Can an entrepreneur be an anti-capitalist?
The short and obvious answer to that is no. But read on.
We were sitting at the office as usual, working away at Scred’s upcoming version 2 (yes, it’s still on its way) and I found I was playing Snog’s ‘Third Mall from the Sun’. This is an album which is almost completely dedicated to criticising corporate gods, greed and consumerism. It is not, however, built with your usual run of the mill anarchist rage and angst, but is actually a wonderfully constructed album with clever lyrics and imagery, beautiful ballads and a vocalist with a voice not unlike the throaty dryness of Leonard Cohen. Mixed with samples and electronics, the result is magnificent.
Obviously I should be less than convinced by the theme, but I’m not. In fact, I find myself nodding my head now and then. I have a severe dislike of corporate bullshit. The stuff fed to the world by overly large slugs, with policies, hollow brands and smiles, committees, committees for committees, offensively bad documentation systems and heavy project management. All coupled with a lack of respect for the intellect and humanity of their employees. The lack of innovation is ever more depressing when one considers how often they themselves misuse that word. As if repeating it will make a difference. The thing is, I’m not convinced a large corporation has to be run like that (and I’m sure there are many good exceptions). They need not become behemoths, but they do so for fear and for limited vision, often to their eventual peril.
Even more distasteful is mass consumerism. People content queuing up for their chance to purchase another low quality disposable garment from H&M, or people who stick to green because, well, that’s what the magazine says is in fashion. Or even people who set up their flavour-of-the-week social network as they think that will make them rich, quick (boy are they in for a surprise). Anyone, indeed, who does nothing but follow the lead of others.
What people forget is that this is not capitalism. It’s just a lack of imagination. One of the great things about the net is that it is very decisively eradicating the total stranglehold of mass culture. It is allowing ever more opportunities for the individual to question the norm and to form their own reality. We now have the power and the means to take consumerism into our own hands.
And what of the entrepreneurs who changed things in the past? Created something wonderful or useful, against all odds? Who stuck to a dream and eventually made it into a success? Robert Stephenson, Alexander Bell and let’s not forget Otto Rohwedder and his proverbial sliced bread. To be an entrepreneur is a chance to build something new and to make a difference. It is a chance to topple those giants and change the world.
In fact every interesting startup will want to be a rebel of some kind. Their dream is to take on the Big Boys at their own game, and beat them. Like that annoying young upstart who just refuses to believe age brings wisdom. The David and Goliath. But being a rebel isn’t something to be afraid of. After all, rebels are more interesting than your average corporate manager. The key here is to be the right kind of rebel.
Many years ago we visited an anti-capitalist “discussion day” out of curiosity and for our love of a good debate. The idea was apparently to form some kind of dialogue, but mostly it was just people from the inside there. We asked the one key question which nobody seemed bothered to ask:
“So say you get rid of our current government? What then? What will you build in its place?”
We thought that was a very important question, especially considering how the event was a mix of anarchists and communists — two groups which in reality couldn’t be further apart. The response was mind-numbing. We were told that, well, they hadn’t really agreed on anything, but they were all of the opinion that the current system sucks, and that’s what united them.
That’s a stupid reply for two reasons: one, how can anyone be sure something sucks if they haven’t created anything they know to be better, and two, bringing down a system and having no plans for the aftermath is a strategy with a long history of total failure. With these groups being so ideologically far apart, it would most definitely lead to disaster.
So the point is, you can’t just go out there and blow things up. You have to have something to replace it. To be a constructive rebel. This is what the very best startups will be.
Not that this stops me from singing merrily along to the juicily catchy lyrics of “Old Atlantis”, from the album that started this rambling. What a brilliant way to end another long day at the office.
Apple’s lax security with MobileMe
I learnt two surprising and potentially dangerous things today. MobileMe’s webmail and Apple’s iDisk are not encrypted. Discussion of this available here and here.
While I can understand that the argument for email encryption is not that obvious, emails being inherently insecure for many cases, I am surprised and disappointed about the lack of SSL encryption for iDisks. This is especially surprising because if you mount an iDisk on Windows you can do so with SSL encryption and it works fine. Even more worrying is that backup data using Apple’s Backup software is also not encrypted. Now, I don’t tend to store anything of sensitive nature on my iDisk anyway, but I am positive this would catch a good number of people off guard who just expect it to be doing the right thing. Many Macs generally will also be synchronising their iDisks automatically so you could easily be transferring data over an insecure open WLAN the minute you connect to it.
This is doubly troubling because Apple does not actually warn users about this and I am certain many live with the warm cosy feeling that “Macs don’t have security problems”. Apple’s semi-official stance seems to be to use an encrypted disk image on iDisk if you want to pass around sensitive data, which I have yet to experiment with. However I can’t imagine why it would be difficult to use SSL for iDisks or allow the user to turn it on as an option. Finder could even verify certificates automatically and refuse to work if there’s a mismatch (thus removing the possibility of the user accepting a bad certificate).
Something for the Mac users out there to be aware of.
No Finnish outrage at iPhone packages?
I’ve been looking around the few Finnish blog posts and comments online about TeliaSonera’s iPhone packages in Finland and, considering the backlash some operators are getting, it’s been almost a surprise to have heard nothing but silent grumbling here.
Let’s look at the basics. The iPhone is a nice device, no doubt about it. Sure, Apple is still messing things up by not offering an unlocked version, but it does something that phones have done poorly for quite some time: Internet connectivity. There is over-the-air syncing, a good browser, rich email, an in-built store, video features, maps and widgets. The kind of device to finally get people using the Internet on the go. Yet that usefulness has been all but destroyed by extremely poor packages under the TeliaSonera wing.
To put it bluntly, none of the packages offer the one thing you really want with an iPhone: unlimited data. It’s what the iPhone is about. Even worse, the small and medium package offer ridiculously low amounts: 100MB and 250MB respectively. Only the large package offers a fair, if not fantastic, 1000MB. However that’s 90 euros a month. OK, you do get the iPhone for free then, but you’re still paying for 1000 SMSes and 1000 minutes of talk time. I want neither.
TeliaSonera do offer a ‘My Sonera’ option, where there is a minimal monthly fee and you can build up the package as you want. Downside: you have to pay the full 400-500 euro price for the iPhone, which isn’t even unlocked for you. Additionally I still can’t figure out if I can get unlimited data for the iPhone with that and, if so, what exactly it costs. The My Sonera package builder doesn’t offer the iPhone and doesn’t offer an obvious way to add a data package, unless I can use their USB dongle package for that.
Whatever happened to the lovely “buy phone, pick an operator” model that worked so well here before?
A Web 2.0 bubble?
Steve Rubel posts about what he believes is another bubble about to burst. That after the initial enthusiasm and desire to change the world, everyone is now out for a quick buck.
I’m a latecomer to the Web 2.0 scene, if not necessarily the idea. I do, however, admit that my feeling has often been ambivalent when reading about what is going on. There’s a huge amount of product overlap and of copycatism. Sticking ‘social’ in front of your description does not automatically lead to success or even interest. You need to be the absolute best at what you are doing and offer something really valuable and new to the audience, and forget about the hype.
I have to admit something: I have never thought of Scred as a Web 2.0 application, but rather as a tool to do useful stuff. Scred is indeed an old idea which I happen to think nobody has yet nailed. Before recently I did not blog, as such, although I did read the odd one now and then (I don’t count contributing to the forums of interest groups as blogging). I have contributed to Wikipedia and the original WikiWiki site for a number of years, but I don’t actively use Twitter or Jaiku. I’m a member in only two social networks: Facebook and LinkedIn (the latter for quite some time). Three if you include the Finnish IRC-Galleria.
That doesn’t mean there aren’t great tools and ideas out there. We’ll certainly be using more of them for Scred in the future. It just means I’m not necessarily jumping with joy at the announcement of another tool to manage umpteen blogs and search. That’s just something I do not find myself doing.
Will I be considered lame by the 2.0 scene for admitting this? Possibly. There are, however, loads of really smart and cool people out there, so I don’t intend to view myself as their enemy. Hopefully being a slight outsider can bring something new to the scene as well.
Voluntary economies
Last weekend at the Bar Camp Amsterdam IV there was an interesting presentation by Reinier Zwitserloot of TipIt on “voluntary economies“. Apart from the already canonical example of voluntary economics – namely, Radiohead’s release of In Rainbows as pay what you want – Reinier detailed some fashinating cases of profitable voluntary economics. For example, in the Dutch countryside you can still find unattended fruit stalls where you take the fruit and pay what you feel as the appropriate compensation. However, apparently it is not working as well as it used to be. Happens that folks not connected to the local community come by and “rob” everything the stall’s got.
As an experiment to try whether there is something to voluntary economies we have added buttons to both TipIt and Tipjoy to the right sidebar of this blog. Both of the tipping services are interesting in their own right. Go check them out even if you’re not willing to tip Scred. On the other hand, if you do find Scred useful, why not consider leaving us a small tip?
P.S. While voluntary economies are fascinating we are not entirely convinced. Respects to TipIt for building their product and business model on voluntary economics. Really eating their own dog food. Brave and commendable. However, we here at Scred are a bit more traditional when it comes to business models.
The Next Web 2008
Another month, another conference. This time we’re here in Amsterdam for the The Next Web for Thursday and Friday, and then on Saturday we’re attending Bar Camp Amsterdam IV. A couple of other startups and bloggers from Finland are also present. And as it happens almost all of us had ended up on the same flight from Helsinki.
More later as the conference gets under way tomorrow. Meanwhile check out the coverage in the Startupbin blog.
Why Template Toolkit sucks
A lot of recent Scred development has been built around the Perl Template Toolkit system. I have always been of the opinion that mixing code with the final layout is a very bad idea and this position has only been strengthened by recent experiences. Templates should be just that, templates, or prototypes, of the final result. Files where the visual layout is tweaked, without caring about the logic in the background and which are then processed to get the final result. This does not require anything fancy, just placeholders for the actual data. Let a real script language do the job of managing the logic.
Here are some reasons why Template Toolkit’s model is fundamentally wrong:
- Logic and representation can get mixed without a clear separation of concerns.
- Tasks cannot be separated. A graphics person cannot tweak the visual layout without at least some knowledge of the code, and vice versa.
- Testing is messy at best. Difficult to verify the results of processing in a fashion which is independent of the visual layout
- Editors generally aren’t big fans of mixing two separate languages within each other. Automatic indentation and other editor features might cease to work effectively.
- The need to learn and use Yet Another Script Language of dubious merit.
- Indentation of the resulting HTML easily becomes totally messed up (or alternatively the indentation of the template).
- You cannot view a template file with a normal browser, without passing it through processing. Thus it does not act as an actual prototype for the resulting page.
- Actual code reuse seems to be low.
Many of these points can be applied to any other template system similar to Template Toolkit. Additionally I find the incoherent syntax of the language to be annoying and at least the version I’ve been using does not seem to want to crash if accessing a variable or function which does not exist. Instead it tries to be clever and applies empty values. The final HTML is also left with big white spaces where template code was run (and yes, we tried the whitespace joining option, but that resulted in other problems).
Some of these issues can be resolved by careful TT coding and template modularisation. But then again, why bother? If you are going about separating things then why not do it with any mature script language with rich support for modularisation, objects, test facilities etc.
I spent a day coding a new template system in Tcl. It is based on the idea that templates merely refer to objects by class name. These then provide the actual values and content for filling in relevant parts. A separate Tcl script is evaluated to create those objects. The objects can simply be structures with the required fields, or they can contain methods which calculate the values. This is all invisible to the template. It doesn’t care how things are done.
The templates themselves contain dummy values which can be viewed with any web browser, thus allowing you to tweak the layout to your heart’s desire, without touching a line of code.
I dubbed the system ‘Illusion’ because it is clever at hiding things and the result happens as if by magic, without either party knowing about each other. It is simple and effective and although it is still lacking a few things which I have in mind, I believe it proves the concept and you can play around with it.
For now it’s available as a git repository. You can get it with the following:
git clone http://people.fishpool.fi/~setok/git/Illusion.git
I hate types
This article reminded me of my experiences the other day.
I’ve been coding in the j2me environment (yes, that’s right, part of Fishpool’s new product will run on j2me) and I stumbled across the problem of creating an array from a Vector. I wanted to cast that array to the Person[] type, as one does, but as far as I can tell, this is not possible to do in a generic fashion. The MIDP version I am working in, and possibly later ones, does not provide a toArray() method for the Vector so I conjured up my own, which returned Object[]. Arrays are considered to be their own type, and not compatible with one another, even with casts.
So fair enough, this is a design decision on the part of the Java team, but it makes life difficult. Now perhaps if Java had been designed to do dynamic arrays at the core, as one might expect from a supposed high-level language, this whole issue would simply not exist. Even so, in languages such as Tcl this just simply is not a problem. The language flexes to do what I would like, instead of pretending to know better than me what I want.
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