The fault for that lies squarely with me personally. This was my first entrepreneurial venture, one for which I sacrificed nearly two years of earnings and most of my savings. But it has been a commercial failure: I have been unable to turn ferocious, funny and brave journalism into gold.

It was a bold experiment. But it didn’t work.

There will be those happy to see us fail, among them ideological opponents, wrongdoers, exposed miscreants, disgruntled reviewees and others who, over the course of the last year and a half, have felt themselves for some reason short-changed by us. Our loyalty, however, is to our readers.

Because we could not have achieved the extraordinary profile and influence we did in the short space of time we were operating without the support of hundreds of thousands of readers and thousands of subscribers who put their hands in their back pockets to pay for our content.

I have been overwhelmed and enormously grateful for the enthusiasm of our quiet but fiercely loyal family. It is time, however, to draw a line gracefully under what we have achieved, to take stock, to express our gratitude, and to think about the next bit of the journey.

We are no longer accepting new subscriptions. Over the next few weeks, a few last pieces of pre-prepared content will appear on the site. Thank you, most sincerely, for reading. I’m personally very sorry I couldn’t make this work, and I regret bitterly the things The Kernel will not now do.

And here at The Kernel we have rarely shied away from a bit of gentle ribbing at the laugh-out-loud excesses of the self-regarding social media industry.  After all, the extent to which people feel “empowered” – that is, able to mouth off on any subject with confidence – the moment they acquire a Twitter account is genuinely comical.

But, actually, there’s something rather wonderful going on at these events, daft though their posturing can be. In fact, their very existence says something quite remarkable: that complex codes of social etiquette, previously the playground of the aristocracy, are flooding down the food chain to the lower orders.

Let me explain what I mean.

You see, the more loquacious members of the lower middle classes are these days invariably engaged in service industries, whether it’s public relations in the private sector or human resources in the public. And in these roles, relationships matter, especially now most of them occur over email and perhaps social media, where the potential for misunderstanding is great.

In other words, a slice of society that previously worked in relative isolation is now living socially, with jobs that require ever more sophisticated levels of negotiation, bargaining and communication with other human beings. How you to talk to people matters more for more people than it ever has before.

So they’re signing up in their thousands for conferences and courses that will help them find their way. Sure, there’s a heady whiff of the blind leading the blind, but what is all that windbaggery about “social media best practice” if it is not a group of people trying to feel their way through the construction of a crowd-sourced, internet-era Debrett’s?

Assembling a rubric for effective digital interaction is a worthwhile thing to do for the new connected masses. Those with the luck or determination to attend the best schools or universities already know the rules – they don’t change on the internet – but now, a portion of society who would never previously have bothered with learning which knife to pick up first are now scratching their heads and wondering how they ought to conduct themselves in the public square.

Worries about how to communicate on social platforms aren’t down to technological uncertainty. These days, everyone knows how to use the internet. They are manifestations of status anxiety; the result of ever-greater public scrutiny of the person we present to the world.

Of course, you see plenty of people getting it wrong. There are those who punch above their weight, chatting to celebrities and journalists as if the friendship went back years. There are those who spam: the gauche digital equivalent of Jehovah’s witnesses, tagging everyone they can think of with links to their own blog posts. And there are those, of course, who become abusive.

And there’s reason to suppose an arbitrary cut-off, of sorts: the newly-mannered, hyper-connected service industries populated by the first university-going generation are becoming, socially, professionally, and economically, a breed apart from the council estates their parents might have grown up on.

But the key point to note is that this is etiquette, not technical literacy, on the move – and on a colossal scale. Social media conferences are the new finishing schools for the lower middle classes: places designed not just to impart the ideology of the day, but to equip students with the tools they need to operate in disorientating new professional and social environments.

There’s an argument that the internet is getting more unpleasant, not less. But it seems to me that the trolling phenomenon is pretty much confined to the working classes, who struggle sometimes to navigate these new worlds and appreciate the consequences of their actions, and a few gobby Left-wing agitators.

In fact, the majority behave rather well, their politesse informed by apprehensiveness about when and how to tag people in a tweet and whether and how to use hashtags. These are worries about manners and mores, not about technology.

We should remember, too, that Twitter is not yet, and may never be, a mainstream technology. According to researchers in this area it’s Twitter, with its architectural bias toward rapid, angry and anonymous exchanges, on which much of the worst abuse occurs.

Meanwhile, on Facebook, in email and elsewhere, more people are learning to code-switch – linguist argot for speaking appropriately in different circumstances – than ever before, faced with the variegated demands of SMS, Skype and all the other ways in which we babble to one another, each of which demands a slightly different vocabulary and register.

If those who would in their parent’s generation have been filing clerks or housewives are finding a place for themselves in the information economy in consultancy and communications work, that’s nothing to be sniffed at, nor is their new preoccupation with appropriateness in discourse.

Deride it all you like for its naïveté and foolishness. But the spread of manners, and of people thinking about them, driven by social media and codified by the glut of books and conferences, can only be a good thing – especially in a digital world saturated with furious trolling from below and jealous spite from behind.

It’s taken us a while to read all the novels, categorise them (more on the award categories and prizes soon), strip out any disqualified entries and get them all tagged and filed for public voting. But here they now are.

We have left the author’s original formatting intact in each case, down to the filename. Nothing has been changed about the files since they were submitted at the end of #NaNoWriWee.

(In some cases, that means there are notes intact, comments or messages to Kernel staff! You can ignore those. We’ve left the documents exactly as they were purposefully, to preserve the authors’ work and formatting.)

Later this week, we’ll present a simple voting system for authors to vote on their fellow participants’ work and for you, the public, to vote as well.

As previously mentioned, HarperCollins will select a book or books to be published by them as e-books. Those books will receive a thorough edit before going into production.

As for the rest, well… enjoy the gritty glory of some incredible weekend accomplishments!

I first met Trost in Dublin, in October 2010, at the inaugural f.ounders event. We were in a group of about thirty people scoffing Big Macs and chicken nuggets at 3 a.m. at the Westbury Hotel, sobering up – slightly – from a night in Dublin’s trashiest nightclub, Krystle. Somehow I had a wannabe glamour model and “local IT girl” attached to my left arm. Such things exist in in that city, apparently.

He was the sort of clean-cut, well-bred college boy you could already imagine taking advantage of success yet to come: the boat, the house in the Hamptons, the pressed white chinos and the sparkling, rake-thin Vanderbilt wife hanging on his every word. (This effect has not been lessened by a recent gym binge, which has seen him complement his beloved Big Macs and Taco Bell with a daily exercise regimen.)

Jason moved to the UK in 2007 to avoid a US ban on gambling he described as “crazy” in a guest column for The Kernel in December 2011, having earned his Bachelor’s in computer science and cut his teeth designing software for the global asset management division of UBS. Smarkets, which enables punters to place bets against one another in an online exchange, is his second start-up.

“My first start-up, Descipher, was a modest success,” he says. “With help from my father, who was a pathologist, I created software that enabled consumers to self-diagnose from lab test results. We wanted to make medical information accessible to everyone. I worked on it full-time and it was later sold to Ativa, a Minnesota-based medical technology company.”

Smarkets has enjoyed surprising success given the hegemony of Betfair. It has processed over £265 million worth of bets since launching the product  in 2010 and boasts what the North Carolina-born entrepreneur describes as “industry-low transaction fees”. The company plans to relaunch its consumer product for a higher bracket audience in 2012 and open up its trading API to hedge funds in 2013.

“We also want to let other start-ups build betting applications on top of our platform,” he says. “We’re running a trial now.”

