Innovation in Software

Jessica Mah (who I’ll come back to in a minute) posted a great article this morning titled “Why 99% of Entrepreneurs Fail: Because they don’t do anything”:

“There are three types of amateur entrepreneurs out there, and in my young life, I’ve been every single one of them. By coming to terms with my failures, I’m more prepared to classify which type of amateur entrepreneur I am, and thus preventing myself from failing in the same way again.”

Reading through the three types of amateur entrepreneur, I’m ashamed to admit over the last 3 years over the two businesses I’ve been involved in I’ve fallen into all three. Thankfully due to client work I have not starved to death.

Realistically, for those of us who have to juggle multiple clients and projects in order to survive, pay the rent and still produce our own projects: having 100% dedicated focus is near impossible. That said, getting on with it, doing it well and not getting too distracted is probably a good plan, and certainly one that I had already sketched out at the beginning of this year.

Oh, and Jessica, yes, she deserves a comment. The phrase about her struggling to run a company as a ninth-grader made me want to find out who the hell this person was. The answer? A junior at UC Berkeley, pictured at the model UN at Harvard, and then this in the write-up about herself you discover:

“At age 13, I wanted my own website. In order to pay for hosting bills, I decided to host other people’s websites. The company grew and grew and 1,100 clients later, I decided to sell. The company made barely enough money to buy me a decent car. Firstly, I hate it when people say that everybody was in the hosting business. Unlike most others, I didn’t believe in reselling. I had my own datacenter floor space and owned every one of my servers. Now that’s what I call a real dedicated server company. I sold my clients off for several reasons: 1) I was getting bad marks in school. 2) I wanted a real social life. 3) Nobody in their right mind would invest into a 14 year old. We didn’t have enough cash to take our business to the next level and had the choice to sell off young, so we did. The rest is history.

At age 15, I went back to high school as a bored and unmotivated sophomore. I didn’t have a business to manage, so getting straight A’s wasn’t a difficult task. I then decided that high school sucked and proceeded to skip two years of school. I finally finished high school a week before my 16th birthday.”

Two points:

1. Watch her. You get that feeling the only reason she’s not on the front cover of Fast Company is because she’s at college and not yet 21, right? Me too.
2. Yes, I’m kind of sick too. I thought I was a young business person when I set up on my own for the first time at 27 years of age. Three years on, I now feel positively ancient compared to Jessica…

Oh, and if you’re reading this Jessica, you should stay in tech. Tech needs more women. We’re tired of being the fat white-boy club. Feel free to try and change the face of our industry, because hell we’re not doing too well on our own.

I should have learned by now: January is a rubbish month for most things.

Not least because it follows a time of high spirits, but the bleakness of watching people fail their resolutions, struggle with credit card bills and deal with a slow business cycle would normally make it bad enough. Watching the pound lose face in the markets, people whine about a credit crunch and for several businesses I deal with to baton down the hatches just made it all the more depressing for this young entrepreneur.

Regardless of how bleak it was in other ways, January has been a great month for events in Manchester, and I thought it might be nice to give people a quick overview of what has been going on. In other words: Sorry I’ve been so quiet, here’s something to make up for it.

One highlight for me this month was the fact BarCamp Manchester was announced and booked out in less than a week. There’s still quite a bit of work to be done to get the final few pieces of the jigsaw together, but I’m confident it’s going to be a great event. If not, well, I’ll probably insist it had nothing to do with me!

Another highlight was the new format Co-working day and OpenCoffee that was a bit of an experiment that seemed to work really well for the co-workers. We need to get the OpenCoffee attendance up, but other than it worked well. In fact, the idea is so tempting that Leeds are going to be experimenting with the format in March. I’ll be opening up registration for the next Manchester one on Monday morning (planned to happen on the 26th February, space strictly limited), so keep your eyes peeled if you want in on it.

At the last Co-working day incidentally, it was decided to form a co-operative with a view to taking on a space permanently. Watch this space.

Also this month I managed to sit down and have a coffee face-to-face with Craig Smith who is the man behind O’Reilly GMT and I’ve agreed to start putting more content up there of a more generic European tech nature – at the moment it feels like a cross between an events listing blog and the occasional PR run. I’m working up story ideas at the moment, but if any of you have ideas on how you would like to see it develop, let me know.

