Nick Holmes a Court

Elevator pitch's for A Players...

2012-01-19T00:08:00.001+11:00

How to create a great elevator pitch?

- What we are doing?-
- Why its unique, interesting or valuable?
- Why you should care...

I really wish i had recorded my early elevator pitches for BuzzNumbers. As i indulge in recollection of past events, my first investor pitch took 10 minutes to complete. Rushing forward to today, i've pitched thousands of times over to associates, clients, investors etc. It now feels so natural to give an elevator pitch in less than 60 seconds that i had kind of forgotten that i even had to try to hone the perfect "elevator pitch".

I've recently been working with StartMate and internal teams at BuzzNumbers for new products we are bringing to market this year and the concept of elevator pitch has come up a few times this week and spurred me to think about this again.

As a serial entrepreneur and angel investor who has seen thousands of pitches, i have formed an opinion on what makes a good pitch that works for me on both sides of the table and i wanted to share my experience.

The key things i think you need to cover in your pitch is

- What problem do you solve?
- What traction/milestones you have that achieved to prove you are solving this problem
- What you want from the person you are speaking to? (Your "ask")

So with renewed focus, i though perhaps to deliver my Elevator pitch as see it today for BuzzNumbers...

Version 1

BuzzNumbers helps businesses track, measure and understand what people are saying online and on social media about their company, people, products and competitors.

Our world-class social media analytics platform has best in breed and patent pending realtime monitoring of News, Blogs, Forums, Social Media sites like Twitter and Facebook as well as Video, Classifieds like Craigslist and Ebay and even BitTorrent networks.

Our company was founded in 2009 and is now trusted and used daily by over 150 global fortune 500 companies including Microsoft, AMP, BHP, Astra-Zeneca, EarthHour and multiple Government Agencies and our company is growing exponentially at over XX% per month.

It would be great to get your contact details if that is ok. Do you have a business card so i can send you some information to see if this is of interest?

After reflecting on this <1min pitch, which i use frequently, i realised it is objectively perhaps longer than what is necessary to cement interest and get the business card.

So i cut it down to something shorter

Version 2

BuzzNumbers helps companies track what people are saying about them online.

Our customers use this information to get market research and consumer insights in near real-time, something that was never possible before our patent pending Software as a Service was created.

We founded the company in 2009, and have since grown exponentially and acquired more than 150 enterprise customers including Microsoft, AMP, BHP, Astra-Zeneca and many many more across all industry sectors.

I'd love to tell you more - do you have a business card i can send you some information about our company?

While now under 35 seconds, surely i could do better!
In thinking how i could to get this down, i recalled giving a pitch when i bumped into an old colleague while crossing a pedestrian crossing in the street who asked "what are you doing now?". My crosswalk pitch?

Version 3

I'm at BuzzNumbers. We help companies understand the voice of the consumer on the web. We are growing crazy fast in both enterprise customers and revenue.

It would be great if you could recommend any potential customers, partners or investors that you think would be interested? Do you have a business card i could send a link to our web demo?

Ok, so im now happy with this badass 15 seconds pitch. This pitch is a taster of what we do and why it is cool, and an "ask" to get their contact details without being too pushy.

So what are your thoughts?

What is your elevator pitch?

What do you do? Why is it unique? Why do i care?

Leave a comment!

Oh, the Places You'll Go!

2012-01-09T00:15:00.001+11:00

The man watching... by Rainer Maria Rilke

2012-01-07T22:16:00.001+11:00

I can tell by the way the trees beat, after
so many dull days, on my worried windowpanes
that a storm is coming,
and I hear the far-off fields say things
I can't bear without a friend,
I can't love without a sister

The storm, the shifter of shapes, drives on
across the woods and across time,
and the world looks as if it had no age:
the landscape like a line in the psalm book,
is seriousness and weight and eternity.

What we choose to fight is so tiny!
What fights us is so great!
If only we would let ourselves be dominated
as things do by some immense storm,
we would become strong too, and not need names.

When we win it's with small things,
and the triumph itself makes us small.
What is extraordinary and eternal
does not want to be bent by us.
I mean the Angel who appeared
to the wrestlers of the Old Testament:
when the wrestler's sinews
grew long like metal strings,
he felt them under his fingers
like chords of deep music.

Whoever was beaten by this Angel
(who often simply declined the fight)
went away proud and strengthened
and great from that harsh hand,
that kneaded him as if to change his shape.
Winning does not tempt that man.
This is how he grows: by being defeated, decisively,
by constantly greater beings.

RIP Dennis Ritchie - the man who taught me code

2011-10-15T00:24:00.002+11:00

Today Dennis Ritchie died...

While likely wont get nearly much press, as Wired Magazine put it - Dennis Ritchie was The Shoulders Steve Jobs Stood On

When i was just a young kid, my dad gave me a book "The C Programming Language" by Kernighan and Ritchie - it was this book that first taught me about If/Else, Loops, Switchs, Functions and all the first ways i had ever seen logic described in language. It confused me, it delighted me, it made me want to know more and gave me a thirst for programming.

Thanks Dennis - a generation of programmers thanks you...

Moving from SQL Server to Mongo (NOSQL)

2011-09-28T18:57:00.000+10:00

I presented last night at Sydney Alt.NET event on Lessons Learned migrating from SQL Server (RDBMS) to MongoDB (NOSQL)

Here is my deck, which was well received.

Moving from SQL Server to MongoDB

View more presentations from nickhac

On the conservative moral minority...

2011-09-26T15:37:00.000+10:00

“Ah, you miserable creatures! You who think that you are so great! You who judge humanity to be so small! You who wish to reform everything! Why don't you reform yourselves? That task would be sufficient enough.”
― Frédéric Bastiat

When self reference, irony, and meta humor go too far... (a cautionary tale)

2011-08-17T20:28:00.002+10:00

Creating a profitable startup company (David Heinemeier Hansson) - Video

2011-06-20T21:56:00.002+10:00

Why stress is actually good for you?

2011-06-12T02:27:00.009+10:00

I've been reading some material tonight that argues that stress is actually good for you from a biological perspective and this is called Hormesis. From reading this, i think we can quickly argue that this applies to psychology and that we can in fact improve our capacity to better manage our lives through actively encouraging and engaging in high stress scenarios.

What is Hormesis?

A universal biological principal whereby a stress that is harmful at high doses promotes defense and repair processes at low doses

Examples of Hormesis in action

Allergen immunotherapy
Cold showers as an anti-depressant
Lifting weights to grow muscles
Exposure therapy for phobias/anxiety
Boot camp for delinquent kids

Why this matters?

Exposing yourself deliberately to high exposure stress scenarios, improves your ability to handle and respond to stress, conflict and personal challenges that happen on a day to day basis.

This is both a chemical, biological and psychological theory that has a reasonable degree of proof and projected applicability across our personal, interpersonal and business interactions.

There is an identified neurotransmitter in the brain BDNF which is understood to foster the brain's ability to adapt and learn. This theory states that exposing the brain to high levels of stress and exposure across many dimensions ultimately improves the brains ability to manage lower levels of stress by re-enforcing and strengthening existing neural pathways.

This seems reasonably obvious upon reflection, but if we can use this theory as a call to action for us to deliberately expose ourselves to big stress and big challenges and then use our emotional intelligence to realise that when we do this we are just bringing up our baseline, we can actually use previously unwanted stress to actually better ourselves.

How to use unwanted stress to actually improve yourself?

Push yourself deliberately into scenarios that you are significantly uncomfortable with (and actively try to engage your emotional intelligence to not worry about it) with the knowledge that this improves your ability to better manage everyday situations and ultimately make yourself better equipped to operate in your world.

You might just find that your unwanted stress, actually ends up making you a more balanced and less stressed person!

Thanks to http://gettingstronger.org/hormesis/ for inspiration and data on this...

Do you know where money comes from? (Money as debt)

2011-05-26T00:07:00.000+10:00

Edwina reminded me of a youtube documentary that we watched some time ago. Basically it explains where money comes from. When you withdraw 20 bucks, where does the value behind that actually come from and what hold it as worthy?

Australian Internet - 10 minutes on TPG

2011-05-24T22:25:00.001+10:00

So ive been a long term customer of TPG for Home, Business etc...

Here is a photo of my uptime for the last 10 minutes.

This has been my internet connection for the last few weeks, experiencing drop outs for 30 seconds to 2 minutes at a time about 10 times an hour. Call for support "have you restarted your modem"...