In a race of underdogs, Smarkets is starting to look like a banker. Perhaps that’s why Jason looks so pleased with himself these days. His swagger is typical of an American, but rare in Europe, particularly in an industry stacked high with old timer, track-side bookies. Online betting, with its efficiencies and opportunities, is worth $32 billion of the $381 billion global betting and gaming market. His eyes are on that prize.

Jason has typically cocksure, American-scale visions for where his company could eventually go. “The betting industry has been starved of innovation,” he says. “But it deserves to be treated as an asset class like other financial products. Look at the sophistication of some of the hedge funds that trade contracts. We’re looking to provide the industry with the technology to put betting on a par with that.”

But he also has geographic horizons wider than the United States – and not just because he was forced to move here to start his business, he insists. A year in Germany in 1998 left Jason fluent in German, and he has also lived in Paris – though his French, he confides sheepishly, is restricted to ordering drinks and booking hotel rooms.

“Je voudrais faire une réservation,” he demonstrates, proudly.

(You might imagine that after a year in Bavaria the man would learn to hold his drink, but newly clean-living chief executive Jason is unabashed about his shaky tolerance for alcohol. “Two beers and I’m done,” he admits, lifting an expensive glass of whiskey to his lips.)

Some people are born with six years’ worth of boy scout leadership already running through their veins. And, throughout our friendship, Jason has shown a keen sense of civic duty. So I get a sense that he might have aspirations for public office, like many ambitious entrepreneurs of his generation. When I ask him, he’s cagey – on the record, at least – but it would be a surprise to see him in betting, or tech, forever.

For at least the next few years, though, beating the competition is his focus. And there are few founders in Europe who can match his charisma and sheer force of will. Securing his latest round of funding was a superhuman effort: investors can be wary of betting start-ups, often for no good reason. And founding CTO Hunter Morris left the company quietly late last year, seemingly frustrated with the demands of start-up life.

But Jason is that rare thing in Europe: a competent, technically proficient, fiercely competitive grown-up with charm. Deutsche Telekom apparently agrees. I’ll be a dog player here and say it: given the bad press Betfair has received in recent years and the staggering resentment of its own reluctant user base, Trost is pushing at an open door. It’s tough to imagine its market share weathering upstarts like Smarkets forever.

Unless you’re twelve, or you’ve only ever done it reverse cowgirl because even prostitutes can’t bear to look you in the eye, there’s no reason why you should know that this happened. But that’s what we’re here for, to suffer indignity so you don’t have to.

The sight of thousands of pungent, bollock-scratching virgins waiting for, and then not being told, the price or date of release – they didn’t even show the bloody thing – was too embarrassing for words.

So embarrassing, in fact, that we can only explain precisely how dreadful it was by sharing with you ten things less cringe than the spectacle we valiantly endured on your behalf.

Here they are.

The word “street”

No one street uses the word street. See also: urban, trendy and posh. Just stop it.

A street

Gap yahs

Oh, so you went to the Congo to work in an orphanage for three and a half weeks, and felt, you know, “really connected”? SHUT UP.

That warm glow you’re feeling is dysentery

Replica football jerseys

Cristiano Ronaldo hates your fucking guts.

Up here’s for thinking, down there’s for dancing

Madonna’s arms

We get it, you’re old and you hate yourself. No shame there. But for the love of God dress your age, or, yes, we reserve the right to cringe.

David Cameron pretending to like The Smiths

No, you don’t. Stop lying.

A predator festooned in his usual raiments

Reading PandoDaily

Just when you thought it was getting better.

Like chickenpox, it’s painful but you only suffer it once

Pushing your Foursquare check-ins to Twitter

Before you say it, yes, we totally do this, but we recognise at least that it is not hot.

It might be big but it’s not clever

The Hospital Club waiting list

Absolutely no one cool has ever publicly admitted to enjoying this place. Seriously: who would wait on a list to drink in an overpriced bar full of heinous agency tossers?

A sample of the current waiting list

Android phones

We’ve been through this over and over, and still you people don’t listen.

Jimmy Savile almost certainly had an Android phone. Think what you’re doing.

Wizards

When did wand stop being a dirty euphemism and become an acceptable topic of adult conversation?

‘It shows that there’s no limit to what gay and lesbian people can do, even being a wizard headmaster’ – Stonewall, 2007

As you were.

I was nearly 12. The crime was so minor I shall brush over it quickly, but the reaction quite contradicted the indiscretion. I was told to be quiet; ten minutes later I was having my school diary marked with a black point for having talked again. In similarity to my belief Stefan was to blame, here I understood quiet to mean “make less noise”, not, “do not talk”. To this day I still feel this was a fair assumption.

I cried. No, I wailed. It was the final class of the day and for the next three hours until home time I was in upmost hysterics. I believe the teacher didn’t know what hit him. Nor did my form teacher. Fittingly for this story, that day I went home with my Head of Merchant Relations for supper. Andy of course wasn’t my HoMR at the time. Aged 10, he was my Jonna Lomu Rugby playing arch rival on the PlayStation.

I’m not sure his mum knew what hit her either that evening. A lot of water came out of a small boy that day. Of course no one should ever feel sorry for me. I had a very privileged education. An all-boys private school, incredible facilities, the best teaching staff the Bagshot area could muster up. It was only a black mark after all. But I was always a good boy.

I was a prefect in prep school, I led the anti-bullying team during independent school and was class President for all my years at High School in America. I played by the rules and no doubt I benefited from doing so. Teachers did seem to like me; with that I could negotiate rules to benefit me. Let’s flash forward to what’s more important however: today.

I’m 26 ¼ now. My personality is different to that of the editor of this magazine, without doubt. I would be interested to know how he was in school. Maybe a square bracket annotation could follow here. [No.—Ed.] But, like the editor, I run my own company. Sure, they’re in different vertices but we’re all playing the same game. Today, I’m still that good boy – no alliteration.

But I feel it holds me back. I hire, I have to fire. I make decisions that team members aren’t happy with, but I believe they are the best for the business. I have to answer to investors when KPIs are missed or decisions change. I’ve received threats for potential copyright infringement, and threats from previous business partners. I argue with co-founders and business partners.

I don’t suspect these experiences are any different to the other hundreds of thousands of other business leaders around the world. But in a start-up, there are more uncertainties, especially when you’re working towards break-even point, as so many are. Where your revenue flow is on a knife-edge and platform evolution rests, smaller decisions seem huge.

Being thrust into these experiences by a series of quick funding rounds and service launches has at times brought back that inner anxiety; the feeling of being “told off”. There are no tears these days, luckily. But while rationally seeing these problems or situations through to their conclusions I have also had to learn how to manage my emotions.

Of course, the correct emotional state in business is not to have one at all. To fully separate any personal feelings from the situation, Concentrating on the next decision for the business can only be done without wondering if you’re “in trouble”. Case in point: a customer called up livid assuming we had sold him a counterfeit DVD. He wanted to sue, call the police.

Sure, it was how people react when they are angry and upset, but reacting to it personally wouldn’t have helped. I stepped in, we got to the bottom of the matter, and everything was sorted. (It wasn’t counterfeit: it had somehow been opened en route). Take the personal out of everything, then add it back in later. That’s not to say be an arsehole and forget about people’s emotions. That is wrong.

I sometimes wonder, if I had been in trouble more as a child, that when situations occur in my adult life like the above I’d be better prepared to deal with them. Being a good boy isn’t always good, I guess. But I’m learning how to grow a thick skin now.

Red Herring’s organisers failed to rebut TechCrunch’s claims that the business was now “a revenue-raising exercise” that “lacks respectability in the marketplace” and is “trading on Red Herring’s long-lost past as an editorial force”.

Strong allegations. But they’re entirely congruent, as are the reports from start-ups listed in TechCrunch’s coverage, with what The Kernel has heard from those “lucky” enough to receive an email or call from the awards company.

