Let me know if you’re going to be there, it’d be great to connect.

I’m planning to write a post over the next week or so with my predictions for the coming year. I look forward to your comments.

The reason for this blog post is that I’ve recently been through that early adopter annoyance. I signed up to a free beta for a product that looked interesting and for a number of months got a decent service for free! Being enthusiastic about the service I provided good feedback which (I’m told) helped the service to improve. A few weeks ago I was informed that the free beta would be stopping and everyone would be migrating to a paid plan. There was the offer of a reduced deal for beta users to ease this pain. My immediate reaction was to feel annoyed, I put this down to something going from being “free” (free can evoke powerful emotions) to paid for and the sudden change in value to me. I supposed my relationship with that company also changed from being more of a helper to someone that they wanted to get money out of.

Now, I want to make clear that I don’t have any distain for this particular startup or think that their service is bad value for money. I think that startups have to be very careful when going through this transition phase. Early adopters are often very enthusiastic about a particular product. If you can keep them happy then they will often evangalise about your product much more effectively than you ever can, for almost free!

If you’re transitioning to a paid for service then make sure you keep your early adopters happy!

Please also help out by signing up to the Facebook group and following ArgentVision on twitter.

We’ve come up with several approaches to try out our theories. The current focus is on idea generation but soon I hope to move onto idea development and getting teams together. For the moment there are three aspects which I will cover in more detail:

Twitter Business Ideas

I’ve been playing with Ruby on Rails recently and decided to write an app that saved all tweets with the #businessidea hashtag. People can then vote on their favourite idea. I’ll be launching an alpha version very soon. I’m encouraging people to tweet their business ideas, I’ve already started!

Twitter is a perfect platform to share early stage ideas, it’s very easy to use your favourite mobile device or even SMS to record your ideas. Something that we’ve pretty much agreed as a group is that the idea alone is useless, it’s the execution. Thus, it is pretty pointless holding all your ideas close to your chest. I certainly won’t be tweeting all my ideas but I certainly be tweeting those that I think other people can use/gain from. I look forward to seeing your ideas on Twitter!

The Innovation Network

Most of the credit for this idea goes to Nick but I did help set it up! This is a google site (a wiki) that we’ve given a select group of people access to. We wanted to create an environment that was a bit more closed to see if it would encourage better participation (see halfbakery.com for a completely open version). Here we have an inbox of ideas that people then comment on and expand.

This has been quite successful and now seems to be gaining momentum. We’ve reached a critical mass of about 10 people and the ideas are coming thick and fast. If you’d like to participate then drop me an email. We’re trying to get a broad range of skill sets so tell me a bit about what you might bring to the network.

There are several ideas that look like having a lot of potential. We’re now thinking about how to take them forward. I’ll keep you posted!

One Ton Challenge

This is another idea that Nick had a lot of input in. The basic premise is to come up with a business idea that generates £100 a month with minimal time and money input. The idea should be scalable so the profit per month can be ramped up with relative ease. Originally we were going to do this amongst friends but the idea has somewhat changed direction and we’ll be launching something aimed at students.

The thinking behind the idea is that everyone is trying to become the next google. Our belief is that people should focus on selling “stuff” to really get a handle on how to be an entrepreneur. We’ll be updating the website soon and hopefully launching the competition towards the end of the Summer.

I’d like to thank Ainga and the team for all the fun times we’ve had and also wish Zaizi all the best going forward.

From the beginning of June I’ll be doing a multitude of things. I’m currently involved in a couple of early stage startups that I’ll no doubt talk about in more detail over the coming months. My other plan is to do consulting and contracting — I need something to pay the bills. Drop me a line if you would like to discuss any opportunities.

Moving On

What about the downsides? One of the arguments from IT departments is the explicit risk measurement that can be achieved through the outsourcing of infrastructure to the cloud. Instead of the systems team having to write risk management plans and defining how likely downtime is and how much it would cost the cloud provider offers an explicit guarantee in the form of an SLA. The management of that risk is now in the hands of the cloud provider and the company just needs to pay them their fee. Surely this is a good thing? Well, yes, to a certain extent: relying on someone else to manage your risk isn’t always the best approach. Consider the current economic crisis caused by badly managed risk. Banks were caught out because they thought there was less risk involved in lending than the reality.

The other thing that exacerbated the credit crunch was the network effect. Banks in different countries had become so intertwined, everyone had lent and borrowed money from everyone else. When banks asked for their money back it caused a chain reaction of more banks asking for their money back from each other. A cloud computing world is more interconnected and reliant on one or two providers (theoretically, these providers should be more resilient because of multiple data centres) so if something goes wrong then the damage caused is more likely to be greater than a single company’s infrastructure being compromised.

These two effects (the network effect and the bundling up of risk) are important for the future of cloud computing. Cloud providers must offer transparency and detailed SLAs that mitigate the effect of unforseen events. Companies must also realise that going on the Cloud is by no means a Silver Bullet and must take into account all the risks involved (and realise that extreme and unforseen events are more likely to cause problems than when using their own infrastructure).

The history of Wolfgang von Kempelen’s Mechanical Turk

This got me thinking, if you look at someone like George Reese’s definition of a Cloud Service Mechanical Turk meets all the criteria. I’d add scalable as another criteria that a service has to meet do be defined as in/on the cloud and Mechanical Turk does this.

Why does this matter? What people seem to miss when trying  to define Cloud Computing is that it doesn’t matter how the service is implemented! And that is the whole point of the paradigm. For all we know Amazon EC2 could be run by a team of monkeys typing on keyboards or using abacuses. The beauty of Cloud Services is we don’t need to know how they are implemented, just how we interact with them.

When you’re trying to explain Cloud Computing just remember Amazon Mechanical Turk!