trendpreneur

In amongst all this discussion of whether the web is dead, kicked off by the eponymous Wired article, it’s hard not to feel either depressed and defensive or jubilantly optimistic — depending on which pie you have fingers in.

Apps are great. You have control, you can do a lot more with native code, you only need to worry about a single launch platform (to some greater or lesser extent), you can easily make money, you can have an offline experience.

The web is great. You have control, you can iterate, you can experiment with pricing and revenue models, you can pull in elements of other services on the fly, you can share.

The argument is often phrased as a closed vs open fight, a standards vs haphazard war. Of course if you control a walled garden you can specify exactly what playing inside it should feel like. The key element is that it’s walled; if nobody else can come and play, you hinder your own progress as well as your competitors’.

That’s why I was excited to see the Lifehacker Android Pack. Apps? Yup. Closed? Sure. But the very fact that an app broke out of the garden to become a secondary marketplace – to fix all that’s wrong with the primary marketplace – and that it’s possible to do things like recommend a ‘pack’ of apps through what is, itself, an app — that’s pretty cool.

We’ve heard before that plugging holes is not sustainable; of course not. Building on top of another service and hoping they don’t fix the problem you’re solving? Very tricky if you’re a startup looking to take millions of other people’s money. Absolutely fine if you’re an experiment that’s patching up a serious flaw until the powers that be notice you and offer to buy your duct-tape from you.

And apps like AppBrain, ironically, embody what I love about the web. Got data? Got an API? Mix it up and republish it and add your own value on top, then let the world enjoy it. Most of the recent few years’ shift in landscape and thinking wouldn’t have happened without the concept of an API suddenly becoming hot stuff, and the concept of a freely-accessible API being deeply ingrained alongside. But it makes so much sense. Why limit yourself to what your own company’s brains can think up, when people the world over are begging to do stuff with your data?

Anyway, this is why I’m excited by the Chrome web store, as it has the potential to marry up a lot of these concepts – though maybe not initially. But it’s the thought and the attitude that counts, right?

10K Apart is a nifty little contest I heard about from @limedaring (and if you haven’t seen her work or her co-founder post, I thoroughly recommend doing so). The concept’s pretty much as it says on the tin: do something nifty in under 10K. Of course, most of the highly interesting-looking apps submitted so far make liberal use of the “external API” provision; these days, you can outsource the logic, so why not?

The deadline’s on the 25th (next Wednesday) so if you have time but lack inspiration, here are ten things I would be looking at building if I weren’t so busy performing advanced CPR on FestBuzz. (Which, by the way, has up to date listings now! So it’s *half* done…)

In no particular order, and with no particular guarantee any of these are achievable within 10K (but several probably are):

Collaborative short story improv/writing

Much like those round-robin fold-over note stories you used to do as a kid (surely they had a proper name). Each successive visitor adds a sentence blindly, or with the last sentence only on view. At some predetermined N sentences, the entirety is revealed and everyone who submitted a part is notified. Probably needs some kind of web database API.

Minify/10K This

Meta-apps are fun. Could you write an app that, given another app, minifies it and tells you if it’s under 10K, with suggestions for compression? I’m sure you could.

Petrol Money Jar

For the love of god, give this a better name. This is something that could be 10K, probably won’t be, but could qualify as part of the X.com PayPal developer challenge too. Bumming lifts off friends all the time gives you a residual level of guilt. Automatically pay your mates via PayPal when they’re filling up at the petrol station; simplest version is just a pre-filled one-click “Give my driver $10″ button, but think of what you could do with geo and mobile. Track the journey, track the exact petrol station and thus the gas price, enter in the car’s make and model to get the average mpg, and get exact petrol division. Kapow.

Twitterfluff

Enter a website you like (RSS feed) or account that you follow more or less religiously. Enter a time period. Twitterfluff retweets for you every day/few hours with a randomly generated commentary comment to make it look less artificial. E.g. “RT @TechCrunch AT&T Still Not Connecting Calls http://tcrn.ch/abcDE << SO true!!”

Siteroulette

Did you ever visit that site where you typed in a Google search and got the search the person before you had typed in? Kind of like that, but with URLs instead (filtered!), or youtube videos, or…

Beautiful Reddit

Take Reddit. Make it look nice. Similarly, Hacker News (which is beautiful in its elegance, but still, this is a design contest and I’d love to see what concepts people could come up with).

Paper on a Plane

I haven’t found a good implementation of this, though I’m looking. It definitely is relevant to my interests. Anyway, a good, Instapaper-esque but-using-HTML5-LocalStorage-probably, way of saving articles to read later – so when I’m on a plane, I can catch up on the longer, meatier stuff. And, one day, videos too. (A girl can dream.)

Presentation Mode

A conference-style presentation view of tweets, and possibly other social media mentions, of a keyword (conference hashtag) – ideally with some filtering, especially for repeats. Seen this done a lot, always ugly (even the one I built). App for monitoring audience Q&A via twitter on the same hashtag would be cool, too, e.g. with Google Moderator style voting.

Super Magic Awesome Boredom Eliminator 2000

This idea comes from “Hmm, what’s a nifty web API I could use that nobody else might be tapping”. Use Directed Edge’s recommendations API and Netflix’s dataset [or anyone's, really] plus some radical 1950s soapbox style design to create an app where users type in something they enjoy, and the Super Magic Awesome Boredom Eliminator 2000 tells them what they should watch/do next. Add user suggestions for extra sparkle.

