Not good

Yesterday I read an interesting article from TechCrunch about the possible bubble we are in.

It was titled "Too private to fail" and "A bubble by any other name". I would link to it but it has disappeared from their site.

They had made reference to Good which was finally purchased by Blackberry after turning down higher offers and this action has left the employees high and dry (owing lots of tax). In contrast the execs have been left high and well paid off.

The answers are there

Christmas was spent in England.

A bit boring but there was some eating out and drinking Sussex ales - a nice Holiday from Helles (which is the local name for lager).

There was also quite a bit of development work and I made good progress.

Back in Germany for the New Year and continuation with the development. The Crazy Chicken is working on the business plan while I get my geek on ... the only thing is I'm more used to telling people to tell people to do technical stuff. This time, however, there is no one else. Just me.

The last couple of days were spent trying to get authorisation working for the app.

I decided upon Auth0 as it will work across platforms quite nicely (I think).

But I couldn't get it to work following the Appery tutorial. After a break where I watched The Machete I revisited the problem.

The answer was just about hidden in plane sight ... the clues were in the error messages referring to frames. Also there was a short but effective answer in Apery's own database of problems.

I need to go into more authentication work tomorrow.

Just to check

Watching Dragon's Den does count as startup research, doesn't it?

Ceaseless

I've been making progress with the app, one step at a time - "a time" in this case meaning "a week".

But I am making progress.

Take-aways from entrepreneur meet up

Yesterday I went to a second, and last for this year, entrepreneur meet-up.

Some take-aways from it:

• when we were going around the table talking about our intentions some-one after me started saying that the venture he is working for is "dangerously close" to what we are doing. We had a chat a bit later and though it is close the business model is fundamentally different.
• 12min.me (12 minute me) is a good forum to pitch an idea and also to network and meet potential contributors and investors. I know about this event but have not yet been as it is often in German.
• The owner of where we met (in a Cafe) may be a good candidate for an early adoption/beta tester.
• Don't forget cross-selling opportunities from the data will be collecting.

A slog

I went for a Dinnernations thing on Tuesday and then the next few days had a cold type infection.

At the best of times this next step is difficult but I know I will get there.

And now, right now (Friday almost 5pm) appery is having some more maintenance.

Cocktails and curry from 6pm as well (my maintenance).

Sussed it by sleep

For the last few days I've been trying to add a feature to the prototype which will really help us sell the idea.

I knew it was possible but couldn't work out how.

But last night I went to bed and then came the ideas. Sleeping on it worked and this morning it only took around 90 minutes to produce the solution in the dev environment I'm using.

With that feature delivered there are now others in the queue (actually I am using Trello to track these) and I have no idea at all how to deal with them. I guess I better get an early night.