My First NodeJS Application - A Company Logo Generator

2011-05-22T22:26:00.007+10:00

Recently ive decided to learn NodeJS, so a few weeks back i wrote a hello world application. Ive been using Microsoft .NET commercially for around 10 years and although we do use a fair amount of open source technology at BuzzNumbers, i dont write that much code these days so i wanted to get my hands dirty.

I had been looking for a real world application to build in NodeJS and over the last week a requirement emerged for an service that enables me to input a company name in a IMG SRC and get back the company logo.

This gives me flexability so i can just hotlink a company logo anytime when ever im blogging or as part of a client reporting application and the company logo will embed nicely

For Example

src=" http://companylogogenerator.nickhac.com?q=qantas"
or src=" http://companylogogenerator.nickhac.com?q=westpac"

To achieve this i had to use overcome a number of technical challenges...

Extract parameters from querystring to get the company name
Build up a URL based on the URL and Company Name
Download HTML from an Image Search Webpage
Parse the HTML and extract URL's of Images
Redirect the Web Request to serve up the image from the 3rd party suite
Keep the Web Server Always Online and handle errors (using forever)

Here is the code http://pastebin.com/iY2gwUDM

Probably the happiest guy ever...

2011-05-17T23:46:00.000+10:00

How to be happy

Imagine you have to pay $100 everytime you say "umm"

2011-04-28T21:44:00.005+10:00

My dad gave me some advice a long time ago, and it has really altered the way i think about almost every public speaker i hear and almost every conversation i have.

When i was growing up, if i was sitting at the dinner table and had just told the family what happened that day, he would say "you have to give me a dollar for every time you just said umm"

Now, adjusted for income earning power and inflation, today it should be $100, and in my opinion this should apply to "Umm", "Ahh", "you know"

Its always more poignant to leave a white space rather than feel you need to fill the air with noise. Listen to almost all political and key business leaders, they almost never use these words, and often use big clear white spaces in their spoken word.

Now at this point i have to apologise to you if you are reading this, as this information has fundamentally ruined my ability to listen to others who use the words "Umm", "Ahh", "you know"

Sorry... but i hope this makes your speech a little more poignant

The 5 ways of giving advice (and how to be a better leader)

2011-04-23T09:51:00.003+10:00

As a leader in your company or as a specialist with years of experience in your field you are often called upon to help others address their challenges on a regular basis.

From some recent learnings i've had there are 5 different ways that advice is given or received, and i have found this useful to reflect upon as often as specialists we focus on solving others problems rather than enabling them to solve their own problems.

The 5 ways of giving advice

1, Consulting
Giving specific advice and describing actions to solve problems

2. Training
Transference of skills, you impart knowledge of a specific process to enable them - "teach a man to fish"

3. Mentoring
Being available as a wealth of knowledge and experience and sharing past experiences and their outcomes

4. Facilitating
Amongst a group of people, managing the flow of engagement to create an outcome while having no personal agenda

5. Coaching
Creating awareness of the actual current position, thereby enabling people to explore and make choices to create real action and be empowered to solve their own problems

It's important to realise what kind of advice you are giving the people who ask for your time and input. Providing consulting advice is useful in scenarios of high-risk where a solution is needed now, but really doesn't scale as your company grows.

The role of a CEO or leader within a high-growth company should ultimately progress from Consulting to Coach, for example, how many business cards from 1 man companies have "CEO" written on them do nothing else but consulting, contrast that to the CEO of a fortune 500 company who would almost never engage in any kind of consulting, training, mentoring or facilitating but actual purely as a coach to their key executives.

So consider your role within your company or in your engagement with others. How can you progress from beyond being a pure consultant to one that empowers others and creates a multiple of value?

Toilet walls and art...

2011-04-22T22:36:00.001+10:00

Was at a new bar in Sydney last night for company drinks, i saw this quote, and for some reason it resonated with me...

I like the use of the word "discuss"

"If writing on toilet walls is done neither for critical acclaim or monetary gain, is it not therefore the purest form of art? Discuss"

The role of a Startup CTO (Eric Ries, Authors @ Google)

2011-04-20T10:10:00.000+10:00

I had been listening to alot of talk 2nd hand about lean startups etc, but i watched this great presentation by Eric Ries (who i didnt realise was CTO and Founder of IMVU).

He addresses some great questions

- Why Agile or Scum development methodology only really solves half the problem for startups
- When to pivot?
- What to include in your MVP? What to leave out?
- How to speed up your innovation / product / market feedback cycle?

Business Model Generation (Video)

2011-04-20T09:50:00.002+10:00

The future of commerce... Google VP Payments from Web 2.0 SF 2011

2011-04-03T14:41:00.000+10:00

Probably the talk i enjoyed the most from Web 2.0 SF

Kevin Kelly Keynote from Web 2.0 SF 2011

2011-04-03T13:29:00.001+10:00

Been in SF this week meeting partners, VC's, advisors and some great aussie entrepeneurs

Bardia Housman who sold BusinessCatalyst/GoodBarry to Adobe
Cameron Yulli - Founder and CEO of AdGent
Mick Johnstone from Ycombinator who is now at FaceBook
Elias Bizannes from Vast.com (founder of Silicon Beach)
Marty Wells - serial entrepeneur
Ozan Onay - Co-Founder of TopGuest
Chris Saad - VP Product at Echo

I also had the great privilege of checking out some of the keynotes from Web 2.0 SF 2011

Ive been a long time fan of Kevin Kelly (Editor of Wired Magazine) and he gave a great presentation on the next big trends in the web. He is a little slow to start, but if you care about entrepreneurship, definitely recommend watching it through...

Blogging from 36,000 ft in the air at 448mph

2011-03-26T06:45:00.001+11:00

Im writing this blog post from 36,218ft high in the air moving at 448mph on a flight from LAX to SFO on Virgin America. Ive been waiting probably a decade for this moment, and yes, it is as good as i hoped it would be :)

Being Governed...

2011-03-15T21:54:00.000+11:00

To be GOVERNED is to be watched, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, regulated, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, checked, estimated, valued, censured, commanded, by creatures who have neither the right nor the wisdom nor the virtue to do so.

To be GOVERNED is to be at every operation, at every transaction noted, registered, counted, taxed, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, authorized, admonished, prevented, forbidden, reformed, corrected, punished.

It is, under pretext of public utility, and in the name of the general interest, to be place under contribution, drilled, fleeced, exploited, monopolized, extorted from, squeezed, hoaxed, robbed; then, at the slightest resistance, the first word of complaint, to be repressed, fined, vilified, harassed, hunted down, abused, clubbed, disarmed, bound, choked, imprisoned, judged, condemned, shot, deported, sacrificed, sold, betrayed; and to crown all, mocked, ridiculed, derided, outraged, dishonored.

That is government; that is its justice; that is its morality.

General Idea of the Revolution in the Nineteenth Century, translated by John Beverly Robinson (London: Freedom Press, 1923), pp. 293-294."
— Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

The internet as a source of revenue destruction

2011-03-15T08:59:00.004+11:00

In the last ten years the internet has effectively destroyed several billion dollar industries, and replaced them with million dollar industries.

What it seems, is that by creating a significantly more efficient model for both production and distribution, the internet doesn't replace existing revenue, it destroys it.

For entrepreneurs and startup businesses, this creates significant opportunity. For large existing companies, this should be reasonably troubling.

What industries are next?

Interview on iPitch for BuzzNumbers

2011-03-14T14:34:00.002+11:00

The guys at iPitch interviewed me as part of their coverage on successful tech entrepreneurs.

http://www.ipitch.com.au/public/entrepreneur-interview-nick-holmes-a-court-buzznumbers/

Getting what you want...

2011-03-11T21:34:00.000+11:00

There is a pain associated with not having what you want.

There is a pain associated with getting what you want.

Only when the pain of not having what you want outweighs the pain of getting what you want, is it the right time to act.

9x9 web thinkers, 9 unique perspectives from 9 leading Australian web thinkers

2011-03-11T12:54:00.007+11:00

A couple of weeks ago i was asked to participate in a video project by the guys at microsoft asking a series of questions about the web, technology and innovation.

9x9: web thinkers is an innovative snapshot-in-time video project. Documenting the thoughts and opinions of some of Australians web leaders and thinkers. Its innovative design is specifically tailored to accommodate the needs of a diverse viewership from developers to CEOs to the digirati.

http://9by9.tv/index.html

Life balance...

