GeekRebel

Lifting the Venture Capital Skirt PDF

2009-05-14T12:40:59Z

Click here for my 2009 NetProphet presentation in PDF. (Video to follow)

Also see the NetProphet Website and the very active Twitter Stream.

The Truth About Natura Rescue Remedy

2009-04-24T20:52:44Z

I've heard a couple of friends and family swear by Natura Rescue Remedy, "for Shock, Anxiety & Sleeplessness". So I thought I'd do a bit of research. Here's what I found:

Firstly, let's have a look at the ingredients listed on the Natura website. (The ingredients don't actually matter, but more about that later.)

Ambra grisea D6
Banisteropsis caapi Spag D60
Clematis vitalba (Clematis) aqua inf.
Helianthemum nummularium (Rock Rose) aqua inf.
Impatiens glandulifera (Impatiens) aqua inf.
Melissa officinalis Spag D3
Moschus moschiferus D6
Ornithogalum umbellatum (Star of Bethlehem) aqua inf.
Prunus cerasifera (Cherry Plum) aqua inf.

Let's look at each of these in turn:

Ambra grisea.
Natura says: "supports the functioning of the nervous system to treat anxiety, fear, hypersensitivity, shyness and numbness of the body."
Wikipedia says: "biliary secretion of the intestines of the sperm whale ... was used as a fixative in perfumery"

Banisteriopsis caapi
Natura says: "helps calm extreme nervous hypersensitivity"
Wikipedia says: Hallucinogenic used by native American tribes and some religious sects. Entheogenic.

Clematis
Natura says: "is a flower essence indicated for inability to focus on reality and the present and is useful in the treatment of shock."
Wikipedia says: Essentially toxic. Causes internal bleeding of the digestive track. Despite its toxicity, it was used by Native Americans in small amounts to treat migraines.

Rock Rose
Natura says: "is the flower essence that relieves extreme fear and a feeling of panic"
Wikipedia says: "This is a good nectar source for bees"

Impatiens glandulifera
Natura says: "acts on the nervous system to relieve irritability, restlessness, hyperactivity and impatience"
Wikipedia says: When crushed has a strong musky odour.

Melissa Officinalis
Natura says: "has a carminative and sedative action to help induce restful sleep, prevent insomnia, soothe irritability and help cope with stress and tension."
Wikipedia actually notes one study that did find it may relieve stress, though even the authors of this study state that further research is needed to confirm it.
I say: Don't expect much from this as Natura dilutes this ingredient 1000 times before adding it in with the mix of other ingredients.

Moschus moschiferus
Natura says: "acts on the central nervous system to relieve fainting, shock, anxiety and fear."
Wikipedia says: Siberian Musk Deer. Hunted for its musk gland (believed to have aphrodisiac qualities). Classified as a threatened species by CITES.
I say: Now Natura is helping to kill endanged animals!

Star of Bethlehem
Natura says: "is the principle flower essence specifically indicated for shock"
Wikipedia says: "The plant is toxic."

Cherry Plum
Natura says: "is a flower essence that acts on the nervous system to treat anxiety and fear"
Wikipedia says: "excellent for jam making"

Hopefully by now you've figured out that Natura is trying to fool people and relieve them of their money, rather than their anxiety. Firstly, not a single one of the ingredients has been proven to have any of the effects Natura proclaims. Furthermore, the ingredients are so dilute that they wouldn't have any effect in any case.

If you thought that you'd at least get a little bit high from Banisteriopsis caapi as the Native Americans did, think again. It is diluted 1x10^60 times before it's added. This means that there is 1 part of this in every 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 parts of water. That's a pretty big number. Let me try put this another way: It will take 2 billion doses, per second, to 6 billion people, for 4 billion years, to deliver a single molecule to any one patient.

I.e. you haven't a snowball's chance in midsummer to get any effect from Banisteriopsis Caapi.

And that ain't the end of it! Hold on to your chair for this one:

According to homeopathy principles, the more dilute the solution, the stronger the effects! I kid you not.

Now, I know some of you reading this are saying: "But I've tried homeopathy and it works for me!". And this may well be true, because of the Placebo Effect, and of it has indeed been scientifically proven that Placebos do help with symptomatic relief.

The question is: How much are you willing to pay for a Placebo?

