Small Business Owners & Entrepreneurs Meetup Wrap-up Feb. 19

The Small Business Owners & Entrepreneurs Meetup was small in size but large in design. The smaller group was more conducive to free flow of discussion, as opposed to the times when a larger group held round-table discussions. As always, input is valued.

An attendee had to cut her time short but gave a synopsis of her catering business. We discussed in the short time her business history and some challenges she faced.

I’m always amazed at the variety of businesses that face the same kind of challenges – on the one side, we’re human, dealing with on the other side, a technical nature.

The other two attendees, an artist selling her art online faced some growing pains getting a satisfactory shopping cart software in place. A workplace safety and health consultant who faces the task of talking risk management to those who do not think in risk management terms, is planning on building a training and testing application.

I had the chance to present the business-modelling framework at one point to try to help the business discussion. I presented the framework to pivot different streams of business logic – to streamline the discussion with the goal of creating definitive action.

Thank you to those who attended. It was great meeting new people in their respective ventures. Let’s look forward to meeting at the next Small Business Owners & Entrepreneurs Meetup.

Copyright by FuzzyBit Software Inc., licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

Building Your Model of Success 2015

Building the model of success. That’s the theme we left with at the end of the year. The model of success stems from your executive stream. It’s you who is in control of the vision and mission of your business and therefore your model of success. What is your driving motivation? Do your customers and clients feel that way about you? Maybe yes, maybe no, maybe maybe.

So, the executive stream is just one of the four streams of your business. Most will focus on the revenue stream. You will also focus on analytical and production streams. All four streams pivot on your core product or service. All four streams together help build up your business model and business plan.

I’ve created a simple web page that illustrates this for you. It shows you the different components of a business plan and how they all support the core products/services that you offer:

https://www.fuzzybit.com/mind-map/

Play with it for a while and fit it to your needs. I’ve certainly used it in my product development.

Stay tuned for an upcoming Small Business Owners and Entrepreneurs Meetup. See you soon.

* Note: This is not a typical web page. It’s done in what’s called SVG and Javascript. It should be supported by most modern browsers on your desktop, mobile device and tablet. Mileage may vary.

** Note: The web page is published with a Creative Commons license. It’s a very liberal license. You can use it freely, the only stipulation being that the license and attribution stays intact with it.

*** And, finally, why not? This communique is copyright by fuzzybit.com, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

FuzzyBit + Business Modelling

Keywords: business, model, scale

Reference: https://www.fuzzybit.com/mind-map

The FuzzyBit app is ready for beta testing. It’s a scalable application in important ways which means it can grow with you logistically, operationally and in design.

Scale is an important factor in business, too. Designing a product or service is great if that is your passion. As an entrepreneur the sooner you can scale your business the better.

What does scaling mean? First we need to understand models. Think of a model car. What do you want to know about that car? Its physical characteristics. A model sits in place of the real thing so that you don’t have to run around in the real-world looking for it. Instead of a car, think helicopter or ship. As long as you have the model, you can measure it and study it without having the real thing.

Having a business model is no different.

Another important point of a model is scale. Back to the scale model of the car. You know that if the model’s scale is 1:20 then you can easily measure the model’s wheel base or length and then scale up. Easy.

Knowing your business model is no different and is a competitive advantage for your business.

There is more to it but I will leave you with this:

I want you to think about your business and ways for you to model it so you can know its scale. That’s it. Until next time, happy modelling.

FuzzyBit App Ready for Beta

The FuzzyBit web development app is now ready for private beta testing.

Technical Overview

The FuzzyBit app is a hybrid of a CMS and a MVC framework that features a specialized binary tree layout engine referred to as XOO (XOO is actually part of the specification.) The XOO layout engine provides a user interface to create and edit web page layouts. The app is very flexible and customizable. The app has a fully RESTful API which is also extensible.

An open source license, open API and open standards will be part of the app after the beta.

Beta Testers

Beta testers are required to test the UI and the API. Testers will test creating web pages, websites and web apps using the FuzzyBit app. Beta testers are further expected to test the development of the larger business model. For that reason, there will be a 0.1 bitcoin fee for the beta period. Beta testers will be privy to any new business developments before anyone else.

Donations are also welcome.

Bitcoin Address

1APFhXwtz8Y1edridCkviMTPXYYmBSXBTF

1st Address

Being part of the Bitcoin economy is an important step to providing confidence in this and other cryptocurrencies. At this point, Bitcoin will be the only medium of exchange on FuzzyBit and you are encouraged to participate in developing even greater value in this new economy.

