Paul O'Flaherty

Iværk07 – hidden gems

Kasper (my business partner) and I took the time last Friday to visit Iværk07 at the forum in Copenhagen.

For those of you who aren’t familiar (or aren’t Danish), Iværk is is a conference for people who are embarking, in the early stages of, or just thinking about starting their own business.

The event is two days long and features all the usual vendors and a line up of companies and speakers who are there, ostensibly to offer advice to the startup owner and help them on their way, but as is often the case the conference stalls were mostly occupied by folks trying to squeeze the last buck out of the startup owners.

Before I go any further, I must say that we did not attend the Saturday session, (so I missed seeing Martin Thorborg speak) but the Friday one, which was the longest was, for me, very disappointing.

Still all was not doom and gloom.

While many of the speakers were useless there were some unexpectedly good speeches.

When Kasper and I left for Copenhagen we had a list of a number of “must attend” speeches (you can’t see everyone with multiple speeches / workshops happening at once) in the hope that some modicum of advice would be dispensed that wasn’t already available on the back on an average beer mat.

We found what we wanted, but not where we expected to find it.

Our original plan was to see the main debate about whether or not Danish iværksetter (entrepreneurs, founders) were good enough.

We also wanted to see Danish “star” and walking personal brand Ole Henriksen.

Finally we planned to finish our session of speeches by listening to Christian Normann of ICommerce.

There were others, but these were the big 3 for us.

Man, did we get it wrong.

The debate was 5 people agreeing with each other and Ole told his life story and mentioned very little to do with starting a company (or as we expected talking about personal branding).

Christian Normann was a light at the end of the tunnel though. While not the best public speaker his presentation had excellent content. More than enough to keep me brain chugging over on the way back to Næstved.

I’d like to see Christian speak again, and here a few more of his tales from France. Maybe over a beer?

The best speeches / presentations of the day came for some very unexpected sources.

Anders Kissmeyer from Nørrebro Bryghus (Nørrebro brewery) proved to be not only an excellent public speaker with truck loads of enthusiasm and charisma, but allowed us an excellent insight into his mind set, how he does / did do business and how he succeeded.

His speech was insightful, entertaining and you could feel the passion he has for what he does. I’d recommend that if anybody gets the chance to listen to Anders speak about business they grab it by the ears and take it.

The big surprise of the day for me was Morten Wagner. He’s one of the guys behind dating.dk and Freeway.

For me, Morten was the highlight of the entire show.

Okay, lets be honest here. The guy speaks at 900 mph. Humming birds on acid can’t move as fast.

Needless to say, that made it a bit difficult for my Irish ears to absorb everything as fast as all the Danes sitting around me. I got most jokes about 5 seconds after everybody else which can be embarrassing when you’re the only one laughing.

Still, Mortens speech was, informative, witty, intelligent and felt honest while feeling like a good show as well.

Best of all the didn’t used powerpoint! (There’s a lesson to be learned there folks.)

Yet, even Mortens’, Anders’ and Christians’ speeches could not drag the conference out of the pit of mediocrity for us, or maybe just for me.

The sponsors did their best. That’s a fact.

They were there, Multdata, Amino and everybody else and they were being genuinely helpful to the startups and offering advice for nothing. They should be commended for their performance.

Unfortunately, it was all the other stand owners who made you feel like you existed just to be scalped that really got to me.

I’ll be at Iværk08. There’s always a lot to be learned at these conferences, even if it’s not what you intended, and there’s always a great opportunity to network with other business owners.

I just hope that next year things will be better.

Quick note: I have a new personal goal. Before, or at Iværk10, I will be a speaker there.

Spammers make it personal.

I hate to admit it but I got fooled by two pieces of spam today and actually allowed them to slip on to O’Flaherty.

I have since gone back and removed the URLs to which those pieces of spam pointed, but I have not removed the comment itself.

The reason for not removing the comment is that it was clearly written by a real person who had taken the time to actually read the posts in question before commenting on them.

Here’s an example. I received this comment on my post “Speaker Productivity“.

Luckily I have always detested headphones, so I usually make use of speakers. Never though about it in terms of productivity though. This is an interesting concept. With information overload as it is, it is wise to cut every five minutes you can from your workload. While it may not seem like much at a time, it all adds up.

The personal who wrote the comment obviously read the post and left a valid comment. The spam came in the form of the URLs that the commenter used which led to various advertising pages on furniture stores sites.

There was one flaw in the spammers “plan” that may have let them get away with it.

All of the comments they posted came from the same IP address and used the same email address (which belongs to a South African company called WebAdjust).

I will be on the look out for this kind of spam in the future and will actively delete it.

I just wonder how tools such as Akismet are going to deal with this kind of spam especially when the spammers start actively spoofing their IP and email addresses.

Avoid sunlight and improve your sex life

I’m never adverse to a bit on tongue in cheek humor so I was very please when Rick McIver emailed me to let me know about this greta post over on Virtualhosting.com.

Check out “10 ways a programmer can improve his or her sex life“.

Avoid sunlight at all costs.

Pale is in, people, hasn’t anyone been watching Conan O’Brien? Extreme sunlight damages your sensitive skin, and besides, a deep tan will make you look common. If you have to step outside during the day, pull your socks up to your knees, wear a protective flannel over shirt, and top it all off with your grandmother’s gardening hat. Your future hookup will love you for your soft, smooth, milky white flesh. Elizabethan royalty prided themselves in having the whitest skin possible, and who doesn’t strive to be as cool as Elizabethan royalty?

Speaker Productivity

This may be a rather obvious point to most folks but, at home, speakers allow you to be far more productive that headphones.

For the past few months I’ve been using headphones when at my desktop PC instead of speakers. The reasons for this have been many, including desk space and the fact that frigid bitch and I play WoW side by side.

When playing side by side it’s rather unfair to have one player sitting there with booming 5:1 surround sound which is drowning out the audio that the other player is trying to hear through their headphones.

Needless to say, in the interest of fairness, it’s best for us both to use headphones.

Over the past few months I’ve become stuck in my ways of using headphones and failed to realize that they were reducing my productivity.

The best thing about speakers (say when listening to podcasts) is that you can just crank up the volume and wander around the house and make a cup of coffee without interrupting what you’re listening to.

Speakers allow you mobility in your house / office without the tethering wire of the headphones.

Using my headphones, if anything is more that 8 feet away from my desk, then I have to pause the audio, remove the headphones and then un-pause when I return.

There’s a loss of productivity here as it may now take me a number of minutes longer to get to the end of what I’m listening to. That might not sound like much, but if you listen to a lot of podcasts and it takes you 5 minutes extra per podcast (due to being on pause) it starts to add up.

frigid bitch is away today so I just put the speakers back on to my second screen this morning and am loving the fact that I can again wander around while listening to the latest episode of “The Instance“.

I know I could listen to podcasts on my mp3 player and have full mobility. I know I could buy wireless headphones. But why bother?

I’ve got a perfectly good volume button on my speakers…

(Image by William Hook)