Well, I think I have successfully made the transition to TypePad. Hopefully, TechBytes will live there happily for the next few years.

If you are using the XML feed for TechBytes, you need to subscribe to this feed in order to keep reading TechBytes.

I finally got the jasonball.com domain issues worked out so clicking here or typing www.jasonball.com into your browser will take you to the latest version of TechBytes.

See you there.

I have been working on a new version of TechBytes over on TypePad.

I have decided that this will most likely be my last year with .Crap (my affectionate name for .Mac). Unless Apple can actually offer something that resembles value for my money, I'm going to drop the service. .Mac is, in a word, pitiful. Maintaining a website on .Mac has been difficult at best, with sporadic outages and unexpected behavior from the service.

So, come by and visit my public beta of TechBytes at it's new home on TypePad's servers. I still have a few kinks to work out, but it's 95% finished. I am having some problems with Network Solutions and getting my domain (jasonball.com) mapped correctly for the TypePad version of TechBytes, but nothing major.

I've been getting asked a lot lately where ESADE ranks on the Business School tables. Just for the record, The Wall Street Journal ranked ESADE as the #2 International School for 2003.

(I don't put a whole lot of stock in these rankings, because they vary so widely between sources...and business school is only worth the network you build anyway. Real learning, at least in my opinion, doesn't happen in an MBA classroom.)

If you live in London, or simply want to support London, go register here to back the bid for hosting the olympics in London in 2012.

Strangely, one of the main things that I try to shy away from, which is copy-pasting from various news sources, is the one thing that I like best about reading others' blogs.

In many cases you get the same story 100x. I can't tell you the number of times I have seen "Apple released....". But looking at more specialized blogs, i.e. venture capital or mobile phones, in the vast majority of cases I see articles or comments that I normally would have missed.

The value of the blogging ecosystem, as I understand it, is that blogs offer an alternative to mass media's watered-down reporting. Which is true in many cases. But it also fills in gaps for niche areas and provides a service that I couldn't get elsewhere (well, perhaps, but I would have to pay $$$).

At the same time, no one site fills in all the gaps. This is where the cumulative input from 50 different people acts as a collective conscience and gives a fuller picture of what's happening in the world. Maybe this should be known as borg-ing instead of blogging.

On that note, I thought I'd post a copy of my OPML file. I need to add many of these to my Recommended Reading list, but haven't. If anyone knows of VC blogs from London, or has other recommended sites, email me a jasonball at gmail dot com.
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Update

I found this graph over at Strategize. It looks like I'm one of the 79.7% of blog readers.

I just learned that a weekly from my hometown, Jackson, Miss., is at the forefront of cutting-edge newspapers in the US:

"Now the weeklies are trying again: the New Times chain trying to outdo Craigslist with its Back Page initiative, and the Village Voice Media chain appointing a vice president for online. And innovation is coming from the edges, with the Buffalo ArtVoice wading into online multimedia, the Jackson (Miss.) Free Press putting Weblogs front and center on its site, and The Stranger (in Seattle) and Chicago Reader pushing new "aggressively local" online personals." PaidContent.org

Well, I wasn't exactly overwhelmed with responses for tech events in London. Here's a list of what I've come up with so far:

July 13, Content with content?
September 7, InvestFest
September 9, Business Accelerator (TBC)
September 21-23, Mobile Content World 2004

+ I still have one Gmail invite up for grabs if you can add to the list...

I've got three extra Gmail invites hanging around...

The accounts are up for grabs to anyone who can send me a list of events in London for the month of July (or if there's a list of recurring events and they don't repeat until August that's good too) for:

1. Software (Mobile, Video Games, etc.)
2. Technology (In the broadest sense, but preferably start-up related)
3. Venture Capital/Funding

They need to be either free or relatively inexpensive to attend- no $1500 conference links. Free passes to one of those conferences would be warmly welcomed though...

Any one of the three areas qualifies. If you can send info on all three areas, fantastic. If you only know about one area, that's fine too. Send the email to jasonball at gmail dot com. Be sure to include where you want the invite sent. And when the three are gone, they're gone.

I'll publish any information sent to me here as well, so even if you don't get an account, you can sleep well knowing that the info is helping out other people just like yourself.

Also, if there's something confidential (like a link to free $1500 passes) be sure to point that out...

No comments.

It's absolutely impossible for this to be a one-way street. I know you can use external comment add-ons for iBlog, but I would really like Apple to step up to the plate and offer a Typepad/Blogger type of service. The one reason I've really stuck with iBlog (over Moveabletype) is that I really like the blogging tool and ease of use. I'm already spending good money for the .Mac service and don't want to spend another $50 per year to have a blog hosted elsewhere.

Here's to hoping .mac storage goes up to 5GB storage + a snazzy new blogging tool gets introduced at the next Macworld.

I've been working 12-15+ hour days for the past two weeks straight with no access to my Mac, so updating this site has been basically impossible. My current project finishes up the 15th, so I'll chime back in once I'm back in London- crunch time starts monday at 4:00 AM. Wish me luck.

For any friends or family that haven't already inquired, none of our friends or family (in Spain) were injured in the bombings in Madrid.

I'm still in a state of shock, and have been deeply upset by the latest news and images I've seen.

Our flatmates here in London seem worried that London will be next. I'm not so sure, but the media definitely will not be forthcoming about the truth. However, having lived in Spain for almost 6 years, fear of terrorism is something you live with daily.

Read that last line again.

Every day I lived in Spain I could have been killed by a bomb from ETA. It's that simple. Many people tend to forget that ETA is a very real threat in Spain- and London is no different (the IRA).

