crnchd

So what’s been happening in the last 6 months?

Sporting

Well, I admit I’ve spent far too much time on http://www.runsaturday.com which is now a 2500+ member site with lots of useful features for runners, cyclists, windsurfers and beyond. I’ve also had some commercial approaches on this site - but none that have made it anywhere significant yet. I’m not worried about this - runsaturday was never designed to be a commercial project - I created it for two purposes:

• to provide a genuinely useful service
• to improve my technical skills

Both of these are fully achieved - so I’m happy!

Connecting

I’ve continued to develop quite a lot of Facebook Connect technology - and also dabbled with Twitter oAuth and with Google Friends Connect.

These areas are still very interesting to me - and one of my latest projects has involved RPX - http://www.rpxnow.com - which is a great middleware service with an interesting freemium business model.

Meetups

I’ve not been to as many of these in the last few months - mainly because of time pressures.

The most interesting meetups I’ve been to are:

• A meetup of local small tech businesses with our local MP - Vince Cable - it was amazing (but not surprising) how political it got. It was also interesting how much people wanted to talk about big issues rather than small local issues.
• The Microsoft BizSpark launch where there were interesting sessions especially from Dragon’s Den James Caan - his story was much more interesting than I had expected - and from Moo.com founder, Richard Moross - very interesting to hear about the first painful two years of pleasurecards.com (what a name!)

Shopping

Recently I’ve completed a contract based around the nopcommerce .Net ecommerce software.
This has been quite an interesting development for me, involving a lot of customisation of the C# business logic for a very specific ecommerce purpose.

As an extension of this, I’ve also now launched my first ever codeplex project - a small payment provider for SagePay for nop - http://nopsage.codeplex.com/

BizSparking

Finally, I’ve also joined Microsoft’s BizSpark programme. So far I’ve just used this as a route to “free” software - but I am hopeful this will also be a useful networking platform in the future.

Forwards

I’ve found the last 6 months interesting

• I’ve continued to develop my own technologies
• I’ve got some income from the Facebook Connect product I launched for DotNetNuke - and from contracts linked to it
• I’ve got a bit more income from specific contracts - still within .Net technologies

I’d quite like to continue this balance moving forwards - I feel it’s important (essential!) to continue to collect some income as well as to grow technologies.

Hi Again

Sorry it’s been so quiet on here. I will try to rectify this.

The crnch is definitely hitting hard this year. Every day seems to bring more and more bad economic news. And there’s no sign of the “green shoots of recovery” that has certain UK govenment ministers might talk about.

However… all is not gloomy near me.

I personally have had lots of good news:

• The launch of http://www.runsaturday.com has been really well met - the numbers of users are growing every day and I’ve got some exciting ideas about how to grow the site.
• I’ve also finally launched http://www.stacka.com - just a fun site - but based on Windows Azure (including Azure cloud storage) - so a good marker for the future.
• I’ve had some very positive contacts with the team at http://www.dotnetnuke.com - and I’m hopeful I’m going to be contributing in to the core platform soon.
• My investment of time last year in my previous venture is looking like it is going to at least partly pay off.
• I’ve been talking with some good friends about their new company - they’ve got a really exciting new product, and a great team. I’m hopeful I’ll be involved in their website at least.

I promise to try to keep updating this site with some positive news.

Let’s uncrnch.

As part of my experimentation with London’s entrepreneurial meetup scene I’ve signed up for something called Launch48 - #launch48 - it’s aim is to get talented, enthusiastic, intelligent people together for a weekend - and to see whether or not we can successfully launch a new web business.

It definitely sounds interesting to me and it looks pretty well organised - and I’m definitely looking forward to spending some time working in a team for a weekend.

Just scanning through some of the headlines…

The actual fall in UK House Prices in 2008 was 15.9% -http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/7812108.stm

The first of the Q4 2008 sales figures are in - http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/7812954.stm

- from Debenhams - who adopted tactics of lots of big special offer days to get the pre xmas crowds in - their numbers down 3.3%

- from Next - who were much less proactive about attracting shoppers - their number’s down 7% for 6 months

The quote in this article says “challenging year” - and that’s talking about 09 not 08!

Toyota is shutting down all its Japanese factories for 11 days - http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/7813022.stm - simply because supply is outstripping (swamping?) demand.

The revenge of the French?… after years of having Brits using Ryanaid to invade rural France and snap up properties, there’s a story on the news this morning that the reverse might now be happening, especially with the double boost of UK price drops and the low value of Sterling - sorry but I can’t find a link for this at present - but I’ll keep my eyes open…

And finally… on a more personal note, a friend of mine got called to a company meeting yesterday - the news was about “re-structuring” and he is now “at risk of redundancy” - another load of IT jobs bite the dust…

Happy New Year to the crnchd.

Let’s hope (and work hard to make sure) that 2009 is a prosperous one!

For me, skiing over the xmas break was fab, new year’s eve was a bit of an early night (?!) and I’ve been hard at work on a number of web projects, the first of which - www.runsaturday.com - is now live in a “public beta” state.

