McFilter: Business

Launching Booklert, a New Service For Authors

The launch day for a new project feels a bit like having a birthday. You know that it should be a special day, but if you're on your own it's hard to see how it differs from every other day - after all, the project isn't as new and remarkable to you if you've been working at it for the past couple of months.

It also feels like one of those things where it's bad form to talk about it too much yourself. Maybe that's just a British thing. Maybe it's just a me thing... you shouldn't wander round proclaiming that it's your birthday and expecting special treatment; at worst you should just mention it quietly, but preferably you wouldn't even have to do that as somebody else would bring it up and make a fuss for you.

Anyway, consider this the quiet aside that today sees the launch of Booklert, which will send authors updates (via email or twitter) on their book's rank on Amazon. Now if you'll all go off and make a fuss about it, I'll practice playing it down and saying "ooh, your shouldn't... really, you're too kind..."

Tags: booklert author book amazon twitter publishing

Would You Like More Control Over Your Electricity Usage?

For a while now I've been wondering about how to green our homes. Over on the company blog I've just announced the Mazzini Project, the latest idea along these lines that I've been playing around with.

It's a wireless power-monitor combined with a control unit so that as well as letting you know exactly how much electricity whatever is plugged into it is using, you can also turn it on and off remotely. I'm still just building the first prototype (I was wiring together circuits and measuring things with the multimeter just this afternoon) but I wanted to start talking about the idea to see what people thought.

I've put some slides together to try to explain it in more detail, so please have a look at them and let me know what you think. Is it a good idea? Would you buy one? How would you hack one to do things I haven't thought of?

If you want to see the slides full-screen, then you can do that from this page.

| View | Upload your own

Tags: mazzini research power monitor control energy

Which Vision Thing?

Once again I'm late to the party with my blogging. A week or two back, Paul Robinson posted an entry to his blog lamenting the state of the computer industry. I agree with a most of what he said: services like Facebook could be a really good way to keep in touch and engage with our friends, but have devolved into an endless parade of me-too, frothy, time-wasting games.

By the time I'm getting round to writing about it, things have already moved on. There have been a few responses to Paul's initial post; he's posted a summary of them; and thrown up an area of his website to discuss "The Vision Thing". On there they've even started to draft a manifesto.

All of which is highly commendable, but having read through it I'm left feeling a bit like a goth who's arrived late to a rave. Paul talks about wanting some meaning, and a vision that goes beyond building something "a bit like eBay but with a social graph". I don't see anything like that in the draft manifesto. "Down with IE6" is just froth in geek flavour. "Look after yourself" is just good advice, not something to fight for.

It's a very British manifesto: full of good intentions, but lacking ambition. Microsoft didn't set out to "make businesses lives a bit easier", they wanted "a computer on every desktop and in every home". We should be aiming for "renewable power generation on every home and every office" or "computer and Internet access for every single person in the UK" or...

I know that I'm doing no better than Paul in just writing this blog post. I don't have a solution. Yet. tedium is hardly going to revolutionize the world, but similarly it isn't just froth. It's also just the first step towards building something bigger. I don't have a full handle on my mission to change the world, but I'm beginning to grasp the strands that will weave together to produce it.

Tags: thevisionthing mission business tech

I'm Now More-than 25% More Productive

The first quarter of 2008 is over, which means that I've just received my quarterly Productivity Report from tedium.

I can't make a direct comparison just yet because the last report was for a whole year, but if I maintain this rate of completing tasks for the rest of the year, I'll have done more than 25% more things in 2008 than I did in2007. Of course, I'm still managing to add new tasks faster than I can complete them, but you can't have everything...

Tasks are also spending less time in the "system" before I complete them. In 2007, on average it took just over a month for a task to be completed, but so far in 2008 I've almost halved that time.

Anyway, that's enough retrospection. I need to get back to doing things to keep my completion rate up for the next report!

Tags: gtd tedium productivity report

Telling Your Friends What You Do Isn't Marketing

A few days ago, Tom Reynolds posted an entry on his blog highlighting how poorly some marketers try to reach out to bloggers. In it he holds up an earlier post of his about a film from one of his friends as a prime example of how people should market to bloggers.

I can't see how you can call that marketing, apart from in a very small limited sense. My friends all know that I've written a to-do list web app, and I'm sure they've mentioned it to other people, but that isn't going to take me very far in my quest to reach everyone that might be helped by my software.

It's difficult to know how to present my arguments, without coming across like a disgruntled outsider, but I'm interested in finding out what I'm doing "wrong" and hopefully also improving how marketers interact with bloggers.

