Fletch's Blog

New Blog

pjxtian@gmail.com (Paul Christian) — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 17:20:00 +0000

For the last wee while we've had our heads down working on the source code for LiveAps version 2.0. We've basically had to do a full rewrite so the product will scale how we want it to.

During that time I've been developing a new blog which is located at www.fletchnz.com, and any future posts will be published there.

I've had to setup a new feedburner account so if you've like to be kept up to date via RSS or email, please visit the new one and re-subscribe there.

Just so you know, Andrew Campbell, our new Chief Architect, is hopeful LiveAps version 2.0 will be stable in the next few days - but knowing software, I'm thinking we should realistically aim for late July/early August.

I look forward to seeing you at fletchnz.com - I'll be posting there regularly now as my input into the source code is virtually over and I can re-concentrate on business development.

Liveaps Outage

pjxtian@gmail.com (Paul Christian) — Mon, 19 May 2008 14:15:00 +0000

We're currently having a technical difficulty with our server providers and will get the system back online as soon as we can.

Drinktank London

pjxtian@gmail.com (Paul Christian) — Thu, 15 May 2008 14:29:00 +0000

I attended the Drinktank Event at the Firehouse Bar and Club in Kensington last night as part our new 'networking' initiative we've recently embarked on.

I managed to catch up with Danvers Ballieu (pictured on the left below) from Winston and Strawn who's looking to handle our series A funding round, so to have a beer with him was a pleasure - along with the guys from Huddle (middle and right of photo) who organised the event.

Being a club, the drinks were fairly pricey but that was alleviated somewhat by drink vouchers kindly sponsored by Skywrite Communications.

In terms of new contacts, Victoria McEvedy of McEvedy and Associates was interesting to talk to and it looks like she may help us protect our IP as she has worked with Winston and Strawn previously, and is a Digital Media specialist who knows what she's talking about.

David Roberts explained to me a little of what The Filter are up to and that looks intriguing and well backed. Think Last.fm + musicovery.com extended into additional media than just audio.

Simos Kitiris from PeoplePerHour.com has around 6,000 people now globally contracting their services through his short term employment site.

Then later when the event wound down I met up in Covent Garden with Jonty Bankes (bass player with the Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain) and Franca (hope I've spelt that right :-), his new partner from Germany and whom it was a pleasure to meet. By the way, the Ukes are certainly worth a search on YouTube.

Elevator Pitch Makeover

pjxtian@gmail.com (Paul Christian) — Wed, 14 May 2008 15:38:00 +0000

We're currently finishing off coding version 2.0, giving the brand a touch up, and reworking completely our Elevator Pitch - in fact we're making two new videos. One will be aimed at consumer's letting them know what we can do for them - and the other will be aimed at Angel Investors who may be interested in our series A funding round. So sorry there's nothing for you to see today. However, if you are curious as to what our software does you could take a look at the video below showing the workings of version 1.0. It's not great in terms of version 2.0 look and feel but you'll get the idea :-)

Argghh...Networking!

pjxtian@gmail.com (Paul Christian) — Wed, 14 May 2008 15:25:00 +0000

Actually it's not so bad :-)

On the strong advice of the solicitors who are looking at handling our series A funding round, I've embarked on attending industry networking events in the UK.

The first was a Techcrunch Meetup at Waterloo last week which was a heap of fun, I met some interesting people including Jonathan McDonald who's been working on Blyk of late, and who also blogged the event here.

Tonight I'm off to Drinktank in Kensington which promises to have around 70 entrepreneurs there in various states of dishevellment later on no doubt. I might blog that one as it's apparently one of the more organised events with some key UK people attending.

Next Development Phase

pjxtian@gmail.com (Paul Christian) — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 13:43:00 +0000

After having run the private beta for a month or so now, we're ready to go into our next development phase which is to create a new version of the software shaped with the help of our beta testing community (and thanks very much to those of you who got back to us with your thoughts).

I'm conscious of the fact that we've been quiet in the blog and twitter for the last few weeks, but it's been pretty much a head down and work-intensive time.

