billroberts

This event is a fantastic idea - very well done to Gordon and the team for getting it off the ground.

Chances are in the first year it will be a mix of local folks and people who are coming to Edinburgh anyway for the 'main' festival and fringe. But August is a fantastic time to be in Edinburgh and this could grow into one of the main worldwide tech events.

That's true, but you have to work pretty hard on a bike to get your pulse rate as high as you do by running. (I've done a fair bit of cycling and running over the years). For an inexperienced cyclist, tired leg muscles tend to limit the effort before their heart and lungs do. And it's always tempting to take a rest on the downhills. So I reckon in most cases, you burn significantly fewer calories per hour cycling than you do running. On the other hand most people are capable of cycling for say two hours (if they have time) whereas it takes a lot of training to be able to run for two hours.

I love and depend on the web for learning and for communication, but my most useful creative times are away from the keyboard, either mulling over ideas while walking, or scribbling notes on paper. You've got to learn what works for you and make sure you can step back from the always-on addiction.

I suggest reading http://www.withouthotair.com for a reasoned discussion of this issue. A couple of quotes:

"if we covered the windiest 10% of the country [the UK] with windmills (delivering 2 W/m2), we would be able to generate 20 kWh/d per person, which is half of the power used by driving an average fossil-fuel car 50 km per day".

"I should emphasize how generous an assumption I’m making. Let’s compare this estimate of British wind potential with current installed wind power worldwide. The windmills that would be required to provide the UK with 20 kWh/d per person amount to 50 times the entire wind hardware of Denmark; 7 times all the wind farms of Germany; and double the entire fleet of all wind turbines in the world."

A friend of mine who keeps a small flock of sheep as a hobby swears by the run-them-down technique. He doesn't have a sheepdog and sheep can be difficult to catch for a human. But he says that if he is prepared to chase one sheep round the field for 45 minutes or so, then it will give up, even though he can never catch it in a sprint.

iChat, Skype, Swirrl, email

You're absolutely right that that's how it ought to work. And when you have a good relationship with your clients you can sometimes get close to that. In practice it won't always work like that, but you can try to pick and choose your assignments and 'train' your clients to move in that direction.

Services-based companies are of course a well-established and perfectly respectable type of business, but a very different kind of business to a product company. I worked in a service business for many years and it has good and bad points. It's less risky, because in general you don't do any work unless you know you are going to get paid for it, whereas with a product you have to do lots of development and marketing before you really find out whether your product will sell or not.

You do get lots of variety, but on the other hand you don't get so much choice or control of what you are working on.

A successful product business can be more successful (in terms of profit) than a service business. Because if lots of people like your product you sell a lot of it, with very little marginal cost of production.

For a services business to make a lot of money, then you need to have a lot of staff. Then you need an HR department and middle managers and procedures and a dress code and before you know it you're a pointy-haired boss :-) And then making sure all those mouths remain fed is a tough task for the sales team. If you are short of work, you have to keep paying the salaries and you can lose money really quickly, whereas in good, busy times, the profits you can make are capped by the number of people and acceptable charge rates.

Of course you don't need to try to get big - you could set up a small service business and keep yourself in a pretty good lifestyle, without trying to become the next Accenture.

My choice to go for a product style company was mainly because of the creative aspects of it - I wanted to be able to decide myself what would go into the software, rather than having to develop someone else's idea of a product all the time.

Does anyone else think that the shortened URL business is somewhat artificial and limited? I understand the benefit of fitting the URL into a tweet, but full length URLs have a lot of advantages: you can make a judgement on the likely interest or usefulness of the link before you click on it. And there are some links that I normally wouldn't touch with someone else's ten foot cattle prod, which I might click on because I can't do reverse-hashing in my head. (Obviously some of the more mathematically talented HN readers probably can :-)

If Twitter introduces a new way of inserting links then these businesses could disappear overnight.

Yep I think that's the key problem with business plans: estimating sales. You can make a reasonable prediction of costs, but most revenue forecasts are a mix of wishful thinking and random number generation.

Some non-twitter thoughts:

If you haven't already read the Cluetrain Manifesto, then you should. (www.cluetrain.com). 10 years old now but lots of good stuff about why a business should be interested in social networks.

Also LinkedIn groups: lots of people are using those as a way of getting involved in conversations relevant to their businesses - representing their companies, not just as individuals.

We applied unsuccessfully to TC50 last year. One thing that caught us out a little is that they are very strict on the no publicity before the conference rule - that's fair enough of course since they want to maximise publicity/exclusivity around the event itself. But it meant that we held back from publicising ourselves waiting for their decision (and due to the large volume of applicants, final decisions were somewhat later than advertised). Unfortunately when the decision came through it was negative - we would have loved to go, but it's not the only way to get yourself known. You've got to think carefully about the timing of your company launch and how gambling on acceptance to TC50 might affect your other marketing efforts.