In the comments on that post, Tom says:

"Actually posting about Gia's film is perfect, because you have to ask yourself *why* I'm her friend, and it's because of the things that she writes on her blog, and does in life that have endeared me to her.

That's why - it might not scale, but then there are people out there who trust *me* and will be influenced by my recomendations."

and Gia (whose film Tom was talking about) adds:

"I'd say if you are working in online marketing and want to 'use' bloggers to spread your word, then invest your time and yourself in blogging."

The only problem with that is that, as Tom says, it doesn't scale. People who are marketing are looking for things that scale. If Tom is right, then either we end up with lots of marketing people trying to become our friends, or people like Tom who are touting the "How to market to bloggers" talks are selling snake oil. The former sounds like a terrible pollution of the blogging "community", and if it's the latter, can someone please let me in on the secret so I can go back to looking for other ways for people to discover my software.

Don't get me wrong, I don't think that the mass-emailed I'm-throwing-this-at-as-many-bloggers-as-I-can-find-in-case-one-likes-it is the right way to market to bloggers either. I think the real answer lies somewhere in the middle, which is what I'm trying to do right now. But a lot of it is just leaving the odd comment (where I've got something relevant to add) or sending an out-of-the-blue email to someone whose blog I've found (and spent some time reading, and checked to see if there are any indicators that they won't be interested) that might be interested.

I just think this "immerse yourself in blogging" as a marketing strategy is bollocks. I love blogging, and my blog has helped me make all sorts of connections and helped with all sorts of things in life and in my business. But it hasn't helped me market tedium. Maybe I've been too much on the fringe of the "UK blogging 'gang'" that Gia mentions? Or maybe I'm not good enough at self-promotion? Maybe people don't realise that I've got something to promote, and so don't help out?

So, in case anyone hasn't realised...

I've written a web app that helps you stay organized and even tells you how well you're doing, called tedium.
I'd love it if you could tell anyone who you think might find it useful.
I'm still getting to grips with marketing, so if you've got any pointers I'd love to hear more.
And finally, if you've got any thoughts or opinions on what I've been ranting about above, leave a comment or write about it on your blog.

Tags: marketing blogging business uk

Let a Thousand Niches Wither

I've been thinking about getting paid. I was going to say I'd been thinking about revenue models, but that's just a fancy way of saying getting paid, which is maybe part of the problem.

Basically, the web has promises to be the best way for people to connect to each other, and so should be the perfect marketplace. The long tail promises that there are an almost unlimited set of niches waiting to be filled.

In parts, this is true. Take the process that sparked this blog post for example. This morning, Russell Davies wrote on his blog that he'd like a twitter feed of changes in the Amazon sales rank of his book. The idea piqued my curiosity, and an hour or so of poking round the web later, I've found out how to query the Amazon API to get the sales rank for his book and found out how I would hook into twitter to submit the updates.

Now, if I was just knocking something up for myself, I'd be about half-an-hour from having it all finished. But as Russell says, it's the sort of thing that other authors would find useful, so I've been pondering making it into a full-blown service.

"Making it into a full-blown service" is a bit over-the-top, but as Eric Sink said, it's a non-trivial step to go from something hacked together for me to something that I'd be happy letting other people use. There'd need to be a way to sign up, a way to stop the updates, and then the ongoing maintenance if either the twitter or Amazon APIs change.

It still wouldn't be a grand undertaking, but it becomes more like a day's-worth of work now, and then an undefined amount more in the future (but again, probably not too much). It's at this point that it stops looking like a fun problem to spend a while solving, and more like work. I don't want to launch services that I can't maintain, and obviously there's a limit to the number of services I can maintain - particularly if they're being maintained in my spare time.

What the web is missing is an easy way to charge for such small, niche services. Surely something like this is worth the price of a cup of coffee to authors? The problem is that, at present, the assumption on the web is that it should somehow be paid for by advertising, which means that the only things which get built are either a by-product of delivering audiences to advertisers, or things that geeks build for themselves.

If there was a way for people like me to cover their costs (plus a little extra) then we could solve all sorts of niche computer problems for people who can't code, without having to spend all our time working out how to force them to click on adverts.

Annual Report 2007

I don't really do New Year's Resolutions, and I prefer to do my longer-term dreaming/planning as an ongoing background process rather than picking some fairly arbitrary date. However, the start of a new year has happened to coincide with developing a major new feature for tedium, and I've learnt some interesting things as a result.

