After quite a few months of preparation work we can at last tell the world what we’ve been doing and why every single other project of ours has been stagnating. Yesterday at the Open Coffee meeting of Athens, we announced the Openfund is a seed capital construct aimed at supporting startups aimed at the Internet and emerging technologies in general.

We believe that it covers a huge gap in the financing schemes available today in Greece and Southeastern Europe ofcourse. The slides explain how we arrived at the idea in a quite explicit way, so take some time to flip through them.

Now to answer rather bluntly a few questions of the audience that may be popping in your mind:

Why do you make a valuation of the company in advance: This isn’t about what your company is worth in day 0. It’s about the things we’ll be doing together to build your dream. Don’t look at this as a valuation, it’s enough money to get you started (although we’ll guide you into getting further funding in various ways), and getting the Openfund’s executive team as your partners.

Why would I entrust you with my idea ?: There’s a number of reasons really to back this:

1. Our reputation is more valuable that the money we could make by manipulating your idea and selling it out. We are participating in this with our names, not a faceless construct.
2. If you came up with the idea, then you are capable with coming up with more of the same quality. Most companies that get funding later realize that they have to change many parts of their business plan along the way.
3. Your team is most likely the best team out there to flesh out your idea. We’d be stupid to pick another team to do what you’re already great at doing

Do you provide incubation facilities ?: With respect to space, Microsoft Hellas is donating a generous amount of working space for limited spans of time. We’ll hook you up with other office hosting deals and so on, but seriously that’s not a difficult thing to handle. With respect to other things such as helping you with legal, accounting and other details, the answer is yes. We will do whatever it takes to get you to work exclusively at what your main skill is. Beyond that however we’re not a flower garden and we won’t be mass producing pansies. We will guide you into acquiring the skills and solving your problems, but you will have to take the decisions and do the phonecalls.

Do you throw more weight in innovation or profitability: In an ideal world these should be intertwined, but they’re not. We believe that innovation is core to making profit on the web, but we will not be funding research either. Depending on the availability of ideas we reserve the right to foster the ones we believe are the best for all involved parties.

Do you accept groups of 1 member ?: Absolutely not. Find people that you trust and that complement or support your skills. Groups will be given a better chance for both qualities.

I’m an investor. Can I participate in the Openfund ?:Yes. You can head on to the www.theopenfund.com and leave your name and email and we’ll contact you with the detailed investor pouch that contains all the details of the deal.

Do you take in applications of already incorporated ideas ?: This is complicated but solutions do exist. It depends on the maturity of your effort and the status of your intellectual property. We don’t want to get in IP battles and we don’t want to undermine the value of existing work either. Get in touch with us and we’ll work out something.

I visited London recently, and since for the first time I had more than a few hours to spend in the city. One of the things that I wanted to see was the British Museum’s room of the Parthenon marbles. This is a collection of marbles that were scraped by lord Elgin (which is why they are often called the Elgin marbles) from the monument of Parthenon in Athens Greece.

These marbles have been a source of great dispute. Greeks as people feel that this is a piece of our heart missing, and that they are an unremovable part of our history.

Upon visiting I read a pamphlet from the British museum’s administration, that explained the dispute from the museum’s side. The main argument is that combined that with other exhibits, the Parthenon marbles are a piece of a greater puzzle that explains world history.

What it doesn’t explain is that it could tell the same story with the replicas that are currently exhibited at the respective Greek Parthenon museum. It also doesn’t mention that the room is used for receptions, and that in the past the museum had damaged the marbles by scraping them so that they would look whiter and thus more attractive.

Anyway, to take a peek at the amount of things that have been stripped from the Parthenon, zoom in/out of the map below and drag around ofcourse. The diagram behind is a piece of the map, and the photos have been placed on the respective locations.

Upon zooming the photos will look blurry for a while, but they will clear up as the higher resolution is downloaded. I should also warn that if your computer does not have a GPU the display will be choppy.

Please do not embed in other sites. This is an extreme bandwidth hog for me. If you’re interested I can send you the original dataset (250mb) so you can host it yourself.

My presentation as given in the Athens Media Camp II.

Programming Humans

The slides are meaningless without the document, but nonetheless here they are.

I remember listening to Tim O’Reilly some months ago saying that OSS is important because it’s formed the base of cloud computing.

