I have not posted for a while and just catching up on my comments, amazing I have around 30 comments to vet, how many of them are real? a big fat zero

What is interesting is that if I linked up my wordpress to a facebook identity all this commenting would no longer be required; this brings me onto an important topic, spam generation is only really possible from automated systems when used with popular systems.

The cost of running spam systems could be high if customized for every different website commenting system out there; but why bother? there is an amazing 90.5 million wordpress sites.

There seems to by two types of comments out there

1. inline garbage where spammers attempt to fill up comments with jibberish / keywords and links.
2. some kind of generic compliment like “Thank you I loved your blog”, then when inspecting the url link back you discover the real answer, a spam site again.

I have blogged on this previously, but to protect yourself from automatic garbage simply use a system that has a custom registration process, or a commenting system that is run off JavaScript as automatic posters most of the time do not understand them.

If however you are creating your own SEO links please ensure you try to comment on someones actual content, and if possible be the first to comment as your comment will be read first, and your comment will hopefully be seen and followed.

Creating a startup for someone that hasnt done it before could be a little scary, but I will let you in on a secret, all you have to be is a nice guy and make an attempt to connect with the type of people that you are interested in.

Some people worry about all sorts of things, some worry about the idea of an event, but worry it wont work; but hopefully this post will take it away.

The first event I have run is my http://www.meetup.com/Silicon-St-Peters-Street-St-Albans/ I had 30 people turn up (including me) it was great. My intention was to meet others in the tech startup digital space and others that are related to it.

How did I achieve this?

1) Decide who you want to be there and whether the mix of people will find the other people interesting

2) Decide where you will find the people

3) Ask the question why would the other people would want to meet with each other?

4) Publish the event somewhere, get those people to it and make sure they find a good time

5) Get feedback, good and bad feedback is feedback. If you dont get feedback how will you know what you did right or wrong and why they thought it was good or bad?

All good said and done, but in practise how did this work

1) create a group, get a couple of friends to it with the same interest, ask them to bring a friend

2) use linkedin, meetup, event brite and others with simular interests, yes finding people on a one by one basis

3) consider the people you are inviting, for people to enjoy an event people need to learn something and or socialise. Are people somehow complimentary and interesting?

4) keep looking for those interesting people, give yourself enough time to find those people in the industry and or interests you are looking for, its as simple as that.

Finally as part of the feedback process you need to figure out if the night has been a success so you need to ask questions The numbers of people providing  feedback the better, normally people dont like filling in surveys, so surveys need to be short and punchy and take less then a minute to fill in.

Taking those results you then need to decide a course of action, you cant please all the people at the same time, but at the same time you need to try and fulfill peoples needs as best as possible.

Feedback should be anonymous to encourage honesty.

Using Meetup.com and EventBrite as two additional bonuses

1) People turning up you have not invited directly yourself

2) has functionality to achieve it

However the downside is if you wish to move these people to another service that will be more difficult.

Any questions?

The intention is good and somewhere that intention has been lost

Whats the answer? is it discount codes? I say no. Inspiration provided by well known speakers can in fact be great, but like most events inspiration dissipates afterwards as some could argue “we want something more” but may not be able to articulate exactly what they need so they provided links to buy stuff.

I think something that can improve your life is simply training and techniques, in the UK BusinessLink will be revamped, but will it actually help? Has it helped so far?

I think Startup Britain should be about practical techniques that must be about increasing the chances of success.

What techniques am I talking about?  as luck would have it Stanford has pushed the boat forward providing some of their courses online FREE; now thats what a startup needs, not an extra barrier (as a monetary drain). Its not British, but I am. It doesn’t cost anything to check it out, so why not? inspiration fused with something that is actionable and generic enough to be helpful backed by research.

Listed below are practical business approaches that can be used to apply to create a new business; what would you add? please comment and retweet if possible and see if the spirit of startup britain still exist?

Get some money from the goverment finally!

http://www.hmrc.gov.uk/eis/index.htm

Stanford Entrepreneurial Course, free online! could take you a couple of hours flicking through http://e145.stanford.edu/session1

Understand the money factors around Venture Capital, blog weekly http://www.venturehacks.com

The guy behind the Stanford list above, could take a couple of weeks reading as its a blog http://www.steveblank.com

Four Steps to Epiphany Abridged from Steve Blank, a couple of hours reading http://www.stanford.edu/group/e145/cgi-bin/winter/drupal/upload/handouts/Four_Steps.pdf

Learn Pivoting (a way of changing market direction) , he is making it more commercial slowly selling a book based off his blog slowly http://www.startuplessonslearned.com

Dave McClure created his startup metric framework to make you think about objects around AARRR, 20 minutes to flick through http://www.slideshare.net/dmc500hats/startup-metrics-for-pirates-long-version

Lean Startup + Customer Development + Bootstrapping, weekly blog http://www.ashmaurya.com/

Business model generation, a way of describing business models visually to understand yourself and communicate to others, 2 hours effort http://www.businessmodelgeneration.com/downloads/businessmodelgeneration_preview.pdf

Remember this is a place to get started, look through the materials, watch the videos, you get out what you put in

I think the Design Industry didn’t like the fact it was not represented and it led to them picking holes in the design, brand and affected the social aspects of the website, the second set of people appeared to heckle the idea of discounts to startups.