2011-03-06T09:43:00.003+11:00

Yesterday i was taking a walk with an old friend of mine and my daughter at balmoral beach. My friend works in finance and olivia is 18 months old.

A group of tween/teenage girls from the local school stopped us for a survey of some kind and the first question they asked us was "What is your passion in life?". My friend who i consider to be a very economically minded individual quickly responded "Health".

This kind of took me off guard, because in my usual circles this kind of question is promptly responded with answers "leveraging emerging technologies to create transformative impact on people, companies, society and government" or a similar tech/entrepenrially focused answer.

Why this took me off balance is that these tween girls wouldnt even understand this. After 15 seconds consideration my response was "making things people want", (paul grahams words not mine) which for me sums up the product innovation / marketing / startup success focus and life passion that i have had for some time.

(Olivia passion in life is Milk so she doesnt count)

This whole experience reminded me of a blog post by fellow australian entrepeneur Clay Cook that i read a long time ago.

Basically it kind of states that there are multiple aspects of your live you need to focus on, and that success isnt just about financial gain and corporate success.

I really should probably put more focus into the other aspects of this wheel...

The start-up causing plenty of buzz (SMH.com.au) @BuzzNumbers

2011-02-17T15:59:00.002+11:00

“Most start-ups don't solve a problem big enough for anyone to care about and that is why they fail,” Rose says. “BuzzNumbers does exactly the opposite, which is why it's been so successful.

Very cool...

The start-up causing plenty of buzz

10 Simple Truths Smart People Forget

2011-01-12T21:40:00.001+11:00

#1 – Education and intelligence accomplish nothing without action.
#2 – Happiness and success are two different things.
#3 – Everyone runs their own business.
#4 – Having too many choices interferes with decision making.
#5 – All people possess dimensions of success and dimensions of failure.
#6 – Every mistake you make is progress.
#7 – People can be great at doing things they don’t like to do.
#8 – The problems we have with others are typically more about us.
#9 – Emotional decisions are rarely good decisions.
#10 – You will never feel 100% ready when an opportunity arises.

10 Simple Truths Smart People Forget

The war on terrorism?

2011-01-11T23:27:00.003+11:00

"As many critics have pointed, out, terrorism is not an enemy. It is a tactic. Because the United States itself has a long record of supporting terrorists and using terrorist tactics, the slogans of today's war on terrorism merely makes the United States look hypocritical to the rest of the world."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegations_of_state_terrorism_by_the_United_States

Startup Viagra: How to Pitch a VC

2011-01-10T16:46:00.000+11:00

A great presentation on how to pitch your startup to a venture capitalist, from Presentation Camp SF (San Francisco, March 2009).

Startup Viagra: How to Pitch a VC

View more presentations from Dave McClure.

Why do consumer goods in Australia cost 2X USA Prices?

2011-01-09T13:25:00.012+11:00

I'm born and raised in Sydney Australia, although i am increasingly looking to spend more time in San Francisco for work.

As a parent in a young family, we have to make a number of significant life purchases in the next few years (house for the kids, family car, laptops for wife and kids) as well as ongoingly purchasing consumer items for everyday life (shoes, clothes, books, food).

I can't get my head around this. My colleagues in the USA make similar incomes to Australian professionals eg Software Engineers and Accountants. So why is Australia so much more expensive?

Item	America (USD)	Australia (AUD)	Price Multiple
Coke: Can 330ML	$1	$2.20	2.2X
Malcolm Gladwell, Tipping Point	$8.24 Barnes & Noble	$23.95 Dymocks	2.9x
Nike Air Max 90	$94 FootLocker USA	$189 FootLocker Au	2X
Weber BBQ Q120	$139 Amazon	$299 BBQSGalore	2.2x
HP Pavillion Laptop	$549 Staples	$994 OfficeWorks	1.8X
Car: BMW 335i	$55k Cars.com	$120k Carsales.com.au	2.2x
House: 4 Bed	$1.67M Hollywood Hills Zillow	$4M+ Bellevue Hill Domain	2.4X
Total Cost	$1.73M	$4.12M	2.3X

When i first moved to San Francisco in 2000, this kind of made sense as the Aussie dollar was 50 cents to the USD, but todays rate is 1 Australian dollar = 0.9954 U.S. dollar.

Can someone please explain this to me?

Why is Australia effectively double the price for consumer goods when income is nearly equal and the exchange rate is near parity?

Surely the cost of manufacturing is near equal, so where is the difference going (government, retailers, importers)?

Based on this it seems that we can have a much higher quality of life in the USA (assuming healthcare is factored into job income). That said we do love the beach/sun lifestyle we have in Sydney.

I look forward to your thoughts?

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Update: 10-Jan-2010

Wow thanks for all the comments and feedback, some great discussion on reddit with over 70 comments.

This post hit Page 1 on Reddit and #1 on /r/australia.

Clearly this post was not an exhaustive study but it is interesting and i have enjoyed the discussion. Thanks for all your feedback and time.

On a more positive Australian note, ill tell you what is pretty damn well priced for us Sydney Locals... A Sunday afternoon spent swimming and sunbathing on Coogee beach with the family for free!

Who are Australia's top 10 Tech Startups for 2010?

2011-01-04T11:33:00.003+11:00

To recognise the success and growth of Australian startups in 2010, and bring awareness to Australian innovation, entrepreneurship and the quickly emerging Australian startup sector, iPitch.com.au held the inaugural iPitch i10 Awards. We’re awarding 10 high potential and innovative startups out of the nearly 450 Australian startups in the iPitch community...

View Top 10 Australian Startups for 2010 - The Winners of the inaugural iPitch i10 Awards

Hint: BuzzNumbers gets a look-in for the awards :P

failure can be intrinsically valuable

2011-01-01T11:30:00.000+11:00

failure is the default

From biological species to companies to government policies, there appears to be an Iron Law of Failure, which is extremely difficult to break.

Paul Ormerod, Why Most Things Fail

failure can be intrinsically valuable

The knowledge that you have emerged wiser and stronger from setbacks means that you are, ever after, secure in your ability to survive. You will never truly know yourself, or the strength of your relationships, until both have been tested by adversity. Such knowledge is a true gift, for all that it is painfully won, and it has been worth more to me than any qualification I ever earned.

J.K. Rowling, Harvard Commencement Speech

we can bond through our failures

But there is an even stronger reason why we can learn from the failures of others, beyond the simple pleasure of knowing that an expert can fail too. It has to do with our ability as human beings to relate better to people in their failures than in their successes, and to learn more in the process.

Richard Farson, Management of the Absurd

and bonding over failure is a good thing

Over and over again, when people ask how they can achieve the Silicon Valley-type of opportunities in their areas, I tell them, "Celebrate failure."

Tara Hunt, Losercamp

Source: http://failcamp.org/

If you like snowboarding or skiing, this will blow your mind

2010-12-19T23:23:00.001+11:00

Superior, Speed Fly from Marshall Miller on Vimeo.

WikiRebels -- The Documentary Full Version

2010-12-19T21:54:00.000+11:00

No time to think...

2010-12-17T22:21:00.001+11:00

Winning is not normal

2010-12-17T15:04:00.000+11:00

Came across this on the web today...

You look at people who are extremely successful and I can almost guarantee there is at least something very weird or different about them They have attitudes, habits, ideas and tendencies that are very abnormal. And that makes total sense. Because winning isn’t normal.

"Winning" Remember one thing... winning isn't normal. That doesn't mean there is anything wrong with winning. It just isn't the norm. It is highly unusual.

Every race only has one winner. No matter how many people are entered, only one person or team wins each event. Winning is unusual. So it requires unusual action. In order to win, you must do extraordinary things. You can't just be one of the crowd. The crowd doesn't win. You have to be willing to stand out and act differently.

Your actions need to reflect unusual values and priorities. You have to value success more than others do. You have to want it more! Remember, wanting more is a decision YOU make and act upon. You have to make your values a top priority. You can't train like everyone else. You can't be like everyone else. You have to train more, be willing to be different.

You can't talk like everyone else. You can't think like everyone else. You can't be too willing to join the crowd, to do what is expected, to act in a social manner, to do what's "in". You must be constantly willing to stand out in the crowd and constantly take exceptional action. If you want to win and be part of a winning team, you need to accept the risks and perhaps the loneliness...because winning isn't normal.

Source: Winning

Don Drapers guide to picking up women

2010-12-16T22:37:00.001+11:00

Can rewards actually reduce motivation to perform?

