quite a big event in geek circles. He published this book last year and it contains 15 chapters, 10 of which are online and 5 of which are new (and probably won’t go online I guess). The 5 new chapters are:
Update Jan 2005: How to Make Wealth is now online.
Good Bad Attitudes discusses the nerds instinct to step outside of the rules. Hurrah for us thinking outside of the box. How to Make Wealth explains that start-ups are a great way to make new wealth, and as a part of that start-up you can share in that wealth (so get on with it!). Mind the Gap discusses unequal income distributions, Graham think it is less of a problem than is popularly perceived and I tend to agree with his arguments. The last two new essays discuss aspects of programming language design.
Having read all of the online essays over the years, it felt sensible just to buy this book and give Graham a little cash back. I’d definitely rate this book to new readers who are interested in what makes a geek a geek and the world of high-tech entrepreneurship.
If you’ve read the online essays, you’ll still get 5 new chapters and How to Make Wealth alone is probably worth the entire price of the book, I quote:
“At Viaweb one of our rules of thumb was ‘run upstairs’. Suppose you are a big, fat, bully. You open a door and find yourself in a staircase. Do you go up or down? I say up. The bully can probably run downstairs as fast as you can. Going upstairs his will be more of a disadvantage. Running upstairs is hard for you but even harder for him.”
The online essays appear to be word-for-word reproduced in the book, but illustrations have been added. If you’ve never read Paul Graham, I’d suggest starting with his online essay Hackers and Painters (which is also one of the chapters in the book, and obviously the book’s title too). Overall: thumbs up.
Two cool businesses
The Business Experiment is rather novel. Take a distributed bunch of people communicating through an internet site, assume that they’re all reasonably intelligent but not necessarily skilled in any one business disciple, assume The Wisdom of Crowds and see if anything coherent comes out. Boot-strapped and open to volunteers. I like. I wouldn’t throw any money at it, but I like.
And how about a peer-to-peer production site, for the sale of hand-made items? Etsy.com lets you open a store to list your hand-made items, you conduct business privately between yourself and the buyer (so you PayPal each other or send cheques or something), and then you can rate your seller (so no one gets to cheat).
Since there are no credit card transactions the site has a lower overhead and it can charge substantially less than eBay. Neat. Kyran and I have toyed with such a business model, it’s cool to see someone actually doing it ‘in the flesh’.
These came via here and here, with the second linking to The Atomizing Hand a very cool (though rather long) Spring 2005 powerpoint on the economics of peer production.
A dating site that rocks
OkCupid – well, I’ve only just joined so I don’t know if it really rocks – but first impressions are good. First off – you don’t pay – they’ve got a slightly less cynical business model in mind. Second – you develop an online profile based on user-submitted questions – so nothing is predetermined. It looks like everyone is a real user too, rather than the pretty stooges that can be found in other sites.
So, you sign-up and start to answer questions, and 10 minutes later you can do a search. It seems to understand that London is 50 miles from Brighton (and it’s a US site, so that’s not bad) and the matches it comes up with are ok – so far a mix of people with roughly the right interests as me and between here and London. The questions are real easy – just multiple choice, and you can submit your own. The matches are calculated by collating the intersecting set of your and their answers from the pool of random questions you answer. The more questions you answer, the better your profile.
The creators are pretty open – they list a lot of details in the FAQ including thoughts on their business model, advertising (which is how they make their money), privacy, even the programming languages they use behind the site. The give a real simple overview of the profiling/matching techniques they use which covers some sensible-looking math.
Rather nice to see a dating site that doesn’t depend on paying up-front, though I have to wonder if their advertising-only model really brings in enough money. Since they must serve up a lot of photos, that’s a lot of bandwidth…
Now what happens if you could mix something like the Australian GetALife social/activity site, with a dating site like OkCupid – mostly for free, perhaps with company-sponsorship or maybe you’d donate to the site when you did fun activities or had good dates. It is clear that most dating sites are rubbish, heck even Paul Graham has written about improving the online dating experience.
And oddly, these guys aren’t marketing themselves, it all seems to be word-of-mouth (and growing nicely by the look of things). I came across it whilst reading Jacqueline Passey’s blog.
And continuing the theme – here’s Captain Capitalism, an economics bloke (what’s with the dating-friendly online economists?) who’s very open about his dating too. Perhaps a bit too open in his latest post, but heck, good luck chum. Ah, reading the comments a bit more,
“Date with Knock Out Russian Babe went well”
Lucky boy.
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Oreilly High Performance Python by Micha Gorelick & Ian Ozsvald AI Consulting
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