Thanks to a complicated series of events and (possibly) mistaken identity, I found myself in Paris last week for three days. A large global bank were under the false impression that I could help fix their doomed business models and funded the entire trip. I went to Viva Technology — which has usurped the... [more...]
If you've ever needed to migrate data from a 'flat file' format into a relational database, you'll wish you already knew about 'sqlizer'. sqlizer.io is a web-based tool that takes a file (Excel xlsx, comma-separated, tab-separated, XML or JSON) - automatically determines the structure - then generates an SQL script,... [more...]
Hint: they're all awful; 123456 password 12345678 qwerty 12345 123456789 football 1234 1234567 baseball welcome 1234567890 abc123 111111 1qaz2wsx dragon master monkey letmein login princess qwertyuiop solo password starwars If you'd like to show users how good/bad their password choices are, Dropbox have open-sourced a realistic password estimator called zxcvbn.... [more...]
I have been lucky enough to see “under the hood” of 100s of startup companies — mostly early-stage web technology companies — and I’ve spotted some patterns. That is to say, startups that I’ve seen succeed often adhere to many of these criteria. These aren’t “hard and fast” rules, but they are ways of... [more...]
The 'PXP3 Slim Station' is a 'knock off' handheld games console. Made in China and unbranded, it's packaged in a smaller version of a Sony PSP case - cloned of course. It runs a Sega Mega Drive (Genesis in the US) emulator and comes with a built in selection of... [more...]
We're currently on a mini-tour giving a talk ("How not to start a startup") where we try to be self-deprecating and talk about the (many) mistakes we've made along the Droplet journey of the last 4 years. After the talks I've ended up talking to lots of people - mostly other founders... [more...]
Wikipedia works because the number of people who wish to make the articles better outweigh the number who wish to vandalise them. Democracy has a problem: disengagement. There are too many levels of abstraction between the citizen voter and the decisions being made that affect us citizens. The voter votes for... [more...]