Startup Britain was well intentioned, but I feel it may of been advertised and branded in the wrong way and so those taking part in startup Britain may of felt a little cheated

Startup Britain has faced fierce competition to its what twitter users are putting down in their droves; mostly by mocking one liners, others about content and thirdly the startup market noticing technical errors.

Some have mocked david Cameron for having a “levitating head” on the website, others asked that the default person should be a women not a political figure. Here is a picture of the offending head.

The main offending concept was the UK government has recommended a US site to design websites, the UK goverment did not recommend a  UK design company, not surprisingly the design community decided to pick out flaws with the website; below is some  feedback with details of what they are talking about.

1977Design 1977 Design Oh dear. #startupbritain with a crowdsourced ‘logo’. How not to support the UK creative industry. http://bit.ly/gLtt6m via @CreativeReview
The goverments good intention has been met with interesting feedback..

Maylor Phil Maylor And then there’s the ‘iStockphoto’ watermarked image used on one of the #StartupBritain banner downloads. Isn’t that illegal…?

Finally for the holy trilogy unfortunately a spelling mistake was found

Further feedback from the Twittersphere

CrownGallery Crown Gallery #startupbritain if only I’d known how easy it was to start a business before I went to all that bother! Thanks for the advice, Dave

eebandoni: #startupbritain Anyone feel this site is a Public/Private lead generation site? This is Blackhat Marketing Government Style

fnafilms: RT @moongolfer: i was thinking of launching a new startup but couldn’t think of a good logo. can anyone help? #startupbritain

davecoveney: Can’t believe that #startupbritain puts a ‘create a logo’ as a number 4 top tip. Your logo is rarely important. What you do is biggest.

jackdaw100: #startupbritain camerons sweatshop britain

taxiroute: RT @donovanhide: #startupbritain As far as I can tell it’s an affiliate-based website. Is the government getting a commission on the sal …

biz_works: RT @shaawasmund: Childcare is a real issue for new mums preventing them from setting up their own businesses’ #startupbritain

infact….

the good thing so far is… tax benefits for mums creating their own startup..

charlesarthur Charles Arthur RT @qwghlm: Holy ****, just discovered an appalling security flaw in the #startupbritain site to boot. Not saying here. But, ****ing hell

TgirlAmy Amy Looking at the #startupbritain website, I honestly don’t think any of the “offers” are even worth having. Silly discounts on silly products.

FreerangeArtist Hannah Stewart Can someone remind me what the point of #StartupBritain is?How many high growth successful businesses have been started by a self help kit?!

tomroyal Tom Royal This #startupbritain thing is a joke, right? Why else would decapitated Dave be floating in the clouds? http://yfrog.com/h2lxfyuj

andybritcliffe Andy Britcliffe Very much so RT @Nero: #StartupBritain consensus seems to be ‘too many celebrities, not enough substance’…

AnikoZagon aniko zagon StartUp Britain launched today. Great idea so far limited resources… #startupbritain

Craig_McKenna Craig McKenna I am hoping the good stuff behind #startupBritain doesnt get lost in the mass of negative feedback

K8Media Ric Bottomley #startupbritain ”About us” page links to front page – this is a joke, right?

LINGsCARS Ling Valentine RT @andymantell: Any reason why David Cameron is levitating amongst the clouds #startupbritain website? > They used 99designs for it, fools

Demontrout Simon Davies And who thought it’d be a good idea to stick Cameron looking constipated on the home page? http://bit.ly/hImGnA #startupbritain

digitaltoast digitaltoast @ @charlesarthur @gwghlm I’m amazed you even got #startupbritain to load. It’s been down here all morning even though “downfor…” says up

leebandoni leebandoni @Nick_Clegg Since your going for a rebrand how about you use this guy. http://bit.ly/dRFvkQ $4 : Got the idea from #startupbritain

Monster and other job boards have to pay for tv adverts, pay per click, affiliates and network etc. Linkedin is a completly different fish. linkedin has a network effect, a social network with a business spin, so advertising spend must be minimal, or can maintain its position much easier as there is a reason to stay in linkedin (dicussion forums, business contacts) but not a reason to stay at monster.com other then job hunting.

Linkedin has recently made groups open, which can only increase its organic ability, which in effect will increase visiotrs, and some of those visitors can be converted into cash.
So if we compared like for like; lets assume linkedin and monster.com has the same revenue, linkedin must be more profitable as it would take less spend to get a customer and maintain them.

