My Startup Adventure

New News Site.

Wed, 20 Jul 2011 00:00:00 GMT

I've added yet another project to my list. Over the last two weeks I've developed an awesome new news site.

It's a change in strategy from OrderedNews.com and focused on original content, rather than aggregation. It's a bit of a punt, but it's code complete within two weeks, fully socially integrated, and very mass market friendly.

It's written in .net, and I'm very pleased with the architecture, which is incredibly powerful, with abstraction, and can be re-branded and used for any number of future news web sites. I may even be able to license the technology or otherwise monetise it in the way I plan with my previously announced discussion site, which I'm still working on, but will also benefit from some of the technology I've developed over the last two weeks.

In the future I place to develop a facility for commercial advertising placement which I will also implement in DressCodeGuide.com when it is ready.

I expect to make an announcement about the new news site before Sunday when I plan to launch it. No fanfare, but I hope to develop some initial interest socially. It'll take months to get into Google - just one of them facts of life that you cannot change.

More games.

Thu, 7 Jul 2011 00:00:00 GMT

The games thing is not completely dead by the way, although my co-investor decided not to invest the money required to complete their project, I've recently started writing games using the XNA libraries from Microsoft for the Xbox and PC.

It's surprisingly easy (I used to write games in assembly language in the eighties - much harder), and I intend to develop a few Indy games privately in the future. It's not a priority at the moment though, and will take a lot of resources and work to get something that probably won't earn any return.

For the time being, games development will have to go back to being just a hobby.

New projects.

Tue, 5 Jul 2011 00:00:00 GMT

Last year I was working on a couple of start up projects with a private investor, including the media monitoring work and the game I was working on.

Unfortunately trading conditions and Twitter moving in on some of our territory, seems to have stalled those ventures. This is sad as we had built a great social media monitoring product which I think many businesses would have invested in to save themselves labour and time. Time is really what we would have been selling, and I think there was more to achieve.

Since then I've been working on a couple of other ventures. They are both in development so I can't say too much, but one should be a useful marketing and product development tool, and the other a prototype talking shop. Essentially a new take on the forum concept, but a bit more specialised.

Both are dot net developments for those that take an interest in the underlying technology. And both are social projects with integration with Facebook and Twitter respectively.

The first of these new projects is a large job but should produce lots of monetisation opportunities, whilst hopefully becoming and great place for consumers. It's somewhat inspired by my most recent start-up, and builds on the Facebook integration work I have already done.

I hope to have the second project completed in a much faster time frame, and although I'm not expecting to be able to monetise it directly, I think the technology could be licensed in the same way that Wikipedia's commercial company licenses it's technology. I might also consider giving it away to build a client market to advertise related products too, or on a fremium basis (free for basic, but with premium options for a fee), or maybe just provide a platform for others to set-up similar sites, funded by unobtrusive advertising related to their subject.

They are both probes into the power of social networking, so one way or the other I will learn from these projects.

An Interesting day.

Fri, 17 Jun 2011 00:00:00 GMT

Yesterday was an interesting day. In the Chinese sense.

Exciting new project.

Wed, 2 Mar 2011 00:00:00 GMT

Just started working on an exciting new project. It's new, it's exciting, and it's so good, I want to get it to market before I tell you anything! :p

Tango down.

Sat, 5 Feb 2011 00:00:00 GMT

The games project I was working on has been abandoned for now, due agreed investment being pulled. I understand why (it's unrelated to that project), but it's a shame.

The same investor was employing me on his media monitoring project, which is no longer investing in further development at this time, so it's belt tightening time again. IT happens.

Faster than light PC.

Sat, 15 Jan 2011 00:00:00 GMT

My new PC is instant, by the way. I can't overstate just how quick it is in day to day use. I can't give you numbers either, because basically everything is instant.

I did have some grief to start with as my builder put Windows 7 on the regular hard drive, so I had to wipe it and start again, but once I sorted it out, it's been great. That's hope it stays that way for the next 5 years.

New Year - New PC!

Wed, 5 Jan 2011 00:00:00 GMT

I'm notoriously reticient to upgrade my PCs. Once I've got them all set-up I tend to use them until they are hopelessly obsolete. I've even left replacements in corners for 6 months until I could find the time to install them and migrate my work.

However, this year I'm going for it! My current development PC is about 5 years old, so well due for replacement. It is really beginning to struggle. Given my infrequent upgrading I'm going with what I think is a very good spec.

Last year I ordered a custom built budget server with a quad core processor, maxed memory, and 4 SATA2 0.5 TB hard drives, which I setup as a database server with intelligently distributed data to minimise seek times and allow 4x the data transfer rate, and cross drive automated backups. It works really well, and even queries that used to take days before, now take just a few seconds and only hit 5% of system capacity. :)

I've just ordered a desktop with a 30% faster processor, twice as fast RAM, even bigger hard drive capacity, twice the data transfer capacity (SATA3), and a Solid State hard drive, on to which I plan to install windows and the page file. It comes with a 0.5 Tb hard drive and I'm going to add a 250MB one I have laying around (the shipped hard drive from my server), and setup automated cross drive backups, as before, for peace of mind. I've spent about the same as last year, but I'm expecting 10x the performance again at peak loads, and I can't even put numbers on the improvement on my current desktop. In short I'm expecting Windows to boot in less than 10 seconds and everything else to be more or less instant.

That should save me the hastle of upgrading again for another few years...

My glasses have broken!

Sat, 1 Jan 2011 00:00:00 GMT

Damn, my glasses have broken!

That is all. :(

Save'n'Share Anywhere!

Fri, 31 Dec 2010 00:00:00 GMT

I've had a very busy year. I've not had much time to work on my pet project, OrderedNews.com, but over year end I've had some time away from my other projects, and I've polished off some new functionality for it.

I am pleased to announce that you can now save and share stories found in our news archive, either in search, in the feed archives, or from individual stories shared by someone else.

I think you could save archive stories in early versions of the site, but once I had to hive of the archive function to another server, the save functionality was sacrificed, but now it's back.

The social sharing features via share (for Facebook) and tweet (for Twitter) are new this year on the live feed pages, and I am pleased to now also have them for the archive, so if you find a story you were looking for you can tell the world.

In the new year I hope to add the facility to search within selected categories or feeds only, which will improve search results for ambiguous terms, allow you to search a feed archive for a specific story, and allow you to look for stories from a specific feed for a specific date range.

Right, it's 8pm, and my guests are due to arrive soon. Convention dictates that I have to stop work and imbibe generous amounts of beer to welcome the New Year, so until next year, all the best.

Happy New Year!

Matt.