2010-12-12T11:43:00.000+11:00

Contrary to the widespread belief that people are positively motivated by reward incentives, some studies have shown that performance-based extrinsic reward can actually undermine a person's intrinsic motivation to engage in a task. This “undermining effect” has timely practical implications, given the burgeoning of performance-based incentive systems in contemporary society.
It also presents a theoretical challenge for economic and reinforcement learning theories, which tend to assume that monetary incentives monotonically increase motivation.

Neural basis of the undermining effect of monetary reward on intrinsic motivation - Columbia University, New York

Mark Pesce on "HyperDemocracy"

2010-12-12T10:16:00.001+11:00

Why we have technology debt...

2010-12-12T00:26:00.000+11:00

Imagine a kitchen -- not your kitchen, but a large commercial one. A kitchen where the business of cooking is conducted.

Now imagine that you are a chef, and you've been hired to cook here. You set about your work and much is done, but the kitchen is never cleaned. This is not due to malice or incompetence, but because there is simply never a moment to rest between orders. As one dish is completed, another one comes in. This is, after all, your job: You are here to cook, and the product of your craft keeps customers happy. So long as you are producing meals you are doing your job, and the people you work for are running a successful business. Eventually your kitchen gets too dirty, and it starts to negatively affect the quality of the product in a way that is regulated by law. Your kitchen must either be cleaned to meet certain basic standards or it will be shut down.

This is where you point out that that last part doesn't exist for tech companies.

It's a good idea for us to deal with the byproducts of our work -- to take out the trash, to wipe down the counters. It's something that everyone worth their salt knows they have to do, sure. But -- and this is the key -- it is not something our bosses know they have to account for unless they themselves have seen it build up in the codebase or been told that it exists. There isn't a law anywhere that says "Keep your codebase clean or the Department of Code Reviews inspector will shut your shit down."

Explaining Technical Debt to your Non-Technical Boss

Software Engineering Doesn't Work

2010-12-12T00:15:00.000+11:00

Software engineering as it’s taught in universities simply doesn’t work. It doesn’t produce software systems of high quality, and it doesn’t produce them for low cost. Sometimes, even when practiced rigorously, it doesn’t produce systems at all.

Video: Software Engineering Doesn't Work

2010 Summarized With Google Searches (Google Video)

2010-12-11T23:42:00.001+11:00

How to Start a Company When You Have a Full-Time Job

2010-12-11T10:46:00.000+11:00

Todd talks at PlusConf about how he started BuySellAds.com and gives you great advice on how to launch your startup while you have a job. Find out how much money he used to start the company, when he decided to leave his full-time job, how he handled challenges and how he began to grow his company – and find out who his biggest enemy was during the first year of his startup. (You may be surprised.) As a bonus, you will also find out what kind of luxurious vehicle he drives and how deciding to stop working from his home and into an office kept him from losing his mind. ;)

The best advice of all in this video: Stop wasting time and get started on your dream.

Watch live streaming video from plusconf at livestream.com

Source: HackerNews

The Difference between Scientists and Science Advocates

2010-12-10T11:51:00.000+11:00

A Short Cartoon about Time

2010-12-08T20:10:00.000+11:00

Who has share of voice for the Australian Group Buying Market?

2010-12-03T12:35:00.000+11:00

So clearly the hot sector right now in B2C is Group Buying.

BuzzNumbers is due to release a full report end next week with analysis of the sector, but i couldn't help but share this preliminary data.

Now the numbers in this arnt finalised and this is just a draft, so don't take the above chart as gospel, but it is interesting

If you are interested in this be sure to follow @BuzzNumbers or drop me a note an i can email you additional research...

Why work doesn't happen at work

2010-11-30T14:15:00.001+11:00

Jason Fried has a radical theory of working: that the office isn't a good place to do it. At TEDxMidwest he lays out the main problems (call them the M&Ms) and offers three suggestions to make work work.

BuzzNumbers of the Homepage of TechMeme.com

2010-11-30T08:27:00.000+11:00

Just found out today that BuzzNumbers has been voted BizSpark startup of the day and that we have been featured on the homepage of TechMeme.com :)

Reading Julian Assange's (WikiLeaks) Old Blog - Interesting reading...

2010-11-30T00:23:00.000+11:00

Some great material from Julian Assanges old blog (now unavailable)

http://web.archive.org/web/20071020051936/http://iq.org/

Every time we witness an injustice and do not act, we train our character to be passive in its presence and thereby eventually lose all ability to defend ourselves and those we love. In a modern economy it is impossible to seal oneself off from injustice.

If we have brains or courage, then we are blessed and called on not to frit these qualities away, standing agape at the ideas of others, winning pissing contests, improving the efficiencies of the neocorporate state, or immersing ourselves in obscuranta, but rather to prove the vigor of our talents against the strongest opponents of love we can find.

If we can only live once, then let it be a daring adventure that draws on all our powers. Let it be with similar types whos hearts and heads we may be proud of. Let our grandchildren delight to find the start of our stories in their ears but the endings all around in their wandering eyes.

The whole universe or the structure that perceives it is a worthy opponent, but try as I may I can not escape the sound of suffering. Perhaps as an old man I will take great comfort in pottering around in a lab and gently talking to students in the summer evening and will accept suffering with insouciance. But not now; men in their prime, if they have convictions are tasked to act on them.

Anatomy of Cool - Remo Giuffre

2010-11-28T11:17:00.000+11:00

Just came across a presentation i saw at Interesting South 2009, was quite funny and a novel look at what is "cool" and why some people and some things are cool...

Anatomy of Cool

View more presentations from Remo Giuffre.

Startup Metrics for Pirates

2010-11-28T10:53:00.001+11:00

Startup Metrics for Pirates

View more presentations from Dave McClure.

What if everything you think you know about taking products to market is wrong?

2010-11-28T10:51:00.000+11:00

What if everything you think you know about taking products to market is wrong? What would you do differently if you realized that only 1 out of 10 new product introductions result in a profitable business? Would you continue to operate the same way, week after week, year after year?

The surprising fact is that companies large and small, established corporate giants as well as brand new startups, fail in 9 out of 10 attempts to launch their new products.

They unnecessarily burn through billions of dollars as they try to force their new products into markets where no one is waiting to buy.

Yet time and again they all return to the same processes that produce failure.

Download The Four Steps to the Epiphany: Successful Strategies for
Products that Win

The Four Steps to the Epiphany

View more documents from nickhac.

Creating a Data-Driven Startup

2010-11-28T10:26:00.001+11:00

Creating a Data-Driven Startup

View more presentations from David Cancel.

Facing Your Mortality - Frontline Video

2010-11-27T20:57:00.000+11:00

This is a 1-hour PBS documentary I stumbled on showing the growing issues faced by medical practitioners dealing with the chronicaly critically ill, and how their constant circling-the-drain health status impacts those around them.

It's quite hard to watch at times because the patients are going through so much, as are their families, and they have minimal prospects of getting better.

The most interesting quote from the documentary, that these patients are in a state of limbo, a suspended animation, really outlined what modern medicine can do. It can keep people alive almost indefinitely, but is that necessarily an improvement on their quality of life? Millions of questions arise from this, hopefully we have answers one day, someday.

Repeat after me: I am free...

2010-11-27T20:53:00.000+11:00

Job Adverts in X-hacker http header in Wordpress

2010-11-27T10:35:00.001+11:00

One of our guys found some interesting http headers when doing some comment form analaysis

Building Buzz for your Startup (for Free)

2010-11-23T08:50:00.000+11:00

I came across a presentation i gave at ATP Innovations to a group of first time entrepreneurs on How to "Build Buzz for your Startup (for free)".

Its a few years ago now, but i think the messaging is still relevant!

Are you jealous or envious?

2010-11-09T08:51:00.000+11:00

An old and wise DBA colleague of mine would always remind me every time i said i was jealous if i really meant it.

Jealousy: I want what you have and i don't want you to have it.

Envy: I want what you have, but have no desire to take it from you.

Fun facts for the day...

Global Media Spend by Country

2010-11-08T21:18:00.001+11:00

Just came across an interesting dataset about the amount spent on media/advertising by country.

Key Data:

USA: $81BN
UK:$22BN
Germany: $18.7BN
France: $14.1BN
China: $9.9BN
Spain:$7.8BN
Australia: $5.8BN
Brazil: $6BN
Japan: $1.8BN

The $50 lesson

2010-10-28T14:04:00.000+11:00

I recently asked my friends' little girl what she wanted to be when she grows up. She said she wanted to be the Prime Minister. Both of her parents, staunch left wing Labor supporters, were standing there.