“During our enquiries we found little evidence that hundreds of startups – Red Herring claims 500 applied last year – had applied for the awards of their own volition,” says TechCrunch. “Indeed, the vast majority … say they were cold-called by Red Herring.”

And then the kicker. “Only when a start-up expressed interest in attending were they told of the $3,000 fee.”

But let me add something here. What I find more troubling than the naked profiteering that has been going on for so long in plain sight is the level of company information Red Herring demands from shortlisted candidates.

A database of multi-year revenues, EBITDA and compounded annual growth rate (CAGR), combined with all the other data Red Herring is collecting would be valuable data to market analysts and investors. Details about service providers would be useful to other providers.

Is this data being sold? If not, why is it being collected? Because there’s no evidence of a competent or reliable sorting procedure and, as Mike Butcher exposes in today’s report, the judges may well be imaginary. So it’s not to aid the judging process.

I ask because the replies I’ve had to enquiries about Red Herring differed slightly in emphasis from those Mike Butcher has received. Specifically, three former applicants expressed concern – and remorse – at the amount of information they were talked into handing over.

The assurances about confidentiality given on Red Herring’s website are worded in a manner we might charitably call amateurish. (Sceptical observers might ask why Red Herring felt the need to reassure applicants of the same thing four times.)

Your submission is 100% confidential. No financial or other competitive information is ever disclosed. Only a select few Red Herring team members have access to the information. They are sworn to secrecy.

“Sworn to secrecy.” Totally awesome, Sabrina!

That start-ups should steer well clear of Red Herring is already obvious from their grotesque Rachmanism. But those who have applied in the past may want to get in touch with the organisation to ask what kind of data it is holding about them.

They should, at the same time, ask what data is being used for, and to whom it has been sent, using lawyers if necessary.

You see, there’s an argument that awards ceremonies like this and advisors like Ariadne Capital provide a useful filter in themselves, marking out chief executives stupid enough to fall for their snake oil.

Venture capitalists privately scoff at founders who pay thousands of pounds for useless awards and inane advice.

But there can be no defence of the sly misuse of confidential business data, shared in good faith, albeit foolishly, to a zombie magazine lumbering on painfully as a conference organiser.

You might think it churlish to ask if Red Herring is breaking the law – certainly no evidence of that has been found – but given that organisation’s modus operandi, would anyone be surprised if this turned out to be the case?

Someone should put a call in to the Information Commissioner’s Office. But there’s something even fishier about Red Herring, and my hunch is that the worst revelations are yet to come.

How many times have potentially enlightening debates about business models or consumer habits or growth or investment or some other, infinitely more interesting discussion topic been derailed by this soporific garbage?

If women want to stage their own conferences to discuss under-representation, that is a good thing. The more women in the industry, the better. Really. (Just don’t expect to be on the pitch if you’re not comfortable with a level playing field.)

But what’s most peculiar about this empty spectacle of bien pensant posturing is that, so often, it’s actually men doing the posing. I think it’s worth pausing for a moment to consider why that might be so.

No matter the significance, newsworthiness or even comic potential of what’s happening on stage, a male tech blogger can always be relied upon to bleat out the same, tired old commentary as if he were a bold social reformer, rather than the bland, craven hack he so often is.

They do it in the full knowledge that they are being recklessly disingenuous. For this is the technology industry: there are more men in it because the male mind is, in general, better primed with the sorts of skills the industry values; men are simply better suited to most technology jobs.

Women therefore tend to work in roles that require finesse and communicative skills, where they pop up in this world at all. What is hard to understand about this, or offensive about pointing it out?  The sexes are wired differently, and that’s perfectly fine.

There will be exceptions. Women who succeed should be celebrated – though on their merits, not because they have a vagina (hello, Evening Standard). But there will always be more men. It’s a biological inevitability.

It’s certainly nothing to feel crippling guilt about.

Not to be crude, but it does make me wonder if these men, earnestly tweeting their despair at the lack of punani under the spotlight, have mislaid their dumpsticks. I mean, seriously: what turns a normal man into a docile, cringing coward who can only muster “where the bitches be at” when asked to pass judgment on a discussion of importance?

Is today’s man really so emasculated?

Or perhaps it’s the opposite. Perhaps it’s their members leading the way. Perhaps these buffoons are trying to suck up to women merely to get laid. (Newsflash: no woman wants a man so spineless and so ostentatiously beta.) Who can say.

But what infuriates me beyond reason is the implication that the technology industry’s accomplishments are so insignificant and its progress so meagre and unimportant that the dearth of women in boardrooms and on conference panels is a subject worthy of so much time and attention.

It isn’t. Nor, particularly, is the under-representation of ethnic minorities, or gays, or Jews, or paraplegic Armenian lesbians. There aren’t many other homosexuals in tech, but you don’t hear me banging on about it.

I mean, Christ, for a world that prides itself of being a fierce meritocracy, we don’t half go in for some special pleading and minority elevation, don’t we?

The truth is this debate simply doesn’t matter that much. Impressive women who can stand their ground alongside men – and there are plenty of them – succeed not in spite of a supposedly oppressive male atmosphere but because of it.

Because, actually, women have it easy in tech: there are so few of them that conference organisers are desperate to put them on stage. Feature writers are unendingly enthusiastic about trailing glossy pics of them in newspapers and magazines. Prime Ministers are anxious to meet them and be photographed alongside these trailblazing digital divas.

When you think about how easy it is for a female founder to get media coverage, it’s the men I feel sorry for.

And you do have to feel particularly sorry for those poor, disadvantaged men on stage, who are privately as cheesed off by the tweets of loony feminist activists and journalists as those journalists’ own readers are. The specific problem for VCs and start-up chief executives is that they have to pay lip service to the bores, for fear of negative publicity or opprobrium from colleagues.

I’m afraid it’s time to be honest about what’s really going on when a tech blogger – or even, for shame, a proper newspaper journalist – makes these impassioned pleas for arbitrary “equality” or – shudder – “quotas”. Either they are weak and stupid or they are horny.

So let’s stop patronising women. The best women don’t want your pity and the mediocre ones don’t matter anyway. And complaining about a lack of women on-stage at a technology conference is not a brave political statement or an expresssion of the desire for change, or equality, or social progress.

Instead, it is an admission that the commentator has given up trying to engage critically with the issues being discussed. It is an abnegation of intellectual responsibility; a cry for professional help.

It is just another form of empty-headed crowd pleasing; an alternative to coming up with something insightful, useful or witty.

We shouldn’t give in to such vacuity. If you’re a journalist, stop being such a lazy, spineless weasel and start addressing the big issues. Because technology  is changing our world in extraordinary, disorientating ways.

But society has no hope of keeping abreast of the vastness and speed of these shifts when its chosen interpreters are hung up on tired 1960s identity politics and special pleading on behalf of groups to which they do not even belong.

These companies are mistaking journalists and quangocrats for customers. The reality is, internet users are becoming ever more suspicious and resentful of the sort of useless social mash-ups Shoreditchers are trying to emulate. (That’s why none of them is getting traction.) A wider malaise of entitlement and foolish optimism is sweeping Britain and America, gilded by the Oprah Winfrey school of vacuous, feel-good spirituality that tells readers they need only wish for something to be true in order for the universe to conspire on their behalf to provide it.

But we might have hoped that our entrepreneurs would have resisted such admittedly seductive ideas, which are really elaborate methods of evading reality and responsibility. Entrepreneurs should be reading Christenson, not Coelho. Those who are know that the social media wave has crested. They understand why Union Square Ventures’ Fred Wilson did not make a single investment in 2012. They know that the smart conferences are looking beyond apps and the social web.

