It is no bad complaint to be made, but to say this last week was busy would be a gross underestimation. I attended 3 tech & business events, a couple of meetings, 1 educational talk and an attempted visit to the Redwind offices for their open office evening, which pretty much ended in disaster.

I haven't been so busy since I actually had a job.

Dublin Beta

Dublin Beta was awesome, I know for a fact that people were still talking about it days after the event. Dublin Beta, for the uninitiated, is basically a demo day cum networking event where startups demo their wares to a receptive audience and ultimately hope to be voted on by them for the bragging rights of "Winner of Dublin Beta 2012". Despite the shoulder to shoulder nature of the event, or maybe because of it, the atmosphere was very receptive to the general vibe of networking with your peers, something I didn't feel so much about the Startup Summit.

Games Ireland Gathering

The Games Ireland Gathering was an event hosted in the Gibson Hotel beside The Point and just down the road from my old college, The National College of Ireland. It was a pretty serious affair in the sense that, in my mind at least, it was as important as the Dublin Web Summit is to the web, The Games Ireland Gathering was to the game development industries.

Start Summit

The Start Summit was an event put together by the organisers of the Dublin Web Summit as a way to get investors, developers, entrepreneurs and the like to network while the top 3 startups which were voted on its website demoed their wares. I feel I must be very critical of this; the impression given perhaps is that you are getting the creme de la creme, and perhaps by extension that you'll get to see some interesting demos or at least pitches. I feel neither happened. The demo area was relegated to one side of the room, which due to high turnout was incredibly annoying/frustrating to traverse.

Dublin Beta had this same problem but due to it being a smaller event in quantity of people and venue size, their was enough of a churn going that you could make your way from one group to another pretty easily. At the Start Summit I did not find to to be the case at all. Perhaps this was due in part to the venue changing last minute due excess numbers of attendees, but in any case, it felt to me like any concept of seeing a demo was negated by the desire to not have to barge past 50 people with pints in their hands, talking amongst themselves.

Being at the back of the room didn't lend itself well to hearing companies pitches, so I really cannot comment on that, since in all honesty I can't say I heard any of it from where I was sitting. One could argue that such is the result of a last minute reshuffle to a new venue, but I would say that when you pay a ticket price to hear pitches and see demos, the success of the sale should not deteriorate the value of said ticket.

The food was awesome though, and almost makes up for the other failures... almost.

Couple of meetings

I met up with a couple of folk this week also, just to discuss business ideas, potential partnerships etc. Nothing I want to get into too much detail here, but which were definitely well worth doing.

Tog Introduction to Security

Dublin's hacker's space in residence, Tog held an introductory talk on Information Security. This topic is far from new to me, so one might reasonable ask why I'd bother myself with an introductory talk. My answer is quite simply that Tog has competed and won half of the HackEire hacking competitions run by IRIS every year. I was sure there was room for something to learn, and of course there was.

If you have never been to Tog, I cannot recommend them highly enough. Particularly if your into hacking, lock picking, crafts, wearable electronics, 3D printing or any other of a myriad of subjects that get covered or experienced frequently.

Redwind Open Office (attempted)

Well this was pretty much a disaster, for me at least. Redwind is a Dublin based developer of iOS Apps and previous recipient of Enterprise Ireland's Internet & Gaming fund (alongside my ex-employer Decisions For Heroes). Having recently moved into a new office in drumcondra they were to open their doors for people to come along and see their new offices, say hi, have a few beers later in the pub down stairs etc.

Unfortunately, when Zombie and I arrived, there was no sign of life. The lights appeared off from the outside, there was no response to the 3 or 4 presses of the door bell and no bodies of note in the pub down stairs to speak of. So after waiting for 5-10 minutes for some sign of life, myself and Zombie headed home. Which was a disappointing and kind of annoying truth be told, but shit happens.

Next week on LOST...

Hugo has a coronary bypass, while Jack has a nervous breakdown after hearing voices tell him that none of this will ever make any god damned sense. Ever.

Next week is thus far planned to be far less action packed, but we shall see how things progress. I am seriously considering just getting The Lean Startup on audio book at this rate, at least I can "read" it while doing other stuff that doesn't require use of my eyes (notably: programming). I guess that means I'd have to deal with Audible's disgusting native apps again. Ugh. Worst UX ever. If I were a speed reader, this wouldn't be a problem. Do speedos help?

Next week I'll find out the result of the application(s) for Enterprise Ireland's Competitive Start Fund, which I am trying not to hold out too much hope for since the competition is high and I got the impression from EI's application process that they are still keeping one foot stuck in an older mindset when it comes to business plans etc. (which is contrasted strongly by the NDRC which seems to love Lean Startup etc.)