---

References:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeopathy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rescue_remedy

Please share this article with your friends and family. Even if Rescue might have no effects on your body, the long-term effect on the environment from manufacturing and distribution of these remedies is highly destructive.

Entrepreneur Quote of the Day

2009-03-09T06:58:44Z

Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness. Concerning all acts of initiative and creation, there is one elementary truth, the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then providence moves too.

All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one's favor all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamed would have come his way.

Whatever you do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it. Begin it now.

- Goethe

Facebook Hate Not Permitted

2009-02-18T20:34:17Z

geekrebel

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Synthasite raises $20 million

2009-02-17T18:51:07Z

Vinny Lingham just announced to the the world that he has raised $20 million for Synthasite, a simple online website building tool.

After Twitter, this investment is probably the 2nd largest VC deal since Lehman Brothers hit the fan.

TechCrunch has more details, but seems skeptical and questions whether SynthaSite would be able to grow in the "current economic climate". I think this is a silly question. Services such as SynthaSite are perfectly positioned to take advantage of the situation.

There may be an economic crisis afoot, but TechCrunch is mistaken if it thinks it means every economically active person is going to go into hiding after being laid-off. There will be many small businesses founded by laid-off workers in the next year. These businesses will need websites, quick!

With SynthaSite you can set up a brand new website, choose a professional looking template, add some basic info about your business and even create an online store that automatically integrates with your PayPal account. You can then publish to a synthasite.com subdomain or simply pay $15 to buy a custom domain through SynthaSite. You can literally do all of this within 10 minutes.

The other question TechCrunch raises is the Me-Too players in the market. Geez, do they even deserve mentioning? Synthasite has been growing 34% month on month (see compete.com) over the last year, and there's a simple reason for this: Small Town South African born Vinny Lingham is smarter and faster than all the sheltered Stanford kiddies in Silicon Valley combined. Good luck to them though...

Disclaimer: Vinny is an investor in Skyrove WiFi Hotspots.

Wi-Fi in the Developing World

2009-02-10T08:00:31Z

Joy Tang recently sent me a bunch of interesting links anyone involved with Wi-Fi in the developing world should check out:

Wireless Networking in the Developing World (This is a brilliant practical guide everybody should read - h.)
http://wndw.net/

Wireless Africa wiki
http://www.fmfi.org.za/wiki/index.php/Wireless_Africa_Workshop

Wireless Africa Outcome Mapping Workshop at Winneba Open Digital Village, OVF Ghana
http://www.flickr.com/photos/1village/sets/72157607377038340/

Winneba Open Digital Village wireless mesh set up
http://www.flickr.com/photos/1village/sets/72157607311037594/

Last year (2007) through my role as the VP in a Taiwan OEM for networking equipment, I faciliated the process of making open mesh routers based on open source SW:
http://drupal.airjaldi.com/

I am currently part of a force to intiaite Open Hardware. The 2nd conference will be held in Taiwan in March time frame.
http://wiki.openpattern.org/index.php/OpenTechSummitTaiwan2008

oneVillage's Open Digital Village network key points:
http://www.opendigitalvillage.net/index.php?title=Main_Page

Paintbrush 2.0: MS Paint Clone for Mac OS X

2009-02-07T08:44:00Z

I often need to take a screenshot, crop it and save it to a web-friendly format.

In Windows this is a quick and easy process using MS Paint. However, there's nothing bundled with Mac OS that can perform this basic function. (Which is odd, considering they do bundle software that assumes I will start a garage band...)

Enter Paintbrush 2.0 by Soggy Waffles Software.

Paintbrush does all the basic things you need:

Paintbrush can open and save to most major image formats, including BMP, PNG, JPEG, TIFF, and GIF. Full support for transparency is available for image formats which support an alpha channel (currently PNGs and GIFs). You can also paste images copied from many common Mac applications, including Microsoft Office and Apple iWork.

Best of all, it's entirely free. (Free as in beer, and free as in open: the full source is distributed under the GPL.)

Gmail Now Offers Offline Access

2009-02-06T22:08:22Z

Gmail has just become perfect by offering offline access using Google Gears.

No longer do you have to download your mails using a separate application for those times you're running around without internet. Best of all, almost all the functionality you could want is there: read it, write it, label it or star it. Once you're connected to to the internet again, Gmail will send all mails in your outbox.

I think this makes Gmail qualify as the first fully fledged browser-based email application.

