StartVI – The incubator

Oh how I have waited for something like this.  When the huge slow to react monsters can’t deliver what’s actually needed then it gives space for smaller more nimble creatures to evolve and react.  Welcome the small, mobile and beautiful www.startvi.com

VI is:

VI (pronounced ’six’) is a Virtual Incubator for very early stage companies based in Northern Ireland which focuses heavily on mentoring and operational readiness.

And how Northern Ireland needs it. All we have to do is get the Derry branch sorted out….

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: 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.

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.

You’re only as good as your network says you are.

I think it’s fair to say, in reflection, that 2009 was basically spent trying to find my centre of gravity. Towards November I was starting to sound like a bit of a personal pity party so something had to change.  Thanks to my network, finding out the technology landscape and talking to good people I could put myself in the right place at the right time.

There were a few things that happened that did help it along.

Open Coffee and other network meetings do work

You can’t beat face to face networking.  There was a time when I didn’t have to do this, the work was streaming in during the boom times.  Skills are plentiful and it’s a case of being able to sell yourself.  From Open Coffee I’ve managed to show my face once at XCake as well.  On the online side I keep up with Digital Circle and the usual stream of info on Twitter.

Speaking

I don’t think it does anyone any harm to publicly speak once in a while.  I loved doing Barcamp Derry last October.  Prospective customers, investors, employers and collaborators can instantly see what you are like and what drives you.  From the Barcamp experience I would really like to do some more speaking in 2010.

You’re friends

Considering that I moved to Northern Ireland in 2004 it’s taken a good five years to find my networking feet.  There’s a couple of factors in that, partially to do with the existence of technology like Twitter.  I always had a LinkedIn account but I did my searches by sector, not location.

Through the likes of Open Coffee I’ve met some great people.  Even better that most have them have become good friends and are on speed dial if I really need them.  The help, advice and provision that these people are willing to give is also available to you, all you have to do is to make yourself available and willing to show your face.

Write

I have an “articles” section on this site.  These aren’t articles that I just wrote for the fun of it, they are important networking tools to prove your knowledge.  The likes of Java Developer’s Journal, IBM developerWorks and the Belfast Telegraph have given me the opening to write articles on a wide range of technology subjects over the last nine years.

So, to summarise, with this mix of activities I’m just starting to shape and form what 2010 is going to look like, I’m really excited for 2010.  There’s some big things to happen.

Facebook’s 350 Million users.

One bow in the social media expert’s armoury is this notion that you have a potential audience of 350 million users.  I like numbers like this but I do ignore them.  First of all does your product, strartup or offering really have the ability to touch a truely global audience in one go?

They are few and far between in my opinion.

If you take a startup that’s concentrating on the UK market then you’re user segment is more like 19 million (nearly 6% of the total amount).  Then when you start slicing down the age segments you are in the less than 1% numbers.

Hopefully in 2010 we’ll start seeing social media experts starting to get real about the numbers of people that you can realistically reach.

For me in 2010 I’m not looking at the “what next”, I’m sure a gathering of technology folk are too.  This will be the year of getting real about what social media is, what is capable of and what you and I can really do with it.

Square, nice in theory but…..

After watching the CNBC interview with Jack Dorsey and his demo of Square for the iPhone. Well I have a couple of concerns.

In theory I love it but we are essentially at the start of the adoption curve, chasm, call it what you will. The demo looks pretty slick except for one vital bit of information. The signature.

In the demo we see the interviewer sign her transaction for $3.00. All well and good until you picture this senario. I have Square on my iPhone and I find a purse on the floor, pick it up and swipe any cards I find. I actually have to have the authority signing, just a signature of some form (X marks the spot will do). The SMS/Email receipt will go to the signing authority but the transaction has been authorised (in my eyes). There’s no verification of the three digit security code so it won’t fly in the UK until that’s resolved. Finally is there a limit on the upper amount of a transaction, the website suggests “$0 to $60 in under 10 seconds” but that’s no definitive answer.

Also, where are the scan details stored? Externally over SSL or on a SQLite database? I can envisage Square hacks coming out to query any saved data on card info.

Like I said at Barcamp Derry in October. Paypal was not originally designed as a web payment system, it was to prove the concept of one shot cryptography between two Palm Pilots. It never made it as a Palm Pilot system for the simple reason that no one was prepared to use it. As much as I love the concept I can’t see it flying as the wave of public concern will be too great.

