the goose

So – dive in – tell me what _you_ think we should call this baby.

It turns out picking a name isn’t as easy as I thought it might be for tha AppSchool project. I started off with 5tings.com. There is the obvious problems that this can be confused with 5things.com which has some german dude spouting on about something. Then Paul pointed out that it reads like ‘Strings’ – which I’m not entirely sure is a bad idea. Maybe ‘Stings’ is what the cool kids are calling some unmentionable body part or newfangled narcotic. I was too shy to ask. Anyway 5tings is out. So that leaves me with a conundrum.

Read the rest of this entry »

When I heard that Contrast were going to go ahead and develop my latest project I started putting some requirements together. I’m not really a fan of verbose requirements specifications and while I think the easiest to work from are wireframes with notes, I just put together a list in a shared google spreadsheet. Here is what they were.

ID Description
1 A user registration system asks for two email addresses. One for the person registering and one for the person they would like to invite to be their buddy. Read the rest of this entry »

So the guys at contrast asked me to write few words on what my big idea was and why I’m pimping it. I’ve always liked the idea of writing some software that would whirr away on the internet spinning out money so that I could put my feet up on a beach somewhere. I’ve been making various attempts at bringing this about over the years and in that time I’ve started to narrow down exactly what type of money making machine I’d like to own. Before I start any project I measure them up against what I think of as ‘my investment criteria’. So here goes. Read the rest of this entry »

Well it seems as though while I’ve been schlepping my way though a 6 thousand line XML document, someone has built half my web app. I guess I it is only fair and proper to explain what it is now that bits of it are leaking out on to the web. Here is the original pitch email I sent to Eoghan.

To: hello@contrast.ie

Subject:Uh oh. It’s a todo list.

Funny timing this – but I’ve just been for lunch with a guy who wants to have an online todo list written up. Not much of a challenge for the mighty contrast – but this one is a little different – it’ll get used.

Darrell O’Dea is a founder of www.theicesgroup.com. In recent months he has turned his hand to financial coaching and my partner and I have been meeting with him weekly to help grow our www.piehole.ie business. Anyway – Darrell
is considered by many to be pretty successful and he attributes that success to ‘doing five things a day’. He’s not ‘rolling in cash’ successful – but he is good at property investment and managed to ‘quit the day job’ by buying property on the side. If I thought the guy had any chance of shelling out the full fee for this I wouldn’t be writing to you.

Back to my story. It doesn’t really matter what the five things are – he just tries to get 5 done. Priscilla (that’s my partner) and I started out by trying the 5-a-day approach, tracking it all in a Google spreadsheet. It was VERY motivating to see how much work Priscilla had done in a day. If I was falling behind in the amount of items ‘ticked’ off, I’d feel real bad about it and get my arse into gear.

So you see where we are going here. We’d like to build a social todo list where two or more people can sign up and track their their ‘5 a day’ side by side.

Not that novel. So why pick this idea?

Darrell has access to a large database of wannabe entrepeneurs through theicesgroup.com and marketing is his specialty. He will build the system into his coaching business and charge people for telephone coaching using the system.

I know it’s frustrating to write something that never gets used. Pick this one and I guarantee it will.

…

Ta
James