Note: I spent an entire evening hacking around with the Facebook API to see if I could work some sorcery here to do with liking and friends and recommendations and stuff, but no dice. In case you were going to try.

URL! URL! URL!

A mix of the above, and siteroulette, with your own personal sprinkling of inspiration. Kind of like Alltop but basically reduced to a big shiny red button. Pick a category (heck – you could use Alltop to seed it). Voila – a constant URLfest of cool links within that category. Whether tweetmeme, personal twitter feed, the Technorati, or Reddit’s /img section seeds it – all you have to do is press play. Possibly better as a Chrome extension; possibly already exists as a Chrome extension. Oh well.

If you do implement any of these ideas, ever, give me a shout – I’m interested to see what turns up. Good sailin’ to ye.

In the past, I may have lamented the slightly smaller worldview that’s a natural side-effect of starting a business outside the Silicon Valley bubble. (Balanced, of course, by a heightened awareness of how the world works outside California and the US, in places without early adopters and device penetration and AT&T.)

However, idly musing on my longer term ambitions and ideas, a thought crystallised. While thinking big is definitely the path to changing the world, thinking too big can stop you even getting off the ground in the first place. Businesses evolve and rewrite their raison d’être on a constant basis – start with something safe, something that will a) work, b) get built, c) launch, d) have customers and e) get bigger. I’ve seen startups with grandiose dreams stuck at all stages of this iterative cycle without the rocket fuel to propel themselves around again.

In other words: execute! But to execute you need to pick something executable in the first place.

On a more individual level this thinking leads me to the conclusion: there’s no shame or harm in creating a small, successful business and then doing your Big Idea. In fact, while a lot of the media successes are focused on first-time college kids, there are plenty of serial entrepreneurs who aren’t learning everything for the first time, and doing jolly well as a result.

‘Safe’ is a curse word in a world where risk is everything, and I don’t advocate starting a franchise of Subway or anything like that. Even things like starting up a coding or design consultancy, selling handmade jewellery on Etsy, or becoming a paid blogger all – to me – count as baby steps on the entrepreneurial ladder. Course, I’ve done two of the three so maybe I’m biased. (I had an eBay shop, not Etsy.) Depending on your day job, a lot of the relevant experience might already be yours – but don’t underestimate the differences between flying solo and with a harness.

If you’re burning with a big idea, the time and team are right, and you have money to play with, by all means go for the gold. If not, think of how many of today’s successes started as small, experimental, safe side projects – “let’s build a website to scratch that itch” rather than “great idea, let’s raise $5mm” – and just get out there trying stuff that can give you a winning formula to base your future efforts on, or fail quickly enough that it doesn’t matter.

I’m personally going to try out idea iteration – spending two week cycles on each idea in my ideas book, long enough to build a prototype and do some acid testing, short enough to avoid tunnel vision. The test? If after two weeks I don’t want to change tracks, I’m on to something ;)

Are you in your late twenties or early thirties? Did you grow up in Britain and have fond memories of Britpop, Blair and Big Brother? (Scratch that last one..)

I’m working on a wee project combining video and music of the times, and I’d love to collect memories from the time. Wow, that makes it sound like history… Anyway, we all have fond flashbacks to the age of heat reactive tie-dye shirts, and although my middle-of-the-road upbringing is chock full of happy reminiscences, I want more variety!

So, if you have a story, a memory, a moment to share from around 1992 to 2000 – for me, my high school years – and especially if it’s closely related to (or described by) a song popular in the same time period – please share it with me :) You can comment here/on Facebook, or email me (mail at jennielees dot net). Oh, and it doesn’t have to be meaningful or funny – just true.

Hmm, should I start a site to collect these or keep them private?

Here’s mine: our endless school assembly pop culture parodies. I remember dressing up as Mikey from Boyzone (I secretly wanted to be Ronan), doing a Grease ripoff for a departing Latin teacher that was, in retrospect, dangerously suggestive, and for some reason I posed as Renton from Trainspotting in front of our class blackboard in N3. God knows why. Anyway, cue montage! I wonder if kids these days do the same type of thing…

It’s strange being back in Edinburgh after six months away. The city feels comfortable, like an old pair of shoes you forgot you had; the weather isn’t a patch on the South Bay, of course, though it’s not too dissimilar from San Francisco. Minus the wind.

I’m fortunate enough to have lived in and around three lovely cities in my lifetime; Brighton, Edinburgh and San Francisco. Cambridge was pretty nice, too, inspiring yet overwhelming (and suffocating) in its way. Recently, my management coach (for I am growed up and have such things) advised me to travel as much as I can now — to visit the places I’ve always wanted to visit, to live in new countries, to have these sought-after experiences.

So, I shall.

Living in a different country is a fun experience, no matter how similar the country to your own. Even living in Scotland was a change from England — accents, customs, friendliness, the health service… America is a step beyond, a strange mirror country where things are sort-of-but-not-quite the same. On returning to the UK, I see it clearer than ever before. It’s not just that cars drive on the wrong side of the road, it’s the traffic customs around crossing in certain places. It’s not that the health service is totally different, it’s that doctors’ offices have credit card terminals at the front.

Stephen Fry puts it far better than I ever could, and hits the nail on the head — it’s not just that things are superficially different, but under the skin, that’s where it’s interesting.

The next adventure is to go somewhere totally different. In a way, it seems that it would be easier to learn a completely new culture than to do a botch job of assimilating one slightly but not quite the same. But we shall see. For now, I am enjoying the comfort of an old friend in Edinburgh, and secretly plotting my eventual growing of roots here.