Colin Charles Agenda

In may 2012, I went on a little shopping spree on kickstarter. The intention wasn’t to invest in a project but back it. Its clear many people get confused with the concept. Backing a project isn’t like going to a store to buy or pre-order a product either.

Backing a project is rooting for its success. With money, one can only presume that projects execute and whatever was promised gets delivered. It seems however that my kickstarter hit rate is so far a mere 50%.

I backed a project that successfully delivered the goods in September 2012. I was rather thrilled because it clearly made someone’s dreams come true. Another project that I had backed should have delivered on the goals by the end of July.

Sadly, its November and many of the backers haven’t heard back from the project owner. Many comments from concerned backers are posted in the comments section.

Me? I backed what I consider a small amount. In funding, sometimes things fall thru, and in backing projects, sometimes things don’t work out even when the funding goal is reached. Money alone doesn’t make a product!

Is this however a problem? Will someone that has been burnt by a negative backing consider using the Kickstarter platform again? Will it ruin crowdfunding for them?

I don’t have the answers. I will continue perusing the site, backing interesting projects, ensuring people’s dreams can be achieved. Let’s see if my success rate improves over time.

I was recently in Japan and picked up in-store a Native Union Authentic Retro POP Phone Handset for Mobile Devices and Tablets. It is a nifty little device that is great when you have to make long calls (think group meetings, conference calls, etc.). It also means I don’t keep my phone to my ear. The audio quality is pretty good as well, and you can hang up on the call from the phone.

It isn’t something I’m carrying when I travel, but it is a welcome addition to the office. Best thing about it? It uses a regular headphone jack, so no worries about it working on my Android, iPhone, or BlackBerry.

Now, would I get away with driving in a car with this? :-)

I had the pleasure to chat with my former CEO, Marten Mickos, at LinuxCon Barcelona on his birthday. Marten is prolific on Twitter (@martenmickos). I’ve always encouraged him to blog, so I’m glad that he now has two blogs: CEO blog at Eucalyptus, as well as another on Wired’s Innovation Insights.

We spoke about many things, but one of them was email. Marten always replies to emails very quickly and it has always impressed me. He told me he felt bad that now he might take up to a week to reply to an email. He jokingly blamed it on age catching up.

It got me thinking about my email backlog. Across all accounts, I am embarrassed to say I have 3,821 messages that I have to process. I’m sure quite a number of those will require replying (even at 10%, that is quite a number).

There is no better time than now to take over my INBOX. I have the next couple of weeks to be home and a little more relaxed, so I’m going to tackle this email backlog. Once I’ve paid off this debt, I plan to answer emails fashionably quick. I mean if Marten, CEO of Eucalyptus, board member at several firms, can do it, so can I.

Thanks Marten for continuing to inspire me to be better.

For additional inspiration, I plan to listen to Believe in Something Bigger Than Yourself. I’m sure it is one of Marten’s better inspirational talks!

I couldn’t help but overhear a conversation today. It was in an airport bus, wheeling us to our plane. The dramatis personae involve folk that are from America.

Lady: “Where do you work?”

Man: Almost apologetically states, “I work at Oracle, that big database company. Well, until I find something else to do.”

A whiff of silence in the air.

Man: “I used to work for a small company but Oracle acquired it about a year ago”

Another man: ” When does your lock up period expire? Can’t imagine you’d enjoy working there.”

Man: “Soon, real soon.” Giggles

Lady: “Well in this economy, you don’t want to be out of a job. I guess no one leaves a company before having yet another job in the line.”

Everyone nods in agreement.

What can we learn from this?

1. People apologise when they work at a big company? 
2. The economy is terrible that it might be an employer’s market, and there is no longer ease of employee mobility

However, this would be in contrast to the hiring battle that is being faced in Silicon Valley. The FT is the latest to talk about this.

I just purchased The Humble eBook Bundle. I primarily use a Mac OSX based laptop (my MacBook Pro), and secondarily use Linux in various flavours (a Lenovo ThinkPad runs Ubuntu, various boxes run a combination of that and Fedora & CentOS, and virtual machines are growing).

It seems not only with regards to Orbitz showing better, more expensive, hotels to Mac users, even when it comes to the Humble Bundle, Mac and Linux users pay more. Are we just conditioned to pay more than Microsoft Windows users?

I’m glad to support DRM-free e-books & great content. Who knows, I might discover something new.

It didn’t take long for my prediction on 24 September to come true on 11 October. My suspiscion was also correct, it would be led by Marco Arment, but it had nothing to do with Instapaper, it was the launch of a new product titled The Magazine.

The reason to make it iOS 6 only?

It uses some iOS 6-only features and fonts, and it’s architected for iOS 6’s gesture handling. Setting this high baseline also greatly simplifies testing, maintenance, and future updates.

Wow. Fonts & gestures. Amazing.

Greed or tradeoff from Apple?