The internet, as we now know, has singularly failed to deliver on its promises; indeed, the entire technology industry is failing. And the public is starting to notice, starting to ask where the hoverboards and jet packs are, and starting to get angry. Because the gross privacy violations and betrayals users have been subjected to are too painful prices to pay for a product that lets you share photographs of your cat, or harass other people about their lifestyle choices or favourite movie.

The technology industry elsewhere is waking up to its responsibilities, and perhaps its destiny, throwing attention and capital at the quantified self and internet of things movements. Yet East London remains comically untroubled by such revelations, churning out useless social networks and utilities that to those of us with long memories resemble nothing so much as poor imitations of products and business models that failed five years ago in California.

There are nascent glimmers of promise, but it will be some time before we know if the two laptops and a co-working membership crowd are capable of applying themselves to problems that actually matter. Most troubling of all is the lack of awareness that there is even a problem, or, worse, that regardless of the silliness of their ideas, their self-regard will always be supported by an establishment that is desperate for them to succeed.

Desperate the powers behind the Tech City Investment Organisation may be – for jobs, for taxes, for entrepreneurial credentials – but, for now, their efforts would be better spent on the economically productive areas like Cambridge, and not on the increasingly publicly subsidised and failing European internet sector. (You have to feel for the venture capitalists, frankly… they must privately despair at the quality of businesses coming through their doors.)

Meanwhile, the sickness that grips east London – the entitlement culture and the foolhardy state largesse – is threatening to turn promising young buds into putrefying vegetables. The world does not owe you a living, our parents used to say. Start-ups would be well advised to proxy that remark: the world does not owe you profit and traction, and you will never attain it so long as you slack off in the hope that someone else will do all the heavy lifting for you.

There is a very old truism being ignored here: create something people actually want. To find out what they want, you only need to listen. Not to the tech blogs or ridiculous industry gurus, but to your customers. How many east London start-ups are truly solving an urgent need? I can’t think of one founded in the last twelve months that qualifies. Sometimes it can seem as though the preening wannabe CEOs of Shoreditch care more about their public profile than their P&L.

Stop wasting time jonesing for invitations to Buckingham Palace, guys, and get back to the office. Your country needs you, but you’re not serving it by sucking up to the self-interested apparatus of the Establishment, believing, like some benefits-drunk skaghead, that the State will provide, and that its engorged and multitudinous tentacles are operating in your interests.

Within the QS phenomenon, I’ve always had an inherent suspicion of step tracking, and, specifically, the FitBit device. Pedometers have been around for a long time, so if step tracking is genuinely useful, why has it suddenly seen a surge in popularity? If I’m fit and active, will walking a little more actually make a significant impact on my health anyway? Will it help me to lose weight? Does it help me to get fitter and stronger? Shouldn’t I just go to the gym instead? And is the data even accurate in the first place?

It always seemed to me that people were tracking their steps more for its own sake than as a motivator to actually go out and change something about their lifestyle. Whether as part of our inherent curiosity to know more about ourselves or simply as a way of creating beautiful graphs and charts of data, tracking steps for the sake of it is not going to do a person’s health and fitness any good. And let’s be honest, is the data even interesting in the first place?

On the surface, there don’t appear to be too many applications for knowing how many steps you’ve walked in a day. Sure, you could use the step count to assess how active you are against general norms – a common baseline in order to be considered “active” is 10,000 steps per day, which translates to around five miles – but surely most people are able to intuitively estimate how active they are without the need to track the data so exhaustively on a daily basis?

In FitBit’s introductory video, the company claims that everyday changes can lead you to walk as much as 700 miles further or even climb the equivalent height of Everest in a year. But does the lure of a higher step count really motivate people enough to make these significant everyday changes? How many people actually reach those lofty goals over the course of a year? It’s easy enough for people to make short-term changes, but for people with a standard routine and limited time, incorporating two miles of extra walking per day is going to be a hard thing to make stick in the long term.

Actually, the evidence is that step tracking can work. Statistics show that the average user takes over 40 per cent more steps per day; and a recent obesity study found that in the first six months, over 40 per cent of Fitbit users lost five or more pounds. Impressive numbers, and I think there are two reasons for this success.

The first is gamification. Gamification is one of the most appealing and motivating factors at play in the QS movement, with leaderboards being a key feature of most self-tracking apps. Competition is a powerful motivator, and even with something as simple as step tracking, being able to say that you’ve beaten your friend is a strong incentive to take the stairs at work, or to walk shorter distances instead of taking the car. Shame is also a powerful motivator: if you thought you were fit and healthy, but then found that you were way below the FitBit average in terms of the number of steps taken, you’d likely resolve to do something about it.

The beauty of gamification is that the tracking devices themselves don’t even need to be accurate to produce these motivations in people; they merely need to produce consistent results between users so that comparison is effective. Nike, whose proprietary Fuel Points measure has less everyday meaning than a straightforward statistic like the number of steps walked, knows this.

This encourages new Fuel Band users to compare their stats against other users rather than against individual goals that are difficult to immediately quantify. As such, gamification is built into the product from the beginning, and users can even compare their statistics against those of elite athletes if they so wish.

There are still challenges. Gamification will not be enough to make step tracking work for everybody. For every winner on the leaderboard, there is a loser: beating your friends can be a powerful motivator, but consistently losing to them can be just as powerful a de-motivator. And what if you forgot to put on your FitBit one morning? Would you take the stairs at work, or would you just take the elevator because you’d be unable to take the credit for it otherwise? The challenge for devices manufacturers here is to find other ways to encourage lifestyle changes outside of the friendly competition element.

And step tracking can be enormously effective at helping you to lose weight, without even changing how active you are. At its most basic, the amount of weight a person loses or gains comes down to the simple equation of calories in minus calories out. By tracking steps, you can immediately get a handle for one side of the equation by learning how many calories you use up in your normal daily activities over the course of an average day or week.

However, in order to actually achieve any weight loss, the other side of the equation still needs to be balanced. You can walk twenty miles a day, but you still won’t lose any weight if all you eat is pizza. So you need to track the amount of calories in as well. Unfortunately, this is where balancing the equation gets hard in today’s world. Whereas step tracking is passive and automatic, there is no existing way of tracking your food consumption without resorting to becoming a part-time data-entry person. (The current market-leading services, such as MyFitnessPal, require users to manually enter every item they eat and drink, which is both time-consuming and error-prone.)

Many metrics are becoming as easy to track as your steps, with products like the Withings scale for automatic weight tracking and WellnessFX, which can give you a full health breakdown in exchange for just a drop of blood. But, arguably, the most important metric, food consumption, does not yet even have a semi-automatic solution. Innovation here would be an enormous step towards solving our increasing problem with obesity.

Chris Hollindale is co-founder & CTO of Hasty

The formats were made for each other.

So it’s surprising, in a way, that it has taken this long for a fully-fledged social network for pranks to emerge. Last week, German start-up Klash announced a six-figure investment into its platform, on which users are encouraged to dare their friends. These dares range from the asinine to the eyebrow-raising.

Klash presents a daily challenge to its users, but also allows challenges to be set between friends. And all the usual voting and social sharing tools are there too, of course, to encourage users, in the words of the founders, simply to have more fun – to inject a bit of playtime into the dull grind of adult existence.

It’s an appealing proposition. The psychology of practical jokes has been somewhat flattened and harshened by reality television. These days, pranking is about peacocking machismo or ritual public humiliation. If the Klash platform were to take off, could it reintroduce some innocent joy into the business of acting like a doofus?

After all, most of the dares on the site so far are pretty tame. The risk that pranks as viral spectator sports might lead to ever more dangerous acts of stupidity seems not to be realised – though there’s no telling to what extent the list of dares is being engineered or moderated by Klash in these early days.

