External brain-drive. The randomest thought ever...

I guess it needs a brief (and boring) introduction first, i.e. why the hell this thing has crossed my mind. You see, I'm doing an MSc in high performance computing and as a part of my course I have to undertake a project. It's the same one I've been working on for my honours degree: optimising a neural map simulator. The software simulates visual cortex - a small part of the brain responsible for processing visual input. I remember asking once a PhD student from the group what were the goals of this kind of research, and one of them was, as he said, to find out how human memory works.

This made me think: so what if they succeed once? I'm quite sure that one day someone will make this discovery, it's just a matter of time. Given the current speed of development in technology this might even happen during our lifetime, of course if we don't nuke ourselves away by that point. Let's imagine for a second that someone has finally discovered and described all the processes happening inside a human brain. What's gonna happen next? Let's also imagine that they not only found out how it works but also how to interact with it: if brain can be described as a very powerful computer (i.e. it can compute stuff), then it must be possible to read data from it and write back. I cannot imagine the possible range of technologies that could be created based on that interaction! However, let's think about one of them: external hard-drives for brain (brain-drive!): the technology that allows recording memories on interchangeable microchips, thus greatly (possibly infinitely) extending the capabilities of rather limited human memory:

...
- Oh hey man! Long time no see, how's life?
- err. Hi! Who are you?
- Dude, I'm Fred. Fred from your 32 PetaByte blue Sony chip. You know, the one that has a sticker "friends and family" on it...
- Ok, just give me a sec. <...> oh, hey Fred!
...

I guess it would be very confusing to lose one of them. But let's go even further and imagine that would be possible to back-up all lifetime memories of one person on one of such "brain-drives", then wipe clean all memories of another (but not the first one!), and replace them with the backed-up data of the first person (update: adjusting all the biochemical processes inside that brain to make it an exact copy of the first one - don't think about implementation, just assume it's possible), just like you would dump all the data from your old PC hard-drive onto an external drive and then copy to a new one on a different PC: same files, new system.

Now, try to answer that:

• After such operation, would the recipient of memories be the same person as the donor?
• If the first person was you, which one of the two would be the you?

Apologies for this brainfuck, but I had to share.

Innovation, ideas and execution

It's funny to hear people sometimes say that social networking is such a recent thing, only a decade or so old. Guys, we've been doing it for ages! I remember myself blogging with friends and using instant-messaging and sharing photos and doing all that stuff that's called "web two-point-oh" since the first days I connected to www. Well, not as much picture sharing in the old days of dial-up, but that's irrelevant. If you think about facebook, there was absolutely nothing revolutionary about the idea of connecting people online - it's been done before by MySpace, Friendster, Livejournal, etc. E-mail for Christ sake! Remember, back in the day facebook didn't even have the instant messaging system and status updates - stuff that makes a very big part of it now! Actually, here's a very good article by Mark Suster (yes, I'm a fan) that covers everything that I said and a lot more.

Listening to young people talk about social networking as a new phenomenon is a bit like hearing people talk about a remake of a famous song from my youth as though it was the original version.  If you think “Don’t Stop Believing” was first recorded on the show Glee I’m talking to you.

What made facebook so big was not as much the idea as the execution:

• bring it all together
• one page per person
• no nicknames, only your real name
• initially exclusive to students
• free picture sharing
• Events and groups

And, most importantly, all that - combined in one resource. Brilliant!

"Are you on facebook?"
"No, what's that?"
"It's a website, helps you keep in touch with your friends. Come on, everyone is there, can you pass me your laptop?"

Speaking about ideas and innovation, many people say "yeah, maybe I'd want to start a business one day, but I don't have any ideas, and you really need a good one", or "Why the hell would I/you want to do this, it's been already done by ... !". How many times do you think Zuckaberg heard "dude, how is what you're working on actually different from Myspace?". I don't know, but probably a lot.

Ideas are nothing: they don't cost anything and they are not protected by IP in most countries. Execution is everything: it's what brings revenues and changes the world we live in.

Ideas are for everyone: life is full of problems, which could be solved. If it's something a bit more trivial than a fatal disease, it could be solved by you. But all of us prefer to ignore most of them. Because execution is for chosen ones: very few of us can execute and ship the solution.

Ideas are easy. Execution is hard.

Having a "good idea" is essential though because it's the only thing that's going to motivate you and without motivation, face it, you will never ship, so don't even try. From this angle, it's enough for the "good idea" to sound only good to you, and, perhaps, people who are going to be working with you. "It's been done before"? Not the way you'd do it! Although I'm no way I'm arguing against opportunity assessment and market research: it's absolutely essential and helps you figure out how to do it. Being bold helps as well, I guess. Well, that's what the "big guys" say:)

long time no see

It's been a while since I last posted here, thought I should make a quick update just to keep this blog alive, sort of.

Right, that's our logo=) There has been a lot going on, mostly on the development side: at the moment there's sh loads of code in the repository that, unfortunately, does very little on the front side. This is, as I realised, mostly because we decided to skip the prototyping stage and go straight for alpha, and it's an entirely different story, as you do have to write enormous amount of code to ensure scalability, component re-usability, etc. If the whole thing works out - fantastic, we saved some time on prototyping. If not - well, I got to work on my first proper MVC system in PHP, a hell of a lot of experience. It wasn't actually something we talked about as a team, but rather happened naturally. Oh, the team! There's finally only three of us. I counted today: at different stages of the project 7 people have come and gone. Some were really excited about the idea, but when it came to the point of "ok, let's do it. now" suddenly all the motivation disappeared, but whatever, it's just a normal thing to happen.

Well, I think that should be enough for a "quick update". Cheers.

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.