Updates from Neil RSS
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06:41:45 am on August 27, 2009 |
It’s been a while since posting here but I just had to announce Nurphy.com, for which EntreList provided a ton of inspiration.
Holding an ongoing conversation with the ‘Entrelisters’ highlighted a few things;
1) Not everything can work in 140 chars, especially email-esque conversations.
2) People will discover conversations if they’re interested in the subject matter (as the IILWY founder demonstrated when he discovered our ramblings on his start-up and its addictive games).
3) Conversations need to be easily managed via a cleanly presented home page with quick methods of setting privacy expectations, adding new contacts, and marking things as ‘not new’.
That’s Nurphy in a nutshell. If you’re reading this and you want something similar to EntreList.com but with far more convenience that a WordPress blog and its user administration, Nurphy’s the thing for you.
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04:37:57 am on July 18, 2008 |
No worries, Peter, good to hear from you. I saw a few tweets about your Vodafone comp entry - congratulations, that’s ace (and so is the news on exams and wakoopa). Do the top 11 constitute the final round?
I’m still very busy beavering away on the top secret app. Yes, it’s been quite a while, hasn’t it?! That’s what you get for pretty much being a one man show, stuck in the middle of nowhere (Ryan has been doing awesome stuff over GitHub when he can, and we hope to get some good collaboration sessions over the next two weekends). But it’s still looking good…
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10:55:46 am on June 27, 2008 |
@IILWY - I must be psychic. The EntreListers’ favorite ex-dating/casual-gaming site is back in the press. They’ve raised a new round of funding, one of the investors being Mark Andreessen. How cool. Check out the GigaOm post (and I bet TC try their best not to cover it now);
http://gigaom.com/2008/06/26/iminlikewithyou-gets-vc-cash-for-new-game/
The post also reveals a little more info about our man-on-the-inside, Charles Forman. Turns out he’s a Valleywag fave, to say the least;
http://valleywag.com/tech/charles-forman/iminlikewithyou-founder-not-as-big-a-jerk-as-youd-think-318980.php
http://valleywag.com/370335/reallynotinlikewithyouI would like to think that EntreList.com, and the zillions of man hours we’ve poured in to writing about IILWY, has helped to sway the new investors, board members, and team members in their decision. And I’m looking forward to the next sunday session (whenever that may be), safe in the knowledge that the new funding will keep our favorite sunday down-time app around for longer.
Talking of which, Ryan and I are finally meeting next weekend! I’ll make sure we talk about a full-on EntreList meetup in Amsterdam….
@Micro-blogging & Jaiku - I’ve been revisiting my Jaiku account (got the username ‘neil’ back in the day), and it’s not bad at all. I have a different set of contacts from those on Twitter, so I’ve justified actually using another microblogging service (or visiting one when Twitter is down). @Peter, I’m following you, but it looks like you’re back on Twitter full-time. The funny thing is, the Jaiku rss import cron jobs obviously can’t handle a quick update of the imported Twitter feeds - they turn up at least 24 hours late (well, maybe this is a tactical decision - that wouldn’t surprise me).
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10:54:02 am on June 22, 2008 |
@Peter - no worries, I have an allergy which has made my mouth swollen (eek) and my speech even worse than usual. I would’ve sounded like a wookie on Skype. A session next sunday should see me healed and ready to take on those EntreLister’s new to ILLWY.
You’ll like Git, not that I know anything about Subversion. GitHub makes version control far more fun by all accounts, so I’m betting Wakoopa will be on GitHub soon too.
Did you see the comment from one of the guys at ILLWY? We finally got through to them! Maybe we can influence the choice of Power-Ups in the next game…Balloono.
Charles, I want a heat vision power-up, like the one Predator had. That, or a way to take control of another players’ screen. http://entrelist.com/?p=73#comments
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09:46:55 am on June 21, 2008 |
@Everyone - still good for a Blockles session tomorrow? I think 7.p.m GMT (I think that’s the same as last time) will be fine for me. Fingers crossed we have more arcade games available, but the ILLWY guys do have a pretty solid lineup now, and I’m expecting to hear a bit more about them in the press soon. GigaOm went mad over the first dating-iteration of the site, and I think it’s about time the bloggers came back to see what they’re up to now.
Has anything interesting cropped up for you guys in the last week or so? @Peter, I like the Wakoopa biz cards, got a glimpse from one of your tweets with Ryan…
Speak of the devil, Ryan just made a great post on using GitHub. I’m lucky because I came straight to Git without having used SVN seriously, but this has some handy tips for SVN-Git converts and version control newbies like me;
http://thinkrefresh.com/posts/18/git-and-github
GitHub rocks, btw. Ryan and I are both customers. Peter, what are you using for version control at Wakoopa?
