trendpreneur

Idyllic retreat, or boredom incarnate? Perfection is in the eye of the beholder.

You would easily be forgiven for thinking the iPhone was a paragon of technical perfection, the answer to all of our prayers and so forth. Certainly I would warrant that a quick Internet trawl would throw up many articles praising the iPhone as Steve Jobs’ Second Coming, and more or less establishing it as the de-facto web 2.0 geek’s mobile phone of choice. But in amongst such positivity, how do we find the negative? You guessed it, that’s one of the problems I’m trying to solve.

Sometimes it’s as easy as adding the word ’sucks’ to your Googling. And yet an article like this MobileCrunch rundown of ‘8 things that we still can’t stand about the iPhone‘ is full of negative language without using too many explicitly laden adjectives, while also being very specific, constructive and useful. The comments thread is a goldmine for anyone looking to make a better iPhone, so it’s not just Apple that should be paying attention, but its competitors too.

My point here is that although things seem black-and-white when you’re trying to pull out the negativity surrounding a product, often really valuable content can be hard to find manually, whereas a sophisticated natural-language algorithm that weighted several factors would identify the above article as being fairly key to the negative sentiment around the iPhone yesterday and today. Such as, I don’t know, the one I’m developing.

As a side note, most of the poster’s concerns about the iPhone are pretty valid, and as commenters immediately identify, lack of copy and paste is a big problem too. To be frank, though, only two of the problems really affect me – no SMS counter, and no email search. Due to being Twitter-trained, 160 character messages are a luxury, and Gmail offers a web interface for when I need to search — sometimes we train ourselves to work around the device’s faults, rather than expecting the device to work for us.

The final part of a series looking into the realities of professional blogging for others. Check out part 1 and part 2 if you missed them!

The day-to-day life of a blogger can be a lonely one. Although you may be working as part of a large team, you don’t end up face to face with them on a daily basis; generally it’s you, your laptop and… that’s it. The very technologies that allow us to form large, multidisciplinary teleworking teams are also the same ones that cause us to be more isolated than ever.

Fortunately, loneworkers, writers, entrepreneurs and stay-at-home parents have all perfected the art of not going off your rocker while you’re alone with your thoughts and nowt else all day. Here are a few of the ’stay healthy, stay sane’ working and living habits I’ve picked up, both as an entrepreneur and blogger, with a slant towards the cheap ‘n’ cheerful — after all, blogging doesn’t pay that well! [...]

I’ve been swept off my feet lately. Travelling, Twestivalling, getting on NESTA’s Starter for 6 programme, advertising for a cofounder (my mentor’s idea; let’s see how it goes) and not to mention moonlighting as a gaming columnist.

However, I love to play and tweak, so I’m trying out a new theme on the site at the moment. Getting it to look how I wanted included some nasty hardcoding in the PHP, mainly due to hangovers from the previous theme (special categories, etc), but it should work out. The ads are a necessary evil, or rather, an experiment — stats show most of my readers come via RSS, where you won’t see them anyway. Please do leave feedback on the new design if you have anything to say!

Recent reads that may prove interesting to other entrepreneurs, even though they’re not directly startup-related: CityBoy: Beer and Loathing in the Square Mile and The Economic Naturalist: Why Economics Explains Nearly Everything, both train books purchased hastily at King’s Cross, and both surprisingly excellent. CityBoy is an especially poignant read since I foolishly interviewed for a couple of management consultancy and banking jobs, along with every other Cambridge superstar; I may have been richer, had I taken them, but I’m dead certain I’d also be in an asylum by now. Or, judging by Steve’s exploits, rehab.