Alex Krupp talks about cell phone software and why it’s not working

These are good points, but I remain pretty certain that it will be an area that takes off. I think that, as things stand right now, some of the ingredients are:

• Discard what you know about what an application should be like. I think a lot of people approach things with an idea that might work on the web or a desktop, and “whittle it down” some. I think the best cell phone apps will be things that are created from the ground up with the cell phone environment in mind. For example:

• Radically simple. It has to be super simple and easy to use. You should get the basic functionality from it within one or two clicks of opening it (consider that the user already had to click 3 or 4 times just to open your application in many cases).

• By making an application that’s radically simple, it becomes easier to port it to all the many phone platforms out there. If you aren’t doing much that’s fancy, you’re not likely to run into strange limitations.

• The advantages will come from what makes mobile phones convenient: the fact that they are portable and can basically do simple network access all the time.

• Since it’s networked, build applications that are half mobile, half on the web. Complicated interaction goes on the web, and the mobile portion does “the simplest thing that could possibly work”.

My own simple example of an application that basically meets these requirements is a mobile shopping list (with the highly original name of ShopList that doesn’t suck. By that I mean that you would either be already insane or be insane in short order if you tried to enter a shopping list into a phone via its keypad, so that is taken care of on the web.

Sure, it’s not a billion dollar startup idea, but I think I’m on the right track with how to create applications and what sorts of things to create.

My wife Ilenia can attest to my love for maps. Whenever we go hiking and I find a nice map of the area, she usually has to pry me away from it. But I especially love maps on line. As a kid, I used to buy the USGS topo maps at the bookstore, but getting more than a few was expensive for my budget and sort of futile, as you would have to purchase a large number of them to cover any significant amount of territory. So I was happy indeed when I discovered TopoZone. And who doesn’t like google maps?

It was with great joy that today I finally found some good map sites for our new home in Tirol:

http://www.geoland.at/

It’s not the fastest thing in there, but it’s got lots of information that you can play around with.

The second one that I found utilizes the dataset to produce maps with mountain bike routes on them:

http://tiris.tirol.gv.at/scripts/esrimap.dll?name=Bike&Cmd=Start

Too cool!

As mentioned previously in this space, I’ve been thinking about what exactly to work on, and one of the conclusions that I’ve come to is that Stuff To Do is a very handy tool, but there are already too many similar applications out there. Even if they might not have quite the mix of features that makes me like Stuff To Do and keep me using it, it’s not the best space for me to be competing in.

So, with that in mind, I dropped the price to 6 USD a month, and opened it up so that anyone can use the group enabled version for free as long as they don’t mind a few adsense ads. Paying the money gets you an ad free version and a warm fuzzy feeling.

We’ll see how things go with those parameters, and of course I reserve the right to change things in the future.

Depending on how things go, I suppose I might even consider open sourcing it in the future, although since it does what I need, and I don’t want to be responsible for trying to manage it as an open source project, I’m not sure, yet.

Now… on to the next thing…

In one of his many well written and thought provoking essays (Ideas for Startups), Paul Graham has this to say:

Actually, startup ideas are not million dollar ideas, and here’s an experiment you can try to prove it: just try to sell one. Nothing evolves faster than markets. The fact that there’s no market for startup ideas suggests there’s no demand. Which means, in the narrow sense of the word, that startup ideas are worthless.

While I agree with his main point that execution counts, his affermation bugs me a little bit because it clashes with my understanding of economics. To wit, that ideas are “Non-excludable goods“.

As the linked page says,

Non-excludable goods are defined in economics as goods or service whereby it is impossible to prevent an individual who does not pay for that thing from enjoying the benefits of it. Market allocation of such goods is not feasible.

How would a market for ideas work, in any case? How could you prevent someone from listening to a bunch of ideas and just walking away with the ones they like?

Perhaps with lots of lawyering and monitoring schemes, something could be kludged together, but at that point, since the ideas alone most likely aren’t worth that much compared to well executed ideas, putting together that market would probably be more trouble than it’s worth.

So Paul Graham is right, for practical purposes, but his economics don’t seem correct to me.

I just finished reading Jessica Livingston’s Founders at Work, which I found very interesting, and valuable in terms of information on startups. Unlike a lot of businessy books, since the whole thing is interviews, there isn’t really any “filler”. One thing I think might have been more interesting in some ways is to have some more information on failed startups and what went wrong, but it’s probably more difficult to research that.

My question to the world, though, is this:

Who (or what startup?) would you have liked to see interviewed?

It would have been interesting to see Dave Sifry, both because I know him from my time at Linuxcare, but also because he went through a couple companies before the stars aligned with Technorati, which seems to be doing pretty well.

As I take stock of things in my life after our move to Innsbruck, I’m thinking about what to do with the Linux Incompatibility List. I think the site could grow in some ways to get people more involved with the life cycle of identifying what doesn’t work with Linux and then fixing it. There are also some tech changes that I could do. However, I’m also thinking that running the site is not part of what I want to focus on long term. It seems to have been pretty successful so far, having garnered a mention in slashdot and other news sites, and has seen a steady stream of modifications and additions.

Since the adsense from it nearly pays for the server that hosts it, I’ve also been considering the idea of selling it somewhere like sitepoint, but I’m a bit reticent to do that, because the money part of it has to be secondary to providing a useful service to the Linux community. I wouldn’t mind making some money off it, of course, although I don’t think it would be much but I would have to be certain that it “went to a good home” as they say. I wouldn’t mind having fewer advertisements even as things stand now, so I certainly wouldn’t want to see it “monetized” by being crammed full of ads.

Thoughts? Suggestions?

Or, more accurately, by the new configuration of /etc/nsswitch.conf, as detailed in this bug report:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/avahi/+bug/94940

I got pretty frustrated hunting that down. I hope it gets fixed soon after the release of Feisty, because it’s supremely annoying to have a slow internet connection when you know that, well, it isn’t.

Aside from Paul Graham’s list of reasons not to do a startup on your own (http://www.paulgraham.com/startupmistakes.html), there’s another very simple one: pronouns.

It’s much, much nicer to be able to write “we” on a corporate web site. “We” could be anything from 2 to IBM’s zillions, but it implies a real organization, whereas “I” implies some guy off working on his own. Of course, you could lie and write “we”, but that will probably catch up with you at an inopportune moment.

Wow, that sucked. It took this company in Austria nearly a month to connect me back up to the internet. And since I don’t have a laptop with which to roam around in search of wireless, I was pretty much completely out of it since we moved up here. I’m still getting the network reconfigured, so I won’t be at %100 capacity for a little bit.

I took the time to explore the area some by bicycle, which was pretty nice. The area around Innsbruck is full of nice evergreen forests, snow capped mountains and mountain fields. Unfortunately, while everything was quite beautiful, it didn’t smell so good, because the industrious farmers are busy spreading tons of cow dung over all those nice green fields, as well as dribbling it all over the roads leading to the fields… Oh well, we ended up in a nice place, and we’re pretty happy about it. More later as I start getting things going again.

I wouldn’t have thought it several years ago, but I’ve actually been hacking on some Javascript, for Stuff to Do. My immediate need was to make the system work better with IE6, which had problems with the previous way of doing things, which involved big updates to large portions of the page. Now, with Javascript, I do most of the work that way, and rails only has to make note of the new task priorities in the database.

In terms of UI changes, I also flattened the task boxes down just a bit, something that a user requested.

Hopefully it’s reasonably stable, as I will have very, very little hacking time until we are unpacked in our new place in Innsbruck!