Tag Archives: blog
Friday Shorts 17th Feb
"More Accurate" Property of Xkcd.com
Apple App Store Logo
App Economy Creates Nearly 500k Jobs in US: Before the iPhone there was no app industry, but with the meteoric expansion of it and rival devices, the sector now employs in the region of half a million people in the United States alone.
Flexible Screens Have Arrived: C3Nano, a company that makes transparent, flexible screens has secured a round of funding worth $6.7, and is building relationships in Japan and Korea with giants such as Samsung. The technology boasts it’s robust and cost effective. (Includes demo video)
StartUp May Save Businesses Fortunes in Legal Costs: Technology has limited, changed or destroyed many long established industries, now it might be the turn of the legal professions to take a battering, having to compete with technological solutions to some of its core business practices.
The World’s Smallest 3D Printer (Video): What could you do with the world’s smallest 3D printer? At TEDxVienna Klaus Stadlmann demos his tiny, affordable printer that could someday make customized hearing aids or sculptures smaller than a human hair.
Upstart vs Startup: What’s The Difference?
‘Upstart Business’ is a phrase that seems to be creeping into the journalistic language used on tech and entrepreneurial blogs in the US. The first time I heard it I thought the writer was simply playing with the normal term ‘startup’ to be witty and focus on a particularly ballsy and inspiring effort of a young entrepreneur. Then a week or two later I read it again elsewhere. This got me thinking: Was ‘upstart’ just a meme that one clever writer used once and then suddenly caught on with the blogging fraternity or is it now a well known and accepted term? More to the point does its origin matter and is it more important to ask which is better?
Googling the term, you get a myriad of results. Many are for business or consultancy related groups and services that use the ‘upstart’ interchangeably with ‘startup’.
The online dictionary definitions which appear are all similar to this one:
n. A person of humble origin who attains sudden wealth, power, or importance, especially one made immodest or presumptuous by the change; a parvenu.
adj. 1. Suddenly raised to a position of consequence.
2. Self-important; presumptuous.
Reading between the lines in the tech blogs it appears that the difference is this; ‘Startups’ are entrepreneurial businesses that begin with external funding from venture capital from their inception. However, ‘Upstart’ businesses begin without significant external funding, just savings and personal loans from friends and family and usually the founders maintain all equity. This is in keeping with the upstart definition, springing from humble origins to wealth, rather than having lots of cash to play with before you have a customer.
Felix Dennis, Author of How to Get Rich (Image: BBC)
Felix Dennis, author of the refreshingly direct, ‘How to Get Rich’, is very much in the upstart mould and believes a business owner should do everything in their power to hold on to the most equity possible. Each percentage of equity you manage to own, could be worth millions when you eventually sell your business. In one chapter he describes how two important employees at his magazine demanded a small share of the business or they’d start a rival publication.
He instantly called their bluff, fired them and wished them well in their new venture. Within a few years their business was bust and they were back working for him, no hard feelings. When he sold up and moved on, that tiny percentage they had demanded was worth millions; his baby, his millions. Dennis put it in uncompromising terms:
Talent is indispensable, although it is always replaceable.
Just remember the simple rules concerning talent:
Identify It, Hire It, Nurture It, Reward It, Protect It. And when the time comes, Fire It.
Friday Shorts 10th Feb
The Oatmeal - What I want from a restaurant website (click to view full image)
Image by Carrot Creative
Twitter is More Addictive than Nicotine: People are more likely to give in to the urge to tweet or check email than other cravings a US study has found, making it more addictive than both alcohol and cigarettes. Could it just be that twitter isn’t as obviously costly or damaging to your health?
Beijing Micro Bloggers Must Use Real Name or Be Banned: The Chinese government says all microbloggers in Beijing must post under their real names by March 16 or they’ll be banned from the service. The move from the Chinese government is the latest in a series of ways they want to monitor and curtail social media activity in their country.
When the SuperBowl Bored Americans, They Opened Apps: At the less captivating moments of this year’s Super Bowl audiences turned to their second screens, you can see clearly which ads and which game play were captivating and hit the mark and which fumbled and dropped the ball.
YouTube Expands Channels Initiative: Last October, Google announced it would begin rolling out over 100 new channels featuring original programming across YouTube, turning the site focus from one-off videos into a major online content destination, two new automotive channels are its latest offering.
Friday Shorts 20th Jan
Anonymous Take Down FBI
Anonymous Take Down the Websites of Dept of Justice, Universal Music, BMI & the FBI: Hacker Collective Anonymous attacked and took down dozens of websites yesterday in retaliation for the FBI shutting down several sites that they believed pirate media illegally.
Facebook Begins News Feed Ads Rollout: Facebook began a slow rollout of ads to the news feed today, but the units are not called Sponsored Stories as some anticipated.
HP Unveil Giant 11 ft x 7ft Touchscreen For Retailers and Businesses: The HP Vantage Point system is powered by two computers with one graphics card and six monitors, yet this touchscreen can simultaneously register input from 32 fingers. It extends the portfolio of “immersive displays” from HP Labs and is designed as a tool for showcasing retail goods or enterprise data.
The Best Definition for ‘Entrepreneur’?: As an entrepreneur, you surely have an elevator pitch, the 15-second synopsis of what your company does and why, and you can all but repeat it in your sleep. But until recently, most of us have ever seen a good elevator pitch for entrepreneurship itself. What you do that all entrepreneurs do?
As always, your thoughts, opinions and comments are most welcome and appreciated
SOPA: Killing Freedom of Speech for Hollywood Profit?
