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I’ve installed Wordpress MU on a fresh Apache httpd and I go to try it out. I start by clicking on the ‘hello world’ post that comes as default and the page returns a 404 “not found” message. What is happening? This keeps happening to me all the time so I might as well share it here for others.
This can be fixed this by setting “AllowOverride to All” in the httpd.conf file, in the relevant Directory directive section where MU is installed.
Este fim de semana foi o Kickstart 1H10, um Weekend Bootcamp para empreendedores, organizado pela SeedCapital em Lisboa. Correu muito bem, recebemos boas sugestões e foi muito útil. Os projectos que vão receber financiamento ainda não são conhecidos mas posso dizer que estamos super entusiasmados com o nosso projecto, mais motivados que nunca e passámos da fase do “ah e tal temos de acreditar que isto vai funcionar” para “agora sabemos o que fazer e como se vai processar”. Temos riscos que estamos a correr claro mas sabemos quais são e isso reduz a incerteza de todo o processo.
Durou Sexta e Sábado o dia todo. Sexta falou-se sobre Estratégia, Modelos de Negócio, Gestão Financeira, Contabilidade e Fisco. Sábado falou-se sobre Criação de Negócios e Marketing.
Já tinha feito o Kickstart Mini-MBA com o Mário Valente e portanto algumas coisas não eram totalmente novas para mim. A parte sobre Marketing ficou a cargo do Patrick van der Walk e posso dizer que simplesmente adorei a talk dele. Claramente conhecer o Patrick e poder trocar impressões com ele é uma valia extremamente grande.
No Sábado à tarde as equipas fizeram o seu “elevator pitch” e também uma apresentação de cerca de 30 minutos sobre os seus projectos ao conselho consultivo da SeedCapital, constituído por pessoas da área financeira, propriedade intelectual, advogados, etc.
Algumas coisas que deu para perceber:
O que a SeedCapital está a fazer é diminuir as barreiras à entrada que existem em Portugal para os novos empreendedores tecnológicos. A maior parte das iniciativas do género (IAPMEI, bancos, etc.) são extremamente burocráticas e tratam tudo da mesma forma, seja o vosso negócio uma carrinha de cachorros ou uma coisa tecnológica. Normalmente é logo exigido um plano de negócios e não há ajuda para o elaborar.
A sensação que tenho é que o processo na SeedCapital é mais gradual e faseado. Tendo uma ideia que à partida parece ter potencial aprende-se a que perguntas é preciso saber responder para analisar a sua viabilidade, em oposição ás outras iniciativas onde é preciso responder ás mesmas perguntas (possivelmente mais), sem estar consciente da sua importância e de como chegar ás respostas, e isso é fundamental.
E já agora, qual é o projecto que estás a desenvolver??
I had this fantastic idea the other day. A web site where people can watch live concerts. I’m talking here about:
High-Quality Audio Streaming
High-Quality Wide Screen Video Streaming
Don’t you just love it?
DVD-Quality like.
But then I found out about Fabchannel.com, now closed after 10 years in business, and moved on.
and all because corporate greed and short-sighted people run the industry.
There is really nothing like free advice..
What I mean by this is the following.
Right now you might be struggling with something. Your startup, your thesis, your project, whatever.
Have you thought of all the experts in the world that can help you? They are all at the distance of an email. All the entrepreneurs, all the scientists, all the teachers in the world. It might take just one email to change what you’re doing to be something awesome. Why not take the action?
As I mentioned in my previous post, I have some friends who are not applying to SeedCapital because they are by themselves. Unfortunately there isn’t yet a place where people can see what projects are in need of more people. It is also not that easy to meet someone on-line to work together. We need a certain trust in that person, etc.
I think the best way to meet people that are interested, smart and have initiative is to attend one of the many hacker events that are held monthly (or at least regularly). In Lisbon we have several of them:
Twittlis – monthly meeting of twitter.com users in Lisbon
http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/4884748/pt/Lisbon/Twittlis-monthly-meeting-of-twittercom-users-in-Lisbon-19/Mar-Adentro
AltLab Hackerspace Lisbon
http://altlab.org/
Lisbon Perl Mongers Group
http://lisbon.pm.org/
Comunidade Portuguesa de Rich Internet Applications
http://www.riapt.org/
Lisbon Ruby Group
http://www.ruby-pt.org/
Gathering of Developers
http://god.pt/
One Over Zero Group
http://oneoverzero.org/
Do you know of any other groups?
