2 hour turbo

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Nexus One initial impressions

via AudioBoo

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And so it begins

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Looking after Santa

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Oh yes!

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The giblet source

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For all you gravy lovers

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Le Web

I was lucky enough to finally make it to Le Web this year. It was in parts tedious, entertaining and inspiring.

Tedious

Sponsors' speaking slots are inevitably best avoided. Microsoft and BT were both guilty of not having anything useful to say and should have kept out of the keynote room.

The platform discussion was equally dull. LinkedIn, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter all represented and none of them with anything particularly ground breaking or indeed enlightening to say.

What made it even more tedious was the underlying baiting of the man from MySpace for his tiny developer community. School playground stuff.

Entertaining

Hadn't seen Gary Vaynerchuk speak before and he certainly is a force. He took a while to get going but there was no stopping him at the end.

Paul Carr is an incorrigible smart-arse which was absolutely perfect for taming a panel of the 'best' of Europe. Some of his put-downs where first-rate. 'I've seen first-hand that Europeans can give birth to people' was a classic.

Inspiring

The start-up competition was probably the most interesting thing on day 1 and was some real insight into what the new breed of companies are working on. Especially relevant given some of the concepts and projects I'm forming at the moment.

I really liked Shutl as they seem to solve a problem, though not sure how well it will scale out of major metropolitan areas. Partly though I have a thing about the Internet being used to control and improve real things so this may have made me a little pre-disposed to liking it.

CloudSplit again solved a real problem in an elegant way though really represent a feature for the Amazon Web Services offering at the moment. Will be interesting to see how they expand out to help you manage other cloud providers.

RunKeeper I think has big potential but I'm not quite sure they quite see it yet.

Back in the keynote room Tony Hseih was truly thought provoking. The culture he created at Zappos.com is truly a phenomenon.

We've just been working through defining our Vision, Mission and Values at Esendex and I felt we were not quite finished. After Tony's talk I think there is a lot further to go.

Also in the keynote room it was great to see France's Internet Minister Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet demonstrating that the French, and indeed Spanish, governments are putting real money and infrastructure investment into supporting the development of a technology industry in Europe. Please take note UK government.

It was a great Le Web. Very professionally put together, great speakers, fantastic WiFi and great food.

If there is one recommendation I'd make it is that you make more of the Deep Dive, Startup Competition room content. There was some real value to be had in there and it worked well against the big keynote format.

When I look at my notes from the last couple of days, they're all about things I want to do, ideas to explore and books to read. So it can't have been too bad.

Hope to be back next year.

Riding the Boards of Champions

I put this video together from our Beeston Cycling Club trip to the Manchester Velodrome.

It was an absolute blast. Can't wait to go again. The banking is very steep, 42 degrees, but really not that scary once you get on to it.

It was also great value. We had dedicated use of the track with a coach for 2 hours. For 16 of us this came to £23.50 each including bike hire.

I just hope the indoor velodrome in Leicester gets the go ahead. Beeston CC may end up with a track team yet.

Riding the Boards of Champions from Adam Bird on Vimeo.

Sake-fuelled cultural insensitivity

Mrs B and I were lucky enough to go to the Eat Japan Sushi Awards over the weekend.

We had a great time, ate some amazing, truly world-class, food and made good use of the complimentary sake and beer.

There were seven chefs from seven different countries, all with a very different approach to the challenge.

The Czech entrant made a 'cute sexy hedgehog for pregnant ladies'. The US entrant had infused his with soil and the Italian entrant had used only Italian ingredients, even the rice.

The event was ultimately won by Tomoyuki Abe of Japan. This wasn't the foregone conclusion it may sound like. All entries where truly amazing but his salmon nigri was utterly sublime and he was a thoroughly deserving winner.

The great thing about the event was that we, the attendees, got to vote for the winner, which meant we had to taste all of their dishes. I actually plumped for the British entry as I felt his entry really worked well together but Mrs B, being Mrs B, voted for the eventual winner.

I guess I have to concede she has impeccable taste in many things ;)

Part of the evening involved a maki (sushi roll) making demonstration and then competition open to a couple of members of the audience.

I was one of those members and emerged victorious, though I had an awful lot of help from my appointed sushi-master. Video below.

Unfortunately, in my sake-fuelled joy I ended up hugging him, I then remembered the Japanese aren't big on the whole body contact thing.

Guess that career with the UN is on hold for a while.