Such moderation doesn’t scale, and the team will be spending a lot of money on lawyers in the next few years insulating themselves from liability. It’s obviously something they’re thinking about: founder Alex Napetschnig told me that Klash requires a login via Facebook, which generally “prevents people from doing very stupid stuff”.

“It’s like posting pictures on Facebook,” he says. “You are in a social community, and you have to live with the consequences.”

His optimism is admirable. I can’t help but wonder, though, whether this sort of silo for particular kinds of action and content has had its day. Do people still visit dedicated social networks? I can think of successful examples of this model only in music and dating, not in such a specific niche.

The site appears to be gaining some initial traction. “We had some kids in Holland who were doing snow angels in their boxer shorts,” says Napetschnig. “You see, we try to position ourselves not in the Jackass segment but in the fun segment, to encourage people to get out there, enjoy themselves and not take themselves so seriously.

“For example, we’ve hosted Klash dinners. They’re like a regular dinner, but you’re not allowed to use cutlery or eat for yourself. Those little rules create so much fun. That’s a good example of the spirit of the site.”

Other challenges on the site include well-worn student favourites, likely to induce anger and dry cleaning bills. “Smash an egg on a friend’s head” and “shake a can of Coke and give it to a friend” are popular examples. There’s also the more masochistic strain, including “‘ice’ yourself in the middle of a crowd” and “eat an onion”.

What would in previous eras have been restricted to the heads and photo albums of a few prank-loving frat boys is now spilling out onto the internet. The exhibitionism coded into Klash is what the team will be hoping lifts it into the A-list. The team says human beings “weren’t born for boring”.

It’s early days for this experiment in juvenilia. Refreshingly, however, one thing you can’t accuse the founding team of is not practising what they preach. One can’t help but feel this is a university project, growing out of control, in search of a business model. But then, other social networks have done rather well with less.

Just don’t even think about smashing an egg on my head, bozos.

Mensch paid $1,095 for the domain articl.com in November 2012, when Menshn was still a going concern. The Kernel understands that Luke Bozier was involved in discussions about the new service, suggesting that even before the revelations about Bozier’s private life, the pair were considering a move from the flatlining Menshn.

Former Tory MP Mensch has reportedly been soliciting advice from Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, who recently moved to the UK and who has been establishing himself as a technology mentor to the rich and powerful. Wales did not return a request for comment.

Articl.com was registered via the same private registration method as menshn.com, except domain privacy settings were applied after the initial purchase. Consequently, old preview text on Google lists “Louise Mensch” as the administrative contact.

Mensch’s London address in Child’s Street and a mobile telephone number are easily searchable online as a result. Articl.com itself is not yet live.

It is not yet known what service articl.com will host, though given Mensch’s history as a member of the Select Committee for Culture, Media and Sport and the name of the start-up, it is likely to be a content start-up of some kind.

Mensch declined to comment on the contents of this report.

As a content creator, I ought to be – and am – viscerally opposed to piracy, even though I too get frustrated at the absurdity of geographic rights restrictions, but when I look at the dire state of the creative industries and how derivative and moronic their output so often is, I can’t help but ask the question.

There are two interrelated points here: the first and most important is that there is more good content than anyone will ever be able to consume on their own, across a bewildering range of formats. The second is that the content being produced today is so squalid that the arguments for its protection and continued production are weak.

Culture has always produced a lot of drivel along with the diamonds. But are we producing diamonds any more? Certainly academics, art historians and journalists have never been so scathing about the output of the contemporary creative industries.

Hollywood has lost its way utterly, the consensus seems to indicate, lurching from sequel-filled summers to endless comic book adaptations that speak not to the aspiration and nobility of the human spirit but only to the creative bankruptcy of screenwriters and the new risk-averse attitude of commercial executives.

The book trade, too, needs saving from itself. Are we really to feel remorseful at the demise of an industry whose crowning recent achievements are soft porn and Katie Price’s fifth wittering autobiography. Some way from the glories of Enlightenment philosophy and Romantic novels, innit.

Amazon and its new digital marketplaces and smart reading devices have got more people reading, yes, but they’re all reading the same, dull-as-ditchwater mainstream drivel. That’s not a problem if you believe that books are gateway drugs, but it is for modern novelists.

Why? Because the great literature readers are moved to investigate, if they are, after being introduced to reading by the likes of Harry Potter or Fifty Shades, was written a bloody long time ago. Look at the few decent bits of literature in the bestseller lists and you’ll see what I mean.

I’m not just talking about movies, music and books. The contemporary art world too is stagnant, in deep and desperate crisis. Not for nothing are the new art-focused tech start-ups driving more people to fewer works: a vanishingly small number of artworks today have any hope of speaking to the public.

High culture artists working today seem hopelessly preoccupied with their own egos and media profiles. Does Tracey Emin imagine that her fetid, pornographic doodles will one day hang alongside Caravaggios? Does Damien Hirst think a few coloured glass medicine bottles deserve a place in the history books?

No wonder that when people these days are quizzed about their favourite works of art, they cleave to the classics.

When I interviewed Carter Cleveland of Art.sy in Berlin recently, I asked him whether he was concerned that products like his are responsible for accelerating the homogenisation of culture.

After all, it’s true, isn’t it, that services like Last.fm, far from delivering the promise of offbeat indie discovery, instead simply generate new marketing channels for the likes of Lady Gaga and One Direction. Does Art.sy simply enable a million people to vaguely indicate that, “Yeah, I quite like that Mona Lisa thing”?

My question was not intended to be hostile. Indeed, the more I think about it, the more it’s clear to me that exposure to great works is a public good, particularly when you look at the absurd dross being shown in Tate Modern and celebrated by prizes like the Turner.

The one glimmer of hope is, perhaps unpredictability, television. Hollywood has lost much of its allure and ability to inspire, yet TV has become ever more compelling and sophisticated. Who would have imagined that a medium once so derided for being brainless would be such a jewel?

The Oscars shortlists these days make depressing reading. But look at the saturation of brilliant television programmes such as Breaking Bad and the surfeit of marvellous HBO shows, and compare it to the one or two good films we might be lucky enough to get from the movie industry each year.

Only television is today doing what art ought to do: discuss contemporary concerns and explore the unique conditions of present society that affect the human condition. It’s little wonder consumers don’t value content when the examples of it being churned out by supposed quality outlets is so poor.

Perhaps I’m being reactionary. My favourite art critic is Brian Sewell, after all. But consider the fact that even if you were only interested in books, Western culture has already created more masterpieces than you are likely ever to be able to read. There is no shortage of great content.

What’s the conclusion here? Don’t pirate TV shows, maybe. And don’t worry about movie studio closures or the crisis of confidence in the recording industry. Go watch The Godfather, or listen to Billie Holiday’s exquisitely painful late recordings, or read some Dickens, instead.

Best of all, if the latter is of greatest appeal? All the good books are out of copyright. You can download them on your Kindle for nothing. You’ll never get through a fraction of the great literature out there – and that’s before we even look beyond Europe and the United States.

When there’s something being produced worthy of protection, perhaps consumers will be more sympathetic to the enforcement of copyright. But it’s tough to make the argument that The Wanted are of significant enough cultural import to warrant punitive legislation for those who share their dreary tunes.

The creatives industries continue to bleat that they’re dying, but they do nothing to save themselves, instead churning out dross. Quite honestly, who cares?

Following revelations that the Menshn co-founder solicited sex with young girls on Craiglist with the words, “I like young girls. I’m hot and well endowed”, wrote on a site called DarkJB “I love Brazilian teens so much. It’s almost worth flying all the way to Rio to get some jailbait action” and solicited pictures of a young girl called Alina from the vladmodels.ru site, which has advertised the sale of pornography featuring girls between the ages of 12 and 15, we were sent Twitter direct messages from Bozier that bore the date “Oct 24″.