The Northern geek scene has been developing in other ways as well. In the last month we’ve seen Manoj step up his events with the re-launch of the NW Startup 2.0 site. Always the man of ambition, he’s going for three regular events each tailored to an audience that four years ago probably didn’t exist in Manchester. I’ll be going to as many of them as time affords, keen to meet up with people who don’t make it to the more geeky events.

And of course those lovely Yorkshire types have been stretching out ahead of us North Westerners with the launch of NorthPack. Since the death of afeeda I’ve missed having a single place to track the whole of the local scene’s blogosphere. Good work lads.

Also, there appears to have been a miscommunication about my anatomy in the last month, as I got an invite to the very first Manchester Geek Girls Dinner being run by Valerie de Leonibus. It sounds like a hoot, so I hope it builds into a regular event like many others have around the UK and abroad.

All good stuff.

February and March are already looking like busy months, and with all that plus my own business to sort out it looks like the whole of 2008 is going to be filled with inspiration, communication and ideas. How on earth can we fail? :-)

I’m almost human again after last week’s ‘grand tour’. I am however a little behind on blog articles. As promised though, some notes from Thursday’s mashup* event:

Sun Microsystems were providing space for this event at their office in Sale. It’s a great venue, but the trip out of central Manchester during rush hour left your correspondent a little frazzled. All trips out of Manchester leave this correspondent frazzled though, and it may have just been the task of crossing 8 lanes of heavy traffic that did it.

We opened with David Terrar from Blognation giving us a run down on where he’s seeing ‘Web 2.0’ technology in the enterprise. He touched on the BBC using blogs and wikis extensively, and discussed Pfizer’s use of the same. A lot of people seem to be trying to lock into consumer-orientated applications because the current success stories – Facebook, Flickr, MySpace – are in that arena. I think David is onto something in that the real money is bringing this style of social technology into the enterprise.

Simon Grice then did a more bi-directional talk on the premise that Web 2.0 doesn’t exist. I piped up and got agreement with Simon on the point that indeed the very first web browsers had “edit” capabilities and at some point, somebody decided it was too anarchic and turned the web into a broadcast medium. We’re now just getting back to where the web should have been more than a decade ago.

I also had to admit to the room that I have hired deviants in the past. Long story, I’ll fill you in some other time…

Simon discussed the disruptive nature of new media, and cited his own recently-launched testcard.tv – a site lawyers working on behalf of media companies will no doubt be particularly interested in.

UPDATE: Checking URLs, I notice that testcard.tv has been put into an “Under maintenance” mode, citing the takedown of a similar service and asking people to head over to their blog – it’s one way to get traffic I suppose. :-)

Next up, was Lee Strafford of Project Sahara. He’s trying to gauge interest on this side of the Pennines in what could be an interesting project. Talking to people after the meeting, the consensus was “wait and see where it goes”, which is unfortunate as it needs people to get involved now for it go anywhere. I’m going to do some talking around over the next few weeks and see what interest there is in getting stuck in at an early stage.

We then skipped the break – Ouch! Don’t do that again! My brain was hurting! – before moving onto case studies of NetVibes, edocr and Meecard. All interesting stuff, but I was already quite familiar with NetVibes and edocr – Meecard was a little food for thought though.

There then followed some discussions, some light networking, some pizza and a few beers before wandering off home.

All in all, this is a more polished and business-focused version of GeekUp. As a format it has a lot of potential, and providing the case studies and speakers can be lined up it could be a regularly anticipated event. Some people complained about the £25 entry fee (a sentiment I broadly agree with), but I know several people want to try and help out on that front.

I also find myself a little disappointed that I’m going to have to wait until February until the next one, so that has to be a reassuring thumbs-up for Manoj and Simon.

Whilst some may ask what could you do with infinite bandwidth, others are actually trying to get there. Internet2 – a research project that is surprisingly low-profile outside of those directly involved – has recently reached 100Gbps and there are, as ever, plans to go faster.

We’re at an odd period in the history of the Internet when it comes to bandwidth. We’re at speeds fast enough to provision most people’s textual and audio requirements just fine, and a few years away from being able to provide enough space for everybody’s HD video requirements. The question is, what next? What uses can we put higher speeds to? We’re quickly reaching the point where we can send data around between nodes faster than the nodes can do something useful with the data.

Once we’re at the point where data can consistently be transferred quicker than it can be processed – either by a computer or a human – we’re at a new point in the history of the network. Suddenly the big powerful boxes stitched together with string become mere silos for the data. And we, the users, reach a point where there is true saturation. At what point will the capacity for data transfer outreach the collective human capacity for making use of it?