What most people don't realize, though, is that the chances of being killed by a terrorist are almost nonexistent. This month's Wired touches on the topic in "America's Flimsy Fortress" and gives some numbers to consider:

"Terrorist attacks are very rare. So rare, in fact, that the odds of being the victim of one in an industrialized country are almost nonexistent. And most attacks affect only a few people. The events of September 11 were a statistical anomaly. Even counting the toll they took, 2,978 people in the US died from terrorism in 2001. That same year, 157,400 Americans died of lung cancer, 42,116 in road accidents, and 3,454 from malnutrition."

That said, the numbers and statistics don't take away the pain of those who have lost loved ones due to the bombings.

The latest news seems to point to Al Quaeda as the responsible party, saying this is the response to Spain's involvement in the war...which leaves me with a mix of anger and fear. Not fear of a bombing or attack in London (because there will most likely be one), but fear of where this is leading and a sense of helplessness faced with Al Quaeda attacks.

Both the Spainsh people and British people protested *heavily* against their participation in the war...and now those same people that were against the war are being punished for their country's involvement....an involvement they did *not* condone.

Apparently the men in custody in Spain for the bombing are Moroccan, which will only add to the growing animosity regarding immigrants (particularly from Morocco) in Spain. Plus, the election will probably go to the Socialist party because of the apparent involvement of Al Quaeda... This is shaping up to be a national and political nightmare, and I am deeply concerned about the outcome...

More comments as the news develops.

There's a new Wired article up about blogs. This section caught my eye:
"Using newly developed techniques for graphing the flow of information between blogs, the researchers have discovered that authors of popular blog sites regularly borrow topics from lesser-known bloggers -- and they often do so without attribution."

I was wondering whether this was some sort of cosmic coincidence—like when the same commercial is playing on three different network television channels at the same exact time (which btw isn't coincidence at all; it's marketing) or when several different things (television shows, newspaper articles, conversations with friends or strangers) in a given week all have the same subject or theme that was not brought about by yourself—or whether I was just being paranoid, but I've noticed recently that several more notable blogs than TechBytes note the same exact information (and twice now even the same exact phrasing) shortly after I have posted the info here...

You know who you are! Hands off my content!

Now what would be really funny is if someone would repost this exact entry, only bothering to change 'TechBytes' to the name of their blog, and then if that in and of itself became some sort of meta-meme that worked its way through the blogworld...

Well, hot on the heels of my disgruntled London Wi-Fi report, The Wall Street Journal has published an article this morning that seconds my opinion: Wi-Fi in Europe is too expensive and isn't targeted properly.

"On a recent morning, Robert Cameron sipped coffee in a Starbucks shop in London's financial district, downloading e-mail onto his laptop.

The Starbucks coffee shop has a high-speed Wi-Fi network that its customers can use to surf the Web without wires, but Mr. Cameron, 28 years old, wasn't using it -- the price of £5.50 ($10.31 or €8.25) an hour was just too expensive, he says. Instead, the theater director chose to hook up his computer to the Internet with his mobile phone, even though the connection is much slower than Wi-Fi."

My point, along with the WSJ, is that these Wi-Fi hotspots simply aren't practical. Period. If you work with T-mobile or Vodafone, contact me and I'll be happy to help you solve these issues...

My Wi-Fi experience in London has been anything but pleasant. I've been using the Surf and Sip network at my local Caffe Nero, and the network has been down every day for the past week. Granted, they usually get the network back up in a few minutes, but still...

Now I'm locked out due to a poorly configured service:
"Warning: fwrite(): supplied argument is not a valid stream resource in /usr/home/freeside/cgi/sns_API_php/sns_socket.php on line 49"

Another issue that annoys me is finding an electrical outlet to plug in my computer. Once you find a Caffe Nero with a Wi-Fi network, you have to find an outlet. This is no small challenge. When we first arrived, I spent the better part of my days looking for a Caffe Nero that offered the ability to plug in. (Starbucks, in my experience, was even worse. I could *never* find an outlet.) However, if you are planning on doing any long-term net usage at Caffe Nero in London, the best one I've found is Caffe Nero on Edgeware Road. There are 4-5 tables you can work at easily, and the staff is quite nice. Just make sure you're a big fan of Company Segundo...because that's all they play.

One question I keep thinking about is: Who are they targeting? Wi-Fi services in Airports and Hotels has a much more clearly defined target: Businessmen. However, the Café niche isn't quite as clear...

- If you are a business man (from the UK), you should have a Blackberry or similar device, or a GPRS account- which means you don't need the Wi-Fi service.
- If you are a Tourist you probably didn't bring your laptop and an EasyInternet Cafe is probably the best (and cheapest) option.
- If you're a geek, you have your own home-made antenna, so you're not going to use this service.
- If you're a student you have university access and you probably don't have money to spend in a Cafe anyway.

Who's left? People like me that have recently moved or the occasional businessman from outside of the UK.

I've only seen 2-3 people on the net here; over the course of a week. Plus, as soon as BT turns on my home connection, I'm out of here- never to pay another pound for Wi-Fi at a Caffe Nero. The directors of Surf and Sip should sit up and pay attention here.

I recommended a pass on a possible Wi-Fi investment in Spain almost one year ago because the economics seemed all wrong...and from my recent personal experience that was a very good call. I really just don't see this as an attractive business, unless you can completely dominate the market, offer 100% coverage and very interesting prices. Neither of which are the case with the current Wi-Fi offering in London, and it is a service I'm using becuase I really don't have another option yet...but as soon as I do, they've lost a customer.

I haven't been blogging very much these days, as we've been getting settled in London. House hunting has taken a major effort and now the job hunt begins- if you're working in venture capital in the City, or have any ideas on which early-stage funds might be hiring, drop me a line.

Posting will be sporadic over the next days and weeks as well- as I've got a backlog of things to get to, if I have time to get to it.