We've had excellent feedback with some feature fine-tuning that we hadn't thought of, and we've had a chance to get some initial user data from the servers.

During the beta we've also made a fundamental change to the business with the appointment of Andrew Campbell as Chief Architect for the project. Andrew brings large scale deployment experience to Liveaps, and has given us the in-house ability to address properly some issues we had with V1.0.

So during the next month he'll be putting his stamp on the product by re-engineering the database, as well as overlaying the new interface and feature set. The next version will be so far removed from what we have now, we're no longer supporting V1.0 in any real way and are concentrating on production of V2.0.

While we're working on the back end, we still would really welcome comments on the interface, and we'll shortly be putting screenshots up for discussion in the beta community.

Oh, and by the way, we have a pretty cool Glasgow development office to work in :-)

This is the daytime view of the River Clyde from the balcony,

and here it is at night.

A Mini Moment

pjxtian@gmail.com (Paul Christian) — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 12:56:00 +0000

On a Ning Community front page, you can only fit 5 rows of Members avatars with 6 people per row maximum - and today we filled up that particular box so I thought I'd record the moment to look back on :-)

Many thanks to everyone for the valuable feedback to date, especially Bob from Iowa who has stopped me making a few mistakes :-)

LiveAps is Live!

pjxtian@gmail.com (Paul Christian) — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 16:29:00 +0000

We've started releasing the private beta accounts today. Our first release is a smallish batch as we want to watch what happens on the servers etc., but after being in development mode since Sept 06, the 12th March 2008 is a pretty special day for our Company :-)

Over the next couple of weeks, we'll be enabling all registered accounts and really look forward to feedback to review when working on our development plans.

Personalised Start

pjxtian@gmail.com (Paul Christian) — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 17:39:00 +0000

We were thinking today that it wouldn't be too hard for us to build a set of startpage widgets and make them available to you when you login to liveaps.

Currently this is what you see when you log in:

I know it would certainly make my life easier and more portable if it was more like this:

Admittedly I've used screencapture from Google and Twitter to mock this up, but you get the idea. Sort of like Netvibes or Pageflakes, but without being restricted by columns.

What do you think? Is this something you would use, and if so what kind of widgets would you want to see?

For starters we're looking at:

- Email
- Bookmarks
- World Clock
- Calendar and Notes
- Twitter
- Last.fm

We don't want the number available to become overwhelming, but we're keen on your input :-)

The Place Where Websites Live

pjxtian@gmail.com (Paul Christian) — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 14:49:00 +0000

In the countdown to our software release, it's not just the product that's being fine tuned - we're fine tuning everything!

That includes the business plan, marketing, our identity, how we should be thinking as a company, etc, etc.,.

A key part of this is setting our goals, and to simplify this we've been thinking, "if all goes well, what do we actually want to be specifically?"

We've thought about this long and hard and what we've all agreed is that we want liveaps to be to websites what YouTube is to video and Flickr is to photos, in other words, the place where websites live :-)

Simplifying our overall goals and targets into one phrase has helped us a lot in terms of the way we think, how we behave, and what we are to actually do day to day.

It may seem odd that we would state such a lofty goal publicly, but there comes a time when you simply need to work out who you are as an entity, define that, and get on with it - and coming out and saying it means there's no going back!

As is normal with these short posts, I like to add something a little quirky so here's a video I spotted on a blog post by Mike Butcher from Techcrunch UK...

Concept Discussion For Next Site Update

pjxtian@gmail.com (Paul Christian) — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 22:59:00 +0000

We're interested in your feedback about features we're planning for our next website update. The key points we're discussing at the moment are:

1. We're probably going to place an advertisement at the top of the page. We won't be placing any on your published pages, but we feel we should take the opportunity for this revenue stream from our homepage.

2. We'd like to create ways for you to promote your site so are working on the concept of 'recently added sites' and 'search'. If you can think of any other categories, please let us know.

