Get Hypersocial!

It's been a while since I last posted here, being terribly overwhelmed by exams and coursework at the moment. However, I couldn't miss this year's last session at E-Club! Tonight's event was hosted together with EUTIC (Edinburgh University Trading and Investment something) at a new venue: good old Appleton Tower instead of Business School. The event was OK, not good and not bad either. Started off with some guy talking about bonds, found it somewhat boring, I'm not into finance at all. That was followed by a few very successful retail entrepreneurs including Shaf Rasul (another Dragon from Dragons' Den) talking about their life stories and a new venture called Big Offers - that bit was interesting. Unfortunately, I urgently had to reply to a few emails during their presentations and as a result couldn't take any notes, so no story, I'm afraid. On the other hand, I started writing this post, hence should share something interesting (-ish? Will you find it interesting?).

I'll talk about one thing that occupied my mind for quite a long time now and, more recently, piles of A4 paper sheets and a few MB's of memory on my hard-drive: one small start-up idea. No, I won't post my business plan  (well, I don't have one yet tbh) here or opportunity assessment, just a very brief summary of what it is. It's called Hypersocial, not a final name though, but rather something I've written at the top of a one-page document where I for the first time decided to summarise the idea, the core concept of which was born two or three years ago in an argument with a good friend of mine over imperfections of democratic system and how bad it sucks sometimes, but that's out of scope anyway. Much more recently I decided to turn this concept into something that could be used as a real web-service one day and provide real value.

Any business idea has to start with a problem, so called user pain, and a solution that is sought to fix it. In my case it was information on the web and the way I am interacting with it. Same as everyone, I like reading interesting articles and watching cool videos on YouTube, but it's often so hard and time consuming to find it because:

1. There's too much rubbish (irrelevant and useless data) shared on the Internet (especially if you think about social media).
2. There's a lot of information that is actually "cool" and "interesting", but just not for me!
3. Finally, often I don't know what I want (Fuck man, that's a big one!)

So, I thought, wouldn't it be nice to have some online resource that knows what you want and aggregates information into a news stream, that is specifically tailored to your interests? That's the first problem which is concerned with getting information.

The second one has to do with giving. What do you get back when you share something good with your friends and the world? Well, I get comments sometimes when I post in this blog and, to be honest, they make me happy. Same thing with "likes" and comments on facebook, @mentions on twitter etc., but, strictly speaking, these don't carry any persistent, long-lasting value, something I could monetise or at least look at and say "Yeah, I've done [that much] good for this world".

So, the system I have in mind, and hopefully you will see one day in your browsers, is a social (hyper-social!) network that knows what you like and gives you that, connects with people that you find interesting, gives a strong incentive to share good quality information with the world and rewards for doing this, even with real-world money! Plus some other cool features not mentioned here. However, there's a catch (there always is!), so one thing to watch out for is: hey, it's gonna be highly addictive!

How is that going to happen? Well, I can't really tell you everything just now, so stay tuned. Although probably next time I'm going to post something here is not going to be any sooner than after a couple of weeks.

Thanks for reading!

Social Enterprise

When hippies go entrepreneurs

Social Enterprise and Social Innovation discussed yesterday at E-Club, not overly impressed with the topic, to be honest. I mean, I really respect all the not-for-profit good-doing and world-saving work they are keen on, especially the passion with which they are trying to save all poor souls in this world, the climate and other stuff, but I guess it's just not my cup of tea. Hope it doesn't make me a bad person. Yesterday's event was featuring Claire Carpenter, founder of The Melting Pot, Scotland's premier space for social innovators. A couple of quotes I wrote down in my notepad at the event:


...It's going to cost you three times more and take three times longer than you think it is. If you knew it was, you wouldn't bother.

Many of us exist without e-mail, but Twitter - we love it!

I hate saying this, but people are becoming a marketplace

Claire was followed by a couple of other speakers, one of them bringing a fair bit of retardation to the conference: this woman, I'm not sure what kind of business she's doing, but presumably it has something to do with making people look like idiots. "Can everyone here please stand up. Now turn to the left, say your name and have a wee bit of laugh, turn to the right, clap your hands and have a wee bit of laugh, turn around and have a big silent laugh and dance..." WHAT THE F....!!! Guess it was just this bit that made me feel negative about the event.

