While, I think the idea was good in practice, it wasn’t the right time. My current struggle is attempting to determine if now is the right time.

Learning and planning some personal growth
Back then, I realized pretty early on that I didn’t have all of the right pieces of the puzzle. I had no idea if I could scale effectively, whether I could effectively manage staff, or even which technologies to build my business around (I tend to be a bit of a jack of all trades). Oh, and my wife and I wanted to start thinking about having a family sometime soon also. So I decided to take an offer to move back as a permanent employee of the company I worked for before jetsetting off to the UK.

One of my key drivers for going back to full-time work (apart from the need for a stable income) was to address some of those questions that I had stumbled across in my six month small business “entree”. So at that stage, I set myself a very clear roadmap (not written down mind you…) to push myself in uncomfortable directions to get some answers. I needed to know if I could manage people and be effective in the business side of things in addition to being a good coder.

The plan was simple, and I followed my code of being open and honest. I communicated to my manager and executive manager that I had a strong desire to grow my business smarts so I could one day go back out and run my own business successfully. Through ongoing conversations, opportunities to explore and grow my business skills in that environment came about, and I would certainly have to say over the last five years, I have achieved far more than I ever would have thought back then.

My original goals once again beckon; however, and I again need to contemplate what to do.

When do you have enough to start out on your own?
Right now, I am trying to decide between:

1. Going out and starting up my own business; or
2. Joining another company doing similar things to what I have done before (stuff I actually really like doing).

Both options look reasonably solid; I’ve got work lined up if I start out on my own so I’m not too worried about initial cash flow (down the track it all gets a bit hazy). I do however have two young kids, and my wife and I made a conscious decision that she was going to be a full-time mum – so the family is dependent on my “bread winning” ability. Also the company that I have an offer from looks to be offering a position that I should find quite rewarding. Being a good logical person, I have put together a spreadsheet comparing the options against weighted categories. Alas the numbers do not reveal a clear and obvious winner.

Right now, I would love to hear some other people’s experiences about starting their own businesses (ideally in the IT space), or those who decided not to (but wanted to) and have continued on with rewarding careers working for others. Please – if you have a story to tell I would love to hear it. If you’ve written (or read) a post or article previously, just drop the link in here with any useful comments and I’ll have a read. Don’t worry I am not going to make my decision based on your story alone, but the more information I have now the more empowered I will feel to make a decision, and then to make that decision right.

My gut says do it, I guess it has been for as long as I can remember. I’ve also been preparing for quite a while, have most things ready to go, but am mindful that two little people and a loving wife are along for the ride.

The coworking movement looks really interesting to me – eventually I hope to go out on my own and create a successful startup, and what better place to spend the infant years of your startup that doing that with like-minded individuals. It just makes sense. I mean most of my ideas come to me when I am driving home from a day of work, so whilst at the time the ideas is formulating I am on my own, the idea is generally related to a conversation I have had with someone that day.

So, therefore, if I went out on my own and worked from home then firstly I wouldn’t be driving anywhere (and thus get my thinking time) and secondly, I wouldn’t be mixing with people from different backgrounds and experiences. Thus I could potentially get stuck in a rut… coworking seems like a great way to combat that. Not only that, but it’s an effective way to set up shop somewhere without the massive initial overheads.

Stupeflix is a site that enables you to automatically generate video from a series of images, and apply text and a backing track to make a video that is quite compelling. In the past I have used Animoto and recommended it to friends as a great and simple way to put together a great video from existing static images. Honestly, I will continue to recommend Animoto as an excellent tool for generating video online – the effects and overall feel of the video coming out of Animoto has an edge over the end product Stupeflix creates (you can do a side-by-side comparison of their demo videos and you’ll see what I mean).

What makes Stupeflix different, however, is that it exposes a RESTful API for generating the videos. This in turn opens up some amazing opportunities for websites that already have a large amount of static imagery they would like to present in a more compelling way. Mike Butcher in his techcrunch post suggests a few application possibilities around generic eCommerce sites which includes some potential uses of the generated videos to assist with monetization of your own sites.