3. Affiliates - we'd like to introduce the ability for you to make some money if you bring us customers. Initially we're thinking of testing this by providing approved partners with a promo code, and if the concept works for everyone we'll build an embedded widget. We're leaning toward PayPal as our method of distributing your earnings. If you're interested in becoming an affiliate, just send an email telling us a bit about yourself.

4. We're looking at adding two new features to the liveaps bar at the top of free pages. First, a 'share' button so people can tell others about your site. Secondly, a 'report inappropriate content' button. We'll keep track as much as we can about what's published, but we could do with your help if something slips through that shouldn't be a liveaps page. We want our service to be family-friendly so we'll close down any site that publishes things like pornography and violence etc.,.

Things we're not going to include are:

1. Friends - How many friends do you need :-)? As you have the opportunity to publish your email address on your site, that should be enough. Although we do want to have a happy community of users, we're not trying to build a social network as such and don't want to create yet another source of spam for you.

2. Email - Personally I think Gmail is great and so do our customers judging by these numbers, so not a lot of point trying to compete with that.

Please let us know what you think. Also, if you'd like to join the discussion about Pro Version pricing (which hasn't yet been decided), please click here.

Email Reply-To Address Fixed

pjxtian@gmail.com (Paul Christian) — Sat, 16 Feb 2008 17:30:00 +0000

I received an email from one of this blog's subscribers the other day quite rightly pointing out that the reply-to address on the email updates was wrong.

I thought I'd got it right updating various accounts with our gmail address, but I forgot Feedburner (which sends the emails). I had a go at updating the address in the account settings but that didn't fix the problem.

So I've had to delete the old subscription box and have added a new link at the left of the blog. Unfortunately this will have deleted your email subscription so if you could re-subscribe that would be great!

In the meantime, you might want to take a look at this very funny (I thought) video with the fake Steve Jobs accepting a TechCrunch award on behalf of Apple (posted by TC 18 Jan 08 but still a classic). Bear in mind that the founder of TechCrunch is Michael Arrington :-) Also, the language is a bit fruity so beware if you're easily offended.

Does Odeo = Music where YouTube = Video and Flickr = Photos?

pjxtian@gmail.com (Paul Christian) — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 00:54:00 +0000

It was interesting today. While we work on re-construction of the servers in readiness for our software V2.0 install, I realised I'd better do something pretty quick for my wife's band website that I was currently hosting in V1.0.

So as a fall back, I redirected her domain to Blogger and built a site. It was easy enough to embed video from YouTube and a photo from Flickr, but I've never settled on a music server so gave Odeo a go.

I found my way through to what I wanted via their studio beta service and it worked really well. I was able to upload the band's mp3's and then embed some widgets playing them through the blog.

I was also then able to create a podcast (serves as a playlist) which easily gave a URL to link to (for the more audio link from the blog), and now I'm in the process of uploading all her songs to that.

Odea was the third component of a great little mashup that serves its purpose well for now.

Sure, using Blogger I was still stuck with a template layout, but it's doing the job for the band until our V2.0 is ready - and it was really nice to have found a complimentary service in Odeo to go alongside YouTube and Flickr.

GMail vs Who?

pjxtian@gmail.com (Paul Christian) — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 20:04:00 +0000

When I was going through the beta registrations I kept noticing Gmail everywhere. At first I didn't think much of it, but then I started noticing Yahoo, Hotmail etc., but not nearly as often.

After remembering Richard McManus's post from last August comparing Web Mail Services, and where he described Gmail as "as the product that pushed Web email into the 21st century", I thought I'd do a head count of addresses to see what the percentages were.

Now I know our data is filtered by things like most of our registrants being early adopters, but I still found the fact that nearly half of them were using GMail pretty astounding!

If It Does What It Says On The Tin, What Do You Think It's Worth?

pjxtian@gmail.com (Paul Christian) — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 12:46:00 +0000

Firstly, thanks to all the people who signed up for our beta release after the press coverage at Techcrunch UK and ReadWriteWeb. The response was fantastic and we made a decision to add another server to the rack and double the number of invite accounts available.

Between now and the release, we'd be really interested in your feedback regarding the subscription for the Pro version. We have an idea of what we think it's worth but haven't made the final pricing decision yet.

