paulsb

It depends what region you are in. You should first look at the Business Link website for the list of grants available in your region. Also search for regional development agencies in your area.

I have had some experience with them and the problem is that they don't generally fund companies with no IP (i.e. software) and the process can be slow. If you are associated with a university then there are other types of grant you can apply for. Again, business link, your RDA or the university tech transfer department can tell you about them.

I read this morning that Wind River make an embedded OS for ARM based processors, which is used by many of Intel's competitors in the netbook market. Looks like a strategic move from Intel.

What if you have already registered your company in another country, i.e. a limited company in the UK?

I don't think you are looking for managers, but rather advisor's. At your stage you need people who have "been there and done that". I imagine that you and your team are technically focused (building the tech and filing for patents), but you need advisor's to help you shape the business.

My experience is that I am too technically focused, but my advisor's help me and teach me about the business side of things. At a later date, when I have employees, then I will think about getting managers, and I will also try and keep hold of my advisor's as directors.

People who have done it before and raised funding will help you shape the business to raise funding, not managers.

The girl with no emotion cracks me up.

A widget/plug-in thingy that scans your music library and adds the artists to your list would be nice.

It will only happen when $200 million is "nothing" to a company. Pharmaceutical companies have an equivalent of "chief aquisition officer" who deals with finding partners and aquiring companies, but they only do that because the cost of developing a succesful drug is ~ $1 billion (no exageration). Drug companies often partner with someone and will aquire them if the partnership proves fruitful.

It is often much quicker, and ultimately cheaper, to aquire someone than to develop the software themselves. When software development costs reach the dizzy heights of drug development costs, then there will be the necessity for a cheif aquisition/partnership officier.

And: http://krow.livejournal.com/602409.html

Works well enough but looks bad. I would:

1) Get rid of the brown and orange combo - too 70's, and the orange doesn't work well with the orange lines of the map;

2) Move the map to the middle and have your results in a column on the right;

3) On the left, have a column for inputting the location data, have a clickable calendar to select a date, and have a slider bar so you can increase or decrease the "within" search area (or perhaps something like a target board where the middle is the location you put in and you click on an outer ring to widen your "within" area);

My personnel design philosophy is: reduce the number of clicks - that is, always try to reduce the number of clicks a user has to do to get the information they want. E.g. for the "within" drop down menu: one click to get to to drop down and another to select the option; a slider is one click to zoom in or out. Having a calendar already on screen removes the need to try and use the pop-up one, which again reduces the number clicks from a hover and click to just one. However, where you have lots of options, such as the genres, I think you still need a drop down menu because there are two many options to list....unless you put them all in some sort of bar. Don't know. Try it.

Anyway, I hope that made sense and helps. Good luck.

Very nice.

I doesn't seem to have changed. I meant to have the pop-ups/previews only when you hover over the actual blue link and not when your mouse goes over the whole grey box background around the link. That way the user hovers over the link and can preview it before clicking without having the pop-ups everywhere.

The pop-ups seem to come up in the same place and if one comes up before another, which is a problem caused by having the pop-ups come up when you go anywhere near the grey bar, it becomes difficult to know which pop-up is for which link. Personally, I would have the user hover over the blue link, then have the grey background box come up as a sort of guide for the eye to follow towards the pop-up, and have the pop-up surrounded with the grey background box as well (at the minute it has no background 'frame'). This way you guide the user from the link to the pop-up and they know exactly which pop-up relates to the link.

Also, I would reduce the size of the tag cloud. I just searched for Adobe AIR and the cloud was huge. Perhaps have the top/most occuring tags and the ability to expand the cloud if you want to.

I quite like it. I would restrict the pop-up/preview images to appear only when the user hovers over the link and not when they are in-line with the link - it gets pretty annoying very quickly.

It's not a cell and it definitely isn't life; it's just DNA and few enzymes trapped in a lipid vesicle. People have been doing this for years.

I also read that they were thinking about having entrance exams as well.

Mine, at the minute, is: To organise science in order to accelerate research.

What's yours?

socialcell, socell (almost sounds like social), (mobilesocial), moso, mobiso

So very true. I think experience gives you the knowledge to recognise when something can be done better because without it you just think that this is the norm and how things are. Throw in a dash of frustration just before "there must be a better way" and you have yourself an idea with determination behind it which is going to solve that problem.

I always have a bunch of paper in my back pocket for writing stuff down on the spur of the moment and then I develop the idea as a mind-map, sleep on it, and then develop it some more.

last.fm is easy enough.

I just tried it; thought I found a clever domain name that ended with .ge; struggled to find somewhere to register an international domain name (anyone know of a good place?); found out .ge is the domain for Georgia; found out that the the "administrative contact and the technical contact must reside in Georgia"; game over. This is going to be harder than I thought.

A whole new world has just opened: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=190581

I am going through this process at the minute and some of the techniques I have used are:

1) Putting your name into a common phrase:

Because I am doing a start-up which involves searching and finding information, I imagine using a name in the following phrases:

"Just _______ it"; "_______ search it"; "_______ it"; "Look on ______"; "Have you searched _______?"; "Have you looked on _______?"; "It's on ________"; "Just use ________"; "I use ________"; "Powered by _______";

2) Only use words that have two or three syllables:

Names like Google and Amazon work because they only have two to three syllables, making them more memorable and punchier. Having more syllables soon makes the name forgettable and easily misspelt; having one syllable lacks emphasis.

