2009 February | PocketSmith

The Dragons’ Den

Sunday, February 22nd, 2009 by Jason

We’ve moved into the Centre for Innovation down here at the University of Otago, and as a part of our work with The Distiller we’re paving the way for our startups and uni faculties to work together. This is something I’m particularly passionate about, and we have a clear opportunity to bridge some amazing talent and research on a very practical level through this venture of ours.

Last week, Francois and I were invited by Andrew Long to be a part of a Dragons’ Den session for his Comp 113 summer school class, alongside Phil Osborne from Marketing. For those unfamiliar with the show’s format (I believe the US equivalent is American Inventor), keen entrepreneurs present their ideas to a panel of ‘dragons’ – investor-entrepreneurs who grill the poor candidates and either shoot their ideas down, or negotiate for a chunk of equity in exchange for a bag of money. I haven’t seen too many episodes myself, but I faintly remember stacks of cash sitting on the table for the poor entrepreneurs to salivate over. Very tastefully done.

The Dragons

Comp 113 (check out the wiki) is a paper that focuses on Web 2.0 and online communities. It looks like a heck of a lot of fun for the students, and through the Den we were privy to the guidance and work that Stephen and Andrew have put into the class. We were advised that the session was going to be filmed, but little did we know that they’d gone all out and staged it in a studio, at the AV Development Unit!

So, for around three hours, slowly wilting under those burning lights, we listened to and provided feedback for some fascinating projects presented by a number of teams.

Overall we felt that there was a high level of creativity, and that those who presented put a lot of time and effort into their projects. It’s good to see a 100-level paper engaging students so well.

We ended up picking a top three, and the verdict can also be found on the wiki.

This is the second year for this class, and we think the format rocks.

Tags: Community, dragons, students, university
Posted in Ramblings, The Distiller, User experience | 2 Comments »

Reactivity vs Proactivity

Saturday, February 21st, 2009 by Francois

Nobody is perfect.

As an Operations Manager, my role is to improve business processes and keep an eye on the big picture.

Recently, Jason and myself went overseas to seek commercial opportunities. We experienced very different cultures, business environments, and mindsets.

As soon as I came back to New Zealand, I should have done what I use to do regularly: Shut down my computer, go back home, take a pen and a piece of paper and write down where are we at and where are we heading to.

Instead, I have being focusing on my own tasks: Seeking new leads, managing the PocketSmith community, taking care of the business structure, etc…

I have being reacting to a set of upcoming events.

So what should I do?

Acknowledge my mistake
Stop assuming I know where our business is and what we have to do
Write down a list of key objectives to reach
Gather the guys together
Set up a timeframe with clear deadlines
Assess regularly progress towards our goals
Stick to the plan

As part of The Distiller, we are committed to start a Sprint, i.e. a 12 week fixed time period in which the co-founders of a participating company concentrate on developing the business.

This framework should encourage us to deliver faster results collectively.

I will keep you updated on our improvements

Posted in Ramblings, Startup tips | No Comments »

Show / hide system and hidden files quickly in Mac OS X

Monday, February 9th, 2009 by James

Although there are an inordinate number of applications that allow you to show and hide the hidden and system files in OS X, it has always felt a little bloaty to me. I did use XMod (http://www.geekpeaksoftware.com/xMod.html) for sometime, however I didn’t like that I had a whole host of functions I never use to just show / hide hidden files – and it takes four clicks to do so once you are even in the app. Fussy I know.

I have just stumbled across this nugget here – which lists the command to show and hide files, with the commands etc.

So what I’m doing here is using these commands to make a little terminal command that quickly shows and hides the files, instead of having to remember / look / copy + paste the command, or clicking like a maniac in XMod. If you are not comfortable using Terminal, just grab XMod above

Open up Terminal
Enter the following to edit your bash profile
nano ~/.bash_profile
Copy and paste the following three lines in at the end – make sure they are on separate lines. You will need to keyboard navigate arrows etc (just in case you aren’t familiar with nano)
alias show_hf="defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles TRUE; killall Finder" alias hide_hf="defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles FALSE;killall Finder"
Save the file (WriteOut – control (not command) + O) and exit (control + X)
Enter the following into the Terminal to reload your bash profile:
source ~/.bash_profile

You can now open your terminal, and enter the following to show all files quickly:

show_hf

And then to re-hide them:

hide_hf

Of course you can name these aliases anything you want.

Now, this post is not without a disclaimer – the above could be done much more elegantly I’m sure. I tinkered with setting it up as an Automator script so that we could have a little icon in the dock to click on. However I didn’t Google enough to figure out how to test what the current setting for AppleShowAllFiles is, and Terminal works well enough for me. If you have any insights let me know in the comments

Tags: hints, os x, tips
Posted in Technology | 3 Comments »