The Register nails it, as usual

with an article about the current craziness of venture investments.

Take-aways from yesterday's AGBC Exchange meeting

... none really.

But, I did observe that Germans are very territorial about data and don't like it in the cloud.

They would prefer it within their domain. It's very difficult to get across that the cloud is just an off-site, shared set of data centres with lots of certifications and security which very few companies could afford (or even think of).

After the main meeting someone explained to me that the German experience left them wary of entities having their data. He pointed out that the Nazis were able to quickly round up Jews in The Netherlands because the Dutch had just held a census where people had to put down their religion.

The tech is there

Here is the first of (hopefully) quite a few lessons learnt - so one day when I am rich and a poster-boy for the start-up community I can use them to give an inspiring speech. And then all the hot babes at the speech (there is always at least one, although maybe after consuming a few free beers first) will want me.

From my mobile app development oddyssey I have relearnt that the tech is there.

Having spent an IT career successfully avoiding any coding now that I am in a startup there is no one around to write the code we need.

But no one will give us money, even seed money, without some sort of prototype.

So I  had to roll up my sleeves and do it. Not easy as learning Java, or even JavaScript, isn't a quick activity. But eventually I found appery.io which I can relatively quickly use to create a prototype.

Now it ain't - or won't be after the trial period - free but it cheaper than hiring a bunch of developers just to write a prototype.

The products from this appery.io service is a little bit clunky but it is good enough.

If you need to do something the technology is there - quite probably free or cheap and relatively easy to use - at least in the early stages.

Day of rest failure

After getting the kernel of the app (database uploads, downloads and push notifications) to work I was going to do anything other than dev work today.

This morning I did some tax related paperwork (for the company).

And this evening I am going to a business networking event where the business advisor we met last week will be speaking.

And in case he, or anyone else, would like to at least see a glimpse of what I've been working on, I thought I better tart it up this afternoon.

Which I have.

It is by no means complete (it needs authentication, payment oh, and lots more) but it looks a bit better now.

There

I eventually got the push notification to run from an event rather than a user input.

It bloody works!

I've been testing it repeatedly because I am so relieved.

The app needs quite a bit of tarting up before it reaches beta level but right now the main functions I needed to work work.

Almost there

I can now get push notifications to work from a button on the app - so, semi manual.

This wasn't easy and I look at appery's examples until I found something that worked.

Now I have to get the push notification to be triggered by an event but ...

... in half an hour appery is having some system maintenance. I've stopped all work and saved everything rather than push everything to the last minute.

Hopefully the maintenance will last less than an hour.

Well that was quick

I now have push notifications working ... manually.

appery.io's videos really make it easy (though I think going through the tutorials first helped get up to speed).

Soon, tomorrow I have to make PNs work automatically from a database event.