We were told that some of these messages were sent while Bozier was with his business partner, former Tory MP Louise Mensch. Mensch later confirmed that she had attended dinner with Bozier. Since the DMs bore no year on them, we took Mensch at her word.

Ms Mensch has now reversed her earlier position, making the basis for our story insecure. It now appears that this particular conversation happened in 2011, not 2012, before Bozier had met Louise Mensch. The “business partner” to which Bozier referred in his messages was, according to Bozier, someone other than Mensch.

Our original story about Bozier’s solicitation of young girls and images that may be illegal remains wholly unaffected by this error, but we would like to apologise to Bozier and to Mensch unreservedly for the allegation that Bozier engaged in this particular conversations while at supper with Louise Mensch.

Luke Bozier was arrested in December 2012 after resigning from MenschBozier Ltd. and quitting as chief executive of Menshn. He has been released on bail until February.

The jury comprises industry experts, entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and media representatives with start-up expertise. It includes:

1. NEXT Chairman Matthias Schrader (CEO, SinnerSchrader)
2. Uli Hegge (Chief Representative, comdirect)
3. Alexander Hüsing (Founder, Deutsche Startups)
4. Ciaran O’Leary (Partner, Earlybird VC)
5. Christian Leybold (General Partner, e.Venture Partners)
6. Colette Ballou (President, Ballou PR)
7. Caroline Drucker (Country Manager, Etsy)
8. Sebastian Matthes (Editor, WirtschaftsWoche)

Milo Yiannopoulos from The Kernel will also provide input into the selection.

Public voting ends in ten days. There’s still time to nominate your favourites in the meantime and to vote for the nominees. The jury will add their points to the community votes, which will be accumulated at a ration of 2:1.

The final NEXT 100 will be announced in March here at The Kernel and on the NEXT website, and each member of the NEXT 100 will be invited to the conference on 23-24 April. To meet Europe’s top digital influencers, NEXT invites you to purchase your tickets for NEXT 13 now.

Confirmed speakers at NEXT 2013 include Robert Scoble, Caroline Drucker, Yossi Vardi and Neelie Kroes.

Tickets are available at nextberlin.eu/tickets, at a reduced price for a limited time.

Sure, more people are reading than ever thanks to Jeff Bezos’ pocket-sized libraries, we moan. But look at what they are reading. Barely a decent novel, even one of contemporary fiction, troubles the top 100. Things are even more grim when you look at the “top free” books. Talk about monkeys at typewriters.

And yet, I do own a Kindle. It’s the new Paperwhite and I have to confess it’s marvellous. It’s more than marvellous, actually: I hate to admit this but it’s not too much of an exaggeration to say it’s slightly transformed my life. I used to read for perhaps an hour a day. Now, it’s four – often more than that.

And it’s pretty clear that the success of the Kindle has encouraged people to read more, whatever it is they’re reading. And yes, that can only be a good thing, as erstwhile Kernel contributor and founder of Noosphere Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry pointed out to me on the telephone yesterday.

I’d called him intent on writing the sort of predictable “what’s wrong with a nice hardback?” column you might expect from a young fogey. But with a few short examples he convinced me that I was being snobbish and stupid.

“If you’re a bored housewife of 45 with access to the internet,” says Gobry, “it’s not a choice between E. L. James and Flaubert. It’s a choice between E. L. James and Farmville. And I’d say, even if only by a whisker, that reading Fifty Shades is a better use of your time than a Facebook game.”

He’s right, of course, and he’s right too that reading is a gateway drug; that bad books often lead to better things. “As a teenager I read Tom Clancy,” he says. “It’s not high literature, but it made me the sort of person who reads. And now I read smart books. Most of the time, anyway.

“If you look at the phenomenon of the Oprah book club, few of the books on her list are masterpieces. I don’t know, there might be a few good books there. But isn’t it a good thing that people all over America are hanging out, reading and talking about books?”

I suppose it is, and as a Mariah Carey fan until the point of death I’m in no position to scoff at popular culture. I have even, mirabile dictu, been moved to investigate Harry Potter, which I would never have done had it not been for the Kindle. (They get great after Azkaban, in case you’re still a Potter virgin.)

It does seem daft not to have read something so completely culturally ubiquitous. For one thing, you miss out on references in conversation and on television. And who wants to be the kind of disingenuous, cranky bore who claims never to have seen an episode of EastEnders? Not I.

So where are the hours being stolen from, if I’m finding all this extra time to read? The truth is I couldn’t tell you. I don’t spend any less time working, that’s for sure. Or rather, to be precise, I don’t produce any less work or get any less done. There’s something about reading that sharpens the mind.

Now I take regular breaks throughout the day to finish a few more chapters of Daphne du Maurier, or Christoper Isherwood, or even, yes, J. K. Rowling. When I return to work I feel renewed, refreshed, brimming with new ideas and anxious to get my own pen to paper.

I probably watch a bit less television, which for me means fewer episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Modern Family. My iPad sits lonely and unused. Occasionally the battery runs down because I haven’t picked the thing up for a week. Instead of wasting six hours on social media, I’ve re-read another Dickens this week.

For the life of me, I can’t think what I was ever worried about.

Pretty much the only thing that was going on in terms of starting up – especially online – was a few people talking with lots of enthusiasm and occasionally misguided visions of what all this could become. Anyway, fast forward: here’s the good, bad and ugly about the current state of play.

Community

Initially an early community of enthusiasts coalesced around meetings. First up it was the OpenCoffee community with its well-known format of start-up presentations sandwiched between networking sessions. Just a handful of people turned up in the beginning and each time meetings took place in a different, usually WiFi-less cafe.

Most will agree that in those early days presentations were usually representative of the immature ecosystem – mostly half-baked university projects and pre-alpha sites with little in the way of an actual business plan.

But the community grew – and so did its quality. Steadily, the type of start-ups presenting on the Open Coffee podium improved, meetings expanded to other cities and other specialized communities (each with its own series of events) started cropping up.

Currently, apart from the 300-strong monthly meetings in Athens, there are semi-regular events in at least five other cities over the country, and one can find an event to discuss and network on subjects from Javascript to smartphone apps’ creation.

Coworking

Critical for progress are coworking spaces, physical locations where office space with necessary facilities are offered at a competitive price. The perks and the rent were not the real advantages when these spaces began to appear, though. For one thing, such initiatives attracted like-minded individuals and companies in a single place where they exchanged practical information and collaborated.

For another, coworking spaces have served as the go-to place for any community hosting its meetings. Essentially, coworking spaces have turned out to be makeshift self-organised clusters. Currently, there are at least five such active places in Athens with coLab, the most important one, expanding outside the capital.

Talent and experience

Furthermore, more “traditional” or established companies (i.e., those that have been standing on their own feet for more than 5 to 10 years) have also caught up on the new way of doing things and the new digital landscape, either by better integrating social media campaigns in their communication efforts (e.g., Papaki, the principal domain registrar for Greece) or by involving state of the art software technology and superior design in their products.

This is important. Experienced professionals have been created this way and are involved either in their spare time or even on company time with the broader tech community. Some of them have actually left their day job to pursue their dream, building their own start-ups.

There are also a few second- and third-generation entrepreneurs who have had significant (or at least some) success with their previous ventures and are becoming interested in investing both their hard-won capital or their experience into the younger and more promising members of the community, with BugSense being a good example of the latter. It has $100,000 in funding secured and Samsung, Skype and Meebo as clients.

Such people are the Greek version of angel investors, coming either from the tech sector, and as such offering the so-called precious smart money, or from other industries entirely.