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12:40:13 am on June 16, 2008 |
@ILLWY - Yes Peter that was great, next weekend would probably work for me. Voice really mixes things up, it’s far more fun. And I’m impressed with the skype conference calling feature.
The new arcade games are great too, Dinglepop being my favourite so far. They do seem to have even more in the works - maybe if we can on being flag bearers for ILLWY we can get our own game requests turned in to real apps? Talking of which, we need a 3 or 4 player collaborative SmashTV, top-downer shooter as well. That way we can lambaste the weakest player, rather than just sending them the entire back catalog of orange flavour powerups…
This really reminds me of Xbox Live, just without all the required hardware, subscriptions etc. Social gaming on the rise, I think.
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05:59:47 am on June 14, 2008 |
@ILLWY - 7pm is fine for me. How about everyone else?
@iPhone - I’m looking forward to tackling a completely different approach to interfaces and engaging users, which undoubtedly we have to deal with when targetting apps to iPhone/touch-screen mobile users.
@Plurk - it has a horizontal timeline view of tweets/plurks, but I’m not a fan, it’s just hard to follow data this way. The vertical, chronologically ordered view that most social apps use is far more appropriate.
@EntreList - the list view of ‘Recent Projects’ is unweidly, unless you can stick to <10 or so tags. I definitely agree with the point re. tag clouds, they would make far more sense, and we could take out the ‘tag it’ and use the space for more comment input. Although Safari pretty much kills off the necessity with the easy resizing of inputs. And we definitely don’t need the feeds - but all of this just comes bundled in the theme. Fingers crossed you’ll see something that answers most of these issues in the app I’m working on.
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01:53:55 am on June 10, 2008 |
@Everyone - Peter and I were thinking of doing an ILLWY session this Sunday. I’m good all day at the moment, let’s see what works for everyone else (maybe some time in the evening?). Some highly-competitive Blockles and furious Draw would be great.
@iPhone. I’m so so so glad I didn’t buy a first gen now we know that the 3G will be aggressively subsidised. By doing this, Apple just made one of those moves which we always think the big cos should do, but they never seem to have the guts to carry out. I may even put in a pre-order on the O2 site today.
So, hands-up; who on EntreList won’t own an iPhone by the end of this year?
@EntreList - I may have asked a similar question before, but does anyone have any thoughts on this site? E.g. Do you have any suggestions for improving the layout? Is the input box big enough? Too many tags, maybe? Or, do you have any thoughts on the conversation?
Finally, we’ve been using the @SomeDude comment-directing convention on EntreList for a while now. Do you see any synergy with how Twitter handles the conversion to user profiles, and do you think there’s a place for this on EntreList?
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11:31:55 am on June 2, 2008 |
This is the second I’ve composed this post. I’m far too enraged to explain how I managed to lose it the first time. Damn.
@Peter - thanks for the link. I came across that in my reader but I didn’t actually read it until you brought it to my attention. That’s EntreList-powered filtering at it’s best. Facebook do have a mainstream-friendly version of all the WebTech flavours-of-the-month, but they need to focus more on Twitter-esque coversation.
@Wakoopa, @Peter - congratulations on the new round of funding. The upcoming recommendation project sounds like it will be in safe hands then.
@Plurk.com - Ryan and I had a simultaneous Skype-chat/Plurk-testing session last night. It may be the hot topic right now, but I wasn’t particularly impressed with some of the design decisions, particularly those moving comment.count links…Has anyone else had a chance to try it?
@IILWY (I’mInLikeWithYou) - The guys at our favourite Tetris-morphing startup have added ‘Draw’ to their arcade suite. Ryan and I had a go on this too, and it’s pretty special (unless you’re using a trackpad, please use a mouse).
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12:24:59 am on May 22, 2008 |
@Everyone - I just checked on ImInLikeWithYou, and it turns out they’ve built a remarkably similar game to http://XSketch.com, an app I became addicted to a little while back. It’s called Draw My Thing, and we really need to organise an EL session on it, alongside a good old game of Blockles.
Is anyone else as intrigued as I am by the upcoming ‘Publisher’ feature on FB? I think it could be something pretty special.