So I asked her, "If you were Prime Minister, what would be the first thing you would do?"

She replied, "I'd give food and houses to all the homeless people"

Her parents proudly beamed. "Wow . what a worthy goal..!"

I told her. "But you don't have to wait until you're Prime Minister to do that. Tell you what - you can come over to my house and mow the lawn, pull up the weeds, and sweep my driveway, and I'll pay you $50.00. Then I'll take you over to the park where the homeless man hangs out, and you can give him the $50.00 to use toward food and a new house. How about doing something wonderful like that?"

She thought that over for a few seconds, then she looked me straight in the eye and asked, "Why doesn't the homeless man come over and do the work, and you can just pay him the $50.00."

I said, "Welcome to the Liberal Party, young lady..!"

...her parents still aren't speaking to me.

(via @nellch)

Whats your backup plan?

2010-10-26T17:07:00.000+11:00

If you have a backup plan, you still have the option of failing. If you run without a backup plan, you have no choice but to succeed!

What makes Great Hackers great is that they can find a way to get things done when the odds are stacked against them. Pragmatism over Perfectionism.

I'm really lucky to work with some great hackers here at BuzzNumbers...

Infinite Power!

2010-10-18T20:22:00.001+11:00

Why it’s a terrible time to start a Consumer Web/App Startup

2010-10-15T12:20:00.000+11:00

As the founder of a B2B SaaS provider, BuzzNumbers, that is seeing amazing growth and success (10x monthly revenue growth in last 6 months) i am seeing significant numbers of friends, strangers and community starting consumer based web and mobile app start-ups.

In my opinion we are in a huge bubble in consumer web right now and the odds are significantly against you as a first time entrepreneur to try and create something that will even cover costs, let alone become a create a significant liquidity event for you.

There is a flood of new consumer web startups in the market including everything from iPhone apps (to track social interactions and commercial transactions) to web solutions for researching, reviewing and sharing products etc online.

My Experience from starting Consumer Web Startups

I can speak from limited experience having started a number of consumer web startup. Of the 10+ consumer web start-ups i have created since 2001 here are the generalised outcomes

· some never got enough users so i shut them down

· some got users but i couldn’t figure out at way to actually make money

· some got users but never made enough money to make it worthwhile the time input

· 1 grew rapidly and had reasonable revenue, enough to pay for time of the founders and be profitable, but there was no way to go 10X and make something significant from this so we shut it down.

At this point i swore to only do B2B and Business software, where you had actual people with hard cash who if you could solve some of their problems they would likely give you some of their companies money.

So why do i propose it’s a terrible time to start web start-ups?

The trends in Software waves over the last 20 years show we are in a boom
Attention scarcity makes it near impossible to cut through
The value of the problems being solved are near zero
Getting money from users is almost impossible in a world of Free
Crappy Business Models for most start-ups means they are doomed to fail from the start

Reason 1: Review of the booms and trends in Software waves over the last 20 years

Lets look at the history of Peaks and Booms in Software and Web Startups:

Years	Types of Companies	Types	Named Successes
1989-1993	Business Software	Office Productivity, Accounting, Financial	Microsoft Office, Lotus, MYOB, Quicken, Adobe
1994-1999	Consumer Web	Portals, Search, Email, eCommerce	Yahoo, Google, Amazon, Ebay, Hotmail
2002-2005	Business Web	CRM, Marketing, Business Management	Salesforce, BaseCamp, CampaignMonitor, Atlassian,
2005-2010	Consumer Web	Social Networks, Content Hosting Applications, Consumer generated media, Group Buying	YouTube, FaceBook, Twitter, MySpace, Yelp, GroupOn, OpenTable

If we are to review what is in vogue as a measure of when is a good time to start a company and we look at the stock market, we know that when we are in a boom, its a great time to sell and a bad time to buy. So if we are in a boom in the market its probably too late to catch the train.

Reason 2. Attention scarcity makes it near impossible to cut through

There are millions of web sites and and 200k+ iphone applications, and the consumer has ever less attention to go around between the Work, Friends, Family, TV, Email, Web, Social Media, Radio, Games etc.

Creating a new application that provides consumers a new way to do X, it may be the coolest and best way to do X, but how much do i have time to consider it amongst the millions of messages i am getting.

Even if you can get the attention of an already time poor web user, you will still be battling for their attention again and again against everything already in their world an online.

Reason 3. The value of the problems being solved are near zero

When i look at startups ideas i always try to understand the underlying value of the solution or the cost of the problem to the user of that product. So many of the new or proposed consumer web startups out there aim to do something for users that creates almost negligible value.

I realise with this kind of thinking, i may have never been the founder of Twitter or Facebook, but i think that these kind of businesses are outliers. And starting a company that becomes like this is kind of like both starting a startup and winning the lottery at the same time.

Even YouTube despite being a fun and young company, had a very significant value proposition when you look at the cost of trying to upload and host Video Content on the web in the early 00’s. It use to cost tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars for large companies to publish and host video content and YouTube nearly eliminated that making it cheap, easy and accessible for the world to publish content.

Looking at the realworld economics of companies and why people pay for things, if it doesn’t make you money or save you money in a meaningful way, then why does it stand up as a viable commercial opportunity?

Reason 4. Getting money from users is almost impossible in a world of Free

Milton Friedman talks about the 4 ways people spend money, in order of efficiency

1. My money on Me (eg. Buying my lunch or socks – ruthlessly cheap and efficient)

2. My money on You (eg. A birthday present – want value, but really just ticking a box)

3. Your Money on Me (eg. A company allowance for travel or food – who cares as long as my boss doesn’t freak out)

4. Your Money on someone else (eg. The government spending our tax money – We hope the benefits of our X scheme will be of benefit to the community in the future)

Driving consumer web users to pay is like scenario #1 above, and people are very hard to part with their money.

On the other hand consider business services, managers buying software for their staff to use, which is like #3 or #4 (eg salesforce at $1800 per user per year, no problem, ill take 10 seats please, its not my money and our sales guys will be more efficient etc etc).

Think about your own behaviour on the web, think how stingy you are and think how hard it is to get your credit card out to buy something even if it only a few dollars. Even when payment is easy on the app store for iPhone, im still mostly keen for free apps and ill deliberate sometimes over a $6.99 purchase and spend 5 mins trying to find an alternative.

Sites like FaceBook, Blogger and YouTube taught a whole generation of web users that everything they do on the web is free (supported by advertising like tv, which we mostly ignore). With that in mind, trying to get users to pay for your service directly with their credit card is really really difficult.

Reason 5. Crappy Business Models

So if its really really hard to get consumers to pay for stuff online, surely there are heaps of examples of Advertising Revenue or Affiliate Revenue or Traffic Revenue or Data Sales etc

Well Google definitely makes serious coin from Advertising, but most consumer web start-ups that i see are pretty much have some kind of model like “We (or our users) make content, its hosted on our website (or others), and online advertising makes us money.”

I have a number of friends who have businesses like this, and the only ones that make reasonable money seem to have a Direct Sales force and its taken them 5 years to get the level of traffic required to make this sort of thing viable. A fair number of them also needed to take Investment Funding at some point to survive and grow and these days Investors really don’t like these kind of business models. Looking at at Business with Direct Sales Team, Finance Requirements and Long Ramp up time, doesn’t really fit the model that most new entrepreneurs have for their business models.

What i find increadible is the App Store model. Even if you charge $9.99 for your app, you have to sell an absolute crapload of these to repay the cost of development, to cover the cost of operations and to pay market salaries for the founders and employees. Yet everyone has these grand dreams about how they are going to make an awesome iPhone/iPap application. The numbers just don’t stack up.

When you look at the business models of most consumer web start-ups and entrepreneurs pitching their ideas, it seems like it 1999 again and they have mostly only a vague view of how they might make money in the future.

So what are you thoughts, am i wrong? I'm happy to be wrong, but if so why? Leave a comment and ill be very interested to hear your feedback

An anthropological introduction to YouTube

2010-10-15T09:18:00.000+11:00

One of the best talks ever on how YouTube has changed our Culture. Everything from memes, to virals, to stats on the growth and adoption of YouTube as opposed to TV.