At the end of each quarter, tedium now compiles a report showing you how much you've achieved and how you've achieved it. The report at the end of the year looks back over the entire year, rather than just three months, and so I can now show you my Annual Productivity Report 2007.

Over 2007 I completed over 700 tasks, although I replaced each of them with something new and a hundred or so more for good measure. Still, that's only a 12%-or-so rise, which doesn't feel too onerous.

If you look at the graph of new tasks over the year, there's a clear peak at the start of November which matches the start of my 30-in-30 challenge but isn't matched by a similar rise on the graph of completed items. I'm quite pleased with how flat both of those graphs are - I'm just steadily getting things done.

The biggest bump in the completed tasks occurs in July, which is when we were getting things finished on the house and organising moving to Italy, and you can see that reflected in the tag clouds. House and Italy are two tags I used to track everything we needed to fix up before renting our house in Cambridge, and things we needed to do for our move to Turin. The other big tags hyperfocus and thisweek show a different way that I use tags - when I'm reviewing what I need to do, I use those tags to flag the tasks that are a priority for me to address.

The main thing that the punctuality section shows is that I don't assign dates to my tasks very often. It's generally only things like dentist appointments and things that have to happen on a particular day. Fifteen tasks out of seven hundred isn't very many.

Things get more interesting in the productivity section. My productivity seems to steadily decline over the week - starting strongly on Monday and Tuesday before fading on Friday and Saturday before a suprise resurgence on the 'day of rest'. The hourly breakdown is more predictable, although it looks like I have a tendency to add new tasks late in the evening - preparing my todo list for the following day, no doubt.

Moving into 2008, I've still got a lot to do, but 253 remaining tasks is only a third of what I completed last year. There's plenty still to do on tedium, and I'd like to do a fair bit more on learning Italian. I'm looking forward to the end of March when I can compare how I've done in the next report.

Tags: productivity stats tedium report

The A-Z of Personal Productivity

I don't blog about work very often, mainly because I'm immersed in it all the time and so it doesn't occur to me that it would be newsworthy. However, given that part of my current focus is to help people become more productive and achieve their goals, it seems foolish not to promote that on my blog.

Over on the MCQN Ltd. blog I've started collecting useful links to articles about how to get more organized and have also been writing the A-Z of Personal Productivity.

The latter is a collection of tips and techniques on how to tackle and track everything we want to do; from the day-to-day picking up the groceries, to achieving your hopes and dreams for the future. There's a new article posted each week (usually on Wednesday) and so far we're up to D.

Obviously, the methods all work well when paired with an excellent online todo list app such as tedium, but it isn't a requirement for making use of the ideas.

And if you know anyone who might find this useful, or if you've got a blog, I'd be most appreciative if you could spread the word and help me find more people to help.

Tags: tedium productivity gtd todo

If Not Hot Water, Then Something Else?

In a recent email (after my follow-up posting about the solar-water-utility), Jeff wondered if I'd heard of heat pumps and whether they'd be a better solution than solar water panels.

They are something I'd heard of, in fact I saw one in the flesh during the tour of the AC Architects practice a couple of years back. They also had photos taken during the installation, when they sunk the boreholes for the pipework. More recently I'm sure I've heard about air-to-air heat pumps, which I imagine aren't as efficient but don't need you to dig deep holes in your garden.

It isn't something I'd considered with respect to the Green Utility (I can't call it the Solar Water Utility now, can I?) and I'm not going to invest any more time looking into it now, but it's a good idea.

However, today the House 2.0 blog has a post about some experiments that Barratt have been carrying out with Manchester University which give some interesting data points for anyone who would be building the Green Utility. Not taking into account inflation (or presumably other possible energy price increases), they've calculated the payback period for a number of green technologies:

Domestic wind turbines

Although in theory these are a useful approach, with the current technology (possibly the electrics side, rather than the wind "capture") in practice they aren't any use.

Photo-voltaic panels

A £4,500 solar electricity generation system would take 37.5 years to pay for itself

Ground source heat pump

Not as efficient as makers claim, but still worthwhile. A £7,800 system will reduce a home’s carbon emissions by 62% and has a payback period of 15 years.

Solar hot water

They didn't work out the payback period for solar hot-water but did comment that, although they heated water to much higher temperatures, the evacuated tube collectors didn't really provide any benefit over flat-plate collectors, so weren't worth their extra ~£1,000 cost.