Secondly as linkedin has rich data the are more possibilities; for example if you follow a company it is possible to see who has left and what oppotunities are at a new company. What is simular to that at monster? monster does an email alerts function that I think Linkedin has just matched that on beta functionality.

I have been innundated by recruiters recently, think they have just realised they can request a contact and then when they post a job on their status other potential customers will get to see them. Linkedin Jobs seem to be on the rise.

If linkedin uses contextual advertising around jobs and other things like events, etc imagine the higher quality service for employers and employees being more accurately matched as linkedin just has more data; where would you put that advertisement? on the linkedin profile I would think where people update their status

Another potential interesting thing in this case is that if linkedin users pay for the full membership you will see what keywords you were found on, and you will be able to see what made you popular and increase your chances of success to get a job. What can you do on monster?

As linkedin has all the background activity; potential employers can have a look at the potential employee on discussion groups as the content will be better then what you could find on facebook due to its business use.

Another interesting thing..

Linkedin has recommendations built in! monster doesnt, infact you have to go through a big effort before finding possible references, linkedin crease transparency for employers, employees and between businesses.

Its the businesses part that is the magic sauce; linkedin looks like a disruptive innovation as when compared to monster.com

What do you think?

Have you seen this on the Google search page? Ive not noticed it before, its Google Web History. Ive not noticed this before. What is it?

Its a way of google providing tracking in terms of your history.

If you search for something in google and you are logged in and if it is on, google can see what you have searched for and when. With this information Google doesn’t need to display adds based on what you search for, with enough information Google can understand how and what you like and when you like it, a different kind of power as when compared to Facebook information collection that focus’s on your social network.

Google however focus’s on your behaviour, how can you configure this? there is a pause web history button that stops google from collecting this information (well not show it here anyway )

What do you do? pause the history and then clean the history

If you like this functionality you can search within your history

comment system

1. Built into platform (e.g. wordpress)

If you decide to moderate this is great if you have few comments, when there are hundreds of profiles, thats not so good

1. Make your own

First you need to understand what to make and then time and money (likely not the best choice given so many choices out there)

1. Use some kind of widget

Disqus – Has facebook, twitter, disqus own flavour as methods of comment

Facebook Comments – facebook only

Best choice?

For small blogs it might be good to just use WordPress’s built in comments with moderation turned on. Once you reach scale life maybe not so fun, for this reason facebook moderation would be a much better solution.

Why? because people have invested time in creating valid facebook profiles and users are much less inclined to post rubbish or crappy comments because those comments will be seen by the rest of their network

What do you think?

If you have a single server it allows you to deploy whatever you want without having to understand all this new fangled technology, but does it come at a cost? In a way yes it does.

If you have a server you have

1. Familiarity of the platform, maybe quicker for release from what you are used to
2. The server you have may not be up to date with its patching
3. Single point of failure (depending on config)

Sooner or later we may all end up with Cloud Based solutions why? its all in the maintenance and resilance of the current solutions and how much it will cost in the long term

I was asked to help out the other day looking a server hosting datacenter told the SME that they needed to investigate port scanning (I used to do Network planning and rollouts with Exchange server), this was an SME; what they had was a website and a scheduled process to send out an emails as well as other stuff.

So what happened? well I had a look at the box and the problem was the computer wasnt kept up to date, Windows Defender was not running (Microsofts freeware solution to kill spyware), the box was not kept up to date and someone from Poland swept with some script kiddie techniques (there must be some kind of mailing list out there for new exploits that all these guys use)

Anyway turning on Windows Defender it was interesting to see that it picked up win32/sql, but didnt pick up any of the unauthorised software that was already installed as a result from the explotations.

This was all done to the box not being updated to the latest patches.

How a hacker works

 lets say were interested in Specific Linux Versions / Specific Windows Version

How do we find them and what can we do with them?

• Portscan, port 80 (for web) and whatever port you have sql and mysql on
• If they have a webserver then great, request from it, most webservers identify operating systems to the guys requesting.
• Perform a web request and gain access using the latest flaw someone has told you about
• The aim is to download and run an app and hopefully install it using elevated privilidges, in conventional windows / linux machines traditional techniques will work, in a cloud environment this things WONT work, also cloud providers can monitor and try to protect against these (think like a giant firewall)

Cloud based websites have additional benefits

1. Scaling both to more machines at the same time, both day to day and spiking
2. Less cost up front, and hopefully less diskspace usage, and overall cost thanks to economics of scale.

A couple of questions for you

1) How much do your current server maintence cost in terms of people, machine, cover, etc rather then a cloud based solution?

2) how will performance differ for what you actually need? for the majority cloud will be fine, for things like video conference then custom solutions on dedicated machines still may be appropriate.