Its a 40 Min lecture, but is one of the most interesting views of web and culture i have seen

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TPAO-lZ4_hU

Do You Want To Live Forever? (Documentary)

2010-09-22T21:55:00.000+10:00

Channel 4 Documentary following the revolutionary life extension and immortality ideas of this somewhat eccentric scientist, Dr. Aubrey de Grey.

This show is all about the radical ideas of a Cambridge biomedical gerontologist called Aubrey de Grey who believes that, within the next 20-30 years, we could extend life indefinitely by addressing seven major factors in the aging process.

He describes his work as Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence (SENS).

The SENS theory describes “seven deadly things” that erode the body’s youthfulness at the cellular level, eventually leading to death by old age.

Aubrey de Grey means to apply exercise, gene therapy, stem cells, and other yet-to-be-discovered methods of medicine to counteract each of these age-advancing devices:

1. Cell death and atrophy: Treatable with exercise, stem cells, and chemicals which stimulate cell division.

2. Cancerous cells: Theoretically treatable with a type of gene therapy being developed, called Whole-body Interdiction of Lengthening of Telomeres (WILT).

3. Mutant mitochondria: Mutated DNA in the mitochondria causes a number of diseases. These can be prevented by moving the mitochondrial DNA into the cell nucleus, where the rest of the DNA resides.

4. Cell senescence (unwanted cells): Fat cells and other unwanted cruft can be removed surgically, or by stimulating the immune system to attack unwanted cells.

5. Extracellular crosslinks (loss of elasticity): Certain proteins, such as those in cells making up the arteries, become too rigid over time because they bond to each other. These bonds can be broken with certain chemicals (some in clinical trials even today).

6 Extracellular junk: “Plaque” which collects between cells can be eliminated by stimulating the immune system, and/or by using peptides called “beta-breakers.”

7. Intracellular junk: Molecular garbage can be prevented from overwhelming certain cells by introducing enzymes which are known to be effective against such molecules.

View Full Documentary

Requiem for Detroit - Video Documentary on decline of Detroit City

2010-09-19T18:41:00.000+10:00

A documentary about the decay and industrial collapse of America's fourth largest city. Detroit went from a population of 2M to 800k in a little over a decade. An interesting look at what might become of much of the post-industrialist world...

Elias Bizannes : Perfectionism

2010-09-12T23:11:00.000+10:00

The hacker culture consistently is what makes great startups… Hackers - not to be confused with crackers who break into systems - have the intelligence to understand trade-offs and what truly matters. If you are a perfectionist, you will never succeed as a start-up entrepreneur. - Elias Bizannes.

Full SMH Aricle here

Australia: Living in a house price bubble

2010-09-07T18:17:00.000+10:00

Australian has seen 2 generations of significant capital gains in the housing market, however it looks to me that todays prices already have at least the next 10-15 years of capital gains already priced into them.

Morgan stanley has just released a report with some startling statistics around this.

Download the full PDF from Morgan Stanley

Australia’s debt-fuelled housing market remains a major macro risk. Dodging the worst of the global financial crisis didn’t demonstrate that there’s no bubble, in my view it just showed we dodged the prick. I’m not persuaded by arguments that houses are sustainably priced;

Australian house prices are expensive on every value metric. They are expensive relative to history, and expensive relative to houses in comparable countries. Most measures suggest house prices are around 40% above fair value. There’s a word for a financial asset that’s over-valued by 40%, so let’s use it: housing is a bubble.

House Price vs GDP Per Capita

Value of Housing Stock vs Household Income

House Price to Rent Ratio

Australia vs Anglo Countries - Median Multiple / Population

Real Dwelling Prices

Trend Real House Prices vs Trend in Population

Loss Making Rental Property Investors as a % of Tax Payers

Percentahe of Property owners claiming lose

Property Investor Losses by Income Level

Property Investor Losses by Income Level

Real Media Melbourne House Prices

Rental Income, Cost and Net Rent - A bad investment

Download the full Morgan Stanley Report

Publishers, innovation, and failure (by Nic Hodges)

2010-09-07T15:09:00.000+10:00

It’s no great revelation that social Media and the rise of digital communication have completely shifted the media landscape. The speed with which consumers have adapted to technology has outpaced the speed with which many organisations have adapted.

Technology, and importantly communication through technology, has become ubiquitous and transparent in the lives of consumers. And yet the digital world still feels awkward and ill-fitting for many businesses and brands.

And why is this?

Because the 2 billion people using the internet today have changed how they’re behaving.

They’ve started sharing their opinions with the world.

They’ve started making Skype calls to their friends on the other side of the world.

They’ve started using Google as a verb.

They’ve started to expect an instant reply.

They’re uploading 24 hours of video to YouTube every minute.

They’re watching 2 billion YouTube videos a day.

They’ve started to create advertising for the brands they love.

And they’ve started movements against the ones they don’t.

Almost one third of the world’s population is online, and they’re creating stuff. These 2 billion people have become publishers.

And if you think that these 2 billion people aren’t a threat to the way advertisers, agencies and publishers operate, I’d like to introduce you to Apollo.

Apollo helps you discover the best news content from around the web based on your preferences. Apollo gives you all the top news headlines in real-time, aggregated from 1000’s of the world’s top sources and personalised to your preferences. It is an up-to-the minute, mobile newspaper. As you use the application, the Apollo algorithm learns what articles and sources you enjoy and helps you discover new content based on your personal preferences and viewing history.

And importantly, apps like Apollo and social-news aggregator Flipboard aren’t showing users any ads. The users are the new publishers. The editor is now a combination of my social network and complex algorithms. And there doesn’t seem to be much of a role for advertisers.

Essentially, publishing is the new literacy. Publishing is now abundant. And if we look back 600 years to the birth of the printing industry we find that literacy became abundant at the same time as scribes lost their jobs.

So what of publishers, at the time when everybody becomes a publisher?

Publishers create immense value for agencies and our clients. Newspapers have for more than 150 years given us a place to get our message across to consumers. They have provided us with an audience.

And with the birth of digital, the publishers evolved. They created audiences, and gave us valuable spaces in which we could advertise. In less than 2 decades, digital advertising has gone from a non-existent industry, to one worth $2 billion a year in Australia.

But now, if we look at devices like the iPad and how it’s changing media consumption, it’s seems like we’re back at the starting gate again. Consumers aren’t paying attention to our ads online, and more and more they’re actually behaving in ways that cut us out. To continue to be able to talk to consumers, we need to understand that their behaviour has changed. They have become publishers, and that completely changes the landscape for advertisers.

Clay Shirky brilliantly highlights what happens when we move from a scarcity of publishers to an abundance of them…

…surplus always breaks more things than scarcity. Scarcity means valuable things become more valuable. Surplus, on the other hand, means previously valuable things stop being valuable, which freaks people out.

I think it’s a fair observation to say that, on the whole, many organisations are freaked out by the changes that they are seeing in the digital world.

But the challenge for publishers is relatively simple: Create something that is so compelling, that audiences will seek it out.

Create something that understands the changes in behaviour. That understands that people care about sharing content with their friends, and having content recommended back. Something that uses complex technology to present a simple, enjoyable experience.

It’s possible that in five or ten years, the launch of the iPad will be considered as the beginning of a revolution. We really don’t know what sort of impact these devices will have. But no matter what, experimentation and innovation are key.

The thing about being an innovator however, is that there will be failures. And todays publishers could learn a lot from looking at the people who were the catalysts for the revolution we find ourselves in. These innovators weren’t afraid of failure. In fact, in Silicon Valley failure is seen as a badge of honour.

While I’m sure today we’ll hear all about the success of News innovation with The Australian iPad app, It’s just as valuable to hear about, and learn from the failures. We’re on the bleeding edge here, and I can assure you that in the world of technology and innovation, nobody is getting everything right, all of the time.

The winners of the digital era will not simply be those that outthink, but those that outfail.

Communication has changed more in the last decade than it did during the first three hundred years of the printing press.

And this is not a change that can be resisted. This is behaviour, and it can only be embraced.

For advertisers, this change means being brave and stepping outside of your comfort zone sometimes. Devices like the iPad are giving us so many new ways to talk to and talk with consumers. These new opportunities won’t always look and feel like advertising as we know it, but to remain relevant in consumers lives we have to talk to them on their terms.

For media and creative agencies, it means we have to keep exploring and examining. It’s never been so important to understand the intricacies of consumers lives, how and why they’re doing what they’re doing. And this exploration informs our entire business, from the initial planning phase all the way through to the execution of an idea.

