Older blog entries for nipper (starting at number 3)

So - one of my client companies has just closed another round of financing. Strangely enough, it didn't need the money, but thought it might as well get the money in whilst it was on offer. Don't know about the terms attached though.

Seems strange how so many companies with fairly weak ideas can attract investment. From what I've seen, the investors are betting on the people rather than the technology - and they also like people who have failed at least once already. Something about experience of failure. I just wonder what's the optimal amount of failures? 2? 3? Maybe an interesting dot-com idea is one where you get a limited amount of funding, spend it all, and all of the founders are now more experienced and can move up the "investment" ladder.

I should franchise that...

Off to a conference next week at Olympia in London - "M- commerce" type thing.

Amusing thing is that I've got three of my consulting clients exhibiting there and two of them have stands next to each other. What's amusing is that the software I created for two of them is very similar - not at the actual source code level, but in a "design pattern" kind of way because I had the same thought processes when designing it. So both of the products have similar frameworks and therefore the selling points are based around the same framework.

Some neat hack demos there are down to me and a mate as well. Should be fun wandering around anyways and seeing what the marketing types are making of it all...

Had a good meeting last night with some guys from a mobile networking company. They would like to think they've solved a latency problem with mobile TCP/IP.

Unfortunately, their attitude to their work was similar to that relating to cryptographic algorithms. Especially when I mentioned that there were a number of RFCs specifically related to latency problems with "long thin pipes" (long transmission time, not much bandwidth). So, like the amateur guy with the brand new encryption algorithm, they think they know better (which they may do), but aren't prepared to release their "algorithm" for peer review. (And not even prepared to release it to me - a friendly consultant under NDA!).

They mainly want me to work out how to productise their solution. Quite difficult when you don't know what it does...

OK - just joined the site.

Some brief background information - I'm based in the UK and work as a contractor to companies wanting to develop "m- commerce" applications. Usually written in Java.

In my spare time, I also run a company called Kimian Technologies - we're writing some cool open source code stuff based around SMS (mobile phone text messages for the uninitiated) and also stuff relating to gaming on the next generation mobile phones.

Watch this space for more entries...