sent2null space

You'll recall from this post, that I had decided to mount up my trusty steed and head down the road of venture capital and angel investment hunting about 2 weeks ago. It turns out that process is far more difficult than I thought it would be. I had the idea that IT folks would be willing to take a look at the implementation of my technology and be in a position to enter into an agreement to provide a portion of the funding. It just turns out that getting eyes on your product is not easy, even in the internet age. The first worry I had was the fact that most VC's wanted to see a business plan or an executive summary before they even agree to anything. Though my executive summary was general in its description of my business ideas, the business plan is quite detailed. I kept thinking, what is to stop them from passing that plan along to a few geeks they have waiting and funding their own version of my plan idea? The internet is filled with stories that go both ways, of investors...

In today's daily blog hunt I came across this posting: http://www.dmwmedia.com/news/2007/06/25/guy-kawasaki-markus-frind-founder-of-plentyoffish-is-my-hero which has a link to a google video on some start up stories. It really is amazing how varied the stories are. Now that I've finished watching the whole thing I can say a bit more about what I think about it. First, a common sentiment that seemed to weave through most of the panel members was the claim that they started from "zero", now as much as I'd like to believe that I can't. No one starts from zero, if these kids were doing this stuff while college students, where did the money come from to pay for college, and for the ones who were already out of college , how did they acquire the capital needed to get the development software and servers? I have been developing my framework for 6 years now, in that time I needed a great deal of money just to provide for the software and hardware to fund my work. I ha...

I've spent the last couple of days researching the hot trend in software service enablement that is made possible by the idea of web services. I remember back in 2000, when I was still working as a network and pc support technician reading a book on the emerging tool of xml. At this time, the growing needs of web sites to store and provide content thanks to the exploding number of individuals coming online to buy, trade and interact necessitated a way to stream line content creation, transformation and delivery to different locations in different formats. Xml was the magic bullet that was able to provide all these things when used cleverly. I soon found myself during my free time at work, reading the chapters on how xml worked and how to perform xsl transformations. I became convinced that xml related technologies were the future and with that conviction in mind began a secret hunt for a job while I was still working at the bank. I was able to get a job with TheStreet.com in a matt...

I downloaded the latest beta of Firefox 3 beta 4 a few days ago and installed it last night. What a difference an upgrade makes. True to the claims of vastly improved speed, Firefox 3 impressed me with what you can get out of a philosophy of constantly pursuing tight code. In addition to being faster, the new browser also uses memory more efficiently. You'll recall my post on the importance of an almost manic obsession with reducing the memory footprint of every object when coding for scalable distributed web applications, though firefox is not meant to scale or distribute outside of a single computer, the designers realized that the area of memory utilization could be used to affect a noticeable improvement to the user experience and sure enough that is the case in Firefox 3. Pages load in a snap, firefox developers talked up the improvements on the mozilla blog take a look for the specific improvements made. One thing that I am very happy about was a bug I noticed regarding t...

In this post , I made the case that many internet companies are busy solving problems that aren't in need of solution. I wanted to differentiate the conclusion of that article from the ideas I've expressed else where that the optimal solution for a given problem over the long term involves making sure it solves the problem landscape with the largest scope possible. Over time these solutions will lead to reduced costs for the implementer in the form of maintenance and scalability issues which tend to kill projects over time as complexity (in the form of constant dam plugging and retrofitting for problems that weren't originally in the solution scope) builds to unmanageable levels. This is a different focus from the ideas mentioned in the 'good enough' post, which were focused not on the actual solution, which in many cases in these many online business models are indeed ingenious, it is in the selection of those particular problems. In this case, the issue is that t...

I recently answered this question at the linkedin answers forum, thought it was worth reproducing here. I have some more ideas that will be forth coming. 1) Reward employees for what they know, not only for what you hired them. (yes, that is not a typo.) 2) Use your employees for what they know as well as what you hired them for. (see it all comes together. ;)) 3) Allow employees to work from ...wherever. It saves you money and it saves them time...to make you more money. 4) Reward achievement on time as long as it is within project goals. ie. get rid of the time clocks. 5) Some people want to take a nap around lunch time, if you still have a physical office (I know some of you "older" businesses still do that kind of thing) provide a quite lounge precisely for this purpose. 6) If you are forced to lay off workers, offer them a reduced salary before you give em' the slip. It is the least you can do. What are ways that you think companies can get the best out of their empl...

http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/kelly08/kelly08_index.html The article linked above is an excellent analysis on the issues that attend the ubiquity of free content and free services online. It highlights the obvious truth that profitability in the long run will be found from attempting to profit from services that can not be easily copied and distributed online. It mentioned several qualities that can't be copied by the internet however it fails to mention only that the ubiquity of free is not restricted only to the ability for content to be copied online, it also involves the ability for the models of business to be copied as well. For example, "trust" is given as an example of a quality that can't be copied online but this isn't really true. If a network can be built that can harness trust between individuals that join that network it can be used to secure business from those users for having provided that service. Similar provider networks catering to the same ...