This is clever:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CSjwLmepdtk
If you can’t laugh at yourself, I suppose. :-)
Archive for the 'General' Category
I’m spending next week offline.
No email. No RSS. No blogging.
It will be interesting to see how it goes.
I’ll let you know this time next Sunday.
In the meantime, here’s a good story from Sir Ken Robinson’s book “Out Of Our Minds“:
“A well known British journalist was reminiscing about his early days in radio news. He joined the BBC in the 1930s at a time when there was no regular news bulletin. In his first week, a bulletin was scheduled and he arrived at the studio to watch it being broadcast. The presenter sat at the microphone and waited until the time signal had finished. He then announced sombrely: ‘This is the BBC Home Service from London. There is no news’. The view of the times was that news would be broadcast if anything happened to warrant it.”
I didn’t realise it until now, but less is nostalgic.
Congratulations to Tim and the rest of the team at PlanHQ for picking up the “Emerging Gold” at the Wellington Gold Awards this week. The list of previous winners of this category is quite impressive, including Icebreaker in 2001 and Virtual Katy in 2005. Hopefully PlanHQ will live up to the billing and go on to great things.
Celebrations aside, there were a couple of ironic moments for me during the evening …
The last time I attended was in 2005, when Trade Me was nominated in the “Cyber Gold” category.
The speaker that night was the Brazilian Ambassador. So, of course, we all went dressed as Brazilian footballer supporters. I was Rowanaldo (on the right):
It wasn’t such a successful night. Maybe we got ahead of ourselves, but on the night we didn’t even win our category.
If you wanted to be really cynical you might say that it didn’t help that at the time we were completely eating the lunch of the major sponsor (in fact just a few months later, said major sponsor would acquire the company!)
Bit, of course I wouldn’t be so bitter and twisted! :-)
I did have a quiet laugh to myself last night when the introduction video to the same category trumpeted the achievements of Sam and Trade Me, going right back to the famous heater story.
Anyway, it was a good night this time around and we all dressed much more sensibly.
Congratulations to Kiwibank and the other 2008 winners.
Disclaimer: I have a small stake in PlanHQ and also generally support Brazil (unless they’re playing England).
From Steven Berlin Johnson…
“I have some direct evidence (the details of which I can’t reveal for national security reasons) that Dick Cheney read The Ghost Map over Christmas, and apparently enjoyed it. (I’m kidding about the national security, but not about the fact that he read it.) Obviously, I’m not the biggest fan of Cheney, but still, there’s something very cool about the idea. It’s one of the things that’s so rewarding about writing books; I effectively got five or six uninterrupted hours to talk directly to the Vice President about my theories about cities, disease, progress — even the anti-science bent of the current administration. I didn’t get actual face time, but my ideas did.”
That’s very cool, and another good reason to write.
More and more I’m enjoying the challenge of trying to put my thoughts into words here.
I appreciate the time you all take to read them. Thank you!
Paul Graham continues to be my hero. Here is a quote from one of his recent articles:
“Y Combinator is not in the start-up funding business. Really we’re more of a small, furry steam catapult.”
You’ll have to read the whole thing to get the context, but I recommend that anyway.
While we’re at it, here are another couple of interesting Paul Graham quotes about another Y Combinator company, Reddit:
“Now that conventional ideas have caught up with it, it seems obvious. People look at Reddit and think the founders were lucky. Like all such things, it was harder than it looked. The Reddits pushed so hard against the current that they reversed it; now it looks like they’re merely floating downstream.”
– From: Six principles for making new things
And:
“[Digg] took $2.8 million, whereas reddit, their closest competitor, has taken only $88,000. (I know because Y Combinator funded them.) And yet reddit is not only able to compete, but has a visibly more authentic, participatory feeling. I read that the top 100 Digg users submit 56% of the frontpage stories. The frontpage stories on reddit are much more widely distributed. And that may be because reddit grew organically, through word of mouth, like Flickr and Del.icio.us did.”
– From: TechCrunch interview
In national news today:
Family claims largest ever Lotto prize
They won the $19m Powerball jackpot over the weekend.
The parents have said that they wish to remain anonymous.
The son said he thinks he’ll buy an Aston Martin.
One of them is wrong, I guess!
Related posts:
- On having something to be excited about, 24 February 2007
- Maserati Smaserati, 22 June 2007
- Never compare your inside to somebody else’s outside, 9 July 2007
To help avoid falling back into past traps I’ve decided to create an account on de.licio.us where I’ll post any interesting links I come across. That will hopefully allow me to focus on longer form posts here.
If you want to subscribe to the de.licio.us links you can use this RSS feed:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/delicious/rowansimpson
My existing feed for blog posts is:
For advanced users (!), if you’d like a blend of posts and links I’ve created a new feed using Yahoo Pipes which combines the last 10 blog posts and the 20 most recent links:
http://pipes.yahoo.com/rowansimpson/postsandlinks
If you have no idea what RSS is, or how to setup a feed reader, you might find this useful:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0klgLsSxGsU
For people reading this in technicolour on rowansimpson.com I’ve updated the links under the ‘Subscribe’ section on the right.
Enjoy!
At the end of last year I went along to hear Michael Palin speak as part of his promotional tour for his new book and TV series (which is currently screening on TVNZ).
He told a great story about the filming of “The Life Of Brian”. Apparently the film was originally backed by EMI, but when they found out the details of the script they freaked out and pulled their funding (lots of which had already been spent on sets etc, but that’s a different story).
So, somewhat desperate the Pythons eventually convinced George Harrison to pick up the pieces. He even got a cameo role. The rest is history.