And of course there are certain start-ups – one might call them outliers – which against all odds and with little actual help have managed to create a product and business with user traction and revenues despite little support by the community. Those such as Megaventory, which was essentially developed out of a Greek island, or Anlock, which out of the blue has started creating chart-topping educational smartphone apps.

Funding

As of recently, most entrepreneurs claimed the biggest problem with the Greek ecosystem was lack of funding. Indeed, most investment into Greek entrepreneurs has occurred at small levels and abroad. The largest investments so far, DailySecret, secured $1.85 million and fleksy, developing fast touchscreen typing, raised $900,000 from US backers.

This is no longer the case. A few weeks ago, the creation of no less than four funds aimed specifically at Greece were announced. Across them more than €60 million will be spent in pre-seed and seed startups and this is bound to have a profound effect on the ecosystem.

Apart from the actual opportunities which will be given to fund-raising startups, significant activity will take place on the side: teams will be formed, individuals will be intrigued to ride the wave, to be educated and to have a shot with their own project. Jobs will be created.

A mere month after launch, Openfund II has already announced investment into two start-ups. Openfund II originated and essentially evolved out of the initial OpenCoffee meetings (its predecessor, Openfund, has already invested in 8 startups, the most successful of which, Taxibeat went on to raise $1 million) has announced they will be investing €600,000 euros in WorkableHR and €100,000 euros in Incrediblue.

These numbers may seem like peanuts by other countries’ or Silicon Valley’s standards but in a country which has seen essentially zero funding in the sector just 2 years back, they are big.

Events

Important events such as conferences and expos which have the potential to attract significant (at least regional if not international) attention is still something of a missing component in the Greek ecosystem. Although there are remarkable efforts – most notably TEDxAthens with its world-class speakers – other than that there is definitely an opportunity for growth.

Ironically, two quite successful start-ups with Greek founders focus on events: Eventnow, with more than 2000 events matched with vendors per month in New York and California, and Eventora, an invitation management system with considerable recent growth.

Still there is progress on that front too. A short while ago, TechCrunch held a meetup in Athens which was overall considered a success (you can watch a video here). The event was sold out and attendance exceeded expectations with further such events hopefully scheduled for later in the year.

In general, international interactions either by traveling abroad individually, securing booths in international conferences and expos or even inviting attendants and speakers from abroad is something that’s sorely missing currently from Greece.

And given the natural beauty of the country – especially in the summer months – it’s a no brainer what should happen next. And in fact it has been happening already – WPP is already organizing its yearly Stream unconference just outside Athens…

Universities

The level of university education Greeks get is of a very high standard, even if this does not always show in global rankings, and there is an above-average percentage of entrepreneurs with postgraduate degrees. However, studies usually offer highly academic knowledge in courses in relevant university departments and this is an obstacle when it comes to implementing a dynamic, modern education.

This coupled with an education system that is rather disassociated with the market means resources and potential that have remained untapped. The Greek education system is gradually modernising but significant resistance is met and progress is slow.

Getting out

Greece has traditionally been in a difficult situation thanks to geography and this shows when it comes to software start-ups. Stuck in the corner of Europe – but also with an inefficient mentality – traveling abroad and mailing products costs more and takes longer.

These are difficult obstacles to overcome. They often limit Greek start-ups to a small local market. At the same time, access to emerging markets such as China, Russia or the Middle East is not something that has been explored systematically either, leaving the country somewhat stranded. Ironic, really, when you consider our shipping history, but there you go.

A stateless state

Funding aside, the second most serious problem raised by entrepreneurs is state intervention in pretty much all the wrong ways. A high taxation system (regardless of profit), high insurance costs and high levels of bureaucracy all form a difficult framework in which to operate a company.

There are workarounds, of course, which usually have to be learned the hard way and slowly things are being modernised, but progress is slow here.

Stigma

Although we’re still early in the ecosystem’s evolution, some signs of the counter-productive side of Greeks are showing. Entrepreneurism is, to some extent, considered something of a fad, with certain people and events turning to “lifestyle entrepreneurialism” only because it’s cool and not because they actually want to create or contribute.

Also, the generally high cost of living is prohibitive for most that run a start-up. Just securing an adequate income for a decent living is a struggle for most these days and this leaves practically no time or margin for experimentation with something high-risk. People are more positive to the idea of not working for the civil service or a large multinational and instead starting something of their own, but usually they simply can’t afford the start-up lifestyle.

Finally, start-up efforts suffer from the usual “do it on my own” Greek approach. This is fine when you are indeed alone – as you manage to survive and prosper despite everything. But when some critical mass has been achieved, like now, it’s time for companies to start collaborating. And unfortunately, working as a team with a common goal is not something we are usually good at.

Now what?

It would seem that all the pieces are more or less in place. The community is organised and ready, there is talent and adequate experience spread across it, funding is already rolling in to support the effort and some events to keep an eye out for are cropping up.

Surely, there are obstacles as well: there is the notorious Greek tax and legal system, which can seem unbeatable, a change of mentality is also required and gradually happening and it would seem an even more structured collaboration effort across all above fronts is necessary. Also, a few real success stories (i.e., more world-class valuations) will turn heads.

Greece will not soon become the next Silicon Valley. It may also not be the next Israel or even the next London or New York (which have similar size ecosystems). But it’s finally on the map and interested parties should be paying attention.

Dimitris Athanasiadis works as an online business development consultant.

After some serious soul-searching, during which I have reflected on my recent behaviour, I’ve decided it’s time to come clean, because the weight of these accusations is becoming too much to bear. The sheer scale of them has led me to make a confession to my readers today.

Yes, it’s true: I am half a stone overweight.

This used to look good

The problem is, I’m half-Greek and nearly 30 and my genes are suddenly conspiring against me. It’s one thing to be a waspish, misogynistic Right-wing bastard who never shuts up about haggard, overweight celebrity has-beens.

It’s quite another to criticise a woman’s weight when you are yourself developing the first stages of the dreaded muffin top.

You see, no longer do I possess the waif-like figure of my youth. And if I don’t do something to arrest the gentle expansion of my waistline, I fear I may end up looking like a kebab shop owner by the time I’m 35.

The author in younger, leaner days

They say that beautiful people get further in life. And that’s true. I owe much of my considerable professional success as a journalist and television commentator to my looks. But I’m worried: with the onset of middle-age and the popping of buttons, is it all over? Will I never again be as good looking as I am today?

Maybe I’m being over-sensitive, but I feel as though people’s perceptions of me are already changing for the worse.

Am I still hot?

The gentle engorgement of my trunk is having unforeseen but horrifying consequences. For example, when I was younger and earning a decent salary, I spent many thousands of pounds of beautiful designer clothes.

These days, I hardly to fit into anything I bought in 2008.

The ugly truth is that I own about four pairs of jeans that still fit comfortably, from a wardrobe that boasted over forty stylish pairs in its heydey. And why? Because I got into the habit of believing that I could eat anything and yet remain thin and gorgeous.

Forbidden treasures: KFC crisps

This is isn’t the first time I’ve tried something radical to address my personal failings. I’ve attempted many fad diets over the last six months. There was the celery juice and amphetamine diet. There was KFC and laxatives. There was the week of purple food.

Shamefully, I once tried dolly cutlery.

I even paid strict adherence to the highly-regarded “Mel C method”. But frankly, I was tired of having my index finger permanently smelling of vomit and my teeth were starting to discolour, so I had to call it a day.

‘Binge and purge’: not for the faint of heart

Nothing I tried seemed to shift the burgeoning tyre around my middle: I remained a stubborn 33 waist, 34 leg in denim.

Until, that is, my friend Tilo Bonow, who runs a PR agency in Berlin, sent me the answer I had been waiting for.

Time to nextify my calorific paradigm

Here, wrapped in smart, Apple-esque matte packaging, is my salvation: the prospect of public humiliation.

