Facebook has bought the Internet startup Parakey which was founded by two co-creators of the Firefox web browser.
This is going to be an interesting combination, I've been waiting to see what comes out of Parakey since the article about them in the IEEE Spectrum magazine in November.
LugRadio is now finished for another year. I met lots of really interesting new people at LugRadio Live and caught up with some old friends.
I had quite a long chat with Aaron Seigo from the KDE project about Software as a Service (he's not a fan). I realised that we're interested in solving the same problems, but have very different views on how to solve them. I commented that I'd love to see him have a discussion with Chris DiBona from Google about it (he was also at the event). I then wandered into the cafe and spotted Chris sitting in the corner on his laptop so I stopped to say hello. I mentioned my conversation with Aaron, and Chris said to invite him in for a chat. I went and fetched Aaron, bought them both a drink and then tried to keep quiet while they discussed the issue amongst themselves.
It was really quite interesting to see two people, both from the open source community but with differing views have a productive conversation. I actually thought this little encounter was a microcosm for the whole weekend. A diverse community of people with common goals but differing views all together in one building, having informal, intelligent debates about the issues they consider to be important in the software community.
There were representatives from lots of companies like Canonical, Google, Neuros and the BBC and particularly brave attendees from Novell and Microsoft. There were also people from community projects, notably the youthful Bongo Project and MythTV.
On Sunday I had lunch with Elliot from OpenAdvantage (and his friend whose name I've forgotten but would like to keep in touch with) and we must have been having interesting conversations because an hour seemed to vanish in a blink
Also, I think I found a hosting company for Krellian, the Linux friendly Bytemark Hosting.
So well done to the LugRadio team and the event crew who pulled off another great event.
Oh, and hi to all the Wolves LUG people who I had a few drinks with on Saturday night, they were a very friendly bunch!
As I announced in April, this summer I'm starting a business called Krellian.
Since April I have written an outline business plan and given a presentation in front of a Dragon's Den style panel of judges. The judges were impressed and awarded me a £4500 grant on the SPEED Programme. SPEED is a project led by Wolverhampton University with the involvement of many other universities to support Entrepreneurship in students.
On the SPEED programme I've attended a 3 day training course on running a business and am now developing the business idea further.
Well, it's 07/07/07 and as promised I'm launching my company web site(s) today. They're a little light on information at the moment but they're enough to point people towards, bearing in mind I'm working to a five year plan here.
This is the main company web site where products will appear, products being Web Appliances. If that doesn't quite tell you exactly what the products will be then that's partly intentional. I've not decided what the first product is going to be yet, I'm working through a shortlist. The software projects at krellian.org might give some clues.
This will eventually be the home of a suite of web services, but for now it's serving as a bit of an experiment in natural language command.
Now this is the bit where I'm going to need some help. Once I've kicked off development of some software projects, I'm hoping to get developers interested and build a community around the projects. I don't expect this to happen overnight and I think I really need to get a release out first. I'll be working towards a release of something over the next three months.
Webtop will carry on where Webscope left off. It's a suped-up web browser for devices that don't need a desktop.
How I start on the Webdoors project will depend on what I choose to be my first product, but the long term vision is a Webtop Linux Distribution, much like the Desktop Linux distributions we have today. Essentially a collection of libre web applications given a consistent look and feel.
The vision that Krellian is working towards is a Ubiquitous Web facilitating the free sharing of information and ideas. The Ubiquitous Web is device independent. That means you can access information in a format suited to the device you're using, be that plain text, html, vector graphics, voice or even a 3d virtual world. This gives you an idea of the direction of the Webdoors project.
All three web sites are fully W3C compliant XHTML and CSS and are tested in IE6, Firefox and Safari (if anyone could test them in IE7 it would be helpful).
Balancing W3C compliance with the web page actually looking OK in the most widespread but worst standards supporting browser is a bit of a pain. My advice is keep it simple!
It wasn't the original plan but the websites (apart from the software projects) are currently temporarily hosted in my bedroom. That's very bad because out here in the sticks we have a very unreliable power supply and I've recently had a lot of problems with PlusNet, my Internet provider.
I'm looking at hosting options at the moment, trying to get my head around Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud and weighing up the advantages and disadvantages of renting a dedicated server from day one.
Thanks to ALUG for the advice on VoIP service providers, I now have an 0845 number for my business provided by sipgate which points at wherever I happen to be on the Internet.
I've ordered 250 double sided business cards from VistaPrint for about £15 including a completely custom design and delivery etc.
See you at LugRadio Live!