"how do you get value from providing it" - how do you get value from publishing anything on the web? The same principles apply. The value comes from making information more readily available, so people can find out new things, make connections, do their jobs better. If you want to make money from it (and of course a lot of data has already been paid for by the taxpayer) then you can do all the usual stuff: charge for access, charge for services built on top of the data, provide it free and use it to build your brand or to gain attention of people that can be sold to advertisers etc.

One important use case is publishing data for re-use within an enterprise or other organisation - it doesn't necessarily need to always be public.

I know that twitter started as an SMS app, and it may still be popular as such (I always use it on the web), but as internet-on-your-phone becomes more ubiquitous, sticking to the limitations of SMS becomes unnecessary. I'm not sure how far we are from that SMS to internet swapover, but my guess is not very far.

I agree totally. We decided a while back that we wouldn't attempt to support IE6 - life is too short. We do support IE7, but still spend a lot of time on fixes and workarounds for minor incompatibilities. If our stuff works on Firefox, it generally works on Safari too, with no extra effort, but an oft-repeated phrase in our company is an exasperated "f*^&&ing IE!"

Thanks for the explanations! All is now clear. Yep, having to eat that would certainly make you work hard on your startup :-)

The problem I find with it is that if you follow more than a handful of active tweeters, then there are too many tweets to read in a reasonable amount of time. That said, I find I get useful information from people with similar (work-related) interests to mine, and a way to 'get to know' people, which can lead to more in-depth conversations when you have something you want to converse about. (twitter.com/billroberts)

I have a speculative (read: probably garbage) theory, orthogonal to the one in this article, that you can get some idea of a person's personality from their looks. My hypothesis is that as long as you are not too young, then the most common expressions that your face assumes - frowning, smiling, scowling etc - have some effect on your wrinkles and facial muscle development. So maybe by looking at someone, you can see some aspect of the history of their facial expressions and hence guess if they are generally a cheerful, miserable or sneering kind of person.

A corollary (also probably garbage!) is that one of the clues that helps you guess a person's nationality by looking at them is these similar aspects of 'face-shaping': either through the most common sounds they make while speaking their language, or the typical mannerisms of that culture. Obviously this would only work within a group of people that have broadly similar racial characteristics. My 'sample group' is mainly from western European countries.

It's the tram drivers that really take no prisoners :-)

We don't support IE6 on our web app, just IE7, Firefox2/3, Safari 3 (and Chrome works fine). We didn't give up on IE6 lightly, but we use a lot of javascript and getting it to work correctly on IE6 would have taken a lot of time, that we decided to spend on making the app better for the more modern browsers. We realise we're losing some potential customers, but have to balance that against having a better product for the browsers we do support.

As we currently appeal to a mainly early-adopter crowd, then it's not a big deal for us: only a small proportion of our site visitors use IE6 (FF is the most popular). Hopefully once we go a but more mainstream, even the big corporations will have got round to upgrading!

Surely google can correlate the contents of your mail with blogs on getting fired/splitting up with your partner/falling out with your relatives and advise you whether or not you should send it.

Prakash - thanks for posting this. Yes, we 'flicked the switch' yesterday on the first release of Swirrl. It's a hosted wiki designed for collaborating around data. The data side of it is in fact an RDF database with a spreadsheet-like interface.

It's early days for us, but we'd be delighted if any HN readers want to take a look and give us some feedback.

credit card? Assuming the Indian company can set itself up with a merchant ID and payment processor.

It would be crazy to assign unfiltered params to your model objects/DB and I would be astonished if anyone did it - except I suppose inexperienced programmers following simplified example code. But if you code web apps without knowing roughly what you're doing, you're going to fall into security traps whatever framework you use.

Yeah, we demo'd to Jason. Haven't heard yet about round 2, though I suspect the long silence means bad news. Based on his article, at least we got most of the basics right, though I think we failed on the crucial one, of getting across why our product is really interesting.

If you work on your computer all day every day, as many HN readers do, and it lasts a couple of years, then paying a bit extra for something that makes that work more efficient or more pleasurable is well worth it. After years of PC use, I changed to a Mac a couple of years ago, and it's worth every penny.

Yes, the development of the web is definitely not over! Lots of great ideas there. At swirrl.com we're working on something like Paul's item 22, with a bit of 5 thrown in.

Car company hires someone with experience in car industry shocker.

I'm not picking on these guys in particular, because it's a widely used phrase, but does the English language really deserve "liquidity event" instead of, say, "selling the company"?

The UK has the same climate of fear regarding any interaction between adults and children.