Baby is 60 - Tim Panton on voice and computers

The end of the phone number is in sight

babyis60 — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 09:00:25 +0000

We’ve been without our phone numbers for a month.

We’ve survived.

We moved offices a month ago, to a new glass and steel building, as befits our new sharper cutting edge image .

Our new office in 3 Hardman St (photo by jaikdean)

Moving involved switching both ISP and phone suppliers. Our old ISP (Progressive networks) and our new ISP (TalkInternet) liaised with a bit of help from me to ensure that our 255 IP addresses moved in a few minutes.

I watched the process in BGPlay - Here are a couple of snapshots

Our routes via Progressive Networks (before)

Our routes via TalkInternet (after)

In contrast, our old telco (lets call them ‘Beardie Media’) has miserably failed to transfer our phone numbers.

This is despite the statutory duty to port numbers between providers and having had 2 months to do it.

The reason Beardie Media give is “It is all Big Telecom’s fault” This is odd, because we haven’t been a Big Telecom customer for 5 years, our new provider is not Big Telecom either.

The way number portability works in the UK is that a number is managed by one provider for ever. It may be used on other provider’s networks, but it is dependent on the original issuer of the number.

Beardie Media are struggling to port out the numbers we ported in from Big Telecom to Beardie years ago. Big Telecom are perfectly happy to move the numbers when they get the correct paperwork from Beardie and our new VoIP supplier. The people who are dragging their heels are Beardie.

Coincidentally (or not) they continue to charge us rent for lines we can’t use into a building we now no longer occupy, threatening that if we disconnect, then we loose all rights to the numbers.

How have we managed without our numbers? Pretty well thanks. All of our current consultancy customers have Skype, and seem perfectly happy to use it. I doubt that many of them will ever go back to using the PSTN to contact us.

We have had more trouble with our startup (phonefromhere.com) where we are selling a service that provides a gateway between the internet and the PSTN. The existing customers were unaffected, but it has made it harder to get new business.

To work around that we have used VoIP to route the web generated calls to the single working phone we have in the office an analog device on our fax line.

My conclusion from this experience is that telco inflexibility is killing the phone number and with it the landline.

Phone numbers are a thing of the past.

The post-telecom era – still undefined but less fuzzy.

babyis60 — Sun, 08 Mar 2009 20:58:30 +0000

I spent most of last week at eComm – a conference who’s goal was to
‘Define the post-telecom era’.

There was a huge number (90!) of short (15 mins max) presentations
packed into 3 days. This was so much information, I’m still trying to process it.

The talks varied widely, but roughly they split into ‘where are we going’, and ‘how will we get there’.

So for example, we heard from Malcom Matson of OPLAN which advocates the setting up of a city based low open cost networks.

The man from t-mobile illustrated the huge costs of running data networks as compared to the profits made from more conventional voice and text services, at the moment they make a loss on data services, but a profit on SMS.

Conveneer on the other hand were very interested in data, they add small web servers to smart phones, so that web pages can mash-up data (such as location and presence) from the phone with external servers, only problem is that the software does not support the iphone.

More pragmatically, Tropo is a new service from Voxeo allowing developers to develop business apps that include telephony – or ’spice’ as Thomas Howe the new CEO of Jaduka calls it. This was a sub-theme of the conference, everyone is trying to recruit developers to their programs. IfByPhone was offering $25 iTunes vouchers to attendees of their tutorial. Voxeo offered a bounty of $100 for demo apps contributed to their samples. Adhearsion Inc is offering a sandbox, so developers can write Adhearsion code just by installing a local copy on their laptops (which takes 5 mins) and using Adhearsion’s telephony infrastructure. Grid launched a one-stop-shop for services that a developer might want.

The common theme was to facilitate web developers adding telephony to their commercial applications, telephony as a an added feature enhancing the efficiency of business processes .
This whole developer-hunt was kicked off at last year’s eComm where Ribit set up it’s developer program, recruited hundreds of developers and was almost immediately bought for $105M by BT.

Everyone was competing to be ‘more-open-than-thou’. Adobe has created openscreen program which allows device manufacturers to add flash to their devices license free, providing the implementation passes a compatibility test.
Skype opened their new SILK wideband codec, they will release a binary implementation, but not the algorithm.