Anyway, today I'm going to check out the Student Market presentation, event hosted by iCue.

Heidi

Do you have the balls?

Cause she certainly does. And these are not my words but I hundred percent agree with that: I wish I was at least half as bad-ass as her. As far as Silicon Valley goes, she's seen and done it all: together with her brother started a software company in 1979 (T/Maker, one of the word processing pioneers); been Apple's vice-president of worldwide developer relations at the worst of Apple's times; been on the board of several public and private companies; worked as mentor capitalist for a while; signed on with Softbank Venture Capital as a general partner in 1999. She's seen companies rise during the late nineties dot-com craze and crash when the bubble popped in 2000. 52 year old now, still sharp and full of energy, seems like she's never going to stop. Because she is Heidi Roizen.

Personally, it was really interesting for me to compare Heidi's interview at the conference today with the one that E-Club was hosting about a month ago featuring Ann Winblad, co-founder of Hummer Winblad Venture Partners. The general message Winblad was trying to get across, or at least as it seemed to me, was "We're there for you! Go ahead and start a business.", while Roizen's was "It's tough out there, tougher than you could ever imagine.". Only 14 years after co-founding T/Maker would she become a millionaire by selling the company to Deluxe. 14 years of extremely hard work, not having much or any personal life and earning just enough to cover the rent and bills. Furthermore, life didn't get much easier for her after selling T/Maker! And that's fair enough, I'm not being dillusional in any sense, I know that entrepreneur's life is quite far from how it's pictured in Hollywood films, but really, when you look her in the eyes you don't want to even think about starting your own company! Having said this, it's just an impression I got, and she can't speak for the entire industry. In any way, this conference wasn't one of those "Hey, life in Silicon Valley is fa-a-a-antastic, let's all be entrepreneurs!" sort of things. For God's sake, the year is 2010, not 1997 and we're in Scotland, not California.

One thing I would disagree with is her belief that if you want to start an IT venture and get it off the ground, you got to do it the American way and you got to think from the very beginning of relocating to States, or at least having significant presence there. True, they have much more capital than we do here in Europe and that's a very big deal, but hey, wasn't Skype born in Estonia?


P.S.

So, really, who are entrepreneurs: freedom fighters, guys from Forbes cover, those who managed to escape the cubicle nation and change the world or are they just paper millionaires who substituted their 9 to 5 five days a week for 9 to 12 seven days a week, those who risk everything for nothing, dream big but never really see those dreams come true? I'll leave that up to you, however one thing that is undeniable: entrepreneurs are people that don't want to live simple lives.

Democracy VS Dot-Com: Round 1

“The best argument against democracy is a five minute conversation with the average voter.”

Sir Winston Churchill

Now, one thing I would like to mention prior to saying what I mainly wanted to say in this post was this: I am in no way a politician, never wanted wanted to be one and can't say I like them very much. Also, haven't read any books on political theory and,generally, never really been into that subject at all. I'm not an expert, but rather an ordinary "user" or an average voter. However, so often it is only an ordinary user who can say "hey, your product sucks because ... and here's how you can make it better!" Please read it and tell me what you think.



Dot-Com Revolution

You know, I think that Web 2.0 has brought into this world much more than just a cheap and efficient way of communicating with people. It has started a new era of ultimate freedom of information. Anybody can share anything they want with people they know or don't, and nothing can stop this. I mean, let's take a look at the music/film industry and copyrights: Napster was forced to shut down back in 2002 by big guys in the entertainment industry who sought to protect their copyrights, however now, eight years later, you can download anything over torrents and it still doesn't cost you a penny to do that. There are two facts that always hold true about protectionism: 1) it occurs every time someone finds the way to do it cheaper (ultimately, for free as in our case) and better, 2) protectionists always loose in the end, no matter what. The way that torrents deal with copyrights is actually amazing: it's just impossible to make anyone responsible for breaching the law if, potentially, hundreds of people were sharing the same file! Most importantly, nobody cares nowadays, everyone does that and it's cool, it gives musicians that you otherwise would've never heard of a chance to make it to the top. Likewise Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, blogs and other social networks have suddenly made it possible to share your ideas and content with millions of other people that you have never met before, all that for free and without much fear of consequences.