Eat Japan Sushi Awards 2009 from Adam Bird on Vimeo.

Ride like you feel, just occasionaly

Currently in the midst of base-training which for cycling means lot's of long rides at a pace within yourself to lay the platform for the real improvements later on.

On these rides you're constantly monitoring your heart rate, power output or pace to make sure that you're operating at the correct level.

The problem is it can get rather dull.

I had a couple of hours this afternoon that started out as another Zone 2 'endurance' but I pushed it a little more into Zone 3 'tempo' as I was short of the normal 3-5 hours we normally cycle at this time of year.

By the end I'd ditched watching what I should have been doing and just rode as I felt.

It felt brilliant.

Still not up to the pace I was before my crash but it did show me that the base training is having an effect.

I'll return to it on the next ride with renewed motivation.

When you're wrapped up in training plans, it's easy to forget that the reason you ride in the first place is because you enjoy it.

Autumn Epic 09

Finally got round to getting this up on YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qKfaNX4e8tk). Unfortunately I ended up with the obvious use of ELO, Mr Blue Sky as Super Furry Animals, Hello Sunshine wasn't allowed because its WMG copyright.

Vimeo doesn't have that kind of restriction so here is the original Director's Cut.

Autumn Epic 09 from Adam Bird on Vimeo.

HOWTO: Source Control for VMWare Hosted Visual Studio on OSX

I've been wrestling with how to get some notion of backed-up source control for my Visual Studio projects that don't warrant going into the Esendex Team Foundation Server.

Didn't want them to be open source so code.google.com, codeplex.com, etc were all out and I didn't want to pay any money for a secure service.

Here's what I came up with.

Firstly I discovered that OSX ships with and SVN server, very handy. I followed this link to set it up: http://www.martellventures.com/blog/files/544f828ced9567b46fc92006af524d16-24.php.

With SVN running locally on the Mac, I could then rely Time Machine to make sure my source code was backed up.

Then downloaded the Ankh SVN plugin for Visual Studio so I could use and SVN repository.

So far so good, but then how to access the SVN repository. My virtual machine connects to the network independently so I had no consistent way of knowing the IP or hostname that I would need to browse to.

The answer: Bonjour for Windows. Installed that on the Windows Virtual Machine and bingo I can use the advertised machine name of my mac with the .local suffix to access the SVN, no matter what network I'm on.

Blue Ocean Strategy

I bought this book a while ago after a reference on a blog somewhere. I never got round to reading it but it was referred to during a course Julian and I were on at the University of Nottingham as part of the EMDA High Growth Program.

I steeled myself for the read and it was entertaining and thought provoking in pretty much equal measure but I had to push myself through to the end of Part One.

The key chapters for me came in the Part Two. 'Reconstruct Market Boundaries' and 'Get The Strategic Sequence Right' represented the meat of the book. They actually provided something to action.

Was it useful to me? The jury's out on that really. I was up for a good session building the Esendex strategy canvas and looking for where we should be going next. What happened was I ended up post-rationalising our strategic decisions into the various elements of the Blue Ocean Strategy.

Which leaves me with a question. Is this book just documenting the process entrepreneurs like me go through anyway or am I missing the point and using it to praise myself by validating the conclusions I've come to.

The notion of a strategy canvas is great but it's something that is easy to dress-up in hindsight. Emphasise the elements of the business that worked, gloss over the elements that ended up being ill-advised. The businesses that are featured in the examples are undoubtedly success stories but does the strategy canvas tell the whole story?

It would be wrong for me to say reading this book wasn't useful but it wasn't the seminal experience I think I was probably hoping for.

Business Link - I might be about to change my view

As many of you will know, I've been pretty down on my experiences with Business Link. Well, this may be about to be consigned to history.

As part of our acceptance on the EMDA High Growth programme, we had a business review which prompted Julian and I to consider some aspects of how we're running Esendex.

It was suggested we speak to Business Link as the gateway to a host of services and, in truth a little grudglingly, we did.

One meeting on and we're wiser to some relevant grants and services and action is being taken to help us.

I understand there's been a big shake up of Business Link in the East Midlands and if these recent experiences are anything to go by it seems to have done something approaching the trick.

Will keep you posted but if it is as it now appears, maybe the government has provide the help needed for us to trade our way out of this recession.

The Internet is a cess-pool

Running the web site for Beeston Cycling Club has been a real eye-opener as to the crap that stands in the way of legitimate use of the Internet.