I've criticized Google (and others) in the past for overlooking developing countries, but this will be a huge boon to anyone familiar with Flaky Internet Connections in Africa and will further help Google in establishing a global base. Let's hope that 37 Signals and Salesforce.com will also wake up and smell the roses.

Demo Video Below (link):

Google Calendar Goes Offline with Gears

2009-02-06T22:01:17Z

Finally, I'm able to access my Google Calendar even when offline, as long as you are using Google Apps. The bad news is that for the time being it's Read-Only access, so you cannot update or edit any of your entries and have them synchronise later.

TheGrid - Worst. Demo. Video. Ever.

2009-02-05T07:34:19Z

Firstly, watch the demo video below (link):

Secondly, my apologies for making you do that...

So what's wrong with it (as if you had to ask):

1. It was probably made before Vincent Maher joined the team.

2. Horrible gut-wrenchingly irritating music. Someone decided to put some junior raver techie in charge of this project. Rave music sucks in general. It sucks even worse when you try to explain a product to someone at the same time.

3. Annoying voice-over. Possibly by the same raver techie; on speed.

4. What on earth has Facebook or MXIT got to do with TheGrid? Does it integrate with it? Doesn't look like it. Don't mention irrelevant information.

5. Shoddy video of cellphone screens. Take screenshots.

6. No-one cares about WAP or Java or the techie stuff behind it. Put this in the FAQ, and for crying out loud, don't use a PDF for your FAQ. You're a mobile company, make it mobile friendly!

7. Did you really just say: "Similar to Facebook, it's built on an open platform". More irrelevant facts that distract your audience from your message.

8. "Web Two Point Zero" - I think it's pronounced Web Two Point Oh, but I could be wrong. Either way, yet another irrelevant buzzword that does not help in any way to explain what the product is about.

You don't need a big budget to make a very good demo video. Just have a look at CommonCraft's "Explanations in Plain English" videos.

Watch and learn from the video below for Google Latitude, which will likely kick dust in TheGrid's eyes the moment it launches in SA, if for no other reason than having a decent demo video (link):

UPDATE: Arbitrary User informed me that Google Latitude is already available in SA. Just point your Mobile Browser towards http://www.google.com/latitude

Google Latitude Tells Mates Where You Are

2009-02-05T07:30:00Z

Google just launched Google Latitude, a nifty little mobile phone app that will show your friends, wife and boss exactly where you are! (And hopefully lets you know where they are as well...)

Of course, my first thought was to put it on my somewhat pricy Nokia E71 as a simple security tool, provided it would automatically send its coordinates. However, it looks similar to Vodacom's TheGrid in the sense that it will only give away your location when you manually send an update.

Either way, as with Google Book Search, Google did not think any African country was important enough to provide this service to.

UPDATE: Jonathan Endersby just informed me that Google Latitude is available in South Africa, but you can only download it by going to www.google.com/latitude using your mobile phone's browser.

Of course, South Africa has for sometime now had a local offering in the form of TheGrid, but I've steered away from TheGrid mostly because of privacy concerns. TheGrid pretends to be a funky young startup, but in actual fact is owned by Vodacom and I feel almost as if they are trying to hide this fact.

In the meantime i'll stick with PhoneLocator. In addition to displaying your location on google maps, you can also choose to show your location on Openstreetmap.org, which has significantly better street info for South African cities.

Google Latitude Intro Video below (link):

Smarten Up iPhone!

2009-01-31T22:44:57Z

Simon Dingle wrote a great article about perfecting the iPhone that I wish some folks in the Apple Ivory Tower would read. He points out the lack of core features such as being able to send vCards or forward SMS messages.

He then goes on to point some of the things he doesn't miss, and specifically sets his sights on MMS: "Get over it kids, you don't need MMS".

Simon is not the first person to say this to me. And every time it happens, I feel as if I just got told by my grandmother that I "just don't need the internet". If she never needed it, why should I?

Speaking of grandmothers: Nothing comes close to being be able to MMS family photos to PC illiterate grandmothers! (And don't even try to teach them to use something called an "application" on their phone)

MMS is a natural progression from SMS and I think it was Just Plain Dumb for Apple not to implement this.

If the argument is that multimedia could be sent by email, why then bother with SMS if you could simply force everyone to use iChat?

Or go a step further and take out the GSM chip and only allow you to make VoIP calls over WiFi networks?

