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.
"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.
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.
Interesting points. My issue is with your contention that as a service company, you don't decide what goes into the software. This is where a web production/service agency can learn from the creative industry.
Such a service agency should position itself as an industry expert, one that clients turn to for solutions, not products. That is, if a client -- let's say, a chain of local gyms -- comes to you and needs a website built, it shouldn't be turnkey and you should expect to contribute your thinking to the end product, not just the code that creates that.
Not code monkeys. Inform and shape the final product, because you know more than your client. They need you for a reason. They don't know the best answer, you do. That's why they hired you.
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.
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.
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.
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.