Blitzweekend II
For those who were there, you know how great it was. 48h of intense coding and fun. Great ideas came out of this boiling weekend and it’s about time to have another round..!
The "un-organizers" will meet this Wednesday (July 2nd - 6PM) at Laika. We gathered a lot of comments from the previous edition and we’d like hear more comments if you have any.
I’d like to invite other people to join and help us. It’s a lot of work and we never have enough "un-organizers"! Come join us!
About my blog spam…
A few months ago I changed my blog spam filter to Defensio when they started to accept bloggers (gotta support the local guys!). I must say that I’m thrilled with the results. I wasn’t too sure what to expect at first and I was nervous since I wasn’t receiving any “possible spam notification” emails anymore.
Manual monitoring of spam has greatly been reduced and I can now do other things like live a normal life. There are however some cases where I wonder if the plugin was asleep as some very obvious comments made it through all the way to my email inbox. Today for example, I received two emails that contained so many adult words that I stopped counting after 100.
I know that the plugin is a “machine” using some artificial intelligence to decide whether a comment is spam or not. I just find it odd that it works so flawlessly most of the times but it sometimes lets those obvious comments go through the cracks.
All in all, Defensio does the job pretty well and considering the price (free), I’m quite happy. I encourage you to use it!
One last advise to the Defensio coders; if a word is repeated over 50 times or if a comment has more than 10 URLs, it’s probably spam 
Skooiz acquires Yulnews
Yes you read it right. After looking at various scenarios, I decided that at this point, it was better to let someone else pamper my little baby. Skooiz is an Internet company based in Montreal and an official press release should come out fairly quick so come back for more details.
On my side, I learned a lot from this experience. Proper execution is very important. While I planned well in advance by having a well thought of business plan, convincing people and getting funding was another thing. Unfortunately, most people that I talked to only showed interest in the recent days after numerous similar sites popped out here and there (think CNN, Youtube and Yahoo!). I told myself that it was too late in a way. We are indeed a nation of followers, not innovators The idea is still very interesting and I offered Skooiz all my help and knowledge as I still believe in social media. In fact, I cannot see a future not dominated by citizen journalists. Mark my words and let’s see what will happen in 5 years.
So what now? Well I do have at least 3 very innovative ideas in mind and this time I know what to do:
- Screw the business plan - Things never work out the way you want anyways.
- Get a partner who is a coder.
Getting funded is a chicken and egg problem. You need money when you start and people won’t give you money when you start. I now believe that it’s easier to get 10M$ than 10K$ and I think many entrepreneurs-wannabee will agree.
So if you’re a web coder and you’re looking for a summer challenge, email me
There’s no such thing as a chicken knife
You might have seen this beek advertisement sometime ago. Say what you want but strangely enough, it hit me. It helped me clear my mind and focus on good ideas. You might find it funny but follow me for a bit and it might help you too.
The knife analogy helps me redefine if an idea is good or not. You can eat a steak with a regular knife but it’s so much easier with a steak knife. Chicken on the other hand, can be eaten with a regular knife (sometimes without a knife at all!). Steak can be seen as first class meat in a sense because it has its own knife. If you want to truly enjoy a steak, you must buy a steak knife.
This relegates chicken as second class meat. It is so easy to eat that anyone can eat it easily without investing into fancy knives.
So think about your business idea. Do you want to cater to people who won’t mind buying but also investing more money in your own product (as they see the extra value) or do you want to focus on people who don’t want to invest at all? In other words, is your idea so interesting that people won’t mind paying for it AND for extraneous services/add-ons just like they won’t mind buying a nice set of steak knives to truly enjoy their steak?
I believe you want customers who not only want to buy steaks, but also want to buy steak knives. These people are experts and truly appreciate your service or product.
In other words, if your product is not top quality, you’re basically trying to sell chicken knives. No one wants to buy a chicken knife
Wikibody in the news
Just a quick note about one of my ideas being discussed in the news. You can read the article here. I’m still looking for volunteers
Wikibody.org AKA Mapping the human body for academic purpose
You know the feeling. You can’t sleep and your brain is working 100 miles per hour, thinking about stuff. That’s what happened to me yesterday (as most days). This time however, I came up with an idea that I’d like to share with you guys even though it’s not a business project per se, but rather a humanitarian one.
I want to map and inventory humans.
Huh? Yes you read it right. I want to have the largest human database in the world. This database would include pictures and statistics contributed by people from all around the world. These pictures and statistics will be used for medical, research and other academic use. Now I don’t want to simply collect human pictures, I want to collect and inventory body parts associated to specific data like age, measurements, ethnicity, diseases affecting a person/body part, country, sex and so on.
Imagine searching for pictures of skin cancer affecting a hand. It is pretty hard to find decent information right now, let alone extra data such as the cancer stage, the size of the affected area, the age of the person and so on. Google images will probably give you very unpredictable results and will point you to a different site every time. Also, if you are a researcher, you will find the statistical data very handy. Which country has the longest feet in the world? What skin tones can you find in Europe? What is the most predominant hair color in Russia? What is the average nail length worldwide? Which country has the highest level of psoriasis? How tall are 9 years old kids in Finland? What if you want to see pictures of warts on a lip? How about pictures of bee stings on a nose?
Of course, all this would be anonymous to the contributor. Not only you wouldn’t be able to find out who the person is, but you wouldn’t be able to reconstruct the person using a series of images.
I think it’s time to have an online, worldwide map of the human body. Think Google Earth for the human body. Think Wiki and the human body. I present you: wikibody.org
I want this project to be just like Wikipedia: a non-profit organization using an open source platform build by volunteers. Sounds interesting? I think it is. I always wanted to start a great initiative like Wikipedia and I guess this project is interesting enough to get started. What I need from you is to help spread the word and get the ball rolling. It’s for a good cause! If you want to contribute part or full time, please contact me at denis@quebecvalley.com
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