Years later Palin said he asked Harrison why he decided to take the risk and put up the money. His response: “I just wanted to see the movie”.
Nice :-)
I now have one million half written blog posts in my drafts folder (more or less).
I suspect this is a pretty common situation.
This morning I’m declaring blog bankruptcy and accepting that I’m never likely to have the time to finish many, if not most, of them.
There are a few which are pretty much done, but have just never been published for various reasons. I’m going to keep these, and push them out over the next couple of days.
In keeping with my theme of the moment, the others are toast.
Deleting them is a big relief. If I’d known that I would have done it much sooner.
Gotta love LA!
Over the last 10 months I’ve been working 3 days a week at Xero helping out with product strategy and developing internal processes as we’ve grown quickly.
One of the things I’ve focused on is establishing a measurement culture and making sure we’re making product decisions for the right reasons. It’s great to see these things starting to happen.
I’ve enjoyed being able to help shape a new company as it moves from startup to becoming established in the market.
But, now it’s time for something different …
Next week I’m in the US for ETech. I’ve kept the week after that free, so hopefully I’ll meet some interesting people over there who will help me fill those days. If you’re going to be there please feel free to drop me an email.
After that I’m planning to spread my time around a few different things, including working with some of the other companies I’ve invested in. I’ll look forward to writing some more about those here over the next few months.
So, exciting times!
This week web folk from around the country will head to Wellington for Webstock (shouldn’t it really be Webstock 2.0?) to hear a great line-up of speakers coming here from around the world (some of them are here already).
So, it’s timely to remind ourselves just what an unusual bunch we are.
Here are some browser stats the Webstock organisers recently published on their blog:
| Firefox | Internet Explorer | Safari |
|
61%
|
21%
|
13%
|
And, here are the equivalent numbers for Trade Me in January:
| Firefox | Internet Explorer | Safari |
|
17%
|
79%
|
<3%
|
Spot the difference?
We’re not normal, but if we put our mind to it we can empathise, surely?
PS I use Firefox on my chunky Mac, so if I’m throwing stones here I’m throwing them at myself first. :-)
Credit: Jessica Hagy
I’m still in serious sleep debt after a great weekend at Kiwi Foo Camp (a.k.a. Baa Camp) in Warkworth.
This was my second Foo Camp (my first was this same event last year). Once again it was a surprising mix of people and ideas. Between the wine, warewolf, cricket, banjo, and guitar hero there was just enough time for some excellent presentations and sessions - the ones I attended covered everything from pitching tech stories to media, to electric cars, to shareware, to teaching kids to program … and lots in between.
We even managed to stop en route for an indoor ski, which was bizarre but a lot of fun (imagine a giant fridge sitting on the side of a hill on the outskirts of Auckland and you start to get the idea).
So, in place of more words here are some photos from Flickr and some links:
There were 160 people attending this year, including some familiar faces from last year and some new interesting people …
The un-schedule was all over the spectrum …
And lots of interesting ideas changed hands ….
Those lucky enough to bring a tent managed to avoid the synchronized snoring in the whare …
On Saturday morning Kim Hill interviewed some of the attendees (you can listen to the podcast if you missed it) …
On Saturday night Mike and I thought we had the warewolf sussed …
Garth had our back …
But, it’s always the person you never expect …
Well, okay, not ALWAYS …
Later in the evening some of the villagers just preferred to stay asleep …
At the same time these guys were having a lot of fun with fire (and taking some great timelapse photos)…
As was John the next morning…
Russell caught the eye of the scouts from the Indian 20/20 leagues …
And Mauricio made himself comfortable in the commentary position …
Those are NOT beer goggles …
And, at the end of it all, a bunch of happy campers …
But, don’t just take my word for it. Here is what some other attendees thought:
- Russell Brown
- Juha Saarinen
- Glen Barnes (including video)
- Mike Riversdale
- Sandy Mamoli
- Ludwig Wendzich
- Rod Drury
- Miki Szikszai
- Brenda Leeuwenberg
Meanwhile, the Kiwi Foo Camp wikipedia post needs to be updated if anybody has some time to spare.
Tim from PlanHQ is looking for somebody with web marketing skills …
http://www.siliconwelly.com/can-you-fill-my-funnel-then-contact-me/
If you think you might be the right person for this role I’m sure he’d love to hear from you.
And, if you tell him you saw the advert here then maybe he’ll shout me lunch or something.
:-)
This is great news for many reasons, but especially for anybody who needs to find amazing photos to use in a PowerPoint/Keynote presentation…
There must be hundreds of other sources of images with no known copyright, so hopefully this is just the beginning.
“What matters for most people is not how much they know, but how realistically they define what they don’t know”
– Warren Buffett.
It’s a year since I started this blog.
Thanks to everybody who has read it.
Thanks to those who have taken the time to comment and send emails in response. Your thoughts and insights make me much smarter than I would be otherwise.
Thanks too to any of you who told a friend about this site. It’s been an interesting experiment in word-of-mouth growth. I personally told hardly anybody about it. I just started linking to a few blogs that I enjoyed and let it go from there. The number of people who have subsequently discovered it is pretty amazing. Even my mum found it after only a couple of months, when I mentioned her in one post.
Special thanks to those of you who have your own blog and have linked to my posts. You’ve all made it much easier for people who are looking to find me on Google.
Writing all of this stuff down has forced me to think a bit more about what I believe, and to understand a bit more about what I know and, as per the quote above, what I don’t know. I’ve enjoyed it.
Hopefully reading what I’ve written has made you think a little too.
Happy New Year! :-)