Final Word

FuzzyBit is introducing a new model of development. The core architecture has all the structure from UI to API and the XOO is the keystone that bridges that gap between the UI and API. It streamlines the design and development process while reaching for the goal of working the way the web was designed to work.

Contact Developer


Questions, Comments


Better Life Through Knowledge,
Better Self Through Gnosis

Technology is the application of knowledge through physical means.

I had this epiphany this past year as I had to pause my product development to be a stay-at-home dad. I quickly learnt I had to wrap up product development because it was no competition to child development. I tied up loose ends, put the tech in a bubble and on the shelf. It was kind of funny “looking” at that tech bubble from the outside-in while I played with my daughter. It was easy to get caught up in the flash of tech and forget to be down-to-Earth.

In that moment, I think I reinvented myself and my world-view.

When my daughter started daycare and my lessons ended for the summer, I just picked up where I left off but with a fresh perspective. The tech will never be done – there is just too much knowledge to be applied through it. Tech is always catching up with knowledge and therefore tech’s always obsolete out of the box.

The big chunk of time that I had in the project management sense was all broken up into little shards of time scattered throughout the day in the child development sense. This was the reason why I had to put my tech in a bubble but it was also the reason I could take up guitar and university courses again and still be with my daughter. This is the reward of good time management in still staying productive! I could pick up a guitar and put it down right away – I didn’t have wait for it to boot up or boot down, and no damned alerts! I could do a quick song and learn its music.

Beauty!

The Internet is on Fire

Time. Countless philosophers and scientists discussed time. Cultures interpreted and re-interpreted it. Yet, I don’t think we have grasped its meaning or its nature.

Take a look at the rabbit in Alice in Wonderland.

“I’m late, I’m late, for a very important date.”

The rabbit is running around in the story looking at his watch – for an important calendar date. He has contrasting frames of reference that is creating his tension! This rabbit needs to understand why he is tense.

I remember a quote I heard years ago that has lingered with me since,

“Time is what prevents everything from happening at once. Space is what prevents everything happening to me.” – John Wheeler.

What got me thinking about time? Well, it wasn’t time. I was thinking of the impact the internet has had on civilization and was just doing a thought experiment. What other human development has had as major an impact as the internet has had? The internet is accelerating change in civilization.

The invention of electrical alternating current by Nikola Tesla was a major development. Yes, that is comparable. The industrial revolution was also a major development. But both of these were developments in the revolution of labour. The steam engine and electric motors are of physical evolution, extensions of the human arms, leg and back, and the ability to do more work.

So, I kept going back, to the invention of the printing press, back, to the invention of the alphabet, back to cave painting until I got back to the harnessing of fire!

Controlling fire is the premiere development of the human species. It is the harnessing of fire that accelerated human brain evolution but it’s evolutionary effects were not just because of the physiological benefits of heat or protection from predators. It was the time that was afforded to early human ancestors. Fire extended dusk into the night.

It is theorized that the harnessing of fire introduced us to whole new sources of food that was not available to us before. Cooking as a form a pre-digestion provided extra calories and nutrients that were not previously present for the body nor for the brain which consumes 20% of caloric intake!

New skills were developed. Speaking developed as story-telling, singing, joking, playing. The brain developed new skills to fill the time that had expanded. Clans would gather around fires after eating and telling each other of the successes and knowledge gained during hunting and gathering.

And it’s this scenario that my thought experiments provoked by asking what development in history was comparable to the internet. The internet, an extension of the human brain, holds vast amounts of knowledge no brain nor clan itself can hold. It must be shared to remain active. Human memory has been externalized as the internet in the next step of human brain evolution.

This is why the internet is the modern equivalent of the harnessing of fire.

Like, um, Happy New Year!

Filler words and crutch words are bad spoken habits. Writing them out makes it obvious. If we don’t write like that then why do we talk like that? Being aware of these words is the first step in overcoming wasted communication. It takes work to stop using crutch and filler words, and takes more than one person to make it work. Usually a speaker is not aware of how often a filler or crutch word is spoken until a listener points it out. Normally this is not good social courtesy to point out someone’s flaws but it is done tactfully when done at a Toastmasters meeting.

Being a Stay-at-Home Dad

Happy Holidays from my family to yours!