Stop SOPA
There’s been a lot of buzz and backlash these last few months around the tech blogs, websites and forums regarding this controversial new bill which was due to go before the US Congress. SOPA or Stop Online Piracy Act and the parallel PIPA or Protect IP Act, both aim to protect the Intellectual Property market and industry, protect jobs and revenue and is said to be necessary to strengthen enforcement of copyright laws, especially against foreign websites.
In many ways that sounds quite reasonable. Intellectual Property and copyright owners must have some rights to protect their creations, don’t they? They do and they should. That aspect is not the problem with the bill, what is the problem is the knock on effects and the potential for severely excessive use of the bill against freedom of speech as well as destabilising and making less secure the foundations and very structure of the internet.
The eminent Yoast of Yoast SEO fame, one of the foremost and respected WordPress SEO experts unusually ventured into political territory with a recent blog post strongly against SOPA entitled Stop SOPA Help the Internet. In it he directed attention to a video concisely explaining the the very real dangers the bill poses to the safety of the Internet as well as freedom of speech and entrepreneurial innovation. Watch this video as it’s a concise summing up of the argument against SOPA:
PROTECT IP / SOPA Breaks The Internet from Fight for the Future on Vimeo.
So who supports SOPA and who’s against it? Hollywood and the entertainment industries such as the big studios and tv networks, book publishers and music industry players support it which isn’t a huge surprise. View the complete list of SOPA supporters here. More enlightening maybe, are the lists of those in strong opposition or express concern with SOPA. All the big tech and internet companies are there; Facebook, Google etc but also the usually non-political WordPress and somewhat subversive but pro-democracy organisations such as 4chan. The anti-SOPA list really is a who’s who of the internet, tech and pro-free speech, first amendment world.
Maybe more interestingly again however, GoDaddy, Electronic Arts, Sony and Nintendo were on the pro-SOPA side and defected over, many believe due to the extraordinary public outcry against the bill and the bad PR for those who supported it.
There was a crucial turning point for the anti-SOPA camp when the White House stated that they will not support the bill.
“While we believe that online piracy by foreign websites is a serious problem that requires a serious legislative response, we will not support legislation that reduces freedom of expression, increases cybersecurity risk, or undermines the dynamic, innovative global Internet,”
Nicely put by the White House. Artists need to get paid otherwise they will struggle to make more art. But we’re not really talking that much about ‘artists’ here, we’re talking about cases being brought by large Hollywood studios, tv companies, and giant corporations, many that churn out repetitive low grade schlock. These are the companies that could afford to take advantage of the SOPA bill, even banning personal youtube videos and accounts that have their song in the background.
Still, they have a right to protect that schlock or indeed quality work, as any author does. Almost everyone, supporters and detractors of the SOPA bill, agree that it is well meaning in what it’s trying to do in protecting Intellectual Property rights and the jobs of those who create works, it’s just how it plans to do that and on the devastating tertiary impact it will have that people massively disagree.
A few hours following the White House opposition to the bill, Congress shelved SOPA putting off action on the it indefinitely. It’s quite refreshing when democracy and the voice of the people is listened to, but it’s equally terrifying how close we came to this madness becoming reality. Obama may have been the final nail in SOPA’s coffin, in this guise. But how long before it’s back with a different name but a similar danger to freedom of speech?
Friday Shorts 16th December
Desert Island Copyright of Xkcd.com
- What The World’s Biggest Websites Looked Like At Launch: It’s hard to imagine but the world beating websites we all love or loath today were once just scribbles on a piece of paper, or the brainchild of a 19-year-old college student. With the help of the Wayback Machine, which provides screenshots of any website imaginable from its inception until now, we can view the original designs and content of the most visited websites in the U.S.
Screenshot of Path Copyright of VentureBeat.com
- The Path to Make You Want to Delete Facebook: Many now see Facebook as a glorified phone book, chances are you have more than 300-500 ‘friends’. But Path, a lightweight social networking app, caps the number of friends you can have to a more natural and manageable 150. It’s the Dunbar Number — a theoretical limit to the number of connections you can meaningfully track at any time.
- YouTube Buys Company That Processes Music Royalties: In an effort to streamline its often complex relations with music publishers, YouTube has acquired RightsFlow, an upstart company in New York that processes royalties for the music industry. This move could mean a little or a lot more money for musicians.
- Paid Search Drives $6 is Local Sales for Every $1 in Online Sales: Paid search has 6:1 impact on offline sales over e-commerce. Only now with the rise of smartphones and other methodologies is online-to-offline tracking becoming more widely available. Approximately 9% of clicks on a paid search ad generated an offline sale, with some reporting up to 26%. It’s a fascinating insight into consumer behaviour and a warning to online only retailers, that we haven’t all moved away from real world stores just yet.
Linking To Particular Part of Page
Linking to a Heading or Sub-Heading
At the desired destination, add this in the html editor:
Example reads: <h2>Sub Heading 1</h2>
Therefore we simply add in after the h2: <h2 id=”subheading1″>Sub Heading 1</h2>
At the clickable hyper link, write the destination page Url as normal, followed by # and the unique identifier which was what was in quotes.
So in our example on the video the link reads:
http://dev2.selfassemblysites.com/third-blog-post#subheading1
NB: what comes after the # must be identical to the identifier, which was what you put in quotes.
Linking to a Particular Paragraph with No Heading
When you need to link to a section where there are no convenient headings or sub headings you can anchor your link to a paragraph. In our example in the video the paragraph started with ‘Lorem’ so that’s what we called the identifier. Type this in at the desired destination in the html editor.
<div id=”Lorem”>Then the paragraph goes here. At the end of the paragraph where there’s a natural break you need to close off the html command.</div>