Bizcamp Newry: That old guy!

I enjoyed Bizcamp Newry yesterday, though it was a long day for me.  One of the main questions I got of the day was about a gentleman who asked two questions during my Q&A.

1. What time does this finish?

2. I’ve learned nothing from your talk, tell me one thing…..

It was a curve ball, a big one at that.  Like Mary McKenna said to me afterwards (to paraphrase), if you put yourself in those positions of public speaking then you are putting yourself in line for these sorts of response.

There’s a bunch of ways of handling it.  First things first, he is entitled to his own opinion, he is also entitled to his free speech and if he wished to make his opinions known I’m happy with that.

The key here is how to deal with it.  First thing I did was apologise that my talk didn’t meet his expectations. We can’t please everyone at the end of the day and I don’t make it my mission in life to please every person that crosses my path. The risk there is that the same person will expect you to jump high the next time.  One thing if it’s your employer a different thing if it’s a stranger. Secondly I rattled through the slides in my head and reassured myself that the slides did their job.

I answered his questions in the best way I could and confirmed that he was accepting of the answers.  At the end of the day I can’t do much more than that.  Once happy I moved on. From there everything seemed easier.

Sometimes these things come to test us, how do we and how should we respond can be two different things. I could have torn his head off but that would have been the wrong thing to do.  There are days a talk will go well and there are days we can stand up there and stumble on our feet in a grand manner.  It’s all part of the learning experience, we can choose to take something from it and move on or let it fester and cause us pain.

“The Stage”, a platform that commands your attention is a strange place to stand.  In Hebrew times it was used as a place of judgement and in Greek times it was a place for entertainment.  Now the stage is both of these things combined.  You can entertain but if you don’t meet the expectations of those you intend to communicate to then expect the judgement to return at a rapid rate of knots.

With 25 years of standing on stages with a bass guitar around my neck I’ve had my fair share of audient responses.  My favourite is still, “I thought you were shit”, which is fine but it looks like the other 4,999 people there thought it was good.

Bizcamp Newry Slides

Bizcamp Newry was a great success. For those who were asking, or are interested, in the slides you can download them now.

Bootstrap diaries: Will work anywhere…..

In the final throws of the launch product being ready it’s been all (my) hands on deck, so here’s today’s schedule.

6.00am – Coffee and fire up the laptop.

8.00 am – Get myself looking presentable (I think there should be a book called, “Dressing Gown Entrepreneurs”)

9.00a m – Car into tyre centre, made some calls to launch customers.

10.00 am – Back to the house, code a little more.

11.25 am – Head over to Portrush.

12.00 pm – Encamp in Ground in Portrush, coffee is excellent and the cinnamon swirly thing is going down a treat.  More work done…

1.20 pm – Head back to Coleraine, sit in the car park and do some more work in the car.

1.40 pm – Sainsbury’s car park, more of the same.

3.00 pm – Back at the house where my daughter and I play Super Mario Bros on the Wii

5.00 pm – Downtime…….

6.00 pm – Family time making dinner.

7.00 pm – My world stops for TV Burp, makes me honk with laughter which I am not ashamed about.  I need this programme…

8.00 pm – An evening of on and off development work, managed to get an awful lot done.

If you have a full time job and am working on a startup then the evening and weekend route is the way you’ll probably go.  It’s not easy, even more so if you do have a family.  The main thing to remember is that it is achievable.  Good luck.

Bootstrap diaries: There are 24 hours in a day.

How you chop your day up is really up to you.  If you are putting your startup together while holding down a job or doing freelance work then your time is a) limited and b) incredibly precious.

My good friend Simon Keen has been trying to get me into the ways of working in the early morning.  The reasons are simple for me. Firstly, I work better in the mornings I’m a morning person and secondly, I do need some family time.  So first things first.

Early bedtime……

As Simon is working on something and I’m working on something it makes sense to encourage each other to get up at 5am.  We will then hold a quick call on Skype at 5:30, gives us time to wipe the sleep from our eyes and get a coffee down our throats.

Two and a half hours clear work, plus I’ve got 40 mins on the bus if I need to do anything urgent.

When I get home from work my brain is foggy…. I need rest and there’s some wallpaper to go up.

Let’s see how this week progresses.

Bootstrap diaries: pre launch feedback

Wednesday night was Open Coffee in Coleraine.  Though I’m now asked many times why I need it now there’s a steady stream of work, I still get a buzz from seeing the good things that businesses are doing.

Better still was I got some good feedback on my own product and my thoughts were aligning quite nicely with what was going through my head as well.  Feedback though leads to new ideas and sometimes you just have to stop yourself doing anymore development before you go to launch.

The main thing is to put your product in front of potential customers and not developers, they are breeds apart sometimes.  I’m not say that all developer feedback is useless, far from it, but you need to get to the people who are going to use your thing/thang/doofer/doobrie on a daily basis.

The one feature I was toying with is a firm requirement so it got put into the main system this morning.  And the product went from being excellent to being a game changer.  Me, for one, I am a happy man.

So to recap:

• Get to open coffee or any other networking event. Networking face to face is where your potential customers are.
• You can explain things is more than sentences of 140 characters.
• Seek out who you want to demo to, be picky with your potentials.  Are they a short term, mid term or long term proposition?
• If the product is work in progress say so but also have a firm roadmap in your head of when you are ready to launch.  Also mention the future roadmap, it shows commitment to your potential customer and the product you own.
• Open Coffee is usually a relaxed place, so you can relax too.

The pros and cons of video conferencing.

Tonight was the night for a code4pizza meeting in Belfast.  Now I’m fairly settled with the idea that I’m in the minority when it comes to location.  So Matt and I tried Skype video from my house to Core Belfast.

