Opinionated

If your web site makes use of any of the more popular javascript libraries, including jQuery, that are used for AJAX operations you may be able to benefit from a new free service. 

This new service from Microsoft makes use of their thousands of geographically distributed servers.  By pointing to their servers instead of yours for these script inclusions you benefit twice; your pages load faster because the ‘weight’ of that download is shifted onto a server that is likely faster and closer to the viewer, and you get to skip that amount of bandwidth being incurred.

Depending upon the speed and location of your server and the visitor, the improvement can be quite noticeable.

Read more and see code snippets at http://www.asp.net/ajax/cdn/

Elizabeth Edwards and Noel Gauthier did a live interview on Cincinnati’s channel 9.  Noel was at the In One Weekend event a couple weeks ago and I really enjoyed his being there.  Elizabeth is the driving force between IOW and Cincinnati Innovates.  If Noel wins you’ll know why .

I won’t delve into the arguments around the premise of universal health care, there are many better places to look at this and the ROI data speaks for itself and most people seem to get it.  What I want to address is the benefit to a specific segment of the overall economy, chiefly increased and more successful entrepreneurship.

Startup founders are faced with enough burdens and obstacles as it is.  There are big benefits if we can remove two principle ones, the fear of an insurance gap for themselves and their family, and the difficulty of providing reasonable insurance for staff during the period where every dollar put toward sustaining growth makes a substantial difference in the likely success of the company.

Anyone considering striking out on their own as an entrepreneur faces a challenge with insurance.  I’ve faced it many times myself.  Cobra goes some small way toward helping, but it can be tremendously expensive (and the stimulus bill is helping right now but that is temporary).  For young entrepreneurs who are or have a spouse who is “of child-bearing age” it is particularly expensive and scary.  How many inventions, products and companies have we missed out on because the potential entrepreneur didn’t want to jeopardize the well being of their family?

Once you are at a point where you can bring on staff you face this challenge again.  A fat benefits package helps entice people to larger companies.  Small companies and startups don’t have bargaining power to get better plans at better rates.

I would argue our current system is a major impediment to actual capitalism.

  Fully 40% of high-tech workers work in small businesses. The Small Business Administration states that 60-50% of all net new jobs created annually over the last decade were in small businesses.  If that surprises you at all remember the first tool at hand for a public company to raise their share price is to lay people off.  Unfortunately these jobs often come with a price; little or no health insurance, and policies that are easily cancelled by the supposed insurers just when they are really needed.

Even if we can’t all stomach universal health care right now (the right thing is always resisted initially) we should be looking seriously at what an economic boost we would get from providing the kind of plans large companies can afford to entrepreneurs, small businesses and individual contractors.  The best way to get that is some sort of single-payer system.

We’re already paying for it, we’re just not getting it.

  The last weekend of August I participated in InOneWeekend 2009, Cincinnati’s version of an entrepreneurship crash course.

IOW is billed as an event that will build a start-up company in 3 days.  This is of course impossible, but it is an exciting premise.  It is a necessary white lie that adds to the experience, the way “Based on a True Story” spices up movies that have bugger-all to do with actual events.

The Good

  This is an amazing way to network.  Instead of just standing around chatting you get to see people thinking on their feet, generating idea and defending them, seeking understanding and finding consensus.  Brilliant stuff.

Great crowd.  I really enjoyed meeting everyone, even when we were in violent disagreement over something.

Passionate backers.  The team that plans and executes IOW really believes in what they are doing and puts obvious energy into it.  Without that it could never be pulled off.

The Bad

One Hundred is a lot of people.  There were moments when it was far too many.  Great things are generally not created in this fashion.  There is a reason the expression “design by committee” is derogatory.

Not enough techies. Even with a hundred people I don’t think we had enough technical people in the group.  Ways need to be found to get the word out more in the technical community so a deeper and larger team can be attracted.

Compromise. People who have spent most of their lives since college in large companies have learned to do a number of things well, and one of those is rapidly reach compromise.  The problem with compromise is that the majority of the time it involves the least interesting solution or idea.  I rather uncharitably termed this “concentrating the suck” in one moment of frustration.

Scope. The nature of the event causes many viable ideas to not be viable in that forum.  Most good ideas will end up requiring expertise that is not on hand or readily available, or lengthy R&D, or large initial investment dollars.  With none of these available you’re pretty much limited to a web-based service offering.

Real startups are generally a small, highly focused group of people working hard in ways that don’t really resemble what can be done in this setting.  I hope participants who are serious about joining or starting a startup are seeking out information actively.

The Ugly

As stated at the top, the premise that a viable company can ever come out of a one-weekend event is not quite true, and there are two primary reasons:

The first is there is no founder.  Strong founder(s) are the most critical requisite for a successful startup.  The idea is very much secondary, most ideas have no value without execution.  The keynote speaker from Pixar mentioned this about their creative process “A great team will take a bad idea and either fix it or throw it away”, different context same principle.

  The second is naiveté.  You don’t know what you don’t know.  Frequently I hear from people who have what seem like great ideas for a new product or service, but that idea is based to some extent on an incomplete understanding of the problem domain.  This is part of why real start-ups are hard work, and why so many fail.  You will start with a flawed premise due to lack of information most of the time.  And then you will iterate.  You will fail as quickly and cheaply as possible until you start finding success.  If you fail to learn and iterate you will fail.  That is what it is all about.  But in a group of 100 people who are ‘locked in’ for a weekend you are pretty much guaranteed to zero in on a ‘good idea’ based on incomplete knowledge, and then, as a friend put it in another context “We don’t have enough white board space to write down everything we don’t know.”

Even so we may have pulled a rabbit out of the hat with Dipidee.  I learned some things right after the weekend that revealed some of our naiveté in the space, but the people that are attached to it have useful experience in the realm and aspects of what we did have been validated as good concepts.  Now we’ll see if the idea can be iterated on cheaply and quickly enough to make a go of it.

One last point of ugly; the food (prepared by UC campus food service) was particularly bad.  Pizza that resembled its namesake in shape and color only, and sandwiches that seem to have been prepared 24 hours in advance. Maybe I’m spoiled from the extravagant spreads and break foods provided at Microsoft events and the good old days of the Game Developer Convention (back when it was in San Jose and called CGDC).

The bottom Line

InOneWeekend is a cool event and I heartily recommend it for anyone who has ‘itchy feet’ and is thinking of starting a business, or is already in their own business and could use a recharge.  It has a place in the ecosystem for startups and it points up some of the areas in which Cincinnati is currently lacking.  More about that another time.

The kids are fleeing Facebook.  The millenials never trusted Twitter, and now that their parents and even grandparents are hip to Facebook, it is all over.

I have to confess I’ve never been a big fan of Facebook.  I totally get its appeal, but in some ways it is a bit much, and I really never understood using it for business contacts.  But now even Verizon gets it.