Startups and the role of capital and investments

One of the most exciting things about the computer industry these days is the ease with which can get started. Decent computers can be had for well south of $1000, hosting is cheap, services like Amazon EC2 make it ever easier to scale rapidly should the need arise, and the only other things you need are an internet connection and a place to sit. This is leading to more people, like 37 Signals to question the need for investment entirely and others, like YCombinator to successfully make very small investments (thousands of dollars, rather than millions).

Sometimes, however, I wonder - is it just a passing moment in time, a window of opportunity, or is it a long term trend? Historically, to set up something like a factory required a great deal of money, putting it beyond the reach of anyone unable to obtain financing. Even in this day and age, there are plenty of endeavors that require large amounts of capital, and a lot of time, prior to seeing returns: that's how things work in my wife's field, biotech. Some fields have even become more expensive with time. High end computer games are very expensive propositions in this day and age, compared to the low budget stuff typical of, say, the Commodore 64 era, although it's also true that the market has also grown a lot, and that there is still space for smaller-budget operations.

How does all this look historically? Have there been industries in the past where it was so easy to get started? Anything that was able to scale? By which I mean: it might have been relatively easy to start some kind of small business, but it would most likely always stay small, whereas things like Craigslist or 37Signals have the means to grow a great deal without adding lots of people. Will things change in the future so that one or a few programmers can't compete with a big team? Or perhaps things will go in the other direction and more industries will become like computing is today and it will be possible to a biotech startup in your home office?

Syndicated 2008-07-18 11:43:00 (Updated 2008-07-18 12:33:24) from David's Computer Stuff Journal

Misquoted

Well, to be charitable, it was a bit late and so perhaps what I said came out wrong, but in this article:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/07/14/android_developer_unrest/

I'm quoted as saying the problem is with "upper management", which I don't really believe to be the case, going by snippets of conversations and things I've read. Frankly, at this point in time, I have no idea why Google can't talk about Android.

Also, I had several other positive things to say to the reporter, but I guess the 'focus' of the piece was about the problems that Android is currently experiencing. Notwithstanding the recent weirdness, I'm quite happy that someone with a lot of money and muscle is going to be backing an open source mobile phone system, and hope that the current troubles are merely a small speed bump.

Syndicated 2008-07-15 18:53:00 (Updated 2008-07-15 19:09:25) from David's Computer Stuff Journal

Squeezed Books Contest

I'd like to announce a modest contest on the Squeezed Books web site: the person who contributes the most to existing or new summaries wins a free business book + shipping, from Amazon, courtesy of Squeezed Books.

Yeah, I know that it doesn't really compare with the millions that big companies can give away, but I thought it would be a nice way to reward people who work on the site. If it works out well, we'll repeat it every month.

So, if you're the kind of person who already takes notes when you read a book, or you've read a lot of business books and can distill their key points, this might be a good opportunity to take a chance at a free book, and share your knowledge with others (summaries, unless otherwise noted, are under a Creative Commons license).

Questions and comments welcome: it's an experiment, so ideas on how to improve it are welcome too.

Syndicated 2008-07-11 12:07:00 (Updated 2008-07-11 12:30:07) from David's Computer Stuff Journal

Google, Android, and the case of the missing communication

Like many people, I participated in the Google Android contest this spring, and like most of them, I didn't win, but I did enjoy working with the platform, and am very excited about the idea of an open source mobile platform that's relatively powerful.

From the outset, due to the lack of actual source code for a lot of the system, there have been "doubters" about what Google is really up to. I'm not one of them, and am largely ok with their reasons for holding back: I buy their reasoning that the long term benefits of a strong, properly QA'ed launch probably outweigh the possibility of failure that might come from the press and the public at large that doesn't care much about software freedom seeing phones come out with half-baked, early implementations. I think most of us working with Android were ok with that strategy, and the ones who weren't self-selected out of the platform, most likely.

However, lately Google has made something of a mess of their communications regarding Android. The problem stems from the fact that they gave an updated version of the SDK only to the winners of the competition, which for a lot of people felt like a bit of a slap in the face: they helped popularize the platform by participating in the contest and writing applications for it, and in return got excluded from the upgrade path. Personally, it's not really any skin off my nose, as I'm sanguine about the Hecl port proceeding apace when the new SDK is public, but I can see that if you were, say, a company porting your app to the platform and now are left behind the competition winners, you might be a bit irritated.

The biggest mistake they've made though, is a big lack of communication regarding this business. As I said, I don't really have that much skin in the game, and if they explained in a convincing way why they needed to do things that way, they would go a long ways to allaying the frustrations felt by many.