I’ll keep an eye on this one.

Belfast Telegraph article on location based applications.

It’s my turn for the Belfast Telegraph web watch column, this month it’s on location base applications.  If you want to have a read you can visit the BT site here.

New Article: Belfast Telegraph – Jobs are scarce, so it’s time to go online and make it happen.

As this week is entrepreneurship week my Web Watch article is about starting up. You can read it here.

The Bootstrap Diaries – Part 2. Attempts of the past, the Aerleasing story.

No work is wasted, it’s just carried forward into what you are doing.  For better or for worse you will always have access to history and you’ll always improve on what you did in the past.  

The Aerleasing story, a few people have asked so perhaps it’s now time to tell the story.  In 2004 on moving back to Northern Ireland we found ourselves in the Belfast International Airport more times that I can remember, for two reasons: firstly the bookshop was better than all the others at the time and secondly Junction One was the only place with a Starbucks.  True.

I bought a copy of the story of RyanAir and all it’s trimmings and nestled within the first couple of chapters is the fact that Tony Ryan started leasing out Aer Lingus 747’s during the quiet periods.  Brainwave hit almost immediately…. 

A quick look on the internet and there was a few sites full of listings but nothing like I was thinking which was realtime brokerage between lessors and lessees.  Plus the thought of all those brand new planes in the desert doing nothing, it would be good to get those in the air.

Before I did anything I found the trade magazines: Airline Business, Air Transport World, Airline Fleet Network and Planning and Air Finance Journal.  I put calls out out to Airline Business and got a subscription based on the fact I was looking to advertise.  Turned out to be my goldmine, the listings of the top 50 leasing companies was staring me in the face two days later.  

I spoke at Barcamp October past about not being a wallflower, I was one of them and it was really my wife that challenged me to phone one of them up and ask for advice.  I phoned the first one listed and to my astonishment the chap happily spoke to me.  Over three weeks I got the low down on the leasing business and by the end of it I “knew more than the banks do”.  All the time I was coding the system up and actually paid a good graphic designer friend to come up with the branding.

When I got to a point of testing I was invited down to Dublin to have a look around a few things and got into meetings with various folk about the product.  I came back with a ton of feedback and then set about improving the system.  

As a bootstrapping startup you are your own PR company, market research company, sales team and IT department.  The press releases were good but not great looking back, the Start A Business Programme was good but by no means relevant to what I was doing.

Airline Business ran the press release and before I knew it people were signing up and the company names were flashing before me.  Air Transport World wanted to do a small interview and this was pretty important as it was with their main editor in the US.  He speaks and the industry takes note.  

So from my little admin console I saw people adding aeroplanes and then one day someone actually put a sealed bid in.  Then the cracks started to appear, people were just treating it like another listing site desperate to get their phone number out there.  Brokers hated it for the fact that the chain of brokerage was essentially broken by an upstart programmer.  You live and you learn.

About 18 months later I worked on an add on to Aerleasing called the Digital Broker, it could fire out a message to 350+ aviation dealers, end users and airlines with requirements from other airlines.  This would save the end user a good couple of weeks emailing and phoning around.  It was a lead generation tool and the airlines liked it.  The major coup was when Air Finance Journal offered to do a feature on the Digital Broker as the next step forward for the sector.  I was expecting a couple of column inches in the news section.  What I got was a full page, with screen shots…. the user base shot up.  From initial phone calls to getting the editorial took two years to secure, a lot of phone calls, talking to editors and generally having to sell the idea to them.  Once they got it, they wrote about it.

All the time there was interest but not adoption.  There was talk of selling it to Boeing for $2m and there was various other talk by well groomed talkers.  It means nothing until the mandate is signed and the money is in your account.  Deals fall through, some salesmen talk rubbish, it’s all part of the rich tapestry know as startup.  I’m a lot more guarded now.

So where is it all now?  Well Aerleasing just curled up and died really, users lost interest for the simple fact deals weren’t being done so people stopped logging in.  The real issue is what I’d call the “old boys network”, most of this stuff is done on the phone to the folk you know and trust.  Until the new wave come in then it will be hard to change the broker mentality.

It taught me a lot, a heck of a lot about product, people, testing, beta customers etc.  And it’s something that I’ve carried forward for the next wave of madness.

The story continues…. tomorrow night is Go For It programme night.