3) Pick a name that has no direct relevance to your business and from which the focus of your business cannot be guessed; but do base it on something that sounds remotely real or familiar:

This is for a number of reasons. First, it allows you to easily move out of your current business area and into different ones; e.g. if Amazon called itself 'The Bookstore' then their ability to sell CD's, household appliances and web services might have been hampered because people will think that a bookstore won't be able to sell web services very well. Second, having a name that is too obviously related to the type of business your in makes it harder to get a trade mark (at least in the UK it does). Another example would be the mobile phone net work Orange because 'Orange' has nothing to do with phones, just like 'Amazon' has nothing to do with books, but both make people think "Amazon/Orange? What do they do?". Third, basing it on something that is remotely real or familiar adds a bit if credibility and doesn't immediately alienate people - Amazon is a river and forest, Orange is a colour and Google is a real number. Even names like Zoho trigger an association to something real since it sounds similar to Soho, which is a place in London.

4) Don't use names that can be easily mispronounced:

Mispronounced names can lead to misunderstanding and misspelling, which, in turn, can lead to frustration for the user. If you do pick a name that can be easily mispronounced, just misspell it intentionally in order to force the reader to pronounce it properly, e.g. is 'reileigh' supposed pronounced ree-lee, ree-lay, ray-lee, ray-lay - which ever it is, spell it phonetically. If you have to tell people how to say your name, then it's probably not a good name.

I think that's all for now. And no, I haven't found a good name yet!

So very true. The best you can get in the UK is about 24 Mbps down, and 1.3 Mbps up - and that is with ADSL. When it comes to cable, there is only really one operator and that is Virgin Media. When it was NTL it was really good: fast, reliable, no throttling and no monitoring. But when Virgin bought it, then everything went tits-up: throttling, unreliable and part of the phorm debacle. If I had my choice I would go for the Scandinavian or Japanese system, i.e. fast and relentless.

I find mind maps to be much more useful than a list of notes. You can always add notes to the map and attach/link to documents.

Hashbucket, if you're interested in applying powerful algorithms to semantic searching within science, including bioinformatics, then get in touch.

It's all well and good saying that we have everything here in the UK, but where? I want names, places and events.

Where is the UK start-up school with an illustrious list of speakers - including SV ones?

Who are the VC's with some balls to back some risky, yet exciting start-ups?

If we are to catch-up with SV, shouldn't we be doubling, or even tripling, our efforts, like having Seedcamp run twice a year in a similar vein to YC, etc., etc.

There is good reason why the UK/European start-ups have gone to the sates, and that is because they don't believe we have everything here. If we have everything here, then make it more evident.

menloparkbum, if you are interested in solving the problems you mentioned, then please get in touch (my email is my profile page). One of the aspects of my start-up is to solve the problems you have mentioned.

That drive isn't exactly going to fit in my media centre PC.

My ideas tend to form like trees: I have loads of ideas (seeds) that I will plant in my head. Over time, and through research and reading (what's happening around me and on the web; what are the latest technologies; where are things heading; how can I help solve these problems; etc.), one of the seeds will start to develop into a tree. At this point I look up to the top of the tree and try to see how my idea will change the world once its has fully grown. Once I have an idea about that, I then work backwards to try and figure out what parts (branches) are needed to reach the end goal. Some of the branches will also need some development before they are fully formed branches. Sometimes the branches develop so much that they actually create there own seeds, which fall off and grow into new trees; the new trees are related to the original one, but by developing them into their own fully formed idea, allows them to have a wider/greater impact than they would if they were still attached to the original. This process reiterates itself and some of the ideas refine themselves. This is where it can start to get messy, so good organisation is required, e.g. mind-maps and the like.

Most of my ideas develop inside my head when I am not in front of the computer and when I am not really concentrating on anything, which is usually when I am in the shower. I let them ponder in my mind, perhaps sleep on them, and then, all of sudden, I will have the urge to frantically mind-map them out and research them.

With regards to brainstorming, I usually do this after I have envisaged the top of the tree. I usually go to my colleagues and/or advisor's and bounce the ideas off them. We usually then "discuss" how crazy the idea is, what would make it feasible, what attitudes and habits would need to change in order to make them work, etc., which helps me identify what the branches need to look like on the way up to the top of the tree.

So as an example, one of the things I am working on is a way to speed up research - that was the first seed, which was born out of my own frustrations with the status quo. If I speed up research, how will it impact the rest of the world and how will the world work if I pull it off? - which is the top of the tree. Imagining how the world would work if my idea reached fruition, allows me to identify all of the other things that are also required for it to work (the branches). For example, I think a new document format is required to speed up research, and so I have started to develop this as a new branch, which itself is almost at the point of forming a seed, falling off and becoming a tree in its own right.

I have no idea if any of that jibba-jabba made any sense, but it's how I work.

Related: http://www.thecoffeeshopsofmayfair.com/2008/04/thefundedcom-...

Has this anything to do with: http://www.founderslink.com/ (with the 's' in there)?