On Saturday will be the Dublin Game Craft, which I actually spent some of yesterday preparing for. It's been altogether too long since I used Unity in any serious context, so I and Zombie got to grips again with Unity after its big overhaul to version 3.5. I finally got around to making use of 2D Toolkit too, which although I had to buy Glyph Designer to get fonts imported, works a dream at providing just enough of the necessary tools to get 2D working without stepping on your toes and telling you there is one perfect way of doing things (are you hearing me Apple??).

There will also be the Dublin Twitter Teatime on Thursday, which should be interesting. Not least because it won't happen until its too late in the evening to legitimately call it tea-time, but we can forgive them that much at least.

Last but not least, a photo gallery of Mr. Zombie's Adventures:

I think you'll agree, he's settling in quite nicely. He even tried out some rock climbing in before the weather got too bad.

PopCap also sent me a cap, some fridge magnets and some... sort.. of... aromatic silly putty thing? I have no idea. 

I have no idea what I did to deserve this stuff, but I love it. PopCap can go straight the top of my awesome list, I'm not even joking look:

I'm not sure what to name the lil' guy, but I'm taking suggestions. In the meantime, here's the images in handy dandy (spandex-free) wallpaper formats at 1080p:

• What is that thing? A Cat? Can I eats it?
• Braiiiiiinz
• I Want Bird Brainz
• Rock Climbing

• I'm still only at the ~20% mark of The Lean Startup, but time allowing I will endeavour to finish as much as I can in the next week or so.


• I have started work on a side project for improved iOS mapping. There's a whole story behind it but the gist is that I've always found the default mapping application on iOS to be sub-par for what I need, which really isn't all that much truth be told.


• I finally made the switch to using iWork for all my documents, pretty much. I used to use Microsoft Office for Mac but it always had stability problems for me and it still never completely elimated the question of whether the documents created on a Mac were 100% readable on Windows. Google Docs is fantastic for what it is but it's far too provincial, and I dont like the UI one bit. So my workflow is now Pages, Numbers and Keynote on all iOS devices and Mac. 


• Evernote is still going strong, I haven't had a single corrupt note on it since I started using it, thankfully. Although the full screen view is a bit silly (where do I select which notepad I'm using?!), but other than that it's been working very well these past few weeks.


• The process of writing one business plan while helping to write another was an experience all of its own. I still find it rather perplexing why Enterprise Ireland should request 1-3 year financial projections for startup companies, when knowing full well that if such projections could be made it would almost by definition define them as not startups. A startup, in my estimation and understanding, is only really a startup when the market is uncertain or untapped. To make financial projections on such a market is to count your dinosaurs before they're chickens. That analogy really doesn't work so well, but you get my point - projecting the financial turnover of a company yet to achieve any customers, or yet to define a market, is pretty silly if you ask me. The application process was also slightly mired by the fact that the website used for the applications was a little, er, "buggy":
  • With a 30 minute timeout, you can easily spend your time typing eloquent responses to questions and then have all that wiped out because the timer expired. 
  
  
  • The site crashed frequently when pasting text from Pages documents. I often had to paste them directly into TextEdit and copy & paste that into the form just to prevent it bugging out or complaing about something.
  
  
  • I had my entire application wiped at least once, with the exception of a few checkboxes etc. all input forms were wiped. Luckily I had saved all my responses into a Pages document, but if someone who had not thought of doing so had the same experience, it could be soul crushing. certainly at the 11th hour.
  
  
  • The form had frequent bugs/errors in calculating the total number of characters. Quite often I had to trim my text simply because it couldn't count correctly. One side of the form would say 10 characters remaining, while the other would say you exceeded it by 25, or other similarly arbitrary numbers.


• Lean Startup Dublin is a cool group, with a lot of like-minded people but I'm not sure how often I'll be going to its events. I can see the advantage of meeting up with people for networking, chatting, and just going through the various problems/solutions people have had but... I find it a stretch to be asked to pay between 100 and 300 for "training" events where authors of books or authorised speakers of such, essentially guide you through the knowledge you are already afforded by owning such materials. If I were representing an organisation with the resources to pay ~300Euro for a day's training, sure it would be fine, but this group is aimed at startup's - who almost my definition are lean on cash. So, I don't know, but we'll see how it plays out.