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08:06:16 am on May 15, 2008 |
@Amsterdam, @Peter - Thanks for the offer! That’s ace. Last time I stayed in a hotel - no idea where it was, but Amsterdam didn’t seem like the biggest of cities, so presumably it wasn’t far from where you are.
How’s the app Vocabapp coming along? Ryan’s ThinkRefresh has been a serious help for me, especially the latest episode in which my very own question was answered!
@Ryan - I’ll be waiting in line for a beta invite too. I feel incredibly uneducated when it comes to food/wine, so it’s time for a web app to bring me up a social notch. This app will help me I’m sure.
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11:01:07 am on May 10, 2008 |
@Ryan if we set some dates it would be great if you could come along. I don’t have any plans for FOWA or other expos - it all depends on how things go with the project I’m currently working on, cash/finances etc. Carsonified do throw some expensive gigs..(have you seen the price of those startup workshops?!).
Do share more details on The Hub when you can. I’m really interested in the process of organising tasks and ensuring completion (but then who isn’t these days?!), especially instances of awaiting confirmation (client needs to confirm their choice of Charcoal Grey) and then re-activating a project upon receipt of a confirmation (maybe the Xobni guys could do this with their inbox scraping powers?).
£30k…of unbilled work….over 2 months?!
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01:57:10 am on May 10, 2008 |
@Peter - Rupture sounded pretty exciting since it was announced absolutely yonks ago (a $30million beta-period acquisition illustrates this quite nicely!). It was under the radar for ages. Having been a complete Xbox Live addict around the release of Halo 2 (I was there for the midnight opening, what a loser) I’ve always thought we could do more with the data associated with games, and Rupture will probably do this for EA. The Nintendo Wii could make this a mainstream focused business proposition, you’d just need to tie it in to Facebook and create some fun integration with Wii Fit. I have plans for the Wii controller on some of my own projects!
I’ll have to make it to Amsterdam this summer and maybe some other EntreList Board Members (in no way is that pretentious
) can join in on the shenanigans.@Ryan - glad to have you on Board (pun) and it’s good to hear what you’re all about. Don’t worry too much about reading through the entire conversation, maybe you can jump in on a few points if you read something of interest. Do you think Peter would’ve seen your housemates on their fun-filled trip to Amsterdam last week?
Looking forward to hearing more about ‘The Hub’. Would it work in a similar way to what the guys at Trampoline Systems are doing? http://www.trampolinesystems.com/ They had some great press on RWW.
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11:58:06 am on May 8, 2008 |
@Coen - Hi! So if I understand it correctly, the audio part of the surveillance system would adapt to dB level and background noise, essentially replicating how our own ears would filter everything but what we would be most interested in hearing(?). This may not tie in directly, but visual identification is big one for many startupz (I miss-typed that, but I like it so I’m going to keep it) like Polar Rose and Ookles, and Facebook with their tagging. Imagine if we didn’t need to tag our mugs each time we uploaded a pic? If you’re implementing a working model of human audiovisual perception, presumably facial recognition would feature at some point?
@Peter - you lucky, lucky guy. An office with real people in a <5mile radius sounds like fun; my ‘office’ probably isn’t as much fun as Wakoopa’s.
@Blockles - after all this free promotion, I really want to hear from the ImInLikeWithYou guys. In fact, I’d love to devise a Power-Up and get it hacked in to the game for our next match, maybe one which clears your stack and then puts a massive T in the middle. That would be the most inconvenient shape to work with.
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12:29:15 pm on May 6, 2008 |
@Peter - congratulations, that’s some good news. I’m definitely looking forward to seeing the results of the recommendation engine. I know zilch about this topic, so I’ll read your thesis in awe! Will you be working remotely or in-office?
@Introductions - I’m Neil Patrick Cauldwell, I have a [slightly_neglected] stealth start-up blog over at http://WebAppropriate.com, and there’s a personal blog at http://DotNeil.com. I’m too busy working under the radar on the app to write many blog posts on either of those sites, but you’ll see them pick up in the next 2 to 3 months. EntreList is now my preferred place for blogging. This is probably due to the fact that the conversation afforded by the Prologue theme is so much more fun than the traditional blog format. EntreList just flows, normal blogs don’t.
@Blockles Session - the guys at I’mInLikeWithYou have done some great things with Tetris + Power-Ups. I love how Peter has now taken to saving ALL his power-ups for all-guns-blazing Neil bashing sessions, always timed when I’m hitting in the danger zone for maximum effect.
@Coen, Mark & Taede - PhD in AI, start-up ideas, startup experiences?!! Please go wild all over EntreList, it would be great to hear more.