Stating that Open Source is important in the age of cloud computing and Web 2.0, is like saying that an Open Source x86 processor would be important in the age of ‘Windows is 90% of the market’ era of computing.

In the Microsoft camp most of all, we are looking at an Internet Operating System, with analogies to structured storage, network interop, processor interupts, subsystem orchestration and so on. All the bits that you can find in a classic desktop or server OS are there, implemented in a way that makes them prohibitively slow for a single machine but allow them to scale infinitely.

Azure is closed source, implementing open standards. To me as a .net developer there is essentially no benefit from it being based on .net . The framework isn’t visible anywhere, it’s just REST, ATOM and ridiculous amounts of XML and JSON.

That said, the only other company that ‘gets it’ is Sun. To a certain degree they got it earlier and worked harder than Microsoft to get to the ‘The network is the computer’ state. The reasons why they failed are numerous and debatable. To me this was their fixation with not implementing their grid services in a way that doesn’t require you

Amazon kind of get’s it. Their main and most popular cloud product, EC2 is essentially time leasing on a server farm. The Simple Storage and Queue systems are much much more important, but they seem to lack the vision to move further.

The lack of coordination in the OSS camp, is about to lead to OSS missing the opportunity to become the standard in the coming era of distributed computing.

Update 10 March 2009 : IBM seriously really really gets it. I'm impressed. Look at their offerings.Btw Open Source remains insignificant even there.

I read on various news blogs that Twitter announced to it’s whitelisted users that they will be limiting the requests to 20.000 requests per hour. In order to understand the size of the free firehose, that’s 5.5 requests per second, which is quite reasonable actually, unless you need to relay user messages.

For example if I were www.twitku.com and had to relay the posts that users send, it would send me out of business.

In general, Twitter’s API requires authentication for many things that you can cull from the web pages. So there are bound to be attacks.

On the other hand, it paves the road for services that will pay to use the API. This would also solve the issue of having to monetize the site themselves.

Running the queries locally or on federated on-premises servers is cheap, so they don’t have to put ads in the service. On the other hand, now they can squeeze their profit margin, be a platform, and charge other people that use the message bus for their traffic plus some more.

The resellers of the bus will be able to experiment with ads and other income models without jeopardizing Twitter’s ridiculously featureless interface.

Twitter also has a comeback move. Once they locate the model that works in the hands of someone else, they can copy it and raise the price for their API or throttle it some more and drive them out of business.

are going to leweb

see you there

Let’s get something out of the way. The people who dislike SOAP APIs are people who like getting paid to do repetitive and mindless work.

Either that, or they like to take on easy projects such as communicating with REST APIs to compensate for their overall lack of skills.

The only valid criticism I’ve ever heard is that SOAP isn’t meant to be consumed by people. THAT’S RIGHT BITCHES ! It’s meant to be pointed to by a tool that will read the WSDL file and create a wrapper for your language of choice. No XML parsing for you, no mistakes, no type ambiguity, no nothing.

Then again almost all of the critics just attack the fact that the standard is backed by every single large corporation. They can’t stand the fact that the unskillful makers of their ubercool/iconic programming language or framework don’t have the skills to make the mentioned tools.

So so so sad.

Get over it, or suck your thumb and go home.

You know how florists sell cacti in closed pots so that you’ll eventually overwater them ?

Next time also ask them how often you should water them, and they’ll tell you to throw in double the amount than what a cactus needs.

Then again there are accidents where you and your siblings think that the plant is underwatered and you end up choking it with love.

Now now, if you just overdid it, there is a fix. Just take some kitchen paper, roll it and stick it to one side of your pot. In the photo below I have 4 sheets of paper, left in for 24 hours.

Repeat until humidity returns to normal.

Generally speaking, for cacti, if a piece of paper can suck out water, then that water has to go.

The details on the 3rd public release of Skydrive are out. I consider Live’s online storage service extremely important due to the shape of things that are coming. Both from a user and a developer standpoint.

So let’s see what we’re getting.

Hits

• 25 GBs of storage space. Since no one was using the ginormous 5GBs that were previously available they though they could ramp it up anyway. That’s only good. In fact it’s crushing every single paid service I know of.
• Better photos. You can now download straight to the Live Gallery, or download a folder as a zipped file. Awesome !
• Photos can be seen in fantastic Flash or Silverlight slideshows. It also syncs with Live Photogallery’s tags for people etc. The thumbnails are huge blah blah blah. If this was a standalone photo service, it would be great, but it’s actually more.
• Integration with the new Live Home page that we’ve only seen in the Connect programme. It’s awesome, I promise.
• Sync your Internet Explorer bookmarks among machines.

