Toying with ideas: geotagged podcast

Posted on June 8, 2009

Came up with a good distraction tonight and thought briefly about being an iPhone developer. Was chatting with @Simon_Chapman (not sure I’d bother clicking there – nothing but tumble weed) about the various services out there and was trying to come up with a unique way to use some of the new features offered by the iPhone 3.0 software.

Specifically we were talking about how to use the new support for in app purchases and location to build a compelling service. The first thing that came to mind was pretty obvious and no doubt you’d just end up a small fish in a big pond with some monsters, create a service to search for and buy tickets for events near you.

The next idea that came to mind is to create a map based podcasting application. Allow any geotagged podcasts to be places on a map. Browse the map and get some audio or video about things around you. Revenue could be either generated through advertising or through access to premium content.

There you go, that one’s free, unless I find the spare time to develop it myself.

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Hiring startup hackers

Posted on October 16, 2008

I’ve seen a lot of posts recently about how to go about hiring hackers. Well not just recently, it seems to be common thing people ask, because it’s one of the hardest things to do. You’re using an interview, or even a series of interviews to try your best to determine if the person is going to be up to the task.

The problem is of course, you’re really just determining if the person interviews well, or if they’re the graduates that they’ve got good marks. The real problem is of course neither of the two matter because neither of them have much if any bearing on how good a coder a candidate is going to be.

The problem is exacerbated in a startup because unlike some of the more successful bigger players you really can’t afford to take people on a trial basis for 6 months. What can a startup do?

There are a lot of universities that run placement programs for their students, programs allowing them to get real industry work experience. I’ve also worked in companies that made it a policy to hire students for internships then offer the best jobs once they’ve graduated. It was a great way to get talent.

What if you need to hire to fill a more senior role, or you’re not hiring at the right time of year? Student internships usually start once at the same time every year so unless you’re looking for fill a role then, you’re shit out of luck.

I’ve toyed with the idea of a ‘hacker camp’, getting all the candidates together, and paying them to work as consultants on a project – then hiring the best into permanent positions. All the candidates need to be free to work on the project, and a lot of people would be pretty scared to leave a job to take part and some jobs would prevent them from working on the project, so running it over a weekend might be a good idea, but it limits the scope of your project. You’d also still need to have interviews, to make sure you were getting candidates who were really interested in the job, and also to weed out any candidates you knew were totally unsuitable.

I think it’s important that a ‘hacker camp’ should produce something at the end of the weekend and you should get as much of your existing staff involved as possible. To make the cost easier to swallow you could even go so far as making the deliverable a new feature or part of your existing product but that’s not as important as actually delivering something, because that will be the bottom line when it comes to integrating them into your team.

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Up in the downturn

Posted on October 1, 2008

I think it’s clear now, despite all the best hopes of an easy ride, that the economy has gone to shit. I also think it’s clear that no matter how far you try to bury your head in the sand, it’s affecting tech and other industries now. The knock on effect has a arrived and the inability of some to get operating credit as well as the fear of not being able to get credit if they might need it has lead to some belt tightening already, and there is more of that to come.

Maybe it’s a little cynical of me, but I think that some consumer websites which are lean and well capitalised must be liking the idea that people are going to be out of work. I mean without their boss bothering them to get off facebook and do some work – they can just do that all day, can’t they?

Really though, I think this time around the Internet is probably one of the better placed industries. We’ll feel it less and later than others and we’ll come out of it better off and earlier than some. Big ticket items are going to be the first to go, houses and cars are already down and falling fast. Holidays are out, entertainment and going out is suffering and it’s bound to get worse. That’s going to leave people with more time to waste, at home in front of their TVs and in front of their computers.

When confidence and spending starts to rise again, we’ll start to see people with a little money chasing bargains with time on their hands – isn’t that what internet shopping is all about?

The core fact of the matter is the economy is in the shitter because of banks – there is nothing fundamentally wrong with tech companies today. It’s not anything like the previous bust, it’s not a correction reigning in stupid valuations for companies with no clear path to revenue let alone profit.

Is it a good time to start a company though? That depends on how much if any investment you need. If you can bootstrap, and you should, then it’s a great time. If you’re going to need to find investment to get your idea off the ground, you’ll have a hard time with it. Until we can see the light at the end of the tunnel, and we’re sure it’s the end of tunnel investors are all going to assume it’s just a train.

A bit latter than normal, sorry about that. I’m really trying to maintain the post a day thing and I’ve been scheduling them in advance – I didn’t get a chance to get one scheduled for today so it had to wait till work was out of the way. I’ll endeavour to try harder.