We'll be presenting LineBuzz in a quick 10 minute presentation at the Capitol Hill public library as part of the Seattle Tech Startup meeting on May 9. It will be our first public demo of this little project we started on April 1. There will be 5 other companies doing short presentations and getting feedback from the audience. If you run a startup in Seattle or are contemplating the leap, I highly recommend this gathering. We made a ton of new friends last month who are all (as Tony Wright puts it) pathologically entrepreneurial.
There's also a gathering at a local pub afterward which is loads of fun.
I just NAILED this problem I was ranting about yesterday. That's the awesome thing about writing software. It's pure. There's no other way to look at the final product. It either works or it's crap. It's like digging a hole or catching fish. You either caught fish and dug your hole and there they are, or you didn't.
I was introduced to the term "very hard problem" in Seattle. Developers here love to use the phrase. It evokes images of PhD theses and geeks toiling away late at night on pagerank-like algorithms. Most developers rarely have the opportunity to work on truly hard problems in their day jobs and relish the opportunity when it presents itself.
LineBuzz is an incredibly simple application, but its implementation is a hard problem - at least for little old us. When we describe the flow of application execution and talk the algorithm through to test it's logic, and the cat meows, it throws us off bigtime. It requires total concentration to keep it all in our heads. I know a few wicked smart people in Seattle who might think this is a cakewalk - and I wish I had the money to employ them so they could help us keep it all together. But it's just the two of us, so we need to just shut the cat up for a few minutes and get it done.
This rambling 4am post is my explanation of why our launch date is going to slip by about 1 week. But it's going to be worth it. We're about to launch something that no one has done before. We started on April 1 and we're about 85% of the way there so we're doing pretty good. If all goes well, we'll be presenting LineBuzz on May 9 at a gathering in Seattle - details to follow.
We're launching a closed beta for bloggers later this week. If you blog and are interested in a better way for your readers to post comments on your current blogging platform, then join the facebook group titled "r361n4|d w4n75 y0u!" and we'll set you up.
This seemed an appropriate title for my first LineBuzz blog post. I've heard the phrase many times and finally looked up the origin. It refers to pilots back in the day before all the fancy flight control systems. The pilots would fly by feeling the reactions of the plane through the largest point of contact, the seat of their pants.
The meaning is: To do something without planning, to change course midstream, to figure things out as you go. The new project was discovered over beers in the kitchen (we're out of tequila at the moment which is a crisis all in itself) which qualifies for without planning. We put Geojoey on the sideline for a month changing our course. And daily I hear expletives wafting from the "dev" office so definitely figuring stuff out as we go.
So here's to running with an idea and navigating by our, well, you can fill that part in.
This blog is for a little pet project that Kerry and I are working on called LineBuzz.com (not launched yet). We've put our other project that we've been working on for a year on the shelf for 1 month while we try this out. It's all hush hush top secret right now, but we're launching an Alpha 7 days from now. We've given ourselves exactly 1 month and 1 week to see if this will fly. We started April 1. So time runs out on May 7 (2 weeks after launch).
I'm working with a designer friend in Cape Town (D Rock) to come up with some Logo concepts. Here's the first set. I'd love to know what you think. The bird's name is Reginald.
If you don't read it within minutes after it comes out, you should check out David Sifry's (Technorati CEO) state of the Blogsphere (or Live Web as he's now calling it). Every time the report comes out I race down to the part where he compares MSM (main stream media) vs the blogsphere - and I'm usually disappointed. The recent early coverage by MSM of the VA massacre left me speechless. They were thin on facts, so they turned a very sombre event into a soap opera to draw viewers. As I flicked from CNN to MSNBC to Fox (ugh!) I couldn't believe what I was seeing. Sad winding orchestral music was the backdrop to endless speculation with the old (we-don't-got-no-facts) trick of reporters interviewing other reporters.
The first real reporting that came in was from a student called Jamal Albarghouti who shot video, presumably from a cellphone and sent it to CNN's iReports. I've sent in an iReport myself and the nice T-shirt they send you hardly makes it worth it.
Entrepreneurial types reading this may be pondering execution plays. "What if we built a news network on user submitted content and paid them their fair due?" I think that sort of thinking is flawed. You don't want to build an expensive-to-run-and-promote destination for news. You'll just become another news network playing soap opera music to draw eyeballs.
What should have happened is that Jamal Albarghouti should have uploaded his video to his own blog where he owns the content and the brand (his domain name) and earns revenue from his own traffic. Then tools like Digg and Technorati should have alerted the world to the fact that his was the best available news source.
But iReports got hold of it and Jamal will continue his studies and possibly his life in anonymous bliss.
How to solve this? Here are some ideas:
Digg should evolve into the mainstream faster than they're doing. But how do you get away from a vocal early adopter geek demographic? I don't know.
Build a mainstream Digg
Google News could get their act together and mix blogs with mainstream news in a more real-time way so that when something like VA or 9/11 happens, we get the most read site popping up in seconds at the top of the News list.
A "Third Force" could emerge that combines real-time traffic data and full-text search to produce a real-time feed of what's important news right now. Perhaps users do the initial submitting, but then traffic, or traffic growth analysis takes over and says "hey, site X's traffic is growing at 20,000% per minute, we'd better bump him up because somethings going on there.".