Micro CHP (Combined Heat and Power - units that generate both heat and electricity)

No payback figures on these either, although they give figures for the power generated during the year's testing. It might also be worth reading another House 2.0 entry about micro CHP which comments on a report casting doubts over their validity in domestic situations.

Tags: green sustainability power utility solar heat_pump chp

The Green Marketing Manifesto Hits Italy

A couple of days ago as I was passing the little bakery in the bottom of our apartment block the lady who owns it called me over. She wasn't checking if I wanted another siciliana loaf, one of the cool things about life in an Italian apartment block seems to be that one of the shops acts as an informal parcel collection point. Pop in for some bread, and pick up that Amazon delivery that arrived this morning...

Or in this case, my signed, bloggers-review copy of The Green Marketing Manifesto (Amazon UK, Amazon US).

And just to prove that it has made it all the way out to Turin, here's a photo of me holding it in Piazza Bodoni, just down the road from our apartment.

I had intended to make up some stupid pun about the Green Marketing Manifesto and the verdigris on the statue of Alfonso Ferrero, but whilst I was sat in the piazza I realised that I could mention the two green Torinese initiatives which were metres away from where I was sat.

Of course, this being Turin - home of FIAT and Lancia - both initiatives are transport-related. The first is the Autobus Elettrico, an electric bus service. The Star 2 route (so there are at least two electric bus routes) started recently and runs past Piazza Bodoni. The buses (see pic below) don't produce any emissions, and are much quieter than normal ones; they are still loud enough that you hear them coming, which is something I'd wondered about when I'd heard of such schemes before.

The other scheme is the Car City Club car-sharing club. They have lots of parking spaces dotted around the city-centre (like the one at Piazza Bodoni pictured below) and cars are available from 2 Euros/hour during the day (or there's some monthly payment system too).

I must admit I haven't used either of these services, but that's because we live in the middle of town and either walk or cycle (Turin is quite bike-friendly) to get anywhere locally.

Tags: green_marketing_manifesto green sustainability torino turin

The Green Marketing Manifesto

In a blatant plot to promote his new book The Green Marketing Manifesto, John Grant is giving away a free copy to each of the first 50 bloggers to link to him.

It looks like an interesting read, and if I can get a free copy then all the better.

Tony Wilson

Tony Wilson, the man who gave us New Order and the Happy Mondays, died on Friday.

He was always outspoken and often controversial, but was also someone who followed his own path and beliefs rather than blindly following convention.

He often seemed arrogant or pompous when I saw him interviewed, but I much admired his business ideas and his unwavering support for Manchester and the North-West. He showed that you don't have to head to London to have an impact. The rest of the country (and the North in particular) needs more people like that.

Stuart has a round-up of obituaries although I'll add the one from the BBC.

I Don't Sound Like That, Do I?

You'd have thought that with all my karaoke experience I'd have a reasonable idea of what I sound like. It was still strange to listen to myself being interviewed on Shareware Radio.

Mike Dulin (the host of Shareware Radio) collared me when I was at the European Shareware Conference at the end of last year (my notes from the conference) and the interview is now available online.

The interview covers a bit about what tedium is and how it works; and my thoughts on the conference and some of the business side of MCQN Ltd.

My big concern when I sat down for the interview was that I'd "umm" and "ahh" all the way through, which I don't appear to have done. But that could be because Mike has done a good job of editing them out, I don't know. I need to work on my enthusiasm levels though - I'm much more excited about tedium and the company than it sounds in the interview. For an unexpected and un-rehearsed interview though, it could have turned out a lot worse.

ESWC Roundup

This is the last of my posts on the European Shareware Conference 2006. There might be the odd update to the posts if I find links to the presenters slides. I'm missing notes from two sessions - on the first day I missed the start of Tony Edgecombe's talk on Trust and couldn't take notes as my laptop was stranded at the other side of the room on charge. Gavin Bowman's has published his notes for that session. Then on the second day I skipped Thomas Wetzel's presentation about protecting your application (again, Gavin's notes are available) because I was being interviewed.

Mike Dulin had converted one of the rooms in the hotel into something resembling a radio studio and was quizzing me about tedium and the conference for his podcast - Shareware Radio. It was my first ever interview, but Mike does a great job of keeping things moving, and we'll have to see what it's like when it gets aired. Watch this space...