• Windows Phone Camp was an interesting experience. I spent most my time raging that my laptop was so slow - being the laptop I use for all things Windows, it's not exactly what one would call current. In the end, and on reflection, I probably had more of an app completed than most people seemed to have had. But in any case, I had zero interest in showing off a half finished prototype of a prototype.. even for a sexy smart phone. As a development experience Windows Phone 7 is actually pretty nice, you can get a really fully developed understanding of how the UI is put together by being able to manually edit the XAML for the User Interface. Something similar for iOS would be well recieved.

Offices

I'll leave you with some photos I took of the offices I viewed earlier in the week:

1. I have spent the majority of the past week working on and developing a business plan and an application to Enterprise Ireland's Competetive Start Fund. Managing to get all the major questions ahead of time, I've been working through them incrementally and solving some problems along the way. Ironically, this process has me feeling more than anything that I might not just yet want or need outside help. Whilst a 50K cash injection would be nice, and the strings the come with it aren't altogether too burdensome, there are aspects of the process which I would feel much happier about if I had a minimal viable product (to quote The Lean Startup). Additionally, giving away 10% of an idea for 50K (valuing it at 500,000 total) seems decent in theory, but ideas are by definition worthless. It is solely in the execution of an idea where value is generated, so to sell 10% of future value generation before any understanding of what that value may represent, seems to me to be jumping the gun.


2. I went to GTUG at Google Ireland on Tuesday, you've really got to love how Google supports the tech community. Free food and drink doesn't hurt either! It was a decent talk, not much learned from the Swrve talk as it was all stuff I was quite aware of previously, though there were a few stats drops that I would like to check up on (70% of iOS sales are in-app-purchases?). The semantic web discussion was more interesting for me, despite the basic idea seemingly being an old one, it's still interesting stuff.


3. More work continues on the mobile app, but it's now being relegated to 1-2 days per week maximum so that I can focus on other projects without it taking full control of my time.


4. Wednesday was an entire wash-out, I felt to weak to do anything at all. I'm not sure what the cause was, but I felt dreadful all day: slow breathing, weakness throughout my body, very lethargic. I dont know, it's very easy for me to go without food or sleep without realising it, and I've felt very tired in general since I sorted out my sleep pattern around last Thursday. It's quite possible that my body is so used to irregular hours and irregular sleep that now I'm starting to get into a proper schdule, I'm begining to run on fumes when I dont realise it. Either way, we'll see if it continues into next week.


5. I loathe to admit it, but I bought a Kindle and it has really improved on my reading. Not that there's anything inherently wrong with the Kindle, its a wonderful device. But for my own ego or whatever, I would've liked to get to grips with physical books more, but the simple ease of use of having any book I want in my pocket while I'm waiting on a train or between moments is quite liberating. I should be finished The Lean Startup in quick time thanks to the little wonder. My pre-review at 13% progress through is that it's very good but I'm not a fan of the backstory waffle. I understand why it's there, but for a book about using the scientific method for management, I expected more factual data to hang my hat off of, instead i'm given anecdotes -which are to science what elephants are to potatoes... no relation at all. But that is far from my final word on the book, once I've finished it I'll have a proper write-up.

Thankfully, the past week has been far more engaging and active than many of those that preceded it. I got caught up in the whole Ireland SOPA/ACTA debate and wrote a letter which I sent to countless representatives. In retrospect, I feel that letter says a awful lot about how I feel about the way that the Internet benefits our modern lives and promotes culture, artistic expression and even entrepreneurism. Without any of which, we would be a much poorer nation. I'm not sure what impact, if any it had, especially considering the mostly form letter replies I received it response, but that is the way of things I suppose.

I attended two events recently: Dublin Unity3D Development Discussion and the Effective Fundraising Seminar. Ironically enough, they both took place near or at Tog and only a day apart from each other. The Fundraising seminar was particularly insightful, not least because I was the youngest person there by decent a margin. 

I left out that last week I purchased a Macbook Air to bring to these events, conferences and the like. iPads, I find are just too unwieldy for the task of accurate and quick note taking, particularly when what you want to transpose is the exact verbiage of the speaker and there's no hope of me doing that with paper and pen.

So I began using Evernote as my note taking implement of choice and it seems to be working quite well for me. In the past I have had notes summarily deleted or corrupted due to Evernote's synching so I'm still backing up my notes elsewhere until I feel like I can trust Evernote. In the meantime, however I am very much liking it for taking notes. I was able to very quickly take down points of interest from both events, which I think would've been impossible with a notepad and really difficult with an iPad, certainly given the speed at which people spoke.

The text editing leaves something to be desired, you cant edit line spacing and there are some weird bugs if you copy/paste blocks of text from other programs, but apart from that it's doing the job splendidly.

By the way, a Macbook Air 13" does in fact fit inside the iPad pocket of a Scottevest jacket. The zip wont close, but it's better than carrying a bag sometimes.

