Cloud Business Continuity Management Communication Tool
CloudBCM (Business Continuity Management) provides resilient communications infrastructure to ensure that your staff are contacted and can communicate during a business continuity scenario.
Find out more at Cloud Business Continuity Management
Focus Workshop with Mick Liubinskas
These are my notes from the Focus or Fail Workshop @ Pollenizer tonight.
What is Focus?
A common cause of startup failure is trying to do too many things
You can’t beat the big companies by being broad
The more focused and narrow you are, the easier it is to ‘get bought’
As entrepreneurs we underestimate the cost of doing more things
Do one thing, and do it right!
Don’t worry about missing customers, customers move very slowly.
What is Purpose?
It’s not about the technology, it’s about creating and capturing value.
Know your focus, and be clear on why.
Regularly review the purpose of what you are doing.
Ask yourself and write down:
1. Your Wildest Dream
2. Why are you building your business?
3. What is the one thing that happens that means it’s all working?
The Approach
Do things in sequence. You can’t have your vision all at once. Do the most important thing, the core of the product first. And do it really well.
Imagine they are like bowling pins. Hit the first pin really hard.
As a rule of thumb, a new product must be 10x better than the incumbent. So go after the one customer (segment) that is beating down your door for the product.
Test your hypothesis as quickly as possible.
Don’t worry about getting it right first time, because you will definitely be wrong.
Target a segment to own it. You can’t own them all (at least not as a startup)
Plan which segments you will focus on:
Focus (one) | Do (few) | Don’t (many)
——————————————
If you have 20% of the customers in a particular segment, then you basically own that segment. That is much, much better than having customers in different segments all over the place.
Features
( (core utility ) support features ) crap
Customer Development
Customer Discovery → Customer Validation → Customer Creation → Company Creation
How to allocate cost to product versions:
v1 20% / v2 20% / v3 10% / v4 50%
Website lead capture. Turn your leads into happy users.
Context of leads → Qucikest Path → 
Happy Users → Sharing Content?
(SEM/SEO/Referral/…)
Pick one contet of referral at a time, and work it! Get it right.
Use the one context to target your focus segment.
You just need to prove unit sales at a profit, to prove your business.
One track mind (or don’t have all your small balls up in the air!)
1. Sacrifice (Sacrifice everything that isn’t your core focus)
2. Sequence (Sequence to vision – steps from Core to Vision)
3. Core First!!!!
Measure what is important!
Patience and perseverance. Overnight success takes many years of hard work.
Pick Segments where you offer 10x the value. Do this by itemising characteristics, and scoring the segment.
Characteristic | Segment 1 | Segment 2 | Segment 3
—————————————————————————
Reachable
Strong Immediate need…
…
(30 characteristics altogether)
NB1: Slides are here: http://www.slideshare.net/liubinskas/focus-or-fail-workshop-by-mick-liubinskas
NB2: There is a Sydney Lean Startup circle
Delicious Bookmarks – Chrome Extension
Simply Delicious is a simple, rock-solid extension for Google Chrome which provides a neat bookmarking button.
Install it here…
Simply Delicious for Google Chrome
Background
I decided to write this extension after I tried the alternatives and realised that they mostly sucked. The objective here is to provide a neat “bookmark in delicious” button; that’s it.
I eventually plan to include a feature to enable local searching of delicious bookmarks, possibly by downloading them into the browsers bookmark store. Rest assured that this will only be done if it can be done sans-bloat.
Note for Windows users
Windows users currently need the Beta version of Chrome to fully use extensions; available here.
Note for OSX users
Mac users have two options for using Chrome Extensions right now:
1. Developer edition of Chrome (mac)
It’s kind of like a pre-beta. But you want to be on the bleeding edge right? Available here.
2. Chromium (open source)
You can also use Chrome extensions on OSX right now with Chromium. Chromium is basically the open source foundation of Chrome, it’s almost identical but slightly ahead in features.
It’s not as scary as it sounds, just use this Automator app to get and install the latest build for you. If it doesn’t work out it’s easy to reinstall the release version.