The result of all this openness is that we can build apps cheaply and quickly,
which allowed Dave Troy’s ad-hoc team to develop the ‘Twitter Vote Report’ in a couple of weeks, because “it was the right thing to do.”

The extreme instance of this new openness was the Open BTS project which is an open source GSM provider David Burgess demo’d a laptop plugged into a universal software radio. The laptop was running Asterisk and the Open BTS middleware. When switched on, David was able to register a stock GSM handset against his Asterisk open source pbx, and place a call to a softphone via the asterisk instance, all over his own GSM provider. Even the hardware designs of the radio are open source.
This was a highlight of the show for me – It is worth reading David’s interview with Lee Dryburgh (conference organizer) to hear what change this project could effect.
I particularly like the comment David got from a telco executive “That’s great; you can show me a network that costs less to operate. Now what do I do with the network I just installed? How do I leverage my existing SS7 infrastructure?”

There were many debates about infrastructure (de)regulation and spectrum allocation in the USA which I found rather parochial so didn’t listen closely, but I swear I heard someone say that Dolly Parton was involved in a $4.7 Billion subsidy for rural broadband organized by the department of agriculture. I’ve now bought some ear wax remover.

I finally got the concept of net neutrality explained to me (Thanks Jay!), it made me realize just how well Ofcom have managed broadband in the UK. Jay asked me how many ISPs I could choose from, I said hundreds, he nearly choked and explained that he had 2 to choose from.

Mark Spencer from Digium gave an update on the Skype-for-Asterisk gateway and it’s progress so far. One of the issues he mentioned was to do with the fact that Skype ID’s that were signed up as individuals won’t be eligible
as business IDs for Skype-for-Asterisk as the terms and conditions for a business are different. This raised an interesting area about the value of brand names in the new emerging name spaces of twitter, Skype, Facebook etc. John Todd (of Digium) and I had a discussion about this on the VoIP User’s conference.
This is evidenced by the fact that as part of the launch of Grid.com, they bought the twitter id ‘grid’.

Shai Berger (Fōnolo) gave an interesting analysis of the 500 IVR systems that companies expect us to be able to use (”Press one if…” etc). I reccomend looking at his slides once they go online. This is the past we want to escape from.

Looking to the future there were some rosy remarks e.g.
“Content for the Crowd in the Cloud will print money for all of us” from
Gerd Leonhard of MediaFuturist.com, it seems this is already true in Japan and Korea, where mobile social networks are highly profitable (unlike facebook etc). They are profitable because they sell virtual goods to users (music etc) not advertising to corporates.

There were several new communication modes demonstrated all of them trying to cure the problem that Jeevan Kalanithi, Taco Lab described: “computers and mobile phones suck you out of the physical world”. One of the most charming was Ge Wang of Smule, who’s Ocarina application lets you play the iPhone like a flute, but also lets you take part in a sort of global orchestra (But there is a no ‘amazing grace’ rule it seems!).

Outside the talks there was still time to meet the other delegates. There was a fantastic array of bright people, all willing to share notes and exchange ideas. Undoubtedly some business deals were done. Everyone had a mad iPhone app they wanted to write (I’ve got several!).

An exhausting and brilliant 3 days – Thanks to Lee for organizing it and many thanks for Imran for the ticket that let me go.

Some of these photos of ecomm (and many others) can be found at photos.duncandavidson.com

The importance of being available – (tech stuff)

babyis60 — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 16:03:33 +0000

Having got the philosophy and design of a high availability solution out of the way in my last post, this one is about the crunchy hard tech of implementation. (fans of my musings will have to sit this one out )

Westhawk Ltd had a contract to implement a high availability database backed SIP service – what did we use – and why?

After a lot of research and consultation with the customer we decided not to use Oracle (which is our normal first choice) and to go for MySQL as the database engine. Our research had turned up the clustered version of MySQL as a good candidate for the job.

Clustered MySQL has a very interesting solution to the problem of how to keep a pair of database machines in sync. All transactions are committed on both machines simultaneously. The transaction doesn’t complete until both machines have committed it. This is a ’share nothing’ architecture. It could be slow, but the default for the NDB engine it uses is to hold the whole database in RAM. There are some odd limitations involved in this solution. For example: A newly created table in one machine will automatically be copied to the other but a view won’t.