What does “public beta” mean? I think it’s what used to be version 1.0 - it’s just that software peeps are now being more honest about the state of their software - or maybe it’s just a wording that legitimises their dishonesty?

On the credit crunch itself… this article in the Times got my attention over New Year - it shows some interesting stats - including the £500,000,000,000 investment that we UK tax payers are making in the banks - while at the other end of the scale there’s currently just a 0.4 per cent drop in retail sales.

More soon - just wanted to pop in and say Happy New Year while I still could.

For the last three winters we’ve always gone on a ski holiday for xmas.

We always book late and we always head to a 3 or 3-and-a-bit star catered chalet somewhere in France. Generally, the prices have been:

• 2005 - £400
• 2006 - £450
• 2007 - £520 (we treated ourselves to a better location - but we also got a good deal on ski passes which helped to reduce the true cost here)

So, what’s our 2008 price?

Well, I booked a week ago (which is much earlier than I normally would book) and the price was: £260

Not only that, but there was plenty of availability on flights. And there was even availability on trains - something which I’ve never seen before this close to Christmas.

And even at these reduced prices, I still don’t think the holiday companies are selling holidays - especially with the constant stream of bad news about the economy and about the euro exchange rate.

So if you fancy a cheap late deal for xmas, then book tomorrow!

You may have noticed a slight dip in output recently…

The main reason for this has been I’ve been very busy working on a new website - expect the announcement shortly after Xmas.

However, please don’t worry that there’s a lack of crnchd news. Here are some of the highlights from the last week of BBC news:

• crnchd
• • Unemployment increases sharply - http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/7787280.stm
  • Honda slashes its profit forecasts - http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/7787739.stm
  • Grim forecast for endowments - http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/working_lunch/7788016.stm
  • Biggest car sales fall since 1999 - http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/7785358.stm
  • Chrysalis sees its losses triple - http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/7789094.stm
  • Woolworths to close in January - http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/7787904.stm
  • Chrysler plants close for a month - http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/7788954.stm
  • …
• bouncing back
• • Overseas sales boost Nike profits - http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/7788945.stm
  • UK inflation rate falls to 4.1% - http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/7784939.stm
  • US rates slashed to nearly zero - http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/7786282.stm
  • … (but less stories here!)

So overall, there have been three main stories:

1. The US have all but zeroed interest rates
2. The car industry is in dire trouble and needs rescue packages both in the UK and in the US (and in Japan and in Europe and…)
3. The pound has dropped to it’s lowest value ever against the euro

And it’s on that last story that I go dark again… because this next week (xmas week) I’m going skiing - and that means that I will be experiencing the euro-pound divide very close up - sadly I’m expecting to see a tourist exchange rate of less than one euro to the pound!

I’ve just had the radio… and I heard a rather odd advert.

Basically it’s from the UK army and it’s offering a career in the army as a place of safety in these troubled economic times.

Now, I know what they are suggesting - it’s clear that the army will keep getting paid throughout the economic downs and ups - but I’m not sure I’d use the word “safety”, not with the almost daily sad, bad news from Afghanistan and Iraq.

I don’t think I’ll be signing up any time soon… (besides I’m too old anyway!)

I went to woolworths yesterday.

It started as a singularly unpleasant experience. There were sale and discount posters everywhere, there were hoards of people looking for bargains, and the shelves were either piled high with tat - or were completely cleared of goods - the latter especially in the toy and games areas, I noticed.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not overly sentimental or fond about Woolies - I’m not looking at it as some sort of favourite shop that I’ll miss. But it was horrid to see so many people (including me) looking to grab a quick bargain as such a big and history filled business comes to an end…

But then I got to the tills… and there were 2 ladies there who were teamed up to help serve the queues… and they were in such good humour. 2 weeks before Chrimbo with heaps of people impatient to be served and with the surefire knowledge that their jobs were already crnchd, but these ladies were so pleasant and were cracking jokes about the carrier bags were worth framing as souvenirs - suggesting that they’d be worth something on ebay - cheered me up no end

Warning - this might be a bit techy for this blog - sorry if it is.

I saw this job advert on Crunchboard - and think it’s an excellent way of appealing to the intended audience:

$q1 = Are you a master PHP Ninja who loves to code away in the dark?

$q2 = Excel at object oriented PHP, Smarty template engine, caching practices and PEAR?

$q3 = Familiar with CSS, Javascript,  Ajax, Django, XHTML, SQL, Subversion?

$q4 = Aware of RSS, XML-RPC, web services, memcached and all other geeky stuff?

$q5 = Keen to learn much more?

if ( $q1 && $q2 && $q3 && $q4 && $q5 ) {

echo “YOU SHOULD <strong>JOIN</strong> US!<br />

echo “please include some php and javascript code snippets or refer us to projects that you’ve”;

echo “already made. tell us our coding mistakes in this call and let us know what you know about and what to do”;

echo “the new javascript 1.7, mysql 5.2 and php 5. thanx,”;

exit;

}

else {

die(”maybe next time…”);

}

The company in question is CTT in Basingstoke