Bearing in mind it comes with a custom domain name, 2GB storage, online filing system, unlimited webpages and full email support, what do you think a fair monthly fee would be?

If you have an opinion, just let us know in the comments below and we can build a discussion.

Central Web Profile

pjxtian@gmail.com (Paul Christian) — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 20:14:00 +0000

With the PR we've been getting I thought I better go and update my various social network profiles, but that got pretty boring so I made a central profile here and linked to it from Facebook etc., so now I only ever have to update in one place. A good example of a use for our free webpage, and a real time-saver. Admittedly the design is pretty rough'n'ready, but I have a useful profile evolution point now.

Two For The Day!

pjxtian@gmail.com (Paul Christian) — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 18:30:00 +0000

What a great day! We've had our second piece of blogsphere coverage, this time courtesy of Sarah Perez at ReadWriteWeb. Thanks Sarah - you explained us really well - and thanks too to Richard McManus of RWW who (being a fellow Kiwi :-) has been approachable and forthcoming with snippets of feedback over the last 2 and 1/2 years.

Click here for the RWW post...

Our First Bit of PR

pjxtian@gmail.com (Paul Christian) — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 08:12:00 +0000

It was really nice to see a post about us by Mike Butcher at Techcrunch UK, especially after being in development for 2 and 1/2 years.

When you've been working on something for that long, you get to a point where you don't see the wood for the trees, and you're in danger of being so 'inside' the thing, you could lose track of what the general public think of your product when looking at it fresh - so to hear Mike say 'Think online Dreamweaver for creative people' - well that's pretty well spot on.

Click here to read the article.

Using Flickr Photos in the Toolbar

pjxtian@gmail.com (Paul Christian) — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 16:12:00 +0000

Given one of the best uses of our free webpage is a central online profile, I was asked today if we'd built in access to Flickr photo's for use in the liveaps designer.

Well, at this stage we haven't but it's really easy to do anyway. Here's a short video showing how.

Twittering

pjxtian@gmail.com (Paul Christian) — Mon, 04 Feb 2008 15:48:00 +0000

Over the last couple of weeks I've been taking a close look at Twitter and have decided to add it to my daily input/output tools, and use it more like RSS for now than anything else.

The main bloggers I read all have accounts, so it's a really fast way to catch up on their latest posts.

Searching for people by email is always an easy way to go, although I did find today when I was trying to add someone to follow that there was some error happening in the service whereby it would add them but wouldn't show them in my followed people or item feed. I'll try again tomorrow.

I also discovered TinyURL which is a great service for generating short URL's to replace longer ones generated by things like blogposts.

I don't really expect to be followed much myself in Twitter (maybe a few mates might want to know when I write a new blog post) so I won't be out-putting much through it, but I will use it for gathering information in a wider sense than just blog feeds, and see how things develop from there.

UPDATE: I just checked my Twitter feeds and the new guy I followed appeared OK. It just wasn't instant.

V2.0 Pro Beta Invites Released

pjxtian@gmail.com (Paul Christian) — Sat, 02 Feb 2008 10:34:00 +0000

With our upcoming launch in late February/early March, we're issuing 200 invites for Pro Private Beta accounts via friends and family, interested groups, and have also supplied 50 each to the three blogs we rely on for our daily Web 2.0 news.

The Pro Beta accounts are free for 12 months from activation, and include 2GB storage with unlimited webpages. We'll support custom domain names, and we hope to get a strong feedback loop going with our initial Pro Users.

We're also taking pre-registrations for the first 1,000 free webpages (public beta). These accounts are limited to one page and the domain names are in the form of www.liveaps.com/username. They'll be ad-free, but the published pages will have a LiveAps banner along the top (like Blogger etc.,) inviting new Users to get their free site.

From now until launch date we're working on server optimization and bug removal, and also completing the build of the Tutorial Blog.

In the meantime any feedback about the product, presentation and business model is welcome, and we're open to all normal business communications.