That’s the back end – what about the VoIP server ?
We knew we needed something OpenSource, reliable and flexible.
The customer had come to us on the assumption that we would use Asterisk, which we considered and then decided not to. We plumped for FreeSWITCH.

Why FreeSWITCH ?
First off, because of the specific requirements there is very little ’state’ info
to preserve no users, no registrations etc. In fact it is all about call routing.

The way that freeswitch’s xml_curl works makes it
very simple to switch the ‘database’ from one call to the next, so that when one database dies we can failover to the other.

Here’s what happens:
Every inbound call generates an HTTP Post to one of 2 nominated servers.
The post contains all the ‘channel variables’ – dialed number, ANI, channel, IPaddress etc. The web server replies with dynamically generated dialplan for this call telling FreeSWITCH how to deal with it. The dialplan is in XML, so it is easy to generate from a database with standard web tools. If the first web server does not respond, the second is queried instead. (no connections to drop, no mySQL proxy etc.)

Now, I could write a complex dialplan in Asterisk that emulated this behavior, but with FreeSWITCH I get it out of the box. (Xml_cdr works the same way – writing the call detail records to the database via HTTP).

Better yet, the dialplan is in XML and JavaScript, so I can give database part of the project to a webcoder rather than a VoIP person.

So for this specific system, FreeSWITCH has done most of the work for me.
I’m not saying that it is now my default choice – it isn’t – but for this specific task it was the easier option.

We chose to use Glassfish as the web server, which in retrospect was overkill, it has a stack of clustering options we didn’t even touch.

We handle the high availabilty on the front end by having the phone company route their inbound SIP requests to a ‘floating’ IP address. We use the high availability support in SuSE 11 to move the IP address to the ‘active’ node and
re-start FreeSWITCH when needed.

There were of course problems – my ‘favorite’ being when I spent a day working out that the default Linux HA config assumes a cluster consists of 3 or more machines and won’t failover a service unless it has a quorum.

Don’t underestimate the added complexity of building a system with 5 hosts as compared with a single system – the system administration takes a lot longer and is quite a bit more complex.

On the other hand, we have built a high availability VoIP routing system based on free opensource software with a clear and extensible architecture.

The importance of being available

babyis60 — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 13:21:10 +0000

First off – this isn’t about crackberry ‘instant-replies -to-emails-day-or-night’ availability – I’ll talk about that another time.

This is about how to build a high availability telephony service using open source components. I’m writing this with a specific recent project in mind, but most of the lessons are applicable to many services.

I’m going to focus on the hot-standby style cluster solution on the basis that (as Lady Lady Bracknell didn’t say in ‘The importance of being Earnest” )

To lose one parent server, Mr. Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune. To lose both looks like carelessness.

The crucial thing about hot-standby is that either of the two servers can take the full service load and that only one is active at a time. (this is the simplest case of a more general n+1 architecture where you have one more server than you need for peak load.)

Step 1: Find out what your customer needs.

People (customers included) tend to have absurdly high expectations of what high-availability can achieve as compared with how much they will pay for it.

There is a huge temptation on the part of technologists to try to deliver what the customer says he wants, as opposed to what they need! I had a painful education on the pitfalls of this tactic when the first cluster I built (many years ago) failed twice in the first year.

The customer had gone for a belt,braces,the-best-of-everything set-up. The first failure was when the journaling filesystem locked up because (I still wince at this) the license had expired.

The second failure was a hardware failure – the memory in a router went bad – but due to the redundant set up, the bit error in the routing table was propagated to the standby device, and then back to the replacement(s) as they were swapped in.

In both cases a cold start was required resulting in a few hours of downtime in each case. The cluster cost about 3 times what a single system would have, and provided lower uptime.

Ask about the business case. How much would it cost the business if the service were unavailable for 4 hours a year? That’s about 99.9% uptime, but it is also enough time to get tech out of bed, a spare server out of a cupboard a back-up restored and service resumed. Cold standby systems are easy to build, test and maintain. The hardest part is to make sure no-one re-purposes the apparently unused hardware.