We run the site with a Wordpress blog at it's heart. Allowing our members to post and comment on rides, events and anything that takes their fancy, sadly it was thigh diameter last night, is key part of what makes our club different.

Problem is the couple of us that administer the site have to deal with pages and pages of spam comments.

Link building detritus that I'm amazed if it serves any purpose other than to keep several thousand Internet Cafe users the world over meagrely employed.

I guess this is what it was like during the Victorian era in Britain. Rich people able to pay others to mask them from the abject poverty and open sewers running in the streets. Anyone trying to work their way up, beset on all sides by scum.

Ain't progress brilliant.

A view on the economy

A healthy stats obsession is no bad thing when running a business. Measurement, metrics, feedback, refine is all part of the rhythm of improvement.

The great thing about our stats is that they also give us a view on the economy in each of our markets. Our focus on business messaging and the size of our customer base means we see, first-hand, how busy an economy is.

Our traffic reflects the pace of business. The number of grocery deliveries, new furniture purchases, broadband installations, car sales and a whole host of other business transactions.

So, what's the news?

Business is looking good. I'm no economist but based on what I'm seeing, maybe this is a V shaped recession afterall.

Nott Tuesday - Where did all the geeks go?

Last night we had the fourth Nott Tuesday event and from the feedback it was a success. However I've been left with the feeling that something wasn't quite right.

The start-up pitch competition was a new format for the evening and we had some great judges and great companies pitching but the audience wasn't the usual crowd.

As @alanodea said to me, he'd told Tadhg (a Nott Tuesday first timer) that this wasn't what it was usually like.

My vision for Nott Tuesday was that geeks and business could co-exist. Sharing ideas, discussing issues and seeing what opportunities materialise was what I hoped people would be doing.

The dirth of geeks at last night's event has made me wonder whether this is a) acheivable or even b) something that people want.

I feel Nott Tuesday is at a crossroads. I desperately don't want it to become just another business networking event for entrepreneurs to sniff each other's arses. I've no interest in committing my time to something like that.

So was last night just an aberration? Am I reading to much into it? Where do we take this thing?

Pointless Auto Follow from Singapore Democrats

I travelled through Changi airport in Singapore at the weekend and naturally tweeted about it. Next thing I know I get an email from twitter telling me that the Singapore Democrats were following me.

What a load of mistargetted nonsense. I'm not a fan of auto-follows at the best of times but this has got to be up there as one of the worst.

Measure, Measure, Measure

The focus of Web 2.0 this year was the power of less. While there was definitely a feeling that nothing really new was happening in the industry, a couple of talks I attended focusing on optimisation of your business were probably the highlights of the event for me.

Eric Ries (blog: Startup Lessons Learned) was almost evangelical in his talk: The Lean Startup.

He espoused the virtues of measurement, feedback loops and iterative, agile development. All music to my ears and things we're doing and continue to improve on at Esendex.

What really got me thinking though was the notion of A/B testing of application features and measure how that translates into improving your businesses KPIs (key performance indicators).

To date I had considered A/B testing to be the domain of web sites, try different graphics, messages, calls to action, processes, etc and measure the goal completion percentages.

We're deep into building the new version of our new application at Esendex and we're making important decisions about the functionality and features we're going to make available.

The problem is those decisions are pretty much based on opinion rather than any objective measure. While we think they're a good idea, it remains to be seen whether our customers find them useful.

There is a certain amount of inspiration required and going with our gut instinct. Innovation generally involves a step change after all. As Henry Ford famously said:

If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.

But, if we take the leap and put the feature out there, wouldn't it be good to know if it gave the desired results. We need to be able to measure a) whether people use it and b) whether not it had the desired effect.

Outcomes in the web analytics world are generally fairly well defined. A site visitor bought something, registered on the site or, in our case, signed up for a trial.

The desired outcome of introducing a feature could be more grey. Outcomes are very likely not to contribute directly to one of our KPIs. The path to KPI improvement will probably be circuitous and require a degree of assumption but at each step we should be testing the hypothesis.

Often we'll be introducing a feature because we believe that it will improve on of our KPIs but that could just be by offering something other services don't, encouraging people to sign up with us rather than someone else.

In this case we will need to measure an indirect outcome until such time as we enough of a population to then measure more directly against our KPIs.

Very much more art than science.

I'm very much working this through at the moment. We're adding feature measurement into the beta product we're launching in May and I'm looking forward to using this process to improve the product in the direction our customers want.

I'll report back.