Democracy: when it fails

It's probably worth mentioning at this point where I come from, I mean geographically. Belarus. It's a country that used to be a part of a state which several hundred years ago introduced the first constitution in Europe. Now it is in a deep shit from both political and economic points of view, and it's not because people that live in this country are stupid or lazy or whatever, it's just because sometimes democracy fails. When the whole soviet thing collapsed in 1991 we had a chance, but unfortunately it all went downhill from there: now the country is ruled by a dictator who's been in power since 1994 and it doesn't look like it's going to change any time soon, GDP per capita is one of the lowest in Europe, the industry is largely suffering from lack of investment and entirely messed up legal system, all mass media is controlled by the government and so on. To be honest, the entire PESTLE of this country is crippled, if you know what I mean. Interestingly enough, back in the early nineties we had one of the most promising new-built democratic governments among the post-soviet freshly independent states. Then people elected a wrong guy, oops. A bright politician, he always had and still has, despite the poverty and all other damage he caused to the nation, massive support across the country. Why? A very, very charismatic person. People don't vote for his ideas, people vote for his personality, and that's what I think is one thing that is fundamentally wrong about democracy: politicians.

To have some numbers at hand, let's consider UK. At the moment the country is ruled by the coalition of two parties: 307 Conservative MP's and 57 Lib-Dems hold the legislative power. It's 364 people all together. No doubt, these guys are bright public speakers and excellent negotiators. However, do you really think that out of 60 million people that populate this country only 364 are smart enough to propose and legislate bills? You know, maybe there are people that that worked out better ways to deal with unemployment, credit crunch and environmental problems but you will never hear these ideas because they just aren't that great as public speakers. As long as the system functions, at least somehow, nobody cares. It's only when it utterly fails we start thinking of how we could change things and live better lives.


democracy.com

About two or three years ago I had a long argument with a good friend of mine about democratic concepts. You know, he's American, I'm Russian by origins, so we have quite different points of view. Anyway, the main conclusion of that argument was: yes, it's shit, but can you think of better ways? (that's, roughly, what Churchill said long time ago) This made me think, well, what if we could design, at least at the conceptional level, a system that would take advantage of modern tools and technology that would help to make this world a better place?

That's right, move the democratic system to the web! Anyone can vote and anyone can propose new laws. If local community likes your idea then it starts naturally generating buzz, as people discuss and vote for it. In other words, the visibility of your idea on the web grows like a social bubble, it's a bit similar to the way Facebook Top News system works. As soon as it reaches the regional level, people around your state or county will see it as one of the top proposed laws. Anyone can vote for or against the idea and propose their amendments (which can also be voted for or against) to it. When it reaches the top, country-wide level, the discussion is finalised and some legal entity responsible for that legislates the bill. That's it.



Conclusion (sort of...)

Now I'm not claiming this to be a panacea for the modern world political systems, but rather a cool thing to think of. Some might say, you Russians really have this thing for revolutions:) Well, that's really not what I meant to say by all that. Some time ago I mentioned that later on I would post about my business idea. Although it is definitely not about starting a social revolution or anything like that, what I presented here is the underlying concept of the system we're working on, this is where the idea comes from. Because, you know, if they, all the guys that made it to the top, say you got to dream big, then this is my dream: to live in a better world.

Thanks for reading!

Valley Girl in Edinburgh and a great negotiations day!!!

Yesterday Jesse Draper, the Valley Girl (http://valleygirl.tv/) was giving a presentation in my IE class, an excellent insight into social media. Amazing woman, though I felt a bit colour-blind afterwards, as everything around seemed a bit green-ish. Probably my colour recognition got diluted by the amount of pink I saw in two hours=)) Later on, at the E-Club conference she was interviewing Ralf Klinner, the founder of Funky Moves, and also one of the dragons from Dragons' Den.


A bit earlier that day I managed to get on board two friends of mine to help developing the web-site (I'll post about the idea very soon), which is absolutely fantastic! I worked with both of them previously on different projects and they're not only great web developers but also complement each other's and my skills. Really hope everything goes well, because if some team could implement the system in the amount of time we have, then it's only a team like this.

The most amusing spam letter I've ever received!!!