Here are the links to all of my notes from the conference:

Day One

• Bob Walsh: Keynote address
• Search engine Optimization
• Gary Elfring: On selling software
• Robert Martin: Marketing - it's what we do
• Panel #1: Marketing - what are the opportunities in 2007?
• Marcel Hartgerink: Next-generation software protection tools
• Panel #2: Technical issues
• Sinan Karaca: How to build extreme installers
• Thomas Wetzel: Grow your Google AdWords account successfully

Day Two

• Dave Collins: Websites that sell
• Panel #3: eCommerce advances and advantages
• Dave Collins: Google AdWords - taming the beast
• Panel #4: Supporting your users
• Michael Lehman: Project Glidepath
• Website critique

Final Thoughts

I thoroughly enjoyed the conference. There was lots of information to soak up from the presentations, which covered a full range of topics useful to anyone running a business online. As a direct result of the conference I'm going to be ditching Google Analytics in favour of another web server log analyzer (not exactly sure which yet, there are two I want to try), and I'll be trying out Infacta's GroupMail for managing my mailing lists (I've been looking for something to do this for a while, and this looks good and there was a conference offer of a free Personal Edition copy!).

It wasn't just the sessions that were good. I met all sorts of interesting people over the three days (I'm including the evening spent in the pub on Friday as part of the conference).

It was nice to meet both Bob and Gavin after trading emails with them in the past. Plus there were some locals attending who I hadn't met - Tony and Stephen, and one (Martin) I used to play footie with but haven't seen in a while. Then there were all those I met for the first time. It was great to meet you, and illuminating talking to you all.

As always seems the way when I attend conferences, I came away from the event buzzing with ideas and thoughts. Now I need to sift through them and start working on some of it.

Postscript

A final note about my note taking during the conference. It was the first time that I'd used my tablet PC in anger, and it acquitted itself well. The battery lasted half a day before it needed recharging, so I could just leave it to charge over lunch; and handwriting my notes in Microsoft OneNote was much less intrusive and distracting than typing would've been. The handwriting recognition has also been pretty impressive - by which I mean that the process of converting my handwritten notes into what's been posted up here has been: convert the handwriting to text in OneNote; then check the text against the original handwritten version and make corrections. There's generally been something to correct on every line, but I think it was quicker than typing them up manually would've been.

I'll leave you with some of the more amusing mis-conversions I've encountered whilst writing up the notes:

Original

Auto-converted version

Taming your visitors

Gaming your visitors

How many customers

Have mangy customers

FAQs are good

Torsos are gout

Analyze your logs

Downcast your loss

If you're lucky with an engineer

If you're bully with an engineer

Adwords

androids or bywords or woodworks or pollards

Windows

windups

~8000

igloo

ESWC - Website Critique

ESWC - Michael Lehman: Project Glidepath

ESWC - Panel #4: Supporting Your Users

ESWC - Dave Collins: Google AdWords - Taming the Beast

Last Couple of Days to Try to Win a Year of tedium

Things have been a bit manic round here of late, so I haven't had chance to point to a very nice write-up of tedium done by GTD Wannabe.

Luckily, there are still a few days left to leave your thoughts and comments about tedium over on the write-up and be in with a chance of winning a year's subscription.

ESWC - Panel #3: eCommerce Advances and Advantages

ESWC - Dave Collins: Websites That Sell

ESWC - Thomas Wetzel: Grow Your Google Adwords Account Successfully

ESWC - Sinan Karaca: How to build extreme installers

ESWC - Panel #2: Technical Issues

ESWC - Marcel Hartgerink: Next-generation Software Protection Tools

ESWC - Panel #1: Marketing - What Are The Opportunities In 2007

ESWC - Robert Martin: Marketing - It's What We Do

ESWC - Gary Elfring: On Selling Software

ESWC - Search Engine Optimisation/Optimization

ESWC - Keynote Address: Bob Walsh

ESWC

A Good Weekend For Cambridge MicroISVs

This weekend the European Shareware Conference is taking place in the Crowne Plaza hotel in the middle of Cambridge. There are a lot of interesting talks about all sorts of topics relating to writing, marketing and selling software. See the link for the full schedule.

I'll be going along, and will also be heading down to the pre-conference pubmeet on Friday. It's down at The Anchor at 7:30pm. And, because a number of the people who hang out on the JoelOnSoftware.com "Business of Software" forum are going to the conference, there's a JoS meetup happening in the Crowne Plaza at 6pm and then probably moving onto the Anchor a bit later on.

CHASE: Mobile Content and More

tedium Hits Version 1.0!

On the left is a screenshot of all the tasks in my tedium account which are tagged with the "rc1" tag.

What's interesting about that is that they're all crossed out, which means that I've finished them all.