These Withings Wi-Fi enabled scales promise to do what I couldn’t alone. They introduce shame into the equation of weight loss. And I truly believe they hold the key to personal transformation.

After everything I’ve said about him, maybe Jeff Jarvis was right. Maybe publicness is the key to rediscovering our potential. Maybe internet technology really can be transformative.

What I never had the strength to accomplish by myself, I feel I can now complete, knowing that every secretly scarfed Mars bar will be exposed to my 14,000 followers on Twitter in my morning weigh-ins.

Every forbidden slice of Victoria sponge will now reveal itself to world when these scales auto-tweet my weight and fat content every morning. I travel a lot, but I promise whenever at home in London to hop on the Withings every day – after my morning dump, of course.

‘The robe adds at least 4 pounds,’ says Milo

It’s finally time to capitulate to my critics and admit my failings. It’s time to stop talking and start doing. After all, actions speak louder than words and I don’t want my legacy to be a string of broken promises.

So I’m declaring jihad on carbohydrates. I’m also going to cut down on my drinking and my smoking and finally make use of that gym membership card languishing in my “other wallet”. But I’m not doing it alone. The internet is going to help me.

I hope this humble message of contrition and the sincere dedication to action it represents are enough to draw a line under the unrelenting assaults from the mob baying for justice.

In fact, I’d like to thank my critics for their pointed and sustained abuse. Your obsession with me was as endearing as it was delicious. Almost as delicious as the Zinger Tower Burgers washed down with Ex-Lax I must now turn my back on.

I’m going to do it. I am going to get thin. Wish me luck!

Photography by Jeremy Wilson

Thus, conferences and start-ups tolerate the haphazard, unprofessional conduct of leading tech bloggers because they need to. And one of the most effective ways to massage a blogger’s ego is to whack them on a judging panel, which plays to the overweening pride and arrogance of people who leave sentences unfinished for a living. But this is one bit of back-scratching that ought to be quietly strangled.

For one thing, how can a journalist report on a process of which he is a part? Without the most torturous disclaimers, there’s no avoiding TechCrunch-esque “I’m conflicted; get over it” cop-outs that do a disservice to the profession to which tech bloggers pretend. Reporters can’t have it both ways: either they’re reporters, or they’re participants. The Silicon Valley approach of having one’s cake and eating it is both disreputable and unethical. We can do better.

After all, some tech bloggers already have conflicts that would make a newspaper editor blanch. Government committees, shares in business that provide services to start-ups they then write about… it’s astonishing, really. It shouldn’t be necessary to point out that where money or access is involved, journalists have no credibility if they are operating on both sides of the dividing line between scribe and subject. Let’s spare them from further blushes.

I have myself, as the most cursory meander through the internet is likely to surface, broken my own edict many times over the past few years. I’m making a commitment today to stop. I’ll only sit on panels where prizes - particularly money – are awarded when I have expertise in the area being judged. In practice, that probably means media businesses but little else.

Because journalists, me included, aren’t supposed to be judges and gatekeepers. By and large, we don’t have the foggiest idea what we’re talking about. So it’s ridiculous to have our opinion taken into account at a competition whose outcome might be seen by investors or the public to be in some way authoritative or reflective of industry opinion.

There’s a view that in emerging ecosystems, the more the merrier makes everyone better off in the long run. But it’s not the job of the fourth estate to be part of the internal consensus; it’s our job to report on it. We should resist the furry boundaries between blogger, investor and “advisor” that have sprung up in California.

Never run a real business, made an investment or spent even a week working at a start-up? No training in finance, economics or business? No problem. Become a tech blogger and hold the delicate future of a young internet business in your hands. That’s been the modus operandi of tech bloggers and their conference-running collaborators for as long as their have been pitch competitions.

But it’s got to stop. Let’s leave journalists to those jobs they ought to be good at: hosting, moderating, interviewing and attention-seeking, shall we? And leave the “judging” to serial entrepreneurs, investors, and whoever is slapping down the cash. Because this “judging” business as a way of sucking up to writers is just absurd.

Being a perfectionist provides one with a delightful aura when it comes to press relations, too. When a journalist writes about someone, the over-eccentric nature of their attention to detail is always something that is prized highly. It’s a wonderful story if someone takes the longest time to depict the smallest detail.

But why bother? Because, these days, I’m not actually sure you can afford to be a perfectionist. I mean, sure, it works – it’s necessary – for architects. But for start-ups?

You’re not an artist. Your work isn’t your work. Paint a picture and it is your statement to the world. Your charisma and values will shine through the artwork. Build a website or an app and your first user will own you.

I wasn’t a great film director. The relation to this statement and the words above is that I was a good film producer. I realised this at the age of 19 when I self-funded my first sixteenth-century period drama. This is relevant, I swear.

I was the director and producer, spending my own cash on a movie. I wasn’t going to give those two prized credits to anyone else. Especially not at that age.

But each day after shooting it was clear where my priorities lay. I was not interested in reviewing the rushes to make sure the interactions between the two leads were perfect. I was very interested in ticking off a shot list to make sure we had completed everything, and calculating the correct way to squeeze missed scenes into an already tight schedule the next day.

Because getting things done made much more financial sense to me than a smile gone awry from the protagonist in scene 27.

If you place the two scenarios side by side, no viewer will realise they have missed something if it never appeared, I thought. But they will be confused if a scene is missing. A scene sets out a narrative and continues the journey – the missed attention to detail simply improves it.

To understand this better, watch the bonus content on your stash of dust-gathering DVDs. Love Actually, for instance – watch the deleted scenes and you’ll discover new story lines and character plots you’d never have guessed existed. But did you miss them? No, because you never knew they were there in the first place.

And did you care? No.

It would be easy for someone to critique me for this outcome-driven view of cinema. You’re more than welcome to. Simply look at the 1.5 out of 5 star ratings for Roanoke: The Lost Colony on IMDB and take them in. Here’s one of the “most helpful” reviews:

There is nothing to recommend this. I am a History teacher and was hoping that there might be something useable in this film – for teaching unit of Roanoke.

Not only does the story really miss all the best parts of the story, the film-making is totally amateur. No scenes are lit properly. The script breaks the cardinal rule of ‘show – don’t tell’. The actors can’t be blamed entirely as the material is so poor.

What did we learn here? Well, we learned I’m not a natural director. We also learned that maybe a sixteenth-century film is a tad ambitious on the budget we had. I learned a lot more too, but I understand this isn’t a film review column.

Now, what if I had spent more time making the film perfect to correct all the feedback above? Well, we would have run out of money, I would have never finished the movie, I would have never toured America with it, and – here we creep back to the point – never launched my first start-up from it.

In truth, if we had made the film perfect I would have wasted thousands of pounds and probably wouldn’t have raised millions for future projects.

I dropped directing. The next movie I produced won an award, the one after that could attract a named cast. (I then launched a start up in e-commerce…)

People always misunderstand me when I try and express these thoughts. They take it to think I don’t care or have no pride over my work. That’s rubbish. I love productivity, and I’ve learned fast that my idea of perfect isn’t everyone’s. I envy Nike for their strapline.

I was actually told “you have no pride” by someone I had to let go midway through last year. He told me I would never be Steve Jobs by acting the way I did. At that moment, it turned out for some reason I was quite happy about that. I don’t know why. Like all of us, there is great respect there.

The easiest conclusion to take from this is that I could have just regurgitated the “release early” line, which is a very common phrase in the start-up world. But that’s only half of what I’ve learned.

Releasing early is not the key. The key is “release without perfection”.

Finally, just to re-iterate, if you’re an architect inviting me to the grand opening of your newest design – please confirm you haven’t followed any of my thoughts here. I don’t want to die. Thank you.