URLs From the Edge

So once again I'm trying to get a technology start-up off the ground, and in these economic times too - Wheee. Actually, it's a lot of fun and always educational... but oh so much work. Thank goodness for my hard-working co-founders. Rule 10: Always start companies with your close-friends - not only do they have your back, but it's your unthinking reflex to cover theirs too.
(I'll post the other 'rules' some other time :-) )

So I picked up a handful (6) old Dell laptops from Apex Surplus last week. These were some corporations issue-laptops that employee got to abuse for many years until they decided to upgrade en mass. The PCs were sterilized by simply yanking out the hard drives and they were dumped as scrap. Since they are very old (D600 class) laptops, with a lot of miles on them, they really aren't much good at running contemporary multimedia or cpu-intensive apps. My price was about $20 each, and new hard drives cost about $50. A few moments spent installing open-source Ubuntu on them, and voila!

This years event in the desert was very refreshing, psychologically for me. I had a chance to do some serious thinking on a lot of topics and to recommit to some goals. Very good stuff all around. I posted a photo-essay about The Temple over on my flickr site:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/tamooj/sets/72157622176549639/

And some images from this years event itself in another flickr set:

One of the upsides of being between major projects, aside from being overwhelmed by all the chores, tasks, people and hobbies that have been patiently waiting for your return, is getting to spend some quality time at coffee shops or out in the garden, sipping tea and chatting about changing-the-world with the various smarty pants that I'm honored to have as friends.

Topics of stand-out-merit (I'm in love with hyphens tonight) include the changing nature of social media, and how it, by itself, is changing the nature of "change". (Did that make sense? It's late) Beyond the general steepening of adoption curves (memetic virality), we are also seeing a return to a denser social fabric, yet also the solaria-like weak ties that allow access to far-flung resources. The traditional game-theory math falls down here, as we always knew it would. Now we begin looking at all social venues as "marketplaces" with highly connected (access to resources/information) players, but still influenced, perhaps more than ever, by basic social capital drivers and emotions. Facebook is still in a nascent phase with this, but almost all of the larger virtual worlds are seeing this set of emergent structures show up in any kind of transactional analysis of their member/player behaviors. The real fun begins to happen once governments start to see how this helps them shape/control public opinion about policies. Eeep.

Other fun topics: Politics - Poor Obama; Americans' rampant consumerism and credit abuse, evil banking practices and republican mismanagement (not 100% their fault, to be fair) have given us a horrible economic crisis that has sucked all the air out of the room; no matter what positive progressive social changes he stood ready to enact (beyond the obvious barrier shattering he personally represents by sitting in the Oval Office - w00t!), his presidency will be judged largely on how well he can clean up this mess. Looking at the health care debate; the frustration and rage seems centered around people being in rough financial shape. Why blame him for this, I wonder? And the environmental crisis is beyond critical now, and yet we fiddle while Rome burns. Sigh. Yet *another* historic chance for Americans to begin a new age of world enlightenment is squandered. Bleh.

Science: We're imaging, as in "looking at", extrasolar planets! How friggin cool is THAT?! I always go outside and watch the ISS and HST pass overhead a few time each week. The ISS is 350 feet long now; a good pair of binoculars lets you see its shape. Live and Work in Space. We've got to get our heavy industries and power generation infrastructure off our fragile planet before we destroy the biosphere.

Entertainment: Obviously this topic is focused through the lens of video game development. The shift towards casual games and social games and away from the bigger, complex franchises; is this a deeper societal change? An emergent effect of social media? A temporary side effect of the economic situation? Hmmm.

Ok - enough rambling for one night. I have tasks to check off my Burning Man list, and a business proforma to polish. Oh yeah, then sleep. I knew I was forgetting something.

I had just gotten the investor presentation for SharedElectron to a nice, nearly finished place... and then I had a revelation that caused me to tear it all apart and start again. Sigh. :-)

So we finally got the motor test stand assembled! We fired off some motors to collect data and it was awesome. Check out the flickr site for more picts!

What to say? MF is awesome. We spent two days meeting people and having a great time. Check out our site, which is officially in 'alpha' now; www.sharedelectron.com.
Much much more to do; some of the core functionality is still missing. We're working on it.

--M

Linda is out for the week. She, Ron and me are working in the garage to get our website done by Makerfaire.

Taking another swing at the startup pitch. Whew. Been working so hard with Linda and Ron on this all month. I had forgotten what it's like to do the actual work instead of delegating everything. :-) We're still in prototype/alpha stage, so I'll be sure to announce more once we've gotten some of the kinks worked out.
We're targeting the end of the month for our quiet soft launch, so it's back to the grindstone for me.
On the mad-science front, you can check out the flickr site for updates there. I have a side project going that is proving fun.

So, once again I'm building out a large set of financial projections, etc etc. to support a cool business idea and presentation in Power Point. The last time we did this exercise we parlayed ten PPT slides into $4MM, so at least I can say that these occasionally work. Execution of course, is a different matter. :-)

I'll post more details on the business idea soon; but we've got to get it moving and strong nibbles from some savvy angel investors need polite and timely replies. Back to work!