Deciding to put FuzzyBit on pause to be a stay-at-home dad has given me a fresh perspective on my life. During these past few months I have had a chance to rearrange my affairs, and placing Rea first, and other things second, has also allowed me a chance to grow in areas long overlooked.

The Toastmasters speech was one I wanted to record because it was my first public performance on my guitar. The speech and music was not perfect and that’s OK. The following video is a second chance at “We Three Kings” since I had choked on playing it in the speech.

The following is a blooper in which Rea decided to play along on her Fisher-Price wagon that had a spring-loaded rattle.

Time moves on and I will be ramping up FuzzyBit in the new year.

Happy New Year and see you in 2014.

Code – The New Literacy

My daughter is like a magnet. She’s always attracted to her parents and now that she has learnt to walk, she orbits us like a little electron. I’ve picked up my guitar again after 20 years of hibernation so that she’s hopefully being influenced by music. It’s funny how she orbits me while I play guitar and occasionally strums a few strings. She generally allows me to play my guitar but if I’m on the computer she wants to tap away at the keyboard, mouse and screen preventing me from doing anything productive. I learnt that if I ask her, “How does a computer count?” she’ll back away if only for a moment. This way I can try to influence her early about digital and analog ways. She knows what rainbow (ASL) is, that it’s “duga” (SR). She knows the fridge magnet letter ‘M’. Music, colours and language is all analog.

WP_20131016_001

She is “mamina mala maza.”

So, it’s interesting that there is a big push to bring computer literacy to school kids. Start them young. Here’s an interesting quote from the short video:

In China, every student learns computer programming. In the U.S., less than 5%.

Aside from the incomplete sentence, this is an astounding fact. Even if 100% of Chinese children aren’t learning computer programming there probably is a high contrast in computer literacy between the East and West.

I wonder why should we stop at children. We need everyone not to be just computer users but computer programmers. We need to add adult computer programming literacy to this effort. Every parent, business owner, entrepreneur, salesperson, and consumer should be taking computer programming one-zero-one. If we don’t then we will lose another generation of creative and technical producers, and not just borrowed against their future but lent out, with all due respect, to be “Made in China”.

So why wait? iTunesU has catalogs full of computer programming and other subjects, and edX (edx.org) features courses from schools such as Harvard and MIT, yours free for the taking. There’s also some courses spoken and taught in Mandarin if you know the language. Oh, and Duolingo provides free courses teaching many languages, too.

Life-long learning has never been so easy.

And if you know a programmer, reach out to them. It will make your life so much easier.

Edit: I forgot about Scratch programming language for kids 8 to 16 years recommended and parents of all ages.

The Tao of Toastmasters

A new season of Toastmasters has begun and I gave my first speech on Monday. I have a new set of projects and I had done the first speech of the series of “Speaking on Video”. I had gone in early for setting up the camera and projector. Bob was our Toastmaster for the evening and he had introduced a story of the Tao. There always seems to be a theme that runs through a meeting that is neither rehearsed nor planned and that evening was no different. All three speakers are independent of one another but this evening each speaker was in a supporting role of the next. Daniel was the first speaker with his first speech ever and he held the iPad teleprompter for me after he was done. Later, I had turned the camera to face Crystal’s laptop for her speech after she had technical difficulty displaying to the projector. There were bumps in the meeting but it did flow along like a stream past boulders.

The Tao theme popped back into my consciousness later in the week. I am challenged in finding time to code. Taking care of Rea is honestly the best thing in my day so I try to squirrel away time to work at the computer. I know what I need to accomplish code-wise and coding takes a good chunk of time and concentration. I adjusted. I set up the code on-screen just to look at but not to write. I let the problem percolate. I looked. I didn’t code. I looked again. I came back later and looked again. I saw it. I saw the solution. The solution was there the whole time. There was no new coding needed. It was already coded!

The problem wasn’t solved by thinking there was a problem. The problem was solved so long ago that I could not anticipate the solution until I stopped coding. The coded architecture was built well enough that the solution was already built-in. In Western thinking, it’s the problem of the hammer seeing everything as a nail. I was looking for a solution to code. It is the hand knowing the other for the applause. I needed to know the sound of one hand clapping. I know, I know, the metaphor is Zen, not Taoist. Now the irony – what I wanted to accomplish was a way to setup testing procedures (known as “unit testing”) to look for more problems in the code. The way had presented itself so that I could move forward. This time the problem was inside the solution.

YinYang

Tao rocks as the river flows.