@jasonadriaan

Yahoo proves that Silicon Valley is no different to Hollywood

Wed, 14 Mar 2012 05:00:00 -0400

The technology industry is no different to the music and movie industries. We are holding onto archaic laws which are doing more harm than good. Patent law like Copyright law has become completely impractical in its current form.

Old patents made for cascaded windows and one click purchases are being infringed by nearly every startup and if the dinosaurs of the industry decided, they could kill the whole industry with a couple of lawsuits. Everyone has at least one piece of copyright infringed material sitting on their home computer, similarly most startups infringe patents owned by large companies.

The early tech businesses went about patenting everything they could lay their hands on. So pioneer technology businesses now own the vocabulary of the modern web and dare you utter a word and you can potentially have lawyers at your door.

Microsoft sits on 20 000 patents, Amazon owns the patent for the one click purchase, Yahoo has hundreds of patents sitting in their portfolio. Nuclear weapons amassed for a the day when they become threatened or desperate enough to use them.

Patents had an original function of protecting inventors in exchange for public disclosure of their treasured secrets so that they don’t die with them. We have long since moved on from those humble beginings. The road to hell is truly paved with good intentions. Today patents in software are like copyrights on mp3’s - they ignore reality and impede human progress.

So let’s stop writing posts about how Hollywood and the Music industry is outdated, archaic and evil. There is an elephant in the room and his name is patent troll, and he is the demon we have to deal with.

Thoughts on early Zuckerberg

Tue, 13 Mar 2012 12:09:00 -0400

This interview was from 2005 when facebook was still in it’s infancy. Facebook had some momentum but not nearly enough for Mark to be convinced that he was building the 800 million user monster that they have today.

I know some of you have seen this interview before, but I just wanted to note something interesting here. Notice how humble and rather oblivious Mark was to what exactly he was building. It was just a simple little directory to connect people, nothing more.

Hopefully this dispels the myth that visionaries have the complete vision for the future mapped out and with sheer conviction pursue that vision relentlessly. It’s more a sort of trail and error process which starts with a basic tool that has functionality for a specific market and then evolving that tool.

seriously mundane start-up ideas

Mon, 12 Mar 2012 09:23:36 -0400

Recently @adii from Woothemes wrote an interesting piece about the merits of starting a “run-of-the-mill” startup in response to Paul Graham’s “Frighteningly Ambitious start-up ideas” piece.

I’d like to argue that most great businesses have some origin in a really mundane “run-of-the-mill” startup idea.

“A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. The inverse proposition also appears to be true: A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be made to work. You have to start over, beginning with a working simple system.”

- Gall’s Law

The real trick in picking startup ideas is picking a market and adding real tangible value to that market and then evolve from there onwards.

So create real value for a neglected market and evolve. Stop trying to solve your own problems, because as developers most of our own problems have already been solved. Instead add value for the neglected masses out there that can’t develop their own tools.

So often building a simple little office tool for lawyers to keep track of work could be the very thing that becomes the thing that disrupts e-mail.

Dear Facebook, autoshare is bullshit.

Sun, 20 Nov 2011 02:22:34 -0500

Ever since Mark Zuck’ introduced the concept of passive/automatic sharing (marked by ‘read’ and ‘listening’ etc tags) I was concerned that it would be a bad idea, and after using it for more than a month I can confirm… it is indeed absolute bullshit.

In a world where information is currency, the kings are not those who share the most, but rather those who share the most valuable. Many of us spend all of our time online trying to filter all the noise from our already saturated feeds so that we can get to the most important and relevant information. Autoshare spits on those efforts.

Autoshare does the horrible thing of putting mundane unfiltered information on the same level as really important information that those I subscribe to took the trouble of bookmarking as important.

You might think that autoshare can somehow be tweaked to turn it into a more useful product right? Perhaps Facebook should only display the most read articles in your social circle? No. The whole thing is broken. Popularity does not equal good, just look at Justin Bieber. And thus even telling me the most popular autoshared posts is completely useless.

In conclusion, sharing is an active and thoughtful process, and autoshare rapes it.

Imminent group-buying collapse in SA

Thu, 20 Oct 2011 00:17:00 -0400

Introduction

Like a flash-flood it hit our shores, following the hype around the perceived success of Groupon in the States and spurred on by the low barrier to entry. Before we knew it we had close to 30 group buying businesses and more than ten aggregator sites just trying to make sense of all these the deals being generated. The market was well and truly saturated, but that was the least of their worries.