Misses

• 25GBs of space that are separated from the Live Mesh service. No comment.
• Better photos that actually antagonize the photo service found in Live Spaces.
• Sync your Internet Explorer Favorites, but not with favorites.live.com . WTF ?!

And let’s see the user survery results that were taken back in March. This is what users were asking:

• Allowing multiple downloads at once.
• Displaying how many times a file has been downloaded.
• Supporting file synchronization from the desktop.
• Providing an API for storing and retrieving files.
• Adding SkyDrive access from Windows Explorer.

NONE OF THESE IS IMPLEMENTED ! And it remains to see how the fuck they will plug the Live Sync service in this.

What happened to the Live teams being feedback driven ?

To the people that are whining again over Windows 7 copying OSX's dock:

1. look at how the Dock copied the Taskbar in the first place. OS Classic users need to think what they had before that.
2. the simple fact that 7’s taskbar has only 3 things in common with the Dock:
   1. the use of icons instead of descriptions, which is inevitable for multitaskers and makes sense in a touch enabled OS.
   2. the ability to reorder things, which was a longtime request of users
   3. the ability to mix launchers with instance switching. Launchers such as the Dock's stacks existed in Windows since the shell 95

And the reason I'm bitching about this, is that now that the macsexuals have started bitching, I'm bound to hear shit like : "Why do you use a copycat OS ?" AGAIN.

Thing is, OSX has systematically ripped off every bit of Windows they found interesting, JUST like Microsoft has.

Simple yet all inclusive presentation. Almost like a cheat sheet.

One of the best speeches I’ve seen in my life.

This has got to be the oldest VC entrepreneurial pitch in the history of mankind

Look at this market. It’s huge ! If only we could have just 1% of that, we’d be sooo successful !

The thing is, thought that these are just numbers. They mean nothing. The pitch is designed to create a feeling of euphoria and hope.

While it’s true that 1% of a huge market is profitable, the other guys that will take out 10% or 40% or 80% will eventually drive you out, cause you’ll be just noise to them.

I remember sth O’Reilly mentioned during the breakfast that Nikan org’ed: In the past we had 3% success with a drug and it was a failure. After we understand why it worked though, we’ll be able to claim 100% success for 3% of the population.

I think that it’s ok to be in a niche market. It’s just not ok to be a smalltime player in any market. There should be better uses of your time.

While designing your dream garden, there come moments when you ponder: would it be better if I removed anything or added anything ?

• Removing stuff takes bravery or neurosis. You have to take out things that you toiled to add in the first place.
• Adding stuff takes toil. You need to buy a chair, stand back and look at the result and decide if you have to remove it after all.

That goes to say that both Minimalism and Feature packing as goals are problematic.

Don’t put more buttons on the product than benefit the product and don’t remove the buttons that will be useful to the majority of use cases.

Finally, maybe you need two gardens. Or more. Certainly not more than you need to have. Each garden needs different kind of care and you can’t blame the seed maker when you fuck up on maintaining a garden you haven’t visited for years.

Chatting with a sales operator with a ‘cloud computing’ company.

Please wait for a site operator to respond.
You are now chatting with 'Will'
Will: Hi
Will: Welcome to Mosso
Will: How can I help you?
you: hi, Im looking at the feature list on your product and wanted to ask what you mean by 'automatic scaling'
you: does it mean that my virtual machine image gets moved to a more powerful server or that it gets copied across machines or .. ?
Will: It means that there are no limits to how large your account can be, for example if you have a spike of people in your website we can scale up your account dynamically so that you will receive no down time or loss in performance
you: yes ok, but does this mean that I have to write my application in some way or relying on libraries that you provide ?
Will: Not at all
Will: You don't have to do any thing special to your website
Will: we just mirror the data and put it on multiple machines
you: aah I see, so the architecture again presumes that there's only one machine with the master database yes ?
Will: correct
you: ok thanks bye
Will: your welcome

Since when are Application Delivery Networks (and in this instance single-location ADNs) stuff that provides ‘automatic scaling’ ?

Even in the case of Twitter for example, the bottleneck is apparently on the database.

I’m perplexed.