Here’s how I evaluate it: What is the cost of a single server that can handle the load (include software, licenses, set-up, time etc) ? If the estimated loss to the business of a 4 ( or 8 ) hour outage is greater than three times that figure: Go for a cluster of servers.
If not: Buy spare hardware, keep good backups and have your tech’s home number.

Step 2:

You have decided you need a cluster, now decide what technology to use.

Requirements

Again this requires discussion with the customer to ensure that you understand their requirements and that they understand the specific features you are going to build.

We always write a specification at this stage, we state what the user wants and how, in general terms, we will deliver it. We make an effort not to get too deep into the technology at this stage, the specification needs to be understood by business people, not just database (or web) experts. The proposed solution needs to cover the following:

Sessions

There are quite a few technologies that really don’t get on with clusters. Basically anything with a long running session needs special treatment.

The best way of dealing with sessions is to eliminate them if at all possible. In our case the customer accepted that phonecalls that were in progress when a component fails can be dropped, but that if the user calls back, then the call must go through. This avoids us having to cope with migrating calls to the standby server.

Database

The other persistent problem is how to ensure that the database remains sufficiently up-to-date and consistent between the two or more database servers.

I’ll talk some more in the next post about the solution we selected, but in general there are two ways to do this:

Have 2 separate datastores and use regular synchronization to keep them in step.
Have 2 separate databases accessing the same data store but have the datastore itself highly redundant (using RAID).

The option you chose depends on your problem space. I’ll explore the choices we made in the next post.

Migration

How will users be moved from one server to the next? Some common ways are:

DNS – Here you change the IP address associated with your service’s name to direct the users to the correct machine. You need to ensure that the Time-To-Live on the DNS entry is short enough that the old value won’t be cached (somewhere out in the DNS cloud) for longer than the acceptable downtime.
IP address migration – Here you move the IP address associated with the service from one server to another by bringing up an interface on the new server (and taking down the interface on the old server) .
Content redirectors – Here you move the problem (always popular) to a dedicated box which receives traffic from the users and then forwards it to the appropriate ‘real’ server.

I’ll talk about the technical choices we made on our recent project in the next post, but for those who can’t wait, we used the following:

freeSWITCH www.freeswitch.org
Glassfish glassfish.dev.java.net
MySQL cluster www.mysql.com (Note this isn’t the normal mySQL – it is different – but in a good way!)

The way to an exit.

babyis60 — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 12:47:19 +0000

This is the second part of my notes on Essential Mediatech 2008. The first part was about the startups, this one is about everyone else in what I call “the startup economy” VCs, journalists, M+A lawyers, Patent lawyers, accountants, angels, advisors and software suppliers. As you can guess, the startups were out numbered!

I was surprised at how upbeat people were being (at least initially), with comments like “there is still money out there” and “We did a record number of deals last month”. As the day progressed it became clear that the reality is a lot bleaker, those positive comments were retrospective, ask a forward looking question and the fear came back into their eyes. When pushed, Nic Brisbourne of DFJ basically said that they wouldn’t be investing in anything new until things settled down a bit.

The whole crowd had basically one strategy for dealing with 2009 – try and survive it – in the hope (rather than expectation) that 2010 will be better.

There was some specific advice as to how to survive: “have 18 months of cash in the bank, if you don’t – reduce costs until you do”. “Don’t attempt an exit in 2009″. (Although Doug Richard of Libraryhouse said that the leaked presentation Sequoia gave to their portfolio may be a bluff, to get everyone else to cut back while they take advantage of the situation).

There are possible liferafts in this sea of gloom:

The rise of the ‘purchasing classes’ in India and China was described as ‘inexorable’.
There was a view that in a recession more time would be spent at home, so safe, cheap home entertainment will prosper (online games in particular).
The trend towards mobile consumption of internet services represents an opportunity for some.

Probably the most interesting part for me (although entirely academic at the moment) was the panel on Exits and how to achieve them.

Doug Richard and the panel had some specific advice:

Trade sales are the only possible exit at the moment
Most trade sales are to companies you already know
So the strength of your partnership list is a good indicator
Its all about fitting into the agenda of the purchaser
A purchaser is looking for earnings amplification (e.g. if they buy you and introduce you to their customer base, then increase your earnings hugely)
Sales are due to a ’strategic pressure to buy’ on the purchaser
Don’t underestimate the extent to which you can shape your business so that it is a better fit for a potential buyer

However statistically activity is already down – 11% in quantity and 22% in value.

