Every week, I have to use six different Office Software Suites: At school: Microsoft Office 2013 At university: Microsoft Office 365 At work: OpenOffice At home: LibreOffice Everywhere: Apple Keynote Everywhere: Google Docs As an expert computer user (former SysAdmin), I’m often asked for help by people with non-computing backgrounds. […]
startup advice
60 posts
TL;DR: experienced CEO/CTO/TechDirector with long background in programming, sales, and business management (Corporate, iPhone/Android, Games, Education) looking for strategic roles in USA, UK, and Asia. After a year-out to do a post-graduate degree in Education, I’m looking for something new and exciting to do next. My primary goal is to […]
This week I’m paralysed on some of my simplest decisions while happily making complex decisions quickly, and being incisive and highly effective on others. This problem occasionally crops up in my work and personal life, and it frustrates the hell out of me; I’m going to write about it here, […]
Many businesses underestimate the power of a clever Pricing Model. I’m selling a new product at the moment (we’re helping schools teach children to program), so pricing models occupy a lot of my head right now. Startups are so unsure of what model to use that they often say “anything, […]
This: (blocking me from doing any work – I need that spreadsheet, and thanks to Cloud, it’s impossible. Any other system – source / revision control, local files, file servers, etc – would have a quick, easy way for me to get at it. It’s only Cloud that fails … […]
In the past, I’ve found Thomas’s Kickstarter analysis for game-projects very useful. Today I found something that complements them: an excellent visualization of Kickstarter projects. It takes a little thought to understand how to use it, so here’s some ultra-quick example analysis…
My blog posts are info-rich and spam-poor. Most of the “enter your email address” plugins are designed for spam – covered in bling, in-your-face animations, background music, all sorts of crap. There’s nothing out there, so I made one, using a GPL’d existing project. Feel free to use this yourself. […]
Some good observations on tech business strategy here Low-margin can still mean high-value-business: “Most people just look at a company’s margins and judge the quality of the business model based on that, but the cash flow characteristics of the business can make one company a far more valuable company than […]
While upgrading Unity, I noticed the current download page is a great example of how it SHOULD be done: Unity 4 has some … issues … with backwards compatibility – but at least they made the “need an older version?” link prominent. And how many old versions can you download? […]
“Based on a analysis of 10,000 programming sessions recorded from 86 programmers using Eclipse and Visual Studio and a survey of 414 programmers (Parnin:10), we found: A programmer takes between 10-15 minutes to start editing code after resuming work from an interruption. When interrupted during an edit of a method, […]
Building and Dismantling the Windows Advantage – a great article, telling the story in a mix of words and graphs. “The consequences are dire for Microsoft. The wiping out of any platform advantage around Windows will render it vulnerable to direct competition. This is not something it had to worry […]
In the past, I’ve had terrible advice from brilliant people. The best way to avoid that is to be careful to research the brilliant person and tailor your questions to avoid their weaknesses. Tomorrow I’ll be meeting a bunch of people at Google London’s open day. I started by writing […]
http://gigaom.com/europe/makie-future-doll-toy-funding/ “We’re making toys using game data and 3D printing,” explains Alice Taylor, Makielab co-founder and CEO. “We call ourselves a smart toy company, and for us that means there’s a digital side to it by default.” The company slogan is “the action doll you design”, and here’s the concept […]
“Disruption” used to be mentioned frequently as the thing that every company wanted to be (urged on by investors). But what is it, really? I’ve met lots of people who believe it’s “a fancy word for ‘innovation'” – but if that’s all, it would be pretty pointless and vapid. This […]
Please email me (adam at red-glasses.com) if you have skills / interest in the following: Mass market (i.e. everyone + their mom) telling stories javascript frameworks for complex visual 2D stuff (e.g. iGoogle, Netvibes, etc) Visual manipulation of large 2D images on mobile (especially iPhone) NB: we have no funding […]
Someone just wrote this comment on one of my StackOverflow answers: Fundamentally, this question/answer pair is saying: “Apple: one of your non-programming managers made a stupid mistake in one of your core tools, one used every day by hundreds of thousands of people; since you won’t fix it, here’s a […]
Steve Yegge’s Google Platforms Rant is not so much a rant as a sign of someone fighting an inappropriate culture. We saw stuff like this a lot at NCsoft when people were trying to turn around the $100 million clusterf*ck that created hundreds of redundancies all the way to director […]
Here’s a new term: The FAILtrepreneur FAILtrepreneur def: someone who tries to be an Entrepreneur, and takes advantage of lots of things intended to “help” them be a success, but somehow finds each “help” pushes them further and further into mediocrity and the failure of their business. Then they go […]
Tips to Help you Think About Sales at Your Startup We covered much ground. The video link is here and quick time-coded show notes at the end of the post in case you want to jump ahead to just one section. But the ground we covered was awesome for anybody […]
“Starting work without a contract is like a putting a condom on after finding out you got someone pregnant” For this and other great pieces of advice on life as a services company, trying to get paid, watch this great talk from Mike Monteiro: http://www.wikio.com/video/mike-monteiro-ck-pay-5196884