And finally for publishers, this massive change means they have to understand how and why people are consuming content. They have to innovate, and create something that people choose. Something that they seek out.

Great Blog post Nic!

The case for anonymity online (Moot / 4Chan Video)

2010-09-03T15:11:00.001+10:00

AngelConf2010 - What top San Fran angels look for in a startup company

2010-08-15T21:38:00.000+10:00

Just had a listen through the YCombinator AngelConf 2010 Video, some interesting points..

Great companies come from the right founders, in the right industry, at the right time
Founders are more important than ideas or even markets (you can always change ideas/markets but its very hard to change founders)
Look for "ThunderLizards" - startups that are going to move very quickly
The market is small, don't advance yourself at someone else's expense, it will ultimately hurt you
The best deals have significant competition, be sure to add value not just money
Complex terms are a big turn off, Term sheet docs shouldn't be bigger than 1-2 pages
Convertible notes increasingly used instead of equity
Do the founders have a way of managing the departure of a team member so that your dont end up with a dead weight? (Ensure founders have vesting on their starting equity)

Watch live video from Y Combinator on Justin.tv

I recorded a bunch of them to MP3 for my blackberry, you can download them here

AngelConf by nickhac

B&T Hot 30 under 30

2010-08-07T14:09:00.000+10:00

I just found out i was featured in B&T's hot 30 under 30 this week. How cool!

A couple of my mates @Ben_Phillips and @nichodges were also featured in this sound congrats all around.

What Is Law?

2010-08-07T14:05:00.000+10:00

What, then, is law? It is the collective organization of the individual right to lawful defense.

Each of us has a natural right — from God — to defend his person, his liberty, and his property. These are the three basic requirements of life, and the preservation of any one of them is completely dependent upon the preservation of the other two. For what are our faculties but the extension of our individuality? And what is property but an extension of our faculties? If every person has the right to defend even by force — his person, his liberty, and his property, then it follows that a group of men have the right to organize and support a common force to protect these rights constantly. Thus the principle of collective right — its reason for existing, its lawfulness — is based on individual right. And the common force that protects this collective right cannot logically have any other purpose or any other mission than that for which it acts as a substitute. Thus, since an individual cannot lawfully use force against the person, liberty, or property of another individual, then the common force — for the same reason — cannot lawfully be used to destroy the person, liberty, or property of individuals or groups.\

Such a perversion of force would be, in both cases, contrary to our premise. Force has been given to us to defend our own individual rights. Who will dare to say that force has been given to us to destroy the equal rights of our brothers? Since no individual acting separately can lawfully use force to destroy the rights of others, does it not logically follow that the same principle also applies to the common force that is nothing more than the organized combination of the individual forces?

If this is true, then nothing can be more evident than this: The law is the organization of the natural right of lawful defense. It is the substitution of a common force for individual forces. And this common force is to do only what the individual forces have a natural and lawful right to do: to protect persons, liberties, and properties; to maintain the right of each, and to cause justice to reign over us all.

Frederic Bastiat, The Law, 1950

I met Senator Conroy this week

2010-08-07T14:00:00.000+10:00

So i had the interesting opportunity to meet with Senator Stephen Conroy this week.

Stephen Conroy described himself as "the most hated man on the Australian internet", but despite the amount of stick i have given to him on twitter, to be fair he seemed really nice, was well spoken and had some interesting points to say.
His work on the NBN is clearly and genuinely focused on the best interests for the nation which was nice to see.

Im still completely confused as to why he is so passionately behind the NetFilter, which is almost universally declared as a bad idea from everyone in the internet industry. I guess i never really understood why people felt the moral right to try to dictate or regulate the behavior of others.

"Ah, you miserable creatures! You who think that you are so great! You who judge humanity to be so small! You who wish to reform everything! Why don't you reform yourselves? That task would be sufficient enough". - Frederic Bastiat, The Law, 1950

Anyways, In summary Stephen Conroy was a nice enough bloke, in retrospect i wish i had more of a succinct argument to put to him about the Netfilter.

Human, All too Human

2010-08-07T13:28:00.000+10:00

Been watching a really enjoyable documentaries series, i wanted to share this

Human, All Too Human is a three-part 1999 documentary television series produced by the BBC. It follows the lives of three prominent philosophers; Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, and Jean-Paul Sartre. The theme of this documentary revolves heavily around the school of philosophical thought known as existentialism, although the term had not been coined at the time of Nietzsche's writing, and Heidegger declaimed the label.

Human all too human - Martin Heidegger

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-858369328131624007#

Human, All Too Human - Nietzsche

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-184240591461103528#

Human all too human - Sartre

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=59970401509513554

The Will to Truth (Beyond Good and Evil)

2010-08-07T13:23:00.001+10:00

The Will to Truth, which is to tempt us to many a hazardous enterprise, the famous Truthfulness of which all philosophers have hitherto spoken with respect, what questions has this Will to Truth not laid before us! What strange, perplexing, questionable questions! It is already a long story; yet it seems as if it were hardly commenced. Is it any wonder if we at last grow distrustful, lose patience, and turn impatiently away? That this Sphinx teaches us at last to ask questions ourselves? WHO is it really that puts questions to us here? WHAT really is this "Will to Truth" in us? In fact we made a long halt at the question as to the origin of this Will--until at last we came to an absolute standstill before a yet more fundamental question. We inquired about the VALUE of this Will. Granted that we want the truth: WHY NOT RATHER untruth? And uncertainty? Even ignorance? The problem of the value of truth presented itself before us--or was it we who presented ourselves before the problem?

Beyond good and evil

DRM

2010-08-06T23:52:00.001+10:00

SOMEONE IS WRONG ON THE INTERNET!

2010-08-06T23:45:00.000+10:00

THE NEW DORK - Entrepreneur State of Mind

2010-08-04T15:32:00.000+10:00

Ran back into this video that my mate @datrigub sent me last i was in SF, just checked it just hit 1millions views... sweet

Poor Advert Placement for Julia Gillard - LOL

2010-08-04T00:38:00.000+10:00

The Vice of Selfishness

2010-07-27T08:40:00.000+10:00

So most of my friends would know that i am a fairly solid subscriber to the philosophical ideals of objectivism as proposed by Nietzsche and Rand. To this end ive blogged several times about The Virtue of Selfishness, a book on Objectivist ethics.

Today by coincisdence i came across an essay titled "The Vice of Selfishness", which provides a reasonable concise and in my opinion, a very "opinion heavy" response to Rands thinking. It was intersing to explore the counter argument. Ill post a few excepts here.

Animals have it easy. The family dog never wrestles with his conscience over the need to leave some Alpo in his bowl for the poor and hungry strays. Bulls don't apportion the cows to ensure the joys of family life for all concerned. And, once an amoeba splits, the two halves feel no need to keep in touch.

People, however, do not have such an easy time of it. The enlightened, modern person usually measures the progress of civilization by discerning how well its members look after their comrades. While some limited altruism has been documented in nature, conscious altruism can fairly be described as an invention of human beings. Whether it is the Christian axiom to "love thy neighbor as thyself" or the socialist dictum requiring "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need," altruism is widely considered the progressive, humane stance.

Read the full essay, The Vice of Selfishness

BuzzElection Launched. What do people think online of the 2010 Federal Election

2010-07-26T11:30:00.000+10:00

So ive been working pretty hard nights and weekend on a hobby project, BuzzElection.com

Look forward to your thoughts or feedback!

SEO for Software Companies

2010-07-21T21:18:00.000+10:00

7 non-obvious lessons learned running Software as a Service business

2010-07-21T21:14:00.000+10:00

1. You are financing your customers.

Most SaaS businesses are subscription-based (there’s usually no big upfront payment when you signup a customer). As a result, sales and marketing costs are front-loaded, but revenue comes in over time. This can create cash-flow issues. The higher your sales growth, the larger the gap in cash-flows. This is why SaaS companies often raise large amounts of capital.

2 Retaining customers is critical.

In the old enterprise software days, a common model was to have some sort of upfront license fee — and then some ongoing maintenance revenue (15–20%) which covered things like support and upgrades. Sure, the recurring revenue was important (because it added up) but much of the mojo was in those big upfront fees.

In the SaaS world, everything is usually some sort of recurring revenue. This, in the long-term is a mostly good thing. But, in the short-term, it means you really need to keep those customers that you sell or things are going to get really painful, very quickly.In SaaS, things are simple by design — and contracts are shorter. The net result is that it is easier for customers to leave.