Maybe the iPhone should smarten up a bit before calling itself a 'smartphone'.

Township Entrepreneurship and Naked Kings

2009-01-29T21:39:05Z

(Originally appeared on 11 December 2005 at yeahfi.com)

Mark Twain once said that any time he found himself in the majority on any given issue, he always reevaluated his position.

One of my favorite stories of all time is "The Emperor's New Clothes". The main character is a vain king with a particular affection for fine clothing. He gets swindled by two tailors who sell him a suit made of material so fine and pure that it was invisible to the foolish and the unworthy.

Of course, there is no material, but as the king and everyone else don't want to be exposed as fools, they all keep quiet. When the king parades his new suit in front of his subjects they all cheer and make comments about how 'fine' his new suit is. Until a little boy points at the king and shouts out "The King is naked!"

People started realizing the trick, but the king continues the parade, telling himself: "I must go on pretending. I cannot stop now"

I've often felt like the little boy, pointing at naked kings of all sorts. There is a particularly large amount of 'naked kings' being sold to the public these days through the insane amount of advertising, marketing and branding being forced upon us. But who is to blame? The 'swindlers', or the public who accepts their lies?

Luxury goods (think of a $100 rolled-up tobacco leaf) in particular is a whole 'naked empire' in itself. And it's particularly interesting when swindlers try to sell a 'naked king' to a group that isn't used to buying 'naked kings'.

For example, I recently went to a wine-tasting in Gugulethu. For those of you who don't know, Gugulethu is one of Cape Town's infamous townships, and when I was invited for a wine-tasting in Gugs, I thought my leg was being pulled.

But it appears Mzoli, an intrepid entrepreneur who owns a butchery, hair salon, restaurant, cellphone shop and shebeen all in one small building, was launching his own wine label. (The up and coming black middle class is a major new target market for the South African wine labels.)

Everyone at Mzoli's got free samples and Pieter, the wine maker, explained to a crowd of about a 100 black people how to drink and "appreciate" wine in the correct fashion.

He then asked the audience if they could identify the subtle hints of guava and tropical fruits in the Chardonnay and if they could taste any other fruits in the wine. "What else can you taste? What else can you taste?" he shouted at the somewhat rowdy crowd.

And the crowd answered as one: "Grapes!"

Cut Your Site In Half

2009-01-29T21:33:30Z

(Originally posted on 9 Dec 2005 at yeahfi.com)

We finally launched our first public Beta Wi-Fi hotspot this week! However, feature-wise, it's very much a stripped down version of what we envision. And that's a good thing!

Because I believe one should start simple. The really funny thing is, even though our new service does something very 'simple', the interface is anything but. To sign up as a new user to our service, you have to go through 11 webpages!

Our current design was done by developers, for developers". I.e. the webpages were actually built just as "test" pages so that our developers could test the working of the back-end system.

So we went back to the drawing board (literally) and realised straight away that we could cut out 3 of those webpages immediately before any major re-design or development.

Ironically, even though our design is already convoluted and the usability needs much improvement, we're already talking about extra features and in which priority we should be adding them to the existing webpages...

Then I saw a comment by Jason Fried on his Signal Vs. Noise blog: "As sites mature they should be getting smaller, not bigger. Fewer pages, not more. Fewer words, Fewer paragraphs, Fewer options. There's too much on too many sites."

Back to the drawing board again...

Update: Today the entire process has been cut down to 1 step and 3 steps for vouchers and credit cards respectively.

Mate of the Week - EverNote

2009-01-27T09:33:52Z

If like me, you struggle to keep your notes and thoughts together, you might want to take a look at EverNote.

EverNote is like Google Notebook on steroids. Google Notebook is being phased out as we speak. They are no longer signing up on new users and both EverNote and Zoho Notebook are helping users to import their notes from Google Notebook.

The beauty of EverNote is that it syncs across phones (but not S60, yet), PCs and Macs! I find their Mac application to be wonderfully slick and much more responsive than the Google Notebook plugin for Firefox ever was. It also helps that I can easily add notes and photos from applications other than my web browser to EverNote.

A nice little feature on the desktop app is that I can easily paste from the clipboard into Evernote (Ctrl-Command-V) or take a screenshot that gets copied directly to EverNote (Ctrl-Command-C)

Have a look at the video below for a tour of Evernote: