Viewing profile — billroberts

This event is a fantastic idea - very well done to Gordon and the team for getting it off the ground. Chances are in the first year it will be a mix of local folks and people who a…

That's true, but you have to work pretty hard on a bike to get your pulse rate as high as you do by running. (I've done a fair bit of cycling and running over the years). For an in…

I love and depend on the web for learning and for communication, but my most useful creative times are away from the keyboard, either mulling over ideas while walking, or scribblin…

I suggest reading http://www.withouthotair.com for a reasoned discussion of this issue. A couple of quotes: "if we covered the windiest 10% of the country [the UK] with windmills (…

A friend of mine who keeps a small flock of sheep as a hobby swears by the run-them-down technique. He doesn't have a sheepdog and sheep can be difficult to catch for a human. But …

iChat, Skype, Swirrl, email

You're absolutely right that that's how it ought to work. And when you have a good relationship with your clients you can sometimes get close to that. In practice it won't always w…

Services-based companies are of course a well-established and perfectly respectable type of business, but a very different kind of business to a product company. I worked in a serv…

Does anyone else think that the shortened URL business is somewhat artificial and limited? I understand the benefit of fitting the URL into a tweet, but full length URLs have a lot…

Yep I think that's the key problem with business plans: estimating sales. You can make a reasonable prediction of costs, but most revenue forecasts are a mix of wishful thinking an…

Some non-twitter thoughts: If you haven't already read the Cluetrain Manifesto, then you should. (www.cluetrain.com). 10 years old now but lots of good stuff about why a business s…

We applied unsuccessfully to TC50 last year. One thing that caught us out a little is that they are very strict on the no publicity before the conference rule - that's fair enough …

"how do you get value from providing it" - how do you get value from publishing anything on the web? The same principles apply. The value comes from making information more readily…

I know that twitter started as an SMS app, and it may still be popular as such (I always use it on the web), but as internet-on-your-phone becomes more ubiquitous, sticking to the …

I agree totally. We decided a while back that we wouldn't attempt to support IE6 - life is too short. We do support IE7, but still spend a lot of time on fixes and workarounds for …

Thanks for the explanations! All is now clear. Yep, having to eat that would certainly make you work hard on your startup :-)

Could someone describe what is meant by US people when they talk about ramen as the proverbial cheap food for struggling entrepreneurs? I'm from the UK and I'm familiar with ramen …

The problem I find with it is that if you follow more than a handful of active tweeters, then there are too many tweets to read in a reasonable amount of time. That said, I find I …

I have a speculative (read: probably garbage) theory, orthogonal to the one in this article, that you can get some idea of a person's personality from their looks. My hypothesis is…

It's the tram drivers that really take no prisoners :-)

We don't support IE6 on our web app, just IE7, Firefox2/3, Safari 3 (and Chrome works fine). We didn't give up on IE6 lightly, but we use a lot of javascript and getting it to work…

Surely google can correlate the contents of your mail with blogs on getting fired/splitting up with your partner/falling out with your relatives and advise you whether or not you s…

Prakash - thanks for posting this. Yes, we 'flicked the switch' yesterday on the first release of Swirrl. It's a hosted wiki designed for collaborating around data. The data side o…

credit card? Assuming the Indian company can set itself up with a merchant ID and payment processor.

It would be crazy to assign unfiltered params to your model objects/DB and I would be astonished if anyone did it - except I suppose inexperienced programmers following simplified …