Disqus - Latest Comments for thruflo

Re: Almond Biscotti

thruflo — Sat, 03 Jan 2015 18:41:44 -0000

I can vouch for those biscotti :)

Re: "We are not in the midst of a revolution,
we are between revolutions"

thruflo — Sun, 16 Feb 2014 11:10:05 -0000

Disclaimer: I'm an OpenDesk founder.

Small items like a stool are not necessarily the best fit for distributed manufacturing - they use only part of a plywood sheet and are a hassle to make, especially if you're only after one piece. Which is not to say they can't be economically viable, eg if you make many at a time, or if you optimise a sheet layout with multiple pieces, as we do with the the Edie Set: https://www.opendesk.cc/edi...

However, if you take some of the designs from the OpenDesk site that use one or more sheets, like the Desk: https://www.opendesk.cc/lea..., or Cafe table: https://www.opendesk.cc/lea..., you'll find the price points (at c. £700 and c. £300 respectively) are already very competitive.

Fundamentally, open making cuts out whole categories of cost (retail and distributer markups, stock holding) whilst expanding others (labour, materials). I realise the Guardian video highlighted the Edie Stool but I wonder whether it's insightful to use it to critique the economics of the new model when there are many products and scenarios where the trade-off already makes complete economic sense.

Re: The Conventional Wisdom on Business Plan Numbers in a Lean Startup is Wrong

thruflo — Sun, 06 May 2012 11:09:05 -0000

Or if you want to draw a salary at some point ;)

Obviously actual financial planning can be more sophisticated. Somewhere behind all the clever spreadsheets, though, is a hard truth that income must exceed expenditure, once it all tallys up.

Re: The Conventional Wisdom on Business Plan Numbers in a Lean Startup is Wrong

thruflo — Sun, 06 May 2012 11:04:12 -0000

Yup, very true, although 18 months can fly by. This post was inspired by a conversation with a ceo I'm working with who is planning for revenue to start in Y2. For him, having a sense of what his costs (and thus income targets) might be in Y3 is important. Not that those guesses won't be revised.

Re: WikiHouse / The Gwangju Prototype

thruflo — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 16:28:43 -0000

Hi Andreas,

Check some of the early posts on http://blog.wikihouse.cc -- there's some photos of the structure at Gwangju.

James.

Re: http://wikihouse-cc.appspot.com/library/design/6001

thruflo — Tue, 09 Aug 2011 11:59:16 -0000

Test comment (dev thread).

Re: http://localhost:8080/library/design/13

thruflo — Tue, 09 Aug 2011 11:34:19 -0000

Test comment, please ignore.

Re: Why Bitcoin Will Fail As A Currency

thruflo — Mon, 13 Jun 2011 04:41:15 -0000

Hiya,

I've very new to this subject and intellectual terrain. However, it seems to me that https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/... addresses the core point of this article. The key point is that the rise in value through hoarding is offset by "human factors".

As others have said in the comments, it's a "self correcting problem". Tav, do you have a counter to this specific point, or do you agree?

Thanks,

James.

Re: Elements of Knowledge and Embracing Social Media Theory

thruflo — Mon, 10 Jan 2011 09:36:58 -0000

I just finished reading a fascinating book -- http://t.co/EblD2tj -- which walks through the whole of human history and ends with a chapter on what the lessons of the past show us about the future. According to the book, the future is a battle between the Singularity and Nightfall. Will we transcend biology and become a whole new type of interconnected intelligence or will we destroy civilization in all out nuclear war?

Ruminate on that for a little while and then go and check your Twitter stream. Trivial, mindless, self serving inanity, isn't it?

Re: It’s time to nut up or shut up

thruflo — Tue, 28 Sep 2010 06:43:45 -0000

Yup, forgive the slightly facile comment.

It's pretty clear from the price and the feature set that you're targeting "serious" bloggers, which makes a lot of sense given the plethora of free(mium) offers out there.

Aka, scratching your own itch ;)

Re: It’s time to nut up or shut up

thruflo — Mon, 27 Sep 2010 10:06:30 -0000

$49 Monthly -- that goes past my pain point. Ouch.

Re: Facebook Co-Founder Is Building a Social Network for Non-Profits [VIDEO]

thruflo — Tue, 21 Sep 2010 15:59:36 -0000

What about http://openideo.com?

Re: How To Facilitate Insights

thruflo — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 12:31:26 -0000

Interesting post. I wonder then if we brainstorm in order to make ourselves think. It may be we'd be better thinking in a calm, quiet environment but that we just wouldn't. We'd doodle and go and see what's on TV.

I've noticed something similar recently, having just read Barbara Minto's "Pyramid Principle" book, which advocates a way of thinking about writing. The method, which I find very effective, requires serious thought to actually practice.

I notice that I have to force myself to do it. However, I've noticed that when I'm in client workshops, thinking in pyramid logic is also very helpful and comes naturally. I'd suggest that just being in the brainstorm with other people looking at us helps us get over the apathy to actually engage and perform.

Re: Why Ad Agencies Are No Longer In Charge

thruflo — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 17:03:34 -0000

Thanks very much :)

There's a paradox there involving meeting someone who works for a service design agency. I shan't attempt to explore it.

Re: Why Ad Agencies Are No Longer In Charge

thruflo — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 16:58:00 -0000

Very interesting link. I see my post was a little fuzzy. I also never anticipated coming across the phrase, "If you use this approach to analysing a toaster, there is no toaster" ;)

The distinction between types of value reminded me of Umair Haque:

Profit through economic harm to others results in what I've termed "thin value." Thin value is an economic illusion: profit that is economically meaningless, because it leaves others worse off, or, at best, no one better off. ... The fundamental challenge for 21st Century businesses — and economies — is learning to create thick value. ... Thick value is sustainable, meaningful value.