Update (13/12/2009): Since this post I’ve found out about the following groups:
XAMLPT – Comunidade Portuguesa para Tecnologias de Apresentação da Microsoft: WPF, Silverlight, Surface
http://www.xamlpt.com
Ignite Portugal
http://www.igniteportugal.blogspot.com
Portuguese Ubuntu Community
http://www.ubuntu-pt.org
Mobile Monday Portugal
http://mobilemondayportugal.com
Confraria Security & IT
http://events.linkedin.com/Confraria-Security-TB-Store/pub/50120
Unfortunately I don’t know any. I would be interested in such groups but not only in Lisbon. Portugal has Hackers, Makers and Geeks also outside Lisbon, some of them are truly good ones and other truly bad ones, like in Lisbon :)
Can’t understand why we have so many Lisbon Groups and not Portugal Groups instead.
btw, It’s not Lisbon Ruby Group, it’s portuguese ruby group. we co-organized some dinners in Coimbra and Porto.
I think it’s just a mather of audience, if enough people organize stuff outside of Lisbon, the rest of the community will mostly follow (ex: takeoff, barcamp).
Heyas Nuno,
tens também o grupo
XAMLPT – Comunidade Portuguesa para Tecnologias de Apresentação da Microsoft: WPF, Silverlight, Surface (http://www.xamlpt.com)
Bom trabalho com o blog !
Thanks guys for all the feedback.
There is also Ignite Portugal. Their next meeting will be in 17th of December, in Lisbon.
There you go the Portuguese PHP User Group
http://groups.google.com/group/portugal-phpug
I believe that there are some more, but don’t know the addresses.
After the audience suggested that a venture capital firm was necessary in his talk at Take Off 2008, MV started SeedCapital.pt.
SeedCapital has now started to receive submissions and the number of received projects has been quite low.
I know there is a lot of people with potential in Portugal that would like to start their own startup. Here are some things you might not know:
1/ You don’t need to live in Lisbon or even want to live there.
2/ You don’t need to be unemployed ou self-employed. You don’t even need to leave your current job. If you’re working it is very likely you can obtain permission to work on a personal project on your free time, as long as your project doesn’t pose itself as competition.
3/ If you think “I don’t have enough knowledge, if I’m the right person, if I’m bright enough”, join the club, you’re not the only one. In Portugal we suffer a lot from this. No one ever suffered from excess of confidence, so turn yourself to the other extreme. You’ll maybe have more people calling you arrogant, but at least you won’t be insecure anymore. And you can’t do stuff without people talking against you, so get over it. And the most important thing is wanting to do, the will to distend the effort necessary.
4/ You’ll never know unless you try. And even if you’re not selected, it doesn’t mean anything. Ideas can only be tested in the long run and after they are put into practice.
5/ You will need someone else if you’re just one person.
I’ve sent a couple of e-mails to some friends I would like to see them applying. One of the things SeedCapital will probably have is a space where all the startups can be working. It won’t be mandatory to be there of course, but if it works I think it would be great to see that happening.
Also some friends are not applying because they are alone. I wonder how we could solve this. Maybe a startup job board where founders could post a summary of their idea and look for co-founders? I don’t know.
You can still submit your project. Something that might be worth listening to is the talk by MV at Take Off 2008:
@semmais posted a video that shows how it is to interact with “Supond”, our Codebits 2009 project that got elected as the best project. I can’t stop bragging about it :)
That’s right, the project me and @semmais did at Codebits 2009 got elected the best among almost 50 other projects.
The Idea – “Apple Time Machine”-like interface to your Lifestream
You’ve probably heard about Apple’s Time Machine, the backup software that lets you navigate back in time and restore files and folders from your hard drive. Well, we thought: “Why not backup your life as well?”. At least your online life. All your tweets, facebook updates, flickr photos, youtube videos, blog posts, etc. What today is called a lifestream. Imagine you can check what happened this same day, one year before. What were you doing? What did you blog about? Any tweets? Maybe you’ve posted photos or videos. That’s what we wanted to do, within a 3D interface inspired by Apple’s Time Machine. Here is a screenshot of how it looked*:
How it Works
We get the lifestream from one of the many aggregators on-line these days. We used the recently launched Sapo’s Pond web service, that aggregates Twitter, Facebook, RSS feeds, Sapo Videos, Sapo Blogs, Sapo Fotos, etc. We get the data via Pond’s API.