3 It’s Software — But There Are Hard Costs.

In the enterprise-installed software business, you shipped disks/CDs/DVDs (or made the software available to download). There were very few infrastructure costs. To deliver software as a service, you need to invest in infrastructure — including people to keep things running.

4 It Pays To Know Your Funnel.

One of the central drivers in the business will be understanding the shape of your marketing/sales funnel. What channels are driving prospects into your funnel? What’s the conversion rate of a random web visitor to trial? Trial to purchase? Purchase to delighted customer? The better you know your funnel the better decisions you will make as to where to invest your limited resources. If you have a “top of the funnel” problem (i.e. your website is only getting 10 visitors a week), then creating the world’s best landing page and trying to optimize your conversions is unlikely to move the dial much. On the other hand, if only 1 in 10,000 people that visit your website ultimately convert to a lead (or user), growing your web traffic to 100,000 visitors is not going to move the dial either. Understand your funnel, so you can optimize it. The bottleneck is always somewhere. Find it, and optimize it — until the bottleneck moves somewhere else. It’s a lot like optimzing your software product. Grab the low-hanging fruit first.

5 You Need Knobs and Dials In The Business.

One of the great things about the SaaS business is you have lots of aspects of the business you can tweak (examples include pricing, packaging/features and trial duration). It’s often tempting to tweak and optimize the business too early. In the early days, the key is to install the knobs and dials and build gauges to measure as much as you can (without driving yourself crazy).As you grow, you should be spending a fair amount of your time understanding the metrics in your business and how those metrics are moving over time.

6 Visibility and Brakes Let You Go Faster.

One of the big benefits of SaaS businesses is that they often operate on a shorter cycle. You’re dealing in days/weeks/months not in quarters/years. What this means is that when bad things start to happen (as many experienced during the start of the economic downturn), you’ll notice it sooner. This is a very good thing.

7 User Interface and Experience Counts:

In the SaaS world, design matters much more than the old world where users were forced to use bad enterprise software because they had to. Success in SaaS is not just about selling customers, it’s also about retaining them. If your user experience makes people want to pull their hair out and run out of the room screaming, there’s a decent chance that your cancellation rate is going to be higher than you want. High cancellation rates kill SaaS startups. Start recruiting great design and user experience talent now. They’re in-demand and hard to find, so it might take a while.

Source: 7 Simple Lessons from Inside HubSpot

Clay Shirky: Are Lolcats a Sign of Human Progress?

2010-07-20T22:26:00.000+10:00

Some failures are better than others (Seth Godin)

2010-07-20T21:56:00.000+10:00

Not all failures are created equal. When it comes to brainstorms and proposals, fail all you want, Seth Godin advises. By the time you get to board meetings or mockups, the failures should be only occasional. But failing to keep a promise to a customer? That's never acceptable under the Godin hierarchy of failure

A hierarchy of failure worth following

Not all failures are the same. Here are five kinds, from frequency = good all the way to please-don't!

FAIL OFTEN: Ideas that challenge the status quo. Proposals. Brainstorms. Concepts that open doors.

FAIL FREQUENTLY: Prototypes. Spreadsheets. Sample ads and copy.

FAIL OCCASIONALLY: Working mockups. Playtesting sessions. Board meetings.

FAIL RARELY: Interactions with small groups of actual users and customers.

FAIL NEVER: Keeping promises to your constituents.

The thing is, in their rush to play it safe and then their urgency to salvage everything in the face of an emergency, most organizations do precisely the opposite. They throw their customers or their people under the bus ("we had no choice") but rarely take the pro-active steps necessary to fail quietly, and often, in private, in advance, when there's still time to make things better.

Better to have a difficult conversation now than a failed customer interaction later.

Launch of BuzzVoices Alpha today

2010-07-11T23:30:00.000+10:00

Ok so ive been super excited for the last few weeks gearing up for the launch of a new product from BuzzNumbers. Ive been practically unable to talk or think about anything else (apologies to @edwina)

Introducing - BuzzVoices: Australian Forum Insights

Check it out, any feedback you have i would be pleased to hear it!

New Research: The attributes that increase the likelihood of becoming an entrepreneur actually impede startup success

2010-07-11T10:27:00.000+10:00

What do entrepreneurs look like? Are they born or made? This is a hard question. I think the root cause of that difficulty is that we tend to conflate two different questions into one. First, what causes someone to attempt entrepreneurship instead of a more traditional career path? And second, what attributes make someone likely to be a successful entrepreneur?

The difficulty lies in this paradox: many of the attributes that increase the likelihood of becoming an entrepreneur actually impede startup success.

Let’s start with the startup personality attributes. The academic research here is extraordinary. Here are the personality traits that are positively correlated with likelihood to pursue entrepreneurship: extraversion, skepticism, need for achievement, risk taking, desire for independence, locus of control, self efficacy, overconfidence, representativeness (the tendency to over-generalize from small samples), and intuition.

Read the full article at StartupLessonsLearned

Reggae DubStep Mixup

2010-07-10T11:19:00.000+10:00

Ive been working so much i have been mostly relying on DI.FM for music streaming at work, usually the progressive and minimal techno channels, which seem to be the most productive for software development environments.

That said one of my colleagues @brehtt put me in contact with a friend of his who makes some interesting mixups. I really liked this mixup, reminded me of some of the time i spent in east london (hackney/shoreditch/leyton) and the local radio...

Have a listen!

Dub Spectrum by Gilsun

http://soundcloud.com/gilsun

Angry noodle...

2010-07-08T19:58:00.001+10:00

Why You Can’t Work at Work (Jason Fried)

2010-07-06T21:24:00.000+10:00

Video: Why you cant work at work

My feeling is that the modern workplace is structured completely wrong. It’s really optimized for interruptions. And interruptions are the enemy of work. They are the enemy of productivity, they are the enemy of creativity, they are the enemy of everything. But that’s what the modern workplace is all about, it’s interruptions. Everyone’s calling meetings all the time, everyone’s screaming people’s names across the thing, there’s phones ringing all the time. People are walking around. It’s all about interruptions. And people go to work today, and then they end up doing most of their real work after work, or on the weekends. So, people are working longer hours, people are tired – I’m working 50-60 hours this week. It’s not that there’s 50 or 60 hours worth of work to do, it’s because you don’t work at work anymore. You go to work to get interrupted.

Stephen Fry on Philosophy, Logic And Reason (Video)

2010-07-06T21:18:00.001+10:00

In defense of moral nihilism

2010-07-06T21:15:00.000+10:00

Interesting?

Best stair slide ever... (aka, i miss being 8 years old)

2010-07-01T21:03:00.001+10:00

DogBert on Performance Measurement

2010-07-01T17:10:00.001+10:00

BuzzNumbers on the iPad

2010-07-01T16:47:00.001+10:00

Today we launched BuzzNumbers iPad Edition! Very exciting.

The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains

2010-06-28T23:50:00.000+10:00

Neurological research has demolished the myth of the static brain. Neural networks can be rapidly reorganised in response to new experiences such as going on the web. Mr Carr surveys current knowledge about the effects on thinking of “hypermedia”—in particular clicking, skipping, skimming—and especially on working and deep memory. He draws some chilling inferences. There is evidence, he says, that digital technology is already damaging the long-term memory consolidation that is the basis for true intelligence.

Only by combining data stored deep within our brains can we forge new ideas. No amount of magpie assemblage can compensate for this slow, synthetic creativity. Hyperlinks and overstimulation mean the brain must give most of its attention to short-term decisions. Little makes it through the fragile transfer into deeper processing. Clearly, argues Mr Carr, this is a radical upending of the “literate mind” that has been the hallmark of civilisation for more than 1,000 years. From a society that valued the creation of a unique storehouse of ideas in each individual, man is moving to a socially constructed mind that values speed and group approval over originality and creativity.

True, there are compensations: better hand-eye co-ordination, pattern recognition and the very multitasking skills the machines themselves require. Sceptics will rightly point out that similar concerns have accompanied each new technology. Something is always lost, and something gained. Some evolutionary biologists claim that the scholarly mind is an historical anomaly: that humans, like other primates, are designed to scan rapidly for danger and opportunity. If so, the net delivers this shallow, scattered mindset with a vengeance.

Read the full article at The Economist

SXSW 2010: Google in China: Context and Consequences

2010-06-28T23:40:00.000+10:00

Very interesting video about the change in censorship in china from Mainstream media to social media...