The Pros

Well I was certainly there and I could say hello to folk.  I got the majority of the conversations which is the main point of the night.  I didn’t have to stay there all night, I could break off into a group of one if I wanted to but it wouldn’t have been much fun.

The Cons

Laptop microphones are the main issue as they are designed for one to one conversations and not a public forum.  I kept a chat window open just in case I needed to type something.  Luckily the good folk in Belfast gave me space to speak when I needed to.

The only other real drag was that I couldn’t have pizza.  I’ll have to go back to the drawing board on that one.

More talking for February

Following the positive feedback from my talk at BarcampDerry I’ll be doing more talking in February.

• Bizcamp Newry – Saturday 6th February at Southern Regional College, Newry.
• Bizcamp Belfast – Saturday 20th February at the Black Box, Belfast

I’ll be talking on (I think) a few stories about starting up and mobile startup in Northern Ireland, where to go and who to talk to. All good fun as far as I’m concerned.

Code4PizzaCollator: The first outside test.

On my way back from Derry today I gave the Code4Pizza app a whirl to see how it would perform in the realworld.  Better than I had imagined to be honest….

My original concern turned out to be no concern.  When you speed past a stop and get the location I was afraid that the GPS would take time to update.  What actually happens is that the GPS lat/lon data will constantly update as the device is moved.  All you then have to do it tap the “Store Location” button and it’s saved.

As well as Code4PizzaCollator there’s a web based app by Alex McRoberts which does the same sort of thing.  It’s in development at the moment but it will work on iPhone, Andriod and other mobile devices with a connection. You can find it here http://www.koachi.com/mapit/

The reason I didn’t go with a fully connected app was simple.  Connections in the NW of the province are up and down.  You don’t get much 3G coverage apart from Derry and Coleraine at present.  So I wanted to be able to collate data and send in one go to a server when I wanted to.

One unanswered (possibly because it’s unasked) is: at a bus station do I register every stop? I think it’s a good idea for the following reason.  Ultimately I’d like to see an app where a tourist could stand at any bus stop and with GPS pull the info on the different buses that leave and at what times. With near field connectivity (NFC) we should be paying the bus fares with our phones as well, this is already happening in some European countries already.

First we need to complete data and that’s where the crowdsourcing comes in.  With these two apps there’s no reason to say we can’t collect the bus stop data for the whole province.

Code4PizzaCollator: The first push.

An excellent day of coding today as I spent the day hooking up the database storage to the iPhone.  This was all new to me but there’s some good documentation out there.  I used some sample code from Bill Dudney and Chris Adamson’s book “iPhone SDK Development” so I could get used to using SQLite (cos I’m a MySQL kinda guy).

The most useful thing I learned today….. the way that the SDK will copy the SQLite database to a WHOLE new place.  Turns out the insert code was working fine I just didn’t know where it was going.



NSLog(documentFolderPath); is your friend.

So it’s all coming along nicely, the first commit went up to github this afternoon so other people can have a play with it (assuming that you’re all bored with the snow now).  The next job is to bundle up the saved locations and send them to a server (somewhere to be decided).  There’s plenty of resources on getting an iPhone app to pull JSON data in from a URL but not a lot about transmitting it.  This is going to be fun

Code4PizzaCollator: Enriching the community, crowdsourcing and doing something useful.

The basic design from Interface Builder

So what’s the big idea?

A few months ago Matt Johnston organised a small event called Code4Pizza.  The idea being to get the bus stop data for the province and trying to get it out into the community so the community could do something useful with it.

As with all things in Belfast I very rarely get to them.  All my business is really in the north west, the idea is not to get into a pity party about how nothing goes on over here.  It does, we had Barcamp Derry in October and nothing stopped the Belfast folk coming over…. so……..

For those kind folk who heard me talk at Barcamp Derry I did mention a few things about “just doing it” and how I don’t mind how the code is in the first release as long as it works.  Something that some of my collegues at Learning Pool are now making sure I won’t forget

I love the idea of Code4Pizza but I can’t really do anything from where I’m sitting, or can I?  In getting myself back in line with iPhone development and getting my head around Interface Builder’s little ways I wanted to do the following:

• Create an open source project that other members of the Code4Pizza community could work on if they wanted.
• With the app use it to provide Open Data NI, Translink and Code4Pizza more data on where the bus stops for other parts of the province are (Belfast is well documented but it seems from conversations with folk that some parts of the province aren’t great).  Instead of whining about how Translink don’t do anything why not help out instead?
• It means that I can learn some new stuff.  I’m not up on my git and github repository skills so it’s good excuse to polish those up too.
• I get to know the iPhone SDK a lot better by doing something useful than just another bunch of little demos.

All good reasons as far as I’m concerned.

So how does it work?

My commute to Pooly Towers is on the bus every morning. Now I’ve been on the same route many times over the last couple of months so I know where the stops are.  All I need is a method to track them and store them.  That’s where the app comes in.

All I want to store is the latitude and longitude when I pass the stop and what route I was on.  The idea is that developers all over the province can download the source code from github and install it themselves and collate more data if they are on the bus.  If we can crowd source the other data outside of Belfast then I think that will benefit everyone in the province at the end of the day.

So, where is it?

The source code will be hosted on github.  I haven’t put the initial core release of code up but I’ll announce on Twitter when I do.

So, what stage is the code at?

So far the application can pickup the location via GPS.  The button actions work it’s just the SQLite3 database that needs sorting out and the mechanism to upload the data.  There’s a field for the route of the bus number as well but I have left the alphabetic characters in the keyboard as I know there are some route numbers like “FY8″ in the Derry area.

There’s only three buttons: one to get the location, one to store the location and one to upload the stored locations to an online place (like a website/db etc).

The icon is done…. it’s a pizza.