So it has been a while since I posted … have been very busy with doodleboard since the “Mid-Summer Update” post. Check the site out - it is very cool. Tijan and I have been pushing very hard, proved the concept, verified the market, built an alpha product, filed provisional patents. Currently doing our best to turn this into our jobs post-HBS graduation! Very exciting, we’re looking forward to getting a shot at it. Check the doodleboard blog out as well for more of a blow-by-blow of the business.
James and I updated our web host, and with him in Hawaii and I in Massachusetts, my backups got lost somewhere in between for a while… thus this blog was down (and thus the time between posts). Good news - he’s headed back to RI for this summer! It will be great to get the original rocketmonkey back on the east coast.
Finally, I’m going to be a daddy! Any day now - due date is April 11th… kind of crazy to be an expectant father, an entrepreneur, graduating with lots of school debt and no certainty about the future. But I am certain I will love being a father, that I love being a husband to Francesca, and that I can’t wait to meet our child! (Pictures will follow, as the little one arrives).
We are pressing ahead on doodleboard. Check out the blog and public alpha! Tijan and I have been working on this since the mid-summer update post below. I solved some tricky tech problems with drawing lots of things in the browser and maintaining a pleasant user experience… filing two provisional patents on that.
The doodleboard itself is pretty cool - we envision making it easier for distributed teams to actually collaborate remotely. Providing really simple collaboration, updating the whiteboard in all of our offices and cubicles for the information age, in a product that people will use. Check it out, give us feedback!
My neighbor Shirley Bell is a wonderful watercolor artist, and I just completed overseeing her first foray into the world of the web. You can see some of her artwork at www.shirleybelldesigns.com. Just thought I’d share! Some samples of her work are shown below, she also does greeting cards, giclee reproductions, and much more.
It has been a busy and somewhat stressful summer. Having fun, but working very hard trying to get a few ideas moving. The information market research was intereting, but took a lot of attention. GroupCredit has been fun but hard - met with some Venture Capitals who liked the idea, but are worried about the competitive landscape. We are confident a $1 trillion market has enough room… at any rate, we would need to do a lot more work before we could take funding. We see GroupCredit as a 5+ year business, and it might not be the right time to pursue that, being in the middle of business school, and at the end of an economic cycle. We will see.
We have another idea. It is a big, exciting, fun, idea. BIG! And of course, we can’t share it. But we are working furiously to get talented developers to work with us and make it a reality. We would want to get this thing built and launched soon. Like by the end of the year. We stumbled upon this idea a few weeks into the summer, and have somewhat shifted focus to it for the time being.
It is hard being creative, having all these ideas, knowing that nothing will happen correctly without the proper amount of care and feeding, and thus meaning that you really need to pick one idea and make it work. When all your ideas are good, you start wishing you had multiple instances of yourself, so you could pursue them all…
We grievefor the loss of our two good friends and goldfish - OJ and Goldie. OJ died on the first true hot day of this summer, and Goldie followed him a few days later. These fish were centerpieces at our wedding, and we loved them dearly. I took this video of them a few short months ago, and am sharing it with you all so that they might be remembered as they were - playful, happy, and beautiful patterns of life.
Update: switching over to Flickr, until then photos unavailable
Information markets are quite interesting. (Also known as prediction markets, depending on which academic you want to make happy). The academic literature is fun to read and intellectually quite interesting. The general idea is that a diverse crowd of humans is better at aggregating information and selecting the “correct” outcome than is a group of deliberating experts.
For a quick introduction to the concept read James Surowiecki’s Wisdom of the Crowds. More in-depth literature is available on the web, a good starting point is Chris Masse’s prediction market vortal. Foresight Exchange, the oldest online information market, also provides an open source platform for generating customized solutions.
So GroupCredit has an official logo! Tijan and I wore this on our T-shirts tonight while we pitched our concept to the HBS Entrepreneurship Conference this evening. We had a great time, and enjoyed chatting with interested parties afterwards. The logo came out of classroom doodling, and was thrown together in the nick of time ;-).
Tijan and I have been working on a social credit card - putting together a business based upon the theory of social peer monitoring of credit as evidenced recently in micro-finance in the developing world. We plan to apply this model to the US consumer finance market (credit cards) to significantly reduce the APR to consumers by helping them reduce their strategic default rates through peer monitoring and management of their credit positions.
Following up on our idea for digital image management software, Francesca and I developed an alpha version in Java that allows the user to quickly rename large numbers of photos, adding keyword, title, caption, and date tags, which are then available in the filename as well as the image metadata fields. We are very excited for this, and have been working on organizing our collection of 3,500+ images, as well as scanning many more of the family treasures! Screenshots with some descriptive text as to how the program works today follow in the post body.
