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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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.
Conversion to Ubuntu Linux
My Windows XP desktop computer died last Monday (warning: rant coming up) – I woke up to find that rather than dutifully doing what it had been doing all week (sitting there mostly, with some email), it had instead entered an infinite reboot/crash cycle. One evening playing with it (and I’m no slouch at fixing these things) was enough for me to know that XP was dead. Again.
Annoyed with this, I decided it was time to have another go with Linux and see if the situation had improved from my last dabble a year or so back. I plugged for Ubuntu, backed by Mark Shuttleworth (the millionaire who bought a ticket with the Russian space agency to fly to the International Space Station in 2002) to the tune of $10 million US and marketed as a ‘linux for the people’ (rather than the geeks).
So far, so good, one week in I’m still happy enough and I don’t intend to switch back to Microsoft XP. Be warned, the following is pretty geeky:
Installed version: Hoary Hedgehog, version 5.04
Installed machine: Athlon 64, Asus K8VSE Deluxe motherboard, SATA, ATI Radeon 9800Pro, Creative Audigy 2 ZS, 3Com USB WIFI
Installation: easy and painless, there were few questions and mostly I just let the machine churn.
What worked: after installation I had a user account with the defaults for Evolution email (which I don’t like), Firebird for browsing (good, but a pre-bugfix version), OpenOffice and utilities. My mouse, keyboard and basic graphics were ok and I could mount the old XP drive and access my lost data.
What didn’t work: My 3Com wireless card wasn’t picked up, it looks like I need to play with ndiswrapper to get support – this is a failing on 3Com’s part for not providing drivers. My ATI card has basic support (no 3D), but that looks like ATI’s problem for not providing open-source driver support (though they have provided allegedly-hard-to-install binaries). No printer drivers yet, but in fairness I’ve not tried plugged my HP in – however it looks like I have to install more drivers there too.
I burned some backup CDs, but these were all bad burns – I had to install proftpd and send files to my Windows laptop and burn from there to get a good backup. No sound support – there’s a weird hack which seems to have worked, but annoying that it didn’t work out of the box. No fan support – the machine enters a low-power mode for the CPU but still runs the fan at high (and noisy) speed.
It looks as though I can solve all the problems I’ve seen, so I’ll keep plugging ahead for now. There’s an active support community over at UbuntuGuide and the UbuntuForums and the next release is scheduled for October which includes a lot of improvements. I think I might be able to get along with this distribution (here’s hoping), then maybe I can leave my desktop turned on for more than a week without having to reboot.
Update: By default the fan-control isn’t enabled, so the CPU fan runs at full speed (which is loud). I used these instructions to install the fancontrol module (via the Ubuntu forums). I have to do fancontrol at every reboot, I’m not sure which script to add this too yet.
Update: To enable sound on my Creative Labs Audigy 2 ZS under Ubuntu I followed these instructions, essentially you have to use the alsamixer and switch an output from digital to analog. I followed the 2nd entry by Daniel49. Using sudo alsactl store stored the setting between reboots.
Update: Still no wifi on my 3Com 3CRWE254G72 USB stick, even though I’m using the latest ndiswrapper compiled locally with several versions of the 3Com Windows drivers. Will keep trying, the 20 metre network cable is all well and good but is somewhat ugly. If you can offer any help on this one, please drop me a line (2005-08-28).
Update: Woot! 3D graphics now working – I’ve installed my ATI Radeon 9800 Pro under Ubuntu Hoary following these instructions. No problems, I just installed the stock drivers (steps 1 and 3). Actually I messed with Step 3 and had to revert to my saved xorg.conf, but after following the instructions properly it went fine. Now my video is less choppy and the UI feels a bit more responsive.
Collection of Entrepreneurial Tidbits
John points me at Where are all the UK start-ups?, a very interesting read with a heck of a lot of commentary from other budding entrepreneurs. This in turn inspired How to Build a Successful Web Startup in the UK – Part I (Part II online now) which has a slightly odd argument about how our class system holds us back. I don’t buy into this – points about fear of failure are made (which have some truth) and our environment is not one where there are many other entrepreneurial types floating around, so getting into the mindset is harder. But class? Nope, I disagree.
However – once you start down the road, most people are supportive. I’ve met a few naysayers, but they’ve mostly gone quiet once they saw I was getting on rather well with my ideas. Along the way I’m glad to say I’ve met a boat-load of like-minded people – they aren’t so hard to find, you just have to speak up a bit. The hardest bit is stepping out of the comfort zone, taking the plunge and then sticking with it. Working inside the supportive environment of the Sussex Innovation Centre has certainly helped.
My story: got frustrated with my permie Artificial Intelligence research/development jobs last January, quit, took out a loan for 3 months survival money (having no money in the bank – I’d just bought a flat), declared myself a ‘consultant’, then wondered what the heck to do next.
It was an interesting ride for 3 months from my birthday last April to actually getting my first paid Artificial Intelligence consultancy role, but I’ve not looked back. Being freelance now with a number of clients has taught me a new set of skills and it has given me the flexibility to play with my own ideas: CustomKnoppix recently with Duncan and the perhaps rather ambitious BookAnExpert (in preparation) now.
My take-home: if you want to do it, just get on with it. Crack on with the idea in your evenings and weekends, meet like-minded people, but most of all keep pushing it forward. No one else will push it for you, that’s for sure.
If you’re entrepreneurial and you want to chin-wag – feel free to get in touch. Contact details are in the About Me page.
Other stories of note: 37signals have a great entry on low-funded startups and earlier link to a How to Make Big Things Happen with Small Teams presentation. I particularly like their section “Build half a product not a half-ass product”.
The Daily Grind
Jonathan Sanderson of The Daily Grind has the (dubious) honor of being the first person I don’t know to make a comment on my blog (regarding the UK-EFF idea). Cool! He points out that the OpenTech website has videos of the session where the UK-EFF pledge was discussed. 511 people are signed-up now, that’s over half-way in only a few days.
The sign-up is trivial, there’s no commitment to actually honour the £5 a month as and when the pledge is finished (though that’s obviously the idea) and the cause is a good one. With an EFF-like UK organisation heading up privacy issues for the public we stand a much better chance of not having the Government or companies push through ideas which are bad for our digital rights.
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