I'm an Australian, based in the Washington, DC, area of the United States. I spend a lot of time there with Jasmine, Australia's best-known speedsolver of the Rubik's Cube. Prior to the US, Jasmine and I were based in London, UK. We have also lived previously in the United States and Australia.

I have worked for an Australian business rules and compliance company since 1999 in Australia, the US and the UK. I have also lectured in IT and Law related topics at King's College, London, and at The Australian National University.

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[/Business] permanent link

Bootstrapping new IT companies

I just found an awesome (although now slightly old) article from the San Francisco Chronicle about young engineers starting IT companies in the US (linked from GoGoGetter). The article describes its protagonists as living and working in cramped communal quarters to focus on their ideas and build companies quickly:

It's the quintessential post-adolescent male fantasy of the business world: a grungy remix of the "Revenge of the Nerds" frat house with bunk beds and Snoopy sheets, a refrigerator packed with soda and beer, and a garage that doubles as the company break room, where employees can channel surf from the couch or take a dip in the inflatable swimming pool. There is no firewall between life and work for these young entrepreneurs...

The article singles out three start-ups for attention: Meetro, Box.net and HubPages -- and they actually all have pretty cool ideas.

When I first started out in IT, we used to joke about how our company's software engineers would claim they could produce anything (or so it seemed) in a weekend, and how they would hide in an office, accepting only flat food (pizzas) under the door. From the Chronicle article, it seems this dream is alive and well around Silicon Valley today.

This reminds me of some interesting discussions I have had with people around London. You would think that in a city of London's size (7.5 million people in Greater London, which makes it the largest city in Europe), it would be possible to find any opportunity. However, I have never heard of this style of garage-based startup over here. More generally, it is interesting to see how the United States really is the biggest hub around in IT, with even European companies like SAP focusing more and more of their corporate operations in the US.

GoGoGetter has a cool idea based on all of this: a Big Brother-like reality show for future IT entrepreneurs:

They’d be required to live and work together in a small geek abode, ala the Meetro commune, and given, say, $10K in seed money to survive on over the next several months. These would be people from disparate backgrounds rather than friends, who have the potential to either gel or clash mightily.

I would watch it!

Technorati tags for this post: Business Web+2.0 start-up Meetro Box.net HubPages Silicon+Valley London GoGoGetter

[/Business] permanent link

Different web advertising models

Robert Scoble argues that not all web advertising is created equal. Flashy, colourful banner advertising, based on a cost per thousand impressions, is ineffective, he says -- and a discretionary expense which businesses will curb when they need to watch costs. However, he claims that search-based text advertising, charged on a click-through model, does have an impact on web users -- and that Google is becoming a Yellow Pages for the internet. He uses this argument to explain a recent large share price drop at Yahoo!, which was not matched by Google.

This is an interesting argument, and more nuanced than the common street wisdom I often hear, which holds that web advertising is a complete waste of time. However, Google must still be keen to find a way to expand its revenue beyond advertising, by making money from all the other cool ideas it produces.

Technorati tags for this post: Business Google Yahoo advertising Robert+Scoble