One or two of the companies that got in early managed to get acquired and gather some solid support and the rest are now all slowly being walked down into the group-buying cemetery. Dealio was recently the first of many to announce they are to close their doors, with many more to go silently into the night in the next couple of months.

What went wrong? The answer… everything. Group buying was doomed from the beginning, it was a bright idea that was never really going to work in reality.

1. Bad customers

Group buying sites’ value proposition to companies is that they would get them some publicity for their products and business - basically advertising. Group buying sites attracted horeds (if they were lucky) of people that were looking for a good deal. The result was that the type of customers group buying sites generally attracted to these businesses weren’t exactly customers that could be converted into long-term customers, because as soon as they had their fix on your deal, they moved on to the next one. The majority of these people were in it for the savings, nothing more.

The result of this being that businesses couldn’t really be bothered to put up deals onto these sites once they started realizing that essentially they were just engaging in an expensive and rather pointless marketing exercise.

2. No money

Which leads us to the second problem with the group-buying model: not profitable at all. It’s not profitable for the group sites or the businesses selling goods on those sites. The only people winning were the army of coupon clickers. Here is how group buying sites operate: They go to a local business, they ask them to cut their prices by half or more to make it attractive and then once the deal tips (meaning enough people bought in) the group buying site takes half of the revenue that was left over. This means that the business that put up the deal essentially makes 25% back which means they essentially made a huge loss on the sale. What’s even worse is what the group buying site is left with… next to nothing.

To make money as a group buying site you need large volumes of products to be sold and an insane sales team to keep convincing new businesses to buy into group buying as a marketing strategy. Group buying sites take half of every deal that gets pushed through (most of them), and on average deals sit on those sites for days if not weeks until the next deal comes in. Tipping a deal takes a long time, especially with all the competition. Another problem is that businesses will very rarely go and push large volumes of product through on each deal to mitigate risk. The result is that group buying sites sell 10 discounted items worth R500 which takes them a week to flip and make R2500 after all of that. If you doubt me on this, go check to a couple of the sites and do the maths.

3. Tough sell

Third problem with group buying sites is most businesses will try it out once with a small amount of products to minimize risk, gauge the return on investment and move along. So most businesses won’t really consider doing it more than once because they realize it’s expensive and risky but most of worst of all… untraceable in the long-run whether those customers become returning customers.

4. Expensive to run

Forth problem is the amount of marketing the group buying site has to do themselves to acquire customers and amount of labour they need to put into getting deals onto the site through sales. In fact one of the biggest problems Groupon has is that to maintain their business they need to do an insane amount of marketing which resulted in them essentially losing hundreds of millions of dollars yearly.

Conclusion

So in conclusion the situation is simple: In the next few months dozens of group buying businesses will be out of business, leaving all but one or two that - if they play their cards properly - might flourish, but this is doubtful.

So everyone has been going crazy about Quantum Levitation and...

Wed, 19 Oct 2011 08:05:00 -0400

So everyone has been going crazy about Quantum Levitation and the possibility of hoverboards. Guess what… the French are already making them with the same science seen in the now famous Quantum Levitation video.

- Here is a video that explains how this works

- Here is a video that explains how to improve the pinning and to make the levitation happen over a larger distance

- Meissner Effect explained

- Superconductivity explained

- Flux pinning explained

The future! In layman’s terms, when a superconductor is...

Mon, 17 Oct 2011 21:23:00 -0400

The future!

In layman’s terms, when a superconductor is brought to a very low temperature and placed over a magnet it is able to be pinned within the magnetic fields causing it to levitate.

UPDATE: The French are already building Quantum Levitation hoverboards

- Here is a video that explains how this works

- Here is a video that explains how to improve the pinning and to make the levitation happen over a larger distance

- Meissner Effect explained

- Superconductivity explained

- Flux pinning explained

Imagine how cool it would have been if superconductors were capable of levitating in magnetic fields at room temperature?

Imagine how cool it would be if we could take advantage of Earth’s natural magnetic fields and build hoverboards!

The possibilities are endless!

Original Apple Ad: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XUfH-BEBMoY

Tue, 30 Aug 2011 20:46:27 -0400

Original Apple Ad: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XUfH-BEBMoY