October 2008 Archives

Last Friday I went to the Future of Web Apps (FOWA) London 2008 conference. As I only had the single day off work I decided to get the expo only entrance (£5) rather than a two-day full pass for nearly £400. Thus I didn't get to see any of the proper talks, instead I just walked around the floor to see the booths and one "FOWA university" talk.

The talk was by Yuuguu on how to run a company when all employees telecommute. Apparently, the FOWA conference is the first time all the Yuuguu employees have met at the same time. Most of the talk was fairly bland and many in the audience were head down on their laptops or iPhones. However, there were a few interesting points. Yuuguu people don't work if they meet in person, they consider the time too important to waste on work and they bond instead. Also, every Friday they get together online for virtual "beers".

There were a couple dozen companies with booths. A few big names like Microsoft, Sun and Myspace were there, but most were firms I had never heard mentioned before. This caused some awkward experiences, as their names normally give no hint as to their business areas. I would squint at their posters trying to work out what they did (which often didn't help much either). Meanwhile some marketing person would creep up on me, start talking and give me their Moo mini business card (these were literally everywhere). I left the conference knowing what every exhibiting business did, but only about half of them were marginally relevant to me.

The Microsoft booth was by far the best. Among the computers they had a couple of Xboxs and a Surface box - the Xboxs were empty while it was hard to see the Surface through the crowd. Rightly so, it was an impressive machine. All that made me want to code rather than talk and I left after an hour, skipping the Diggnation filming - I saw it last year. Anyway if want you can see the FOWA talks here.

A friend recently mentioned that there is dumb money on Intrade, a site that creates markets in various real-life events such as the US Presidential elections. They said that there are still people betting that Hillary Clinton will become President in November. I'm a big fan of free money so I thought I'd check it out. Sure enough, according to Intrade, there is a 1.6% chance Hillary will be elected President, with thousands of dollars worth of contracts available. I'll grant the chance of Hillary being elected as non-zero, but it must be orders of magnitude less than 1.6%, so what's going on? It was a quiet day so I thought I'd work out if it was a scam or a bad deal.

This blog article argues that current online todo list and project management tools don't meet people's needs and are too complex. Judging by the comments of some people at the London Hackers Meetup, this is not an uncommon view. I agree too. This is why I'm trying to steer a user-friendly middle-path between Queuesarus' competitors - a group it seems Ativiti intends to join (yeah, bring it on!).

So how is it going? Well the Beta testing suggests that the functionality is nearly good enough, but that it is still not user-friendly. I'm not sure what to do. While I knew some parts of the system were difficult to understand, I had a plan for them. However, there are problems with areas I thought were fine. As the blog says, it is a hard problem and I haven't seen it done well. More thought is required, and advice is welcome.

Last Thursday I went to the "London Hacker Meetup #6". These events are organised as a London analogue to the dinners held for Y Combinator" startups in the US, although anyone could go along. Never having been to an Y Combinator dinner, I can't compare to the original, but I definitely found it an interesting evening and more welcoming than the Techcrunch Pitch event. It was held in the Songkick offices in Spitalfields (actually over the market) and drew a crowd of around 30, mainly youngish guys in very casual clothing (there were I think 3 women). I felt quite old and conspicuous in my work shirt and trousers. Luckily everyone was polite and friendly even after I told them I worked at a bank.

There were four quick talks. ConnectiveLogic demonstrated their product to easily create concurrent programs without writing any concurent code - interesting, but I'd have to have a play before saying more. Fuzzwich showed their online product to easily create simple flash animations. It looked fun and having tried it out since I can say it definitely works as advertised - give it a try. Mary (can't remember the rest of her name) spoke about her music recommendation project, The Perceptron. Finally, a guy presented his idea for a startup, then asked if anyone was interested in joining him and applying to Y Combinator. I was tempted, but thought it would be hard to commit to a company with someone I didn't know at all. Also, I'm more invested in Queuesaurus and would need a good offer to move right now.

After the talks we decamped to the local pub. I spoke to a couple of the Fuzzwich people for a while. They moved from San Francisico to London to be near their customers. We discussed how to pay employers (not so little they aren't committed but not too much, they also said an options "cliff" was standard - that is if you are sacked within the "cliff" period, usually a year, then your options are cancelled). We also spoke about motivation and starting a company, their advice was "do it!" They seem like nice people. Later I spoke to a person who had an idea for a startup; but not the technical knowhow to implement it. This seems like a common problem, there seemed to be a few such people around. My last conversation was with a guy I met at the Pitch event. He said that the company that pitched had since shutdown - we talked a bit about founder commitment and how important it is. He didn't seem discouraged at all; he is now interviewing other startups founders to see if they suit him (definitely the right way round!).

I certainly left with the impression that there is still a great deal of activity in the London startup scene, even as the financial IT world significantly slows.