I’ll do a post about my experiences of buying an iPhone later, but I feel compelled to point out something obvious:

• With large complex systems, there will almost always be problems in launch
• First batches of mass-produced hardware involve lots of manual hand-holding throughout the supply chain.
• Early adopters are often techie
• Early adopters go to extremes to get their taste first
• Early adopters are vocal
• The rest of the population couldn’t give a shit what the techie early adopters say
• The rest of the population will wait to get the iPhone

Apple knows this, which is one of the many reasons they (like any other manufacturing company) limit initial stock during ramp-up;

• Damage limitation
• Third rule of Arnold (a wry observational poem from my manufacturing days): “Perfect the design; debug with some tests; launch the product; let the customers find the rest”

Yup… we are Apple’s extended test team.  Tis the price of early-adopter kudos, has and always will be; get over it.  Thanks to us, Joe Public will no doubt be happy with his iPhone.

Forums, google, review sites, friends, relatives - you name it, I’ve scoured it in the name of paintball entertainment. I’ve narrowed the list down to five pretty good sites (click on the titles to take you to the sites themeselves, just in case that wasn’t clear in the previous post)

PAINTBALL PARK

LOCATION: Southampton-ish (20mins from soton)
THOUGHTS: Cool looking sets, recommended by a couple of people

CAMPAIGN PAINTBALL

LOCATION: North of guildford. (about 70 mins from soton)
THOUGHTS: Looks really great. Awesome venue. Check out the different game types!

AMBUSH PAINTBALL

LOCATION: Southampton (about 10 mins from soton)
THOUGHTS: Large sets, but a bit basic-looking. Comes recommended though

WEEKEND WARRIORS

LOCATION: Reading (about 110 mins from soton)
THOUGHTS: Well recommended, but hard to see much from the website

HOLMBUSH

LOCATION: Horsham, east sussex. (about 90 mins from soton)
THOUGHTS: It’s no coincidence this Horsham rhymes with awesome. Check out the gallery! It really does look very good indeed.

My thoughts? Well, you ought to bear in mind these are 915am starts! OMG! Yes, srsly. So to get to the east sussex venue for 9am we’d need to get up really early. But it will be worth it, IMO. So for what it’s worth, my favourite sites are Holmbush and Campaign….

Ok, so here’s the problem. I’m organising Benjie Gillam’s stag party and the consensus is that we should be going for paintball in the south of england. The problem is that:

1. There’s a million paintball venues in Hampshire/Dorset
2. Some of them are terrible… but which ones?
3. The reviews online seem to disagree as to which are best/ok/crap
4. I’m not able to travel down there and investigate them

So… is it possible to work this all out? I’m hoping so. Here’s a list of locations I’ve found… if you’ve any views on them, please leave a remark in the comments. Beer to the winner, or something

SOUTHAMPTON AREA

SKIRMISH PAINTBALL GAMES

LOCATION: Address, Skirmish Lasham, Manor Farm Buildings, Lasham, Hampshire, GU34 5SL
COST: Ultimate Package = £49.95
INFO: Useful, well-designed site. Cool games. Heard some bad reviews though?

COMBAT SOUTH

Hard-core BB guns. Definitely NOT paintball, but looks like a hoot.

PAINTBALLING SOUTHAMPTON

SESSIONS (END TIMES ARE APPROX): 0915 - 1600HRS
COST: £14.99 per person entry: Paintballs £6.99 per 100, £5.99 per 100 if purchased in bulk (2000).
FOOD: BBQ, included I think
LOCATION: Rose Wood, Lee Lane, Romsey, Hampshire. SO16 0AD. Tel: 0800 849 4911

PAINTBALLING HAMPSHIRE

LOCATION: National Paintball Parks (Hants), Street End Copse, Hook Road, Rotherwick, Hook, Hants RG27
INFO: Very generic website

AMBUSH PAINTBALL

LOCATION: Shedfield, Southampton, Hampshire SO32 2HL
COST: £55 - to include all equipment, lunch, hot drinks and 700 paintballs - must be pre-booked/pre-paid.
INFO: Seems friendly. Not sure about how much the facility has to offer

CAMOUFLAGE PAINTBALL

COST: 1000 ball = £39.95
LOCATION: Woodside Farm, Gosport Road, Privett, Nr.Alton, Hampshire. GU34 3NJ
INFO: Very little on the website.