And the interesting thing about that is that "rc1" stands for Release Candidate 1, which basically means version 1.0 of tedium. And I've completed everything that needed to be done for it. Which must mean that tedium is now at version 1.0 and is no longer in beta testing! Woohoo!!!

I don't think I've written too much here about the ongoing improvements that have been made to my web-based to-do list application during the beta testing; I've tended to do that more on the MCQN Ltd. blog.

So, a brief roundup of all things tedium...

What is it? It's a website where you can keep track of all the things you need to do, and which helps you get more of them done. It does that in a couple of ways: firstly by getting out of your way - at its simplest you only need to fill in one box to add a new task to the system, and at its most complicated there are still only three things to fill in (what the task is, some keywords or tags, and a due date). Secondly, being able to tag your tasks lets you view your tasks in a number of ways - by project; by who you need present to do it; by location... whatever suits you best. So you can tailor what tasks you see to all the different situations when you're trying to get things done. Less distractions mean you can focus on what needs to be done now.

What's been added since it was launched? There have been all sorts of little things done here and there, but the big, most noticeable changes are:

• Timezone support. So it works properly regardless of where you are in the world.
• Filtering on multiple tags. Lets you narrow in on a set of tasks even more by showing just the ones which are tagged with one tag AND another tag (AND another AND another AND....)
• Multiple lists displayed at once. Choose up to four different lists (either by tag, or due date, or a mixture) to show on screen at the same time. Then you can drag and drop tasks between the lists to manipulate their tags and/or due dates.
• Tailor the tedium interface to suit you. You can choose which lists are available from the linkbar across the top of each page, so you can quickly switch between those views that you use the most.
• The help system. From each page you can get help about how to use what's on that page; and there's a beginner's guide to get you started and the first of a number of tutorials.

How much does it cost? Everyone gets the first thirty days absolutely FREE, and then being able to stay on top of everything should easily be worth the less-than-$2-per-month cost. To save us billing you lots of tiny amounts each month, we've just made it $19.95/year.

How do I try it out? The easiest way to have a play with it is to jump straight in with a temporary account. You can always convert the temporary account into a proper one later, which will keep any tasks and tags you've entered.

Feel free to let me know what you think of it, or things we could add, etc. either by email or in the comments.

Get Football News On Your Phone

One thing that I've done recently, but didn't mention in the roundup is this set of Premiership football team news feeds for mobile phones.

An IM conversation with Geoff about Dave Winer's BBCRiver.com lead to me knocking up a basic service to give you a list of the BBC Sport headlines optimized for display on a phone or a PDA, whilst Geoff registered an assortment of domain names and setup the index site at newsrivers.com.

To see the headlines for your team, you just need to visit <team-initials>FCRiver.com or find your team on the index page. So, for example, get the latest Liverpool news at LFCRiver.com.

CHASE: Screen Technology

Less Copying, More Innovating

More lamenting why we aren't Silicon Valley via Ellee Seymour, only this time worryingly it's the shadow chancellor complaining.

To begin with, I thought there were some good points in his article, but the more I think about it the less convinced I become.

Why does it matter how many universities we have in the world's top 20? I don't remember any of my peers at school even thinking of going abroad to a different uni, so we aren't losing tomorrow's startup founders there. My experience of university was that it tended to be rather academic, and not too tuned to business, so encouraging that would be more useful to foster more startups.

I'm also unconvinced as to how useful patents are. Myspace doesn't have anything in that hasn't been done before (and given how ropey it is, most likely done better before).

All these efforts and initiatives trying to emulate Silicon Valley are pointless and will ultimately be futile. If I wanted to be part of Sililcon Valley I'd have gone there. I'm not yet sure what we do need to encourage more startups, but we should be looking at how to build our own success, not copy someone else's.

CHASE: Half Minute Media

I thoroughly enjoyed this month's CHASE meeting. Richard Konig gave a very open and engaging presentation about his company, Half Minute Media - quite impressive given that it was his first go at public speaking.

Half Minute Media have some digital fingerprinting technology that they use to recognise ad-break "bumpers" - those programme idents, or sponsor messages that come before and after every break for adverts. They use the technology in an entry-level PC to identify when the adverts have started, and then switch to a different channel for the duration of the ad-break. This lets them provide a service for pubs, bars, gyms and health clubs that shows more targetted advertising or details of upcoming promotions or events at the venue. Revenue comes from the sale of advertising, although the venue showing the adverts gets 30% and the opportunity to use up to 4 advertising slots for their own adverts.