All in all an interesting and well organized day. There are hard times ahead. Indeed the only people who still seemed cheerful by the end of the day were Timo Soininen (Habbo Hotel) and Omar Hamoui (AdMob) both of whom have startups with solid business models in ‘liferaft’ markets.

The top 100 mediatech companies 2008

babyis60 — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 09:28:41 +0000

I was at Essential Mediatech today, an event run by LibraryHouse showcasing the most interesting Mediatech companies in Europe, here’s a quick summary based on my sketchy notes.

There was a lot going on, lots of interesting people and (at least at the beginning of the day) a surprisingly bullish attitude. I say surprising because the crowd are all (in different ways) dependent on the startup economy. To give you a feel for the crowd, there were almost no t-shirts, lots of suits, a few ties and quite a few cufflinks.

Microsoft were there – as sponsors – wooing the startups with nearly free developer tools. Their Bizspark program provides qualifying startups with free tools, but amazingly they charge $100 when you leave the program, I really wouldn’t want to be the one responsible for collecting that from the debris of a failed startup!

The other surprise was their Azure cloud platform. I’d read about it, but not really taken in quite what a big deal it is. As I understand it they not only supply Amazon style ‘cloud’ hardware but also the next 2 layers up, the OS and the ‘core service’ layers. Again I was stunned to see that Microsoft Dynamics CRM counts as a core service! – SQL I understand, but CRM ?!? Thats a shot at Oracle and/or Salesforce. What next – Accounting ? They seem pretty serious about this, they are building European datacenters so that they can hold EU citizens data without exporting it to the USA.

Next up were Brandwatch. They provide a sort of web-datamining app which tells brand holders what people out in the net are saying about their brand. It also alerts them to any sudden spikes of interest so they can actively manage situations before things get nasty. To do this Brandwatch have created an engine that extracts ’sentiment’ and ‘tonality’ from millions of web pages. Spookily the presenter said he wasn’t sure how this technology would be applied in future. I can think of quite a few repressive regimes that would (literally) kill for technology like this, assuming it works.

Polar Rose were almost spookier. They have face recognition software that extracts the 3d contours of a face from a 2d image. This means that it can compensate for camera angles and lighting. They demoed a search engine which finds people’s images (irrespective of the quality of textual tags). It has an ‘This person seen with’ mode – check out who our PM is seen with . As the woman next to me quipped – ‘that technology could break up some marriages’ -especially since they can deduce the age and sex of the face too. Blackmail-o-matic ?!?

Shinymedia were comforting by comparison. A kind of halfway house between print journalism and blogging, trying to retain the best of both, whilst earning a living. I did think that the themes of their 30 sites – largely Technology and Fashion – seemed odd bedfellows.

True Knowledge have launched quizbot which is a demonstrator for their knowledge based search engine. I spent a few minutes playing with it and I’m impressed, it seems to give decent answers and avoid trick questions with a charming directness. Q: “Where is Osama bin Laden?” A: “I understood your question but I don’t know the answer. “. Which is better than Donald Rumsfeld ever managed.

MovieStorm were also charming, with their easy-to-use video creation software although they slightly undermined their case by showing a Marillion fan-created video. (Most of the audience have no clue who Marrillion were, and those that did know that they aren’t what they were since Fish left.) What I loved about MovieStorm (apart from their enthusiasm) was the business model. The software is free, but you pay for content packs, which is almost a tax on laziness.

It seemed to me that several startups were almost too ‘clever’, applying complex maths to ‘fuzzy’ problems, rather than zeroing in on a real need. I wondered if this was due to the way V.C.s fund them. If you have protectable IP (ideally a patent) you are much more likely to get funding. This pushes startups into using non-obvious (and therefor patentable) solutions to problems, which might not be the best way to meet the customer’s needs. I was also stunned by how much money some of them had burnt through, which may be a consequence of the complexity of their solutions.

There were also several very interesting panel sessions, I’ll try and blog about them later in the week.