I wonder whether Haque's "thick value" is Lucy's value-in-context. If the challenge for 21st century businesses is to create meaningful, sustainable value then perhaps service design is the methodology through which to do that.

Re: 5 Lessons from 150 startup pitches

thruflo — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 08:33:15 -0000

I'm reading Steve Blank on Customer Development -- http://www.amazon.co.uk/Fou... -- right now, so your "customer validation" points seem very familiar. One thing that stands out as an 'in-book' reader of what I understand is a seminal text in this area is that you make no mention of what Blank calls Market Type.

I'd be willing to bet that if your snapshot made those mistakes, they also tripped up on which market they were in and what that meant to their business model validation and sales and marketing processes.

Re: Anatomy of a Noob – Why your Mom Sucks at Computers

thruflo — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 04:57:11 -0000

I guess the challenge (for post 2!) is addressing how to make things for "noobs" that aren't broken as a result.

Certainly, there is a learning pathway in most things from "entry level" to "expert tools". For example, a programmer might start using :routes to map urls to handler code before moving on to mapping via regular expressions. The former being simple but ultimately limited, the latter initially incomprehensible but much more powerful.

The holy grail is presumably 'unobtrusive' understandability, e.g.: page elements that contribute to understandability without getting in the way of usability. But then, of course everything on the page gets in the way / occupies some visual hierarchy, which is precisely why the subtler arts of intution and metaphor are deployed.

One pattern is to provide help context (e.g.: helpful 'tip' messages) the first time / few times something is used. Perhaps another is to provide a default and 'advanced' modes, which the user explicitly activates to get rid of the 'helper' gunk once they've learned how to use something.

Personally, I find designing for myself to be infinitely more rewarding ;)

Re: Anatomy of a Noob – Why your Mom Sucks at Computers

thruflo — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 17:14:19 -0000

An alternative conclusion might be "let's stop obsessing over noobs".

As http://sethgodin.typepad.co... points out, we all have a choice over which audience we target and targeting the digital natives is in some cases the better approach.

Re: Out of the cesspool and into the sewer: A/B testing trap

thruflo — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 11:00:47 -0000

Aka local adaptive peaks. Welcome to pagerank...
.-= thruflo's latest blog post: Why Accountants Don’t Run Startups. =-.

Re: The Ghost Protocol – Digital Identity for Immortals

thruflo — Tue, 04 May 2010 09:29:03 -0000

I'd be *very* interested in finding out about your new venture. Interested enough to help ;)

Re: The Power of Digital Ecosystems

thruflo — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 08:49:24 -0000

There's a lot to like in this post. I find parallels between 'real' ecosystems and digital ecosystems fascinating. I'd point to Stuart Kaufmann's books (e.g.: At Home in the Universe) for some fascinating material about how generic ecosystems behave (they tend to self-optimise to the "edge of chaos") which is applicable to the digital arena.

However, being super critical, I'd suggest that the post is also a bit loose in places. The playstation analogy is a bit confusing: the article is about the iPad, which is both a tighter and more relevant example. Also the suggestion that the playstation was the first such digital ecosystem is a little fanciful. Didn't people copy disks on the Amiga 500?

Re: Why App Engine Is Not Appropriate For Bootstrap

thruflo — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 17:32:00 -0000

The crux of the App Engine matter is that it is what it is.

It's designed to support a certain class of app. As the dev team behind it iterate, it may become appropriate for more apps. The decision to use it must be bound to the specific use it needs to support.

For what it's worth, 30 sec request limit makes sense for the type of apps they've designed the platform for, the task queue api limit will clearly increase soon, possibly infinitely (at a cost). Keys_only seems like a pretty good entitiy loading workaround and downtime? You think you can do better?!

The map reduce pattern is on the dev teams' radar and the async is like it is bc they, too, have bills to pay.

Re: It's About Actualisation

thruflo — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 06:07:38 -0000

Amended with apologies...

James.

Re: Pecu Allocations by Tav

thruflo — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 14:55:05 -0000

Woohoo! I knew I was gonna rich be one day ;)

Re: BackTweets To Search Links On Twitter

thruflo — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 11:27:40 -0000

Gotcha; that makes a lot of sense!

Thanks for quick reply :)

James.

Disqus - Latest Comments for thruflo

Re: Almond Biscotti

Re: "We are not in the midst of a revolution, we are between revolutions"

Re: The Conventional Wisdom on Business Plan Numbers in a Lean Startup is Wrong

Re: The Conventional Wisdom on Business Plan Numbers in a Lean Startup is Wrong

Re: WikiHouse / The Gwangju Prototype

Re: http://wikihouse-cc.appspot.com/library/design/6001

Re: http://localhost:8080/library/design/13

Re: Why Bitcoin Will Fail As A Currency

Re: Elements of Knowledge and Embracing Social Media Theory

Re: It’s time to nut up or shut up

Re: It’s time to nut up or shut up

Re: Facebook Co-Founder Is Building a Social Network for Non-Profits [VIDEO]

Re: How To Facilitate Insights

Re: Why Ad Agencies Are No Longer In Charge

Re: Why Ad Agencies Are No Longer In Charge

Re: 5 Lessons from 150 startup pitches

Re: Anatomy of a Noob – Why your Mom Sucks at Computers

Re: Anatomy of a Noob – Why your Mom Sucks at Computers

Re: Out of the cesspool and into the sewer: A/B testing trap

Re: The Ghost Protocol – Digital Identity for Immortals

Re: The Power of Digital Ecosystems

Re: Why App Engine Is Not Appropriate For Bootstrap

Re: It's About Actualisation

Re: Pecu Allocations by Tav

Re: BackTweets To Search Links On Twitter

Re: "We are not in the midst of a revolution,
we are between revolutions"