Please let me know what you think!
Installing Cassandra and Thrift on Snow Leopard – A Quick Start Guide
Update March 25 2010: I will soon update this for Cassandra 0.6 (which is currently in beta). Until then, this process still works – just install Cassandra 0.5.1
I couldn’t find much in the way of an OS X install guide for Cassandra and (particularly) Thrift, so here’s a brief summary of the steps I took to get Cassandra up and running on Snow Leopard.
Requirements: xcode (provides java, ant and g++, autotools etc for compiling thrift) & svn.
I used macports to get “boost, “pkgconfig” and “libevent”, all used by for Thrift.
Part 1: JAVA_HOME
OSX does not set JAVA_HOME for you, instead it must be done manually.
A simple way is to add the following line to ~/.bashrc
export JAVA_HOME=$(/usr/libexec/java_home)
After setting JAVA_HOME, you will need to exit and reopen terminal before the change will take effect.
Part 2: Installing Cassandra
# I installed Cassandra into /opt and run it as me.
mkdir -p /opt/cassandra
chown -R {you} /opt/cassandra
# Need to create the log directory
mkdir -p /var/log/cassandra
chown -R {you} /var/log/cassandra
# Also Cassandra created a directory instead of a file for system.log, so...
touch /var/log/cassandra/system.log
# By default Cassandra 0.4.1 uses /var/lib for data, so...
mkdir -p /var/lib/cassandra
chown -R {you} /var/lib/cassandra
# now lets get the source
svn co https://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/incubator/cassandra/tags/cassandra-0.4.1 /opt/cassandra/cassandra-0.4.1
# If all is well you should be able to build.
cd /opt/cassandra/cassandra-0.4.1
ant
# If that works, you should be able to run cassandra
bin/cassandra -f
All going well, you should be able to, in a new terminal tab, run through the CLI tests here.
Part 3: Installing Thrift
First you’ll need boost, pkgconfig and libevent. So (using macports):
sudo port install boost
sudo port install libevent
sudo port install pkgconfig
Now, with a lack of tags and branches in SVN, I just grabbed trunk (please could someone let me know if this unwise).
svn co http://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/incubator/thrift/trunk/ /opt/cassandra/thrift
SVN revision at time of writing was 817923
Next, we build it…
(Note the /opt/local references, that’s where macports puts it’s stuff by default)
cd /opt/cassandra/thrift
./bootstrap.sh
./configure --with-boost=/opt/local --with-libevent=/opt/local --prefix=/opt/local
# If you get the error:
# ./configure: line 16440: syntax error near unexpected token `MONO,'
# ./configure: line 16440: ` PKG_CHECK_MODULES(MONO, mono >= 2.0.0, net_3_5=yes, net_3_5=no)'
# It's documented, to fix it: (assuming you installed pkgtools from macports)
ln -s /opt/local/share/aclocal/pkg.m4 /opt/cassandra/thrift/aclocal/pkg.m4
# once again:
./bootstrap.sh
./configure --with-boost=/opt/local --with-libevent=/opt/local --prefix=/opt/local
sudo make install
Language bindings
The make install should have installed libraries for ruby, perl, python etc.
EDIT: Python bindings were installed into /usr/lib/python2.6/site-packages. I had to move them to my (default apple provided python 2.6) site-packages.
If you want to install them into a virtualenv you will find the setup.py in /opt/cassandra/thrift/lib/py
Part 4: Generate “cassandra” from thrift.
Navigate to /opt/cassandra/cassandra-0.4.1/interface
and then…
thrift --gen py:new_style cassandra.thrift
This generates the cassandra python package which you can copy to your project.
If you have any suggestions for improvement here, please let me know.
Sydney Dust Storm
Today Sydney is enveloped in a quite spectacular dust storm. Everything is an eerie orange, it really feels post-apocalyptic or like the scene from a martian wasteland.
Here’s a photo that Debi took through our apartment window at about 6am this morning:
Sydney Dust Storm - September 23rd 2009
According to the weather bureau, it’s likely to stay around all day.