The new rock and roll. Which is it – Telephony 2.0 or Web 2.0?

babyis60 — Sat, 08 Nov 2008 17:41:30 +0000

Quick summary: Telephony 2.0 is about money – Web 2.0 is about users (aka fans).

Rock and Roll was about both.

Phonefromhere.com (our startup) bridges the web and telephony, so I spend time in both camps.

Lets look at their Rock Stars:

Diggnation team
Kevin and Alex at FoWA London 08
Mahalo’s CEO

Digium Inc
Mark Spencer, Tim Panton and Duck

Who looks more like a rock star ? (It certainly isn’t me!)

What about money ? Telephony is a vast business 1 Trillion dollar allegedly. Telco’s monetize everything down to the second, Web 2.0’s Achilles heel is the inability to monetize anything except via Google.

So maybe neither is the new Rock and Roll.

I’m thinking it is the crossover between the two that is exciting. Not just the upmarket smartphones. In huge parts of the globe the primary access to the internet is via the mobile phone. That trend is only going to intensify.

The innovation isn’t just coming from the mobile web either. Take a look at twittervotereport.com or fonolo.com to see neat stuff done with phones.

The merchant of Prato

babyis60 — Sun, 14 Sep 2008 14:51:56 +0000

I’ve been re-reading “The Merchant of Prato” by Iris Origo.

The central character – Datini – works away from home a lot, his relationship with his young wife is strained, she spends too much on the housekeeping, he doesn’t entirely trust his business colleagues, he lives in fear of sudden changes in tax regimes. He uses cheap labour from eastern Europe and his religious friend councils him to give more to the poor. His wife can’t conceive, he has an affair with a girl half his age producing a child that was probably his, he repents, they patch it up etc.

Think I’ve been reading airport novels again ? Well no. Dantini is a real person, a 14th century Italian merchant who made a vast trading empire which he left to charity when he died. The reason we know this is that he was an egotistical pack-rat. He kept all his records and donated them to the city of Prato on his death. The city promptly lost them for 300 years. Which turns out to have been a good thing as we now have the most detailed archive of letters, accountbooks, menus, shoppinglists and bills providing an incredible insight into his life.

As you can see people haven’t changed much since then. But some things are utterly different. The other woman- was a slave – he bought her. (He subsequently freed her and arranged a ’suitable’ marriage).

Communication was also different. Running a multinational business was a game of patience and huge risks. Basically, you found an adventurous trustworthy young man, you train him, then send him by ship with a pile of your money to (say) England act as your agent. You tell him the sorts of things the English make that you can probably sell (most often wool). The trip takes a few weeks, he settles into the Italian-merchants-in-London scene, and come the summer buys wool at some locally reasonable price.

The agent sends the wool back by ship to you – it arrives at least a year after you sent him out. You now have to hope that the price you can get for the wool is higher than what it cost you to get it. It may not be, but it might be higher elsewhere, you may choose to ship it on, or sell it to a merchant who has an agent in a city where wool is more in demand. If you had know that, you might have had your agent ship it directly there, but he didn’t know that when he sent the ship.

Which brings me (finally) to the point, information traveled no faster than goods. (Ok, a fast courier might trim a few percent off the the time taken by a tonne of wool). These days physical stuff takes much longer to travel than ideas do. This fundamentally alters the way markets work, the way we do business and increasingly the way we conduct our social lives.

Imagine the value of singe message from Datini to the agent – “Austere Pope elected – buy black wool and send to Rome.” Huge – but only if none of the competitors had that information and connection. So the value of a medium is all about timing, content and provenance, not the medium itself.

Modern telephony fails to capitalize on this distinction. A 5 minute call between location A and B is few cents, irrespective of the importance of the message. There is no club-class for Voice. For a crucial business call, sealing a deal, I might be prepared to pay 10$/min if it provided me with critical benefits. So what sort of benefits might add a factor of 1000 to the value of a call?

provenance – If I know exactly who I am talking to (and even perhaps their legal role?)
security – certainty that the call won’t be intercepted by my competitors
un-deniability – The carrier could produce a recording in the event of a legal dispute
standing out from the crowd – If I get a call and I know the other side is paying $10 per minute then I’ll probably answer it even if I have no clue what it is about. (LinkedIn are heading this way with InMail – a sort of hyper expensive Email)

Conversely there is a largely untapped market in almost free calls – a kind of ambient call, where 2 or more people hangout over the phone whilst doing other things – cooking, homework, watching webTV or whatever where there is absolutely no need for any of the above features.

