A little bit of history

So, I guess people have been wondering where I’ve been. My circa 1998 homepages are long gone. Webfoundry is off the air. Apposite consulting has been shut down. I haven’t posted to my LJ in over a year.

As some of you may know, I’ve been buried in the Canterbury Innovation Incubator since mid 2004. I caught the innovation bug around the turn of the century, and have been pushing one business plan after another ever since. Sadly I got into the internet startup game just as the investors were leaving, and Christchurch has never been the best place to launch an internet startup (although a few of my friends have managed it). In 2000 I was having some innovative ideas about CMS’s. I came up with a pretty good set of ideas in 2001 that involved DHTML based Instant Messaging and a few other bits of cleverness (a lot harder to implement back in the pre “opensource AJAX library” days). In 2004 I started pushing some ideas concerning large scale machine translation, those were the ideas that got me into the Incubator, but eventually we started to make rapid progress on a little sideproject that looked even more promising to explore, and that is where much of our energies have been focused for over a year now.

It’s funny to look back now and see the various ideas I never got past “proof of concept” that others thought of as well and actually put the hard yards in to actually build (That whole 1% inspriation, 99% perspiration thing? Edison was right). I speculate the reason we’ve seen so many startups in the last year is that everyone’s dusted off the ideas they’ve had in the “down years” and got them up to speed in the hope of attracting some of that tasty looking venture capital.

In general, I’ve had far too many ideas for my own good - at one point, I counted over 50 half-baked business plans in my heirarchical outliner.

At first, most of those plans were “community” focused. In the pre-web days I ran a great little dial-up BBS with a very active community. We had a grand time for many years, but like so many BBS’s, we didn’t quite make the transition to the web. We tried an NNTP based service for a bit, and then I wrote a web forum system for it. It never really caught on, and to some extent I felt we’d never recover the old community feeling, so I let it die. I didn’t see much point in open sourcing it, since the entire stack needed to run it (NT/IIS/Delphi/Interbase/Webhub) wasn’t open source at the time, and the UI (designed by Blancmange, although fabulous, was limited by the requirement to support Netscape 4 (many webgeeks still have recurring nightmares about having to support Netscape 4) It’s a shame, because the UI was fiendishly clever, and it did have one feature that still isn’t done properly by most web-forums software - web/email integration. See here for a more recent example of that done well. Sadly, I had just completed the integration about the time I shut the operation down, so I never got to see how well it might have played out. In retrospect, I think it could have been a great bit of community software if I’d just been a bit more persistent.

Persistance. It’s not something I’ve been very good at. Hence the many uncompleted projects. There’s always been something newer and more interesting. However, the current project has had most of my attention for over a year, and despite coming up with many new plans during that time, none of them have had quite the same promise. So you can be assured, this is a very interesting project indeed.