The interface was build using Adobe’s Flash and Flex Builder. For the 3D we used the new 3D object manipulation functionality in Flash CS4 and not Papervision3D.
Any service can be easily added as long as there is a RSS feed available. Also it can be used on the web or as a desktop app using Adobe’s Air. Because it is Flash it runs on Windows, Mac and Linux (provided the Flash plugin is installed).
The Prize
1x 13” Apple Macbook Pro notebook, 1x Apple Wireless Keyboard, 1x Apple Magic Mouse, 2x iPod Nano, 1x O’Reilly Book, 3x issues of Make Magazine.
The Story
My project got the first place at Codebits 2009, I was so happy, couldn’t believe it. Especially because of all that happened before, up to that point of our project being announced as the winner. After all I didn’t know the rest of my team until after the programming contest had already started! And they were already doing a project which eventually they put aside to work on “Supond”.
It was the second day of Codebits when the programming contest kicked off and I wasn’t planning on doing any project. I was hanging around with some old friends on the way to some talk when I noticed a couple of guys working with Flex Builder. I had used Flex before so that caught me eye. I approached and started talking about it. They were working on a project already and after a while I commented about an idea I had. Immediately the guys said “hey, that’s a good idea”, and we started prototyping some code. In less than nothing @semmais had some 3D planes lined up for us to use. I started working on the backend to fetch the data via the Pond’s API. @semmais went home at around 20h and I left a bit later, at 22h. We had a nice long night of sleep.
In the next morning we got together again and I had the lifestream data all nicely put in an array for him to populate the interface. He had the nice interface ready to populate and some nice particles in the background with the galaxy picture @jvarandas had done the day before for us. We started integrating. We hacked, hacked, hacked. Integrated support to watch videos and full-sized flickr photos. And we were ready by the time the organization call in the teams for testing the laptops on stage. Great run, great fun. While it was my initial idea I think what worked nicely was that both me, @semmais and @jvarandas fitted nicely as a team and the result came from that. Here’s a photo we took to upload and test the flickr service on Supond:
Thanks
To Paulo Andrade for helping out with the Pond API. It was so good to, when having a problem with the API, just stand up and walk over to the guys that made the thing in the first place.
This year’s competition was largely decided by votes from the audience. We couldn’t have made it if it wasn’t for all the people there that voted on our project. Thanks to all of you.
To Sapo, because I have to, for organizing this cool hacker conference in Portugal.
The Other Projects
Some other teams had really nice projects as well. I particulary liked the “Time-based OTPs” by Paulo Andrade, the “Simple MBNet” by Pedro Sousa and BlinkBrick, a “lego” like led arduino device by Sergio Veiga. I hope they can finish their projects because they are really cool.
What Now
We are thinking in further developing this idea. If you have suggestions drop us a direct message on Twitter or email. One of the ideas people suggested was to allow saving the data to the hard disk.
* – we’re thinking in posting a live demo for people to play with.
Update: There is now a video demo published.
Parabéns!!!
Pena não terem recebido dois Mac’s :D
Congrats! :)
Sim sr! Parabens! E ate eh uma coisinha bem parecida! :)
It isn’t Silicon Valley but old Europe still has a few interesting things going on in the startup world. I went around to search for startups in Germany and around. I looked particularly for companies doing Software as a Service.
It features where the companies are based and what service they provide. It is by no means comprehensive, just enough to tease those pessimists that say nothing is going on in Europe. Here is the list I came up with, feel free to comment about other interesting startups you know about:
[1] – http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/01/03/german-facebook-clone-sells-for-e100-million
[2] – http://www.high-tech-gruenderfonds.de/htgf/
I think there are a lot of potential in Europe. Keep us updated on the rest of Europe.France has a lot of startups too. Anyway thanks for the heads up in Germany.
Hi Nuno – Thanks for including @scaleup in your list of interesting startups going on in Europe. After spending almost 14 years in the US startup world and the past year here in Germany, I agree with you… Europe is producing exciting some companies right now!
Let us know if we can ever provide any insights or support as you grow your company. We love supporting founders of startups – especially those right here in Germany!
Henrique, 
me is discussing. 
Andre Pinheiro, 
Sérgio Santos 10:21 am on January 12, 2010 Permalink
Obrigado por partilhares a experiência que tiveste no Kickstart. Parece ter sido muito bom. Agora resta saber mais sobre a ideia que apresentaste :)