Would Datini have remained faithful if they had had Facebook and MSN ? Maybe, but probably not, the internet hasn’t changed human nature (yet).

The VC’s holiday home

babyis60 — Sat, 30 Aug 2008 14:24:35 +0000

Your startup is like a holiday home.

A VC is looking to spend a big chunk of money on a discretionary purchase.

They don’t have to buy anything, there are lots of homes for sale and they aren’t in a hurry. (it’s you that needs a roof over your head, not them).

They would like to make a sizeable profit when they sell it in a few years time, so it has to be something they think will appreciate in value and interest other (future) buyers.

They aren’t going to live in it, but they will visit regularly (and sometimes on a whim) so it needs to be easy to get to.

It has to be something that suits them, as they will be stuck with it for a few years.

Most want a property they can just use immediately, some braver ones might take on a project that needs work, but only if it charms the pants off them.

So your job as a founder is to act as an estate agent for your ‘property’.

There are 2 ways to go about this:

Scatter gun (like the timeshare salesman), send out plans to all possible funders all over the world, irrespective of their interest, availability of funds etc. – We are all guilty of this, but it is a waste of time both theirs and more importantly, yours.
Targeted (like a professional salesman), research the available funds, by location, sector and size of investments, stage etc. (look carefully all rules they publish), then get to know a small number of funds in a relatively informal way, find out what they like and dislike, listen to their comments incorporate them into your plans (if possible).

Actually there is a third way, which is to have a list of possible startups (all variations on a theme hopefully) and pick the one that you and your ‘favorite’ VC like best (based on a number of discussions).

With an angel investor, you often are competing for their money with, guess what, a house or a yacht in the sun!

the 2008 Leeds Barcamp

babyis60 — Sun, 17 Aug 2008 11:57:10 +0000

It was great to get over to Leeds and chat with all the bright folks at BarCamp Leeds.

Lots of good conversations, talks and food. (and beer, except I was driving – sigh)

Highlights for me were:

Katie Lips talking about “12 startup mistakes not to make” except that it was 13 by the time she spoke (no, she hadn’t made a new mistake on the day, she’d had – in true web 2.0 style – added an extra one ‘contributed’ by the community). I especially liked the advice to not hide your support forums, on the basis that on balance your users are on your side and it provides a way of showing the world that you are listening. On the other hand I’m guessing she doesn’t have young children as she advises working at home to save money on office space – wouldn’t work for me!

A long technical discussion with Robert Burrell Donkin about email, how broken it is, and how it might get fixed. We talked lots about protocols and how badly the existing 7bit 1980’s email protocols suit the modern multilingual world (”Back then all the mail admins knew each other”). We also touched on how self perpetuating a tech community can be. The complexity of the current email solutions tends to make it very difficult for new (competitive) entrants, combined with the fact that once you have made the personal investment in learning all the tricks, it is harder to see the benefits of radical simplification. We agreed that anger at the inadequacies of the current mess is probably the force that will tip email into the 21st century. That and the fact that the Russians want the internet to work for them too

A chat with Imran Ali about the ethics of online jounalism and how it can be done _better_. In retrospect I think we might have been talking about 1.0 (private sources, hoarding etc) vs 2.0 (communal, open, transparent).

I was shocked by a couple of things:

I found myself almost convinced that I wanted to try out Adobe Air during the talk on DoJo and Air, the feeling faded as I drove home, but still it was definitely there ….

I was also taken aback at the fact that several people said “My health has not been good for the last X years”, what is this? – have we all been hacking too hard, something in the Leeds coffee, or just a co-incidence?

I’m really glad I made it (close run thing, I didn’t know I could untill 9pm the night before). Thanks to everyone for organizing it! Also thanks to folks for putting up with me playing Devils Advocate on more than one occasion (you know who you are).

As an added bonus, the scenery on the M62 inspired me – I had a couple of great ideas, more when I’ve patented one and thought through the other