Richard also covered some of the lessons they've learnt in starting the company. Funding and cashflow are vital - the DTI loan guarantee is expensive (although they couldn't have coped without it), and lack of funding has hampered their growth somewhat. Patents are expensive, and it's too early to say whether they've been useful or not. They have taken the very clever step of patenting some of the methods of attacking their main patents, to help prevent any competition. Don't start a family at the same time as starting a business - at present there are four employees of the company, and two of them are on maternity leave! And finally, get rid of time-wasters as quickly as possible.

Why Haven't You Started A Startup?

The article which indirectly sparked my Is Cambridge The UK's Startup Hub? post has been causing further conversations through a number of other blogs that I read. Not all are centred around working out how to encourage more people to start their own businesses but that's what intrigues me most.

Having thought about it some more, I think that the most important factor in encouraging more startups is people. A business can't start without a founder.

That sounds obvious, and maybe it was to everyone else, but I'd spent some time thinking about all sorts of other factors like location, availability of staff, living costs, and so on before realising that the best way to gain more new businesses would be for more people to decide to start them.

Almost everyone I know has at some point speculated about starting their own company, or getting out of the rat race and having more control over their own life. Yet far fewer have actually done so. Why is that? I'm not well placed to answer the question, because I've started my own company - there are all sorts of challenges and problems that I've encountered, but solving them would just have made the startup journey easier rather than affecting whether or not I embarked upon the journey at all.

So, what I'd like to know is have you ever thought of starting your own business? And if you have, why didn't you continue with it? Or did you start it but decide to stop? And what affected your decision?

Or is it the case with starting your own business that those that are going to do this do, and those that aren't shouldn't be encouraged?

What would it take to persuade you to start your own business?

Bonus links, if you want to read some more about the debate

• Paul Graham's article that kicked off the whole discussion - "How to Be Silicon Valley"
• Scoble on the discussion (he also later pointed to Evelyn's post on the matter).
• Crossroads Dispatches: Monied Sex, Sexy Money, and Silicon Valley's Word
• The Next Silicon Valley? Part One - Inc. magazine present the case against Silicon Valley being the ideal model for startup hubs.
• The Next Silicon Valley? Part Two.

KISS - Keeping It Simple Sells?

Harvard Business School has recently published a report entitled "Feature Bloat: The Product Manager's Dilemma". In it, they discuss one of the big problems facing anyone building products today - that when faced with a choice, people will often be initially drawn to the product with the most features, but in the long run they prefer simpler products that they can actually understand and work.

I'm definitely tending towards the cleaner, simpler, more understandable side of building products. DataCocoon doesn't offer the ability to burn your backup onto a CD because most people know how to copy things onto a CD, and it defeats the "backup software you can forget about" if you have to remember to put in a CD regularly. And with tedium I spend a lot of time working out how to add new features without cluttering the basic mechanism of getting my to-do items into the computer as quickly as possible.

The problem is then how to persuade people to use my software when at first glance it doesn't seem to compare well against some of the competition because they have more features. I'm hoping that the Internet, and the conversations and communication it allows through blogs, forums, usenet, etc. will give people the knowledge to look beyond the initial shiny baubles of an extra feature and choose the product that will best solve their problems.

How I Get Things Done

"How do you keep track of all the things you need to do? Whilst developing DataCocoon I found that there were so many things to keep track of - finishing the software itself, building the website, getting the artwork done, setting up the Ltd...

After reading the excellent Getting Things Done and being overrun with to-do lists jotted down on scraps of paper, I decided it was time I got things computerized."

Over on the MCQN Ltd. blog I've posted an article about how I keep track of my daily to-do items.

The main reason for the post is to announce that everyone else now has the opportunity to use the same tool to keep on top of everything they need to do and so become more productive. I've polished up the web app that I've been using for the past few months now and tedium is now up and running on the Internet.

Is Cambridge The UK's Startup Hub?

Tom Coates makes a very interesting post asking whether or not the UK could foster more startups, and where would it make sense for them to congregate. In it he draws up a shortlist of Oxford, Cambridge, York, Bristol and Brighton.

I don't know much about the other locations, but living in Cambridge it seems to me that Tom has fallen into the London-centric, new media (he says, stereotyping wildly but it fits in with my story :-) trap of complete ignorance of anything going on outside the M25.

