Next Tuesday (December 4th 2007), Paul Graham will participate in the garage special.
The garage is an event limited to 150 persons that held in the Imperial College of London, Paul will be replying the questions of the assistants. Of course, that’s a perfect ocassion not only to speak with Paul… but with lots of enterpreneurs that, hopefully, come from around the world.
I already have my seat reserved (and the plane tickets too!), so if you plan going there, contact me in advance (by e-mail, or posting a comment here) so we can start exchanging ideas as soon as possible.
As a side note, I will arrive to London on Monday afternoon, and leave on Wednesday afternoon, so I will have some time to meet friends in London, and also to visit some museums (like the Museum of London, and the Science Museum).
See you there!
Today is a happy day for us all.
Since now, we had been operating through the society of one of our partners… but a couple of weeks ago, we decided it was the riht time to take the steps to be independent, so we can offer an even better service, meanwhile we’re able to control things much better.
So, from now on, Simple Option is an independent company. Long life to SIMPLE OPTION, S.L.
A week ago I sent an e-mail to spanish branch of Citizen asking for information about some watches, to sell then in our online store.
Today, Chief of Sales for Citizen Spain has called me, and said me that they’re not selling to businesses who have not a physical place to sell them. He made clear that he’s not against selling them online, but it’s only that they’re not selling watches to businesses that do not sell them also offline.
This feels very strange to me, since there are many other online-only businesses like Amazon.com that are selling citizen clocks only online. Also, he told me that they have been requested by many other online businesses to get watches from Citizen Spain, but he refused too.
How can I get your watches? Is it a worldwide ban to online stores (I don’t think so because of the amazon.com case) or this only happens in Spain?
I want to sell some of their watches, because my customers want them, the same as traditional shops like them. And in my honest opinion, their criteria of not selling to online-only shops is making them to lose a pretty important revenue stream, and also is blatantly discriminating.
Constantly we experience changes. And if we think about that, we’ll find out that those changes are circular movements, or are motivated by circular ones. No matter if we look at Web 2.0, or overprotection of children, economic crashes, or even wars, they all are changes motivated by circular behaviours.
Society evolves as a sucession of generations (there are four different generations: Phophet, Nomad, Hero and Artist), as Strauss and Howe have found out in their researchs. This is a pretty interesting thing to take into consideration, if you want to predict how customers and workforce attitudes will evolve in the next years. Top executives around the world (i.e. Jeff Bezos, know this, and apply it to their mid/long-term strategies). For more information about circular movements in Customers and Workforce attitudes, read “How Customer and Workforce Attitudes Will Evolve”, from Harvard Business Review, issue of July-August 2007. If you’re subscribed, read it here. Also check, this complementary material.
And, that circular movement can be seen in other places too… even in computation itself. Like Herb Sutter says, the changes in computation are pendular.
So, if everything is circular (or pendular, call it however you like the most), why trying to reinvent the wheel reinventing solutions for problems that are very similar have happened before? Is it doubt to our lazyness. Even Scott Berkun has his own words on that in his book “The Art of Project Management”.
And the final lesson is: Look backward to be able to see forward. In fact, as I did read time ago somewhere: “If you want to forecast X years into the future, you will have to look back at least 2X years if you don’t want to fail”. And no, this movement can’t be stopped unless you believe firmly in the end of history.
Use subst 
Instead of :
ns_adp_puts “<p id=\”welcome\” class=\”title1\”>Welcome to my website, [getuserfromdb]</p>”
you can do:
ns_adp_puts [subst { <p id=”welcome” class=”title1″>Welcome to my website, [getuserfromdb]</p> } ]
No more escaping the ” symbols! Hail subst! Hail cleaner code!
Recently, many people are asking for changes in the way things are done at the moment. It feels like we’ve really reached the point where our current paradigms are not enough to explain what’s going on, and how we should do things from now on… We’ve reached a point where Internet is dead and boring, thus no evolving, and the personal computing has a future pretty different from its present.
But also, as Thomas S. Kuhn said, not all changes lead us to a better direction, so many people complain about treating Architectures as Services.
I bet that there will be big changes in the next 5 to 8 years in this industry. It has just started. Let’s sit and enjoy (how many markets will be destroyed and may others will emerge in the process)
Nssession is a little piece of software that helps working with sessions if you use AOLServer. You can get the source here: http://bas.scheffers.net/aolserver/
I haven’t been able to compile it in the first try. It seems its Makefile it’s a little outdated. But after a little changes, I got the job done:
… and that’s it ! end the process by executing: a [g]make install !
And now… it’s time to get back to work! Enjoy Nssession
Since around 14:00 GMT (almost 12 hours ago) Skype is down. Many people today aren’t able to use it… to work, speak with family, or simply fight boredom.
To know actual Skype’s status, and the messages from the administrators, check: Skype’s heartbeat page.
I hope the service comes back soon so we’re able to call again people worldwide easily & for free
Brokers in the spanish stocks’ market
Some people say that disasters use to happen on Thurdays… this one has come to support that theory.
Months (if not years) ago some people started saying that the market was going to correct itself sooner or later because of the housing bubble, but that the process would be slow, and non-painful. Some people said there was not such kind of bubble. Now even the words of the people that warned about the bubble seem optimistic… There was a bubble, yes? But the problem were not only the houses, it was ignoring the risks associated to lending money.
Stock markets today are simply busting, and this is a chain reaction. Stocks that lose value have been the trend for the last week in worldwide markets, and today the worst things have happened… a sudden burst. All European Markets have lost around 3%. Asian have lost a lot too… and same for American markets.
And when ALL markets lose… that’s bad, pretty bad. Because the most basic way to protect capital doesn’t work: diversification. Everyone says to control risks by diversifying when investing… but if every stock market is going down, then how much you have diversified doesn’t matter… you go down will the market. If everything goes down, then money (that unreal thing) literally disappears.
What will happen after then? Nothing good. Even if markets recover from this, there will be effects from the vast amounts of capital that banks have been injecting into the market. Expect raising inflation, in the best case.
Months ago some people started to speak about deflation, recession because of the risky behaviours when investing… it’s hard to listen to them when the noise of the cash is too loud… Now it’s time to gather what we’ve been growing up for years.
Market is down! Go bears!
I have being given today a link to a post of Paul Stamatiou called Why You Shouldn’t Ignore Amazon’s New FPS.
After I read it… I was a little skeptical if it would work or not. I was being a little slow today… and wasn’t thinking in the whole picture but, thanks to José María, finally I got it.
To understand it, take a look to Jeff Bezos’ (Amazon’s CEO) talk in TED in February 2003. Pay special attention to the last part of how to build appliances to make the best use of the electricity infraestructure… Jeff Bezos knows that their objective is to build appliances around Internet. And in the process they want to expand Amazon until they can cover by theirselves the operations of their company (I wonder what will be the next thing they’ll come up with), and also to create an infraestructure that others can integrate into their applications (this is the very important thing where Google fails miserabily).
I’ll be awaiting for more news from Amazon… this seems the beginning of something bigger… Let’s see how things evolve.