I also did a bit of investigating of one of the business ideas that's been floating around. Still waiting for a call back from the supplier(s) for that, but nothing really to say about it just yet. I've been working through some other ideas also and have recently come to something that I may be settling on, we'll see. Nothing I want to talk about publicly yet, but its a good sign.

Not much else to report other than that. My printer is playing up, I'm still working on the iOS/Web App from last year despite all efforts to complete that project with haste. 

Dear duly elected representative of the peoples of Ireland,

I write to you today to call your attention to a matter of great importance and urgency to our nation. Before the months end, Minister of State for Research and Innovation Seán Sherlock is to publish an “order” which is understood to allow copyright holders to demand the censorship of Irish citizens access an open and democratic Internet.

The Internet represents the single most important economic, social, and cultural communications tool since mankind spake his first words. The Internet’s ability to promote the free exchange of artistic expression and encourage the discussion of revolutionary ideas such as democracy makes it to the modern world, what roads were to the Romans. The Internet is the road upon which we and our children and our children’s children will prosper. Any attempt at limiting its efficacy, at censoring the free exchange of ideas and expression should be considered an attack on our liberties and our future prosperity, I hope you’ll agree. Whether you recognise it or not, your constituents certainly do and I am in no doubt that they will make you aware of this fact in the coming days.

The Internet, spurred on by the incredible wealth of human talent on the Island of Ireland, promotes and takes an active role in the development of technologies of global significance. Its potential positive impact on our Island has yet to be fully realised; we are only now beginning to reap the rewards of our earlier labours of investing in resilient and wide spread broadband to the nation and other investments. 

Yahoo!, Twitter, Facebook, Google, AOL, FourSquare, LinkedIn, PayPal, Zynga, and many more US based companies came out to protest against similar legislation in their country (SOPA/PIPA) which aimed at addressing copyright holders concerns, by censoring the Internet. These companies and those much like them are the future lifeblood of Ireland’s knowledge economy. To believe we can summarily enact legislation that will censor the Internet and not severely detriment our economy and our democratic rights is foolhardy to say the least.

The means by which this legislation is proposed to work will not achieve its intended result of protecting the rights of copyright holders. Infringing sites will still be accessible by even the most minimally technologically literate persons. This legislation serves only to erode our rights and discourage international investment.

If we continue to let our rights be eroded at the whims of corporations, which place pressure on our leaders to create legislation that chips away at our ability to freely express ourselves, we will fade into insignificance on the world stage and we will have squandered the enormous potential that we, as a nation striving for a knowledge economy, have worked so hard to achieve. 

On the 11th of January, The European Commission recognised that the Internet “has enormous potential for boosting growth and creating jobs.” and that 20-25% of new jobs could come from growth in this area. Growth which will not be possible if the policies in place are more harmful than they are productive.

I ask, with all due respect, please do not let this legislation pass.

• Again, I am being hampered by outside activities that are distracting me from what I want to focus on. I am nearing the end of the early stages of an App I began working on last year and have put that as the main focus recently to ensure that I can get it completed and out of the way while I focus on new things.
• I bought a two week window of advertising on a podcast.
• I spent 4 days, or rather wasted 4 days banging my head against a virtual brick wall trying to fix iOS developer signature failures. Turns out Apple's provisioning portal was generating broken developer certificates. They eventually fixed it, but not after a lot of needless hair pulling and frustration.
• Started working with Parse and TestFlight betas.
• Discovered that my Mac Pro is on the brink of death, it's hard drive is on the verge of a complete meltdown. It literally takes 40-50 minutes to just boot up. So I'm going to have to replace it.
• Today I bought an iPhone 3G for development purposes. There aren't many users on older devices, but I think it warrants a small investment to buy a device to test on so as to avoid problems in the future. I am predicting the 3Gs will soon become the "lowest common denominator" on the iOS platform within the next year or so.
• I haven't made a dent in "The Lean Startup", being too pre-occupied. I will have to rectify that soon.
• I ordered more stationary from Viking Direct, it arrived fairly quickly so I'm already using it to take notes on. I will have to start getting used to the idea of always having a notepad on me. 

For the future:

• The new goal is to begin working on something substantial by 1st of February. In practice this means no more other projects or apps, but to dedicate my time to narrowing down ideas. I have a big stack in the filing cabinet that need to be sorted through.
• I am considering very seriously applying to incubators like the NDRC, DIT HotHouse etc. so will be investigating those opportunities in coming days and weeks.
• I am considering some supplemental education, perhaps some business/payroll type courses.