Things have cooled a little since the dot-com bubble and there's less talk these days of the Silicon Fen, but there are still lots of startups in and around Cambridge. I think there are two reasons that Cambridge startups aren't as well known:

• Lots of the companies produce products which are hidden behind the scenes - for example Cambridge Silicon Radio provide over 50% of Bluetooth chips, ARM's processors are in all sorts of things, and Zeus build web server software.
• And for some reason, there's a tendency for startups to sell out rather than go it alone and so the startup becomes just the Cambridge office of a bigger (usually American, sadly) company.

I don't know if life in Cambridge is perfect for startups, but I've found it pretty good so far. The concentration of software companies in the area mean that I've been able to find bits of contracting to help fund MCQN Ltd. and also make it less risky for employees to join a startup - if it all goes wrong, it's easy enough to find another to join. Plus there are plenty of opportunities for networking: Cambridge Network have the grander, more corporate/VC networking covered; CHASE is a friendlier group aimed at the smaller businesses; and there are groups like CETC and the Cambridge Women's Lunch Club.

That said, maybe I'm not the best person to comment on why more people don't start their own company. What would it take for you to start your own startup?

Just Where Is My Personal Data?

Over on the MCQN Ltd. blog I've just started a series of posts to help you find out what you should back-up.

The "My Documents" folder is an obvious candidate to be backed up, but programs like Outlook Express squirrel away your data elsewhere, often in a location that isn't immediately obvious. What I want to do with the series is build it up into a useful repository of instructions on where to find the data, organised by program name. So, if you can think of any program you use which doesn't store its data in the "My Documents" folder, I'd appreciate it if you could leave a comment about it or send me an email.

If It Isn't Blogging, Then What Is It?

Ellee Seymour and Geoff Jones have persuaded local newspaper the Cambridge Evening News to run a column about blogging and business.

However, as Ellee explains, they aren't sure whether or not to use the word "blog" in the title.

I can understand why... it doesn't sound particularly good, but I think we're stuck with it now and if the column is to draw in people who aren't already into blogging then I think it's important to use the same term as everyone else. Maybe the extended version - "weblog" - would be close enough and a bit more business-like?

Regardless of the term they choose, I hope they set-up some sort of blog to go with the column. It would help show the value of blogs if there's a place for the readers to find the links to the original articles mentioned in the column and, more importantly, somewhere for them to discuss and comment upon the column.

UPDATE: Oops, in my rush to get outside and enjoy the sunshine, I forgot to include the proper links to Ellee, Geoff and the CEN. Added them now.

DataCocoon Is Released!

The big moment has arrived! Today sees the launch of DataCocoon!

The website revamp is also live, so if you head over to www.mcqn.com you'll see it in all its splendour. Whilst you're there you can download the full version of DataCocoon, which is free to use for thirty days so that you can decide whether it suits you as a way to keep your data safe.

Then it's an easy process to buy a licence key to unlock the program to work forever - I know, I tried it out last night. If you're one of the first few people to buy it, you'll even get a phonecall from a nice lady at www.plimus.com as they're taking care of keeping all your credit card details safe and sending you a licence key and they need to ensure that there's nothing dodgy with my new vendor account. Good to see that they're careful not to let people use stolen credit-cards and the like, though do let me know if you have any problems with the purchase process.

Now the real fun starts, as I get thrown headlong into the sales and marketing side of things. But first I need to finish off the speech I'll be giving tomorrow afternoon somewhere just outside of Bolton or I won't be deserving of the title "best man"...

CHASE: Global Warming and Wikipedia

Last Tuesday's CHASE meeting was the best that I've attended. And the first given by someone with a blog. Which means it's a bit easier for me to talk about it because I can just provide a link to his write-up of the event.

William Connolley's presentation was split into two topics. First off he talked about climate change, which is something he's involved with professionally as a climate modeller; and then moved on to discuss Wikipedia, where his work as an "admin" is done in his spare time.

It was refreshing and interesting to hear someone talking about global warming without the usual emotionally-charged doom-and-gloom or "there's nothing to worry about" attitude. Lots of graphs showing a variety of possible predictions, from the optimistic to the pessimistic, which he did a good job of explaining. I'd recommend having a look through the presentation slides which are available at the above link (unfortunately you'll need OpenOffice to read it, but as I found out the other day, that isn't too terrible an install. Shame they don't provide a viewer in the same way that PowerPoint does)

The Wikipedia section of his talk contained less information that I didn't know, but I still learnt quite a bit about the structure of the community and some of the details of how they prevent it from degenerating into a loop of opposing factions deleting each other's content. And it's an area that William has some knowledge of, given that one of the pages he's contributed to most is the one on global warming.