One of the most useful real-world examples I can think of would be on property sales / real estate websites. Nothing would showcase a property better than a video of the still images taken by the property photographer. It would certainly be more compelling than the clunking slideshow mechanisms most of these sites currently offer. The same of course could apply to car sales sites and the like.

Image hosting and stock image sites are another obvious big area that could put Stupeflix to good use. So the next thing to do is to get some time get mashing with their API (I’ll post any updates on this post).

I’m now a proud new parent of Timbert (see below – at the moment he hasn’t taken my last name as I had to pay through paypal and it didn’t give me a chance to provide my details).

Miro is a great product so I am really happy to see them pull together such a great campaign. I must admit though I would have been tempted to adopt a line of code if the product had been something I thought was ordinary. And now we sit back and wait for someone to start running a similar campaign for some old COBOL banking system – that’d be a laugh

If you too would like to adopt a line of code, head over to the url below and for just $4US/month you can:

https://www.getmiro.com/adopt/

Update:

1. It looks like a lot of people are getting a line of code with the last name of Swartz which probably means a lot of people have having to use paypal.
2. There is an excellent post on the adoption campaign over at ReadWriteWeb

Now if you’ll excuse me I have to feed the little guy…

Prezi is different, and I like different. The majority of online presentation tools are aiming to recreate the presentation experience we are all used to when using tools like Microsoft Powerpoint or OpenOffice. Make slide, put on picture, add some text, repeat. Until you have created a presentation that gets across the information you wanted to convey, and a format more appealling than a simple word document. What Prezi does is give you a canvas on which you can take your audience on a journey around your product or concept, which really is very slick.

The Design Canvas
Using the design canvas is quite a simple task, with a very inituitive radial menu displayed at the top-left of the screen that will allow you to create text, lines, frames and then path your objects together into a fluid presentation. There are some limitations in this interface which are a little frustrating, like the lack of a grouping function or copy-and-paste. Even without these features it’s still super simple.

A very funky feature is the method for moving, resizing and rotating objects on the canvas. This is done using what is called the “Transformation Zebra” (interesting). A screenshot of the tool is displayed below:

Basically, inner circle to move, next circle out to resize, and then the outer circle to rotate. Feels and works intuitively.

Showing the Presentation
Here is where prezi absolutely shines. Essentially the presentation is one big canvas, which you can view just like that (grabbing and panning, zooming with clicks and mouse wheel, etc, etc) and this is one way that your presentation viewers are likely to view your masterpiece. For presenting your work to an audience, however, prezi offers the more traditional slide based presentation (they even have an offline player – yippee).

By using the pathing tool available in the design stage, you can connect objects in your presentation and this is defining the logical flow between elements. If you have rotated objects, then the screen will rotate as it transitions from one object to the next, zooming in and out as required to size the screen to the object. It’s just really well done.

To demonstrate, I’ve put together a very quick (and I mean very quick) presentation that captures some of my thoughts around ConceptBuzz (currently on hold). If you have the time, take a look, I think you’ll be impressed (with prezi, not my presentation).

One piece of tech that is particularly interesting is their product called present.ly – which in their own words is “Twitter meets LinkedIn”. Now whilst I believe these guys have done a good job building the technology I have to wonder if the product will make the dent in the market I believe they would like it to.

So many questions in my head around this space…

Will corporates show interest in microblogging? I can just imagine the CEO of some large multinational just microblogging about some aggressive job cuts he is having to make given the financial environment.

If enterprise microblogging becomes something to investigate, will the new kids on the block get to play, or will twitter take that business?

Still, kudos for the build of the app – it feels and looks good; and good luck to the guys at Intridea with the project. From what I’ve seen on their site, they definitely are pulling some great stuff together, so I’m going to keep an eye out for more interesting projects from them – their labs area is a good place to start if you are interested.