That's just something from the other world=)))

Dear,

Kind regard, I am Juan Lomeli, please, kindly permit my contacting you through this medium I am compelled to contact you via this medium for obvious reasons which you will understand when we discuss details of my proposition. Please i will like you to reply to me through my mail address so that we will know each other very well, i am looking forward to your positive confirmation to enable us have an important discussion the we will start from there which will include my introduction, i will send my photos later.

thank you and God bless

Mr Juan Lomeli

Launch48, looking back

So, what the hell has happened last weekend? I'm still not sure, way too many thoughts and emotions, think it'll take a while to process all that. Even though I felt like I was hit by a train in the morning, now I'm surprisingly fresh. Now I'm asking myself whether I'd go there again if it was happening next weekend, and you know what? Without a shadow of a doubt, yes I would! And I'd easily recommend anyone, because you wouldn't get such experience anywhere else and believe me, it's worth your money and time!

Launch48 Edinburgh started with a conference, where speakers from Skyskanner, WikiJob, The Difference Engine and other successful businesses were giving presentations on a number of very interesting topics, mainly about going from local to global and what issues companies have to deal with when entering foreign markets. Anyway, I've talked about it already.

Found an interesting note on the event and projects we've been working on: http://benwerd.com/2010/11/launch48-edinburgh-an-inspiring-start/ . I think we did a very good job, definitely top effort from the team, still can't believe we managed to pull it off in only two days with a team of complete strangers. Really don't know where all this will be going after this weekend and if it's going anywhere at all. It largely depends on... well, it just depends. It's a very interesting case study for me, and I am really hoping that comparetheuniversities is not going to fall apart just now. We'll see.

....

was trying to write a post about what happened at launch today, but it just doesn't seem possible to concentrate on writting, so I'll probably concentrate on sleeping. I'll talk about it either tomorrow or on Monday...

Saturday

Second day of Launch, 1pm. The project I'm taking part in is called comparetheuniversities.com and it's about creating a website for young people to help them make a decision which university to go to and what course to take. One of the coolest features, I believe, is integration with Facebook and LinkedIn and mapping university courses with jobs that people have. For example, if you search for computer science, the website would give you the list of professions you're likely to have after graduating. Likewise, If you want to become, say game developer, the website would suggest what course you should do then.

I think generally it's going pretty well. Had a tiny conflict, but it's been resolved. That's all for now, stay tuned.

Btw, you can follow us on twitter: @launch48, @compareuni, @megatelevizor, @aboynejames, @redsteg, @macleodan, @jimmi2009, @mconnell

Launch48 Day 1

Hey. So, the first day is over. I'm very very tired, it's past midnight already and I should really go to bed soon so this is going to be just a quick update. The conference was pretty cool, some very interesting ideas, very much liked the skyskanner's presentation. Following are just a few things I wrote down in my notepad, quotes and ideas that I thought sounded cool and worth writting down:

• Americans don't like using non-american web-sites
• Think global, act local
• You don't have to be in silicon valley, you can be anywhere to run business
• One of the most difficult things in business is bridging the gap between the technology people and business people
• 2 main rules of successful start-up: 1) Spend no money 2) Take the money

Alright, hopefully tomorrow I'll have a chance to write more about all that and the project I'll be working on, but for now... zzzzZZZzzzZZzzz................

Hacker's manifestum=)

When battery's full and when battery's low

Whenever you're single or when you're in love

Whenever you're sober, whenever you're drunk

Whenever you're up and whenever you're down

Whenever you're sane or whenever you're mad

Wherever you are and what thoughts you have had...

... it don't matter.

You can write CODE. And what you write is BEAUTIFUL.

Happy Hacking!

update

at the moment sitting in a computations with distributed resources (CDR) class - probably the most boring one on the week. Anyway, yesterday I proposed my idea for our IE project. Generally people like it but say it's very complex. 'course it is! At the moment even thinking about the algorithms we might have to use is driving me mad, though it might be too early to think about implementation details for now. So, the team agreed to work on this, which is good. On the other hand, none of them is taking part 2 of this course which runs over the second semester, and that's bad. Don't know how much support I'll get from them in terms of coding the system, but I'd appreciate any, any...

thoughts aloud

Starting to get an urge to do some coding. Hm... what should I start with, interesting=) Probably do some work on Topographica again, especially since I got quite a few new ideas.

post #1

I see an enormous amount of opportunity in parallel programming, I can feel if with all of my inner senses, but I can't quite figure out what it is. It's driving me nuts.