PS., many thanks to Nicole Arnold for her help with our web design and also to John O'Connor for use of the soundtrack in our video overview.

Suggestions for the Ukes of UK NZ Tour

pjxtian@gmail.com (Paul Christian) — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 23:01:00 +0000

The Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain are touring NZ in late Feb/early Mar and the bass player, Jonty Bankes, just happens to be a mate of mine in Crystal Palace.

We've been talking about what might be good Kiwi covers to do in their shows, and I came up with 4 options after some very deep thought :-)

Number 1: Has to be 'Nature' written by Wayne Mason and reaching number 1 in NZ in 1970 performed by his band Fourmyula. The story of the song is here. It was the clear winner of No 1 NZ song of all time in an APRA vote, and although I couldn't find the original or Wayne's later solo release on YouTube, I did find the 1995 cover by Kiwi band 'The Muttonbirds' which gives a good rendition.

Number 2: This 'Crowded House' number would get the punters going.

Number 3: Knowing how the Uke's can sing, this wouldn't be a bad option.

Number 4: For something a bit more 'hip' maybe a Uke's version of Fat Freddy's 'Wandering Eye' would be cool.

However, it's over to the Uke's to work out what they'll play - all I know is that the gig's will be GREAT :-) I wish I could be there.

About Me

pjxtian@gmail.com (Paul Christian) — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 11:59:00 +0000

Hi, I'm a 44 year-old New Zealander currently living and working in London. I came over in May 2005 to join an online software development project which is now thankfully reaching release point.

I'm also a mad cricketer so having had the opportunity to join a pretty amazing club here and playing at extremely choice grounds, I'm kinda loving it!

WORK

I founded LiveAps Ltd (formerly Nirvana Technology) in Sept 2006 after working informally since May 2005 on the project.

Our reason for being is to host, develop, sell and support our online platform.

Previous Work History

- Mar 2000-present - Director - NZ Deer Co - NZ
- May 2005-Aug 2006 - Self Employed - Consultant - UK
- Oct 2001-Dec 2004 - Various - Wiseman Electric - NZ
- Apr 2001-Dec 2002 - Co-Founder - Big Image Print, NZ
- Apr 1997-Apr 2001 - Co-Founder - Larsen Sportwear - NZ
- Jun 1995-Mar 1997 - Agent - Life's A Beach - NZ
- Mar 1990-May 1995 - Founder - Mungus - NZ
- Jan 1981-Feb 1990 - 10 years after leaving school doing various jobs but mainly trying to play semi-professional cricket in NZ and UK.

INTERESTS

I've met a lot of good people in my time from many cultures and walks of life, and doing that's probably going to continue to be one of my great interests for as long as I live.

My family's great and Clare keeps all the photos going at Flickr.

Apart from that, the dynamics of a new business excite me, along with music (here's my YouTube favourites), a good crime novel, local history wherever I am, and anything I don't understand.

And then of course there's the great game - cricket!

I'm lucky enough to get to play for London New Zealand, so if you're a cricketer yourself, why not visit the website?

SOCIAL NETWORKS

Facebook
Kea (New Zealand)
MySpace
Xing
LinkedIn
Twitter

COMMUNICATIONS

Email pjxtian@gmail.com
Tel +44 7518 345679
Skype ID = pjxtian

First Post 2008

pjxtian@gmail.com (Paul Christian) — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 15:44:00 +0000

As we're now less than a month away from our public beta and have decided to release our product for End-Users under our LiveAps brand, I thought it about time to give the old blog a new look and to start writing regularly about business progress.

I'll also be posting about third party applications that could be useful to our Users as I stumble over them when reading the tech news.

We've launched a community site using the Ning platform as a way of getting and responding to feedback, and the liveaps.com website is getting a major overhaul prior to our public beta release.

After two and half years development time, I must say it's pretty exciting to be arriving at the point where our platform is sitting on a decent server farm and being used by people around the world!

It's really only the start of what we hope will be a long product evolution, but everything has to start somewhere. In early Feb we'll be jumping off that cliff and trusting like hell that our wings work :-)