I'm not much of a believer in conspiracy theories and plots, especially where companies are concerned. Inept bumbling is a far more likely explanation in most cases, including this one. What is odd, though, is that Google has a lot of people who "get it". I met Dan Morrill at the Munich Android event, and he definitely gets it. He writes about his frustrations as a developer advocate and all the crazy things people say. Well, one way to reduce the number of batty internet theories (eliminating them is clearly impossible due to the alien mind control rays) is to consistently communicate quality information about what's really going on, something that has been lacking with regards to the SDK question. Here's another Google employee who understands this need to communicate, and apparently does so despite being worried about being "slapped for talking publicy about all this":

http://groups.google.com/group/android-developers/msg/244edfad99870c63

But the root of the problem is certainly not licensing but that there hasn't been a new public SDK release since M5, while at the same time a small group of people received updated versions privately.

I really don't know precisely why this happened; but I'm sure it has more to do with logistics and reducing the burden of support while we shift priorities (to shipping real devices) rather than politics or any will of our part to "hurt the community" (come one guys, we are not that stupid... !)

While others in the team may disagree, I think it was very very unfortunate; some of us are trying to prepare a new SDK release, but it's a lot harder than I can comment on here, so don't hold your breath because it might not happen that soon.

This explains things in part, but still leaves us in the dark, and leaves me with the feeling that someone in power, somewhere at Google, despite his or her clued in colleagues, really doesn't get it with regards to open source.

I'm still unconcerned about the Android source code: I think we'll see it, but to be a true open source project, Android will need an open community as well, not one where decisions are taken exclusively at Google, and not even communicated to the development community at large. All in all, this mistake is more molehill than mountain, but however you look at it, in terms of open source, it is a step backwards.

Syndicated 2008-07-09 12:11:00 (Updated 2008-07-09 12:58:43) from David's Computer Stuff Journal

Cache it all

I recently redid my personal web site, at welton.it. Wanting to be quick about it, and make the look and feel a bit more uniform than it has been in the past, I hacked together some pages in Rails. Despite this being sort of a "killing a fly with a bazooka" situation, I've been doing lots with Rails, so it was quick to use. Here's the thing, though: Rails is definitely overkill, as the site is basically static. I don't need to calculate anything or fetch stuff from a database - I just wanted a reasonably good template system, and I am quite comfortable with Rails these days.

But the idea of leaving Rails running for a static site was of course no good: I basically need to cache the entire thing, so that Rails is simply not involved. How to do this as quick as possible (in between diaper changing and other baby duties!) ? Ideally, it would be possible to introspect Rails in order to know exactly which pages are present, then cache those, and avoid Rails on the server entirely (just generate them locally and put them in subversion), but that proved to be fairly hacky, so I settled for this code, which simply caches all pages which comes across, when caches_pages is placed in application.rb:

class CacheFileName
  include ActionController::Caching::Pages
  include ActionController::Caching::Pages::ClassMethods

  def cachedname(path)
    page_cache_file(path)
  end
end

def caches_pages()
  return unless perform_caching
  after_filter do |c|
    res = c.cache_page
    cfn = CacheFileName.new
    cf = Cachedfile.new :filename => cfn.cachedname(c.request.path)
    cf.save!
  end
end

It simply caches everything. To be able to easily clear out the cache if there are any changes to the site, we record the changes in the Cachedfile model, which is defined like this:

create_table "cachedfiles", :force => true do |t|
  t.string   "filename"
  t.datetime "created_at"
  t.datetime "updated_at"
end

with this model:

class Cachedfile < ActiveRecord::Base

  def Cachedfile.clean_cache
    Cachedfile.find(:all).each do |cf|
      begin
        fn = ActionController::Base.page_cache_directory + cf.filename
        File.delete fn
      rescue => e
        logger.error "Error deleting #{fn}: #{e.inspect}"
      ensure
        cf.destroy
      end
    end
  end

end

which has a class method to go through and clean out all the cached files. I call it manually from ./script/clean_cache:

#!/usr/bin/env ruby

ENV['RAILS_ENV'] = ARGV.first || ENV['RAILS_ENV'] || 'development'

require File.dirname(__FILE__) + '/../config/boot'
require "#{RAILS_ROOT}/config/environment"
require 'console_app'

Cachedfile.clean_cache

It's not a beautiful system, but it gets the job done.

Syndicated 2008-06-13 21:21:00 (Updated 2008-06-13 21:45:08) from David's Computer Stuff Journal