GO BALLISTIC

Also at fareham and portsmouth

PAINTBALL PARK

Not very professional looking - will check out reviews

DELTA FORCE

LOCATION: Lee Lane, Romsey, Hampshire SO16 0AD
COST: Doesn’t state on site, though balls not too much

URBAN PAINTBALL

LOCATION: Hilsea Industrial Estate, 2b Limberline Road, Portsmouth, PO3 5BJ, Portsmouth
COST: £50.00 = 800 balls
INFO: Seems a bit kiddyish and small?

BOURNEMOUTH AREA

CHALLENGE LEISURE

LOCATION: 248 Ringwood Road, St. Leonards, Ringwood, Hants. BH24 2SB
INFO: Not a great website. Nowhere near enough info. Not paintball-focussed.

SKIRMISH PAINTBALL DORSET

LOCATION: Skirmish Paintball Dorset, Oak Cottage, Bere Wood, Bere Regis. BH20 7JJ
INFO: Looks pretty decent… doesn’t have its own website as far as I can tell

BOURNEMOUTH PAINTBALLING

LOCATION: Skirmish Dorset, North Almer Barn, North Almer, Dorset. BH20

DORSET PAINTBALL

LOCATION: Skirmish Paintball Dorset, Oak Cottage, Bere Wood, Bere Regis. BH20 7JJ

DELTA FORCE

LOCATION: Wattons Ford Common, Wattons Lane, Matchams, Ringwood, BH24 2BS.
COST: Doesn’t state on site, though balls not too much
INFO: Is it still going? Heard they had planning permission prob?

MAX EVENTS

INFO: Very little indeed

CAMOUFLAGE PAINTBALL

LOCATION: Christchurch Road, Hurn, Christchurch, Dorset. BH23 6AE
INFO: Very little

NATIONWIDE PAINTBALL

LOCATION: Christchurch Road, Hurn, Christchurch, Dorset, BH23 6AE

PAINTBALL NATION

LOCATION: Hurn
INFO: Very little

GO BALLISTIC

COST: 400 + 1 bomb = £34
LOCATION: Hurn Court Lane
INFO: 12 game zones in firing zone

PAINTBALL SAS

Doesn’t look great TBH

PAINTBALL WARRIORS

LOCATION: Paintball Warriors, Uddens Drive, Wimborne, Dorset, BH21 7BQ
COST: £45 = 1000 balls
INFO: Lots of game zones. Simple but decent site
TIMING: Full Days Paintball : 9.15 am - 4.30 pm ( BBQ lunch included )

DORCESTER AREA

MEGA PAINTBALL

COST: £55 for 1000
INFO: Nice site. Indoor version at Poole. UKPSF

SALISBURY AREA

VIRTUAL WARFARE

LOCATION: Virtual Warfare, Units 3&4 Grimsdyke Granaries, Blandford Road, Salisbury, SP5 5RL
COST: 5 games for £30
INFO: Laser-based, but informative website. Looks pretty good

Any thoughts, leave them in the comments… let’s make this a kick-ass event for Benjie!

I know this is a shameless plug, but it’s in the festive spirit I promise.  Yesterday BrainBakery.com (my web dev sister company to i-together.com) released a facebook advent calendar application for Sumo.tv.

Apart from giving you a bit of much-needed festive bling to you facebook profile, by supplying you great video clips each day up til Christmas, the top few people who invite the most users win an ipod!  So get inviting!

Find the app at apps.facebook.com/sumoadvent.

Note that I’m not using my personal sumoadvent affiliate code as that would be wrong of me… no point trying to win a competition I created

It’s been a huge amount of work, but the end result has been really worth it.  Find all the details at the Blog Friends blog.

I suspect not, but unlike Google, MySpace, Bebo, Hi5 and maybe even Facebook I’m not in the loop on this Open Social thing so I certainly don’t have the whole story. You see, something is really bothering me…

Much of the coverage of Open Social has focussed on developers being able to use “normal” JavaScript and HTML to develop their apps. However, FBML and FBJS, combined with Facebook’s limited indexing on Google, actually do us a favour:

• Stop application formatting bleeding between apps.
• Stop applications being able to control each other.
• Protect users against malicious scripts.
• Only execute scripts in a confined environment that you are unlikely to stumble upon within an normal websearch.
• It’s Facebook’s responsibility to parse our code to ensure it’s not malicious.

I’m going to trackback this post to a few big bloggers in the hope I’ll get an answer in the comments, because I can’t find any answers to these critical questions anywhere on the web.

The thing that bothers me most is that Google doesn’t exactly have a great reputation for quality secure code and attention to user privacy. Do I need to be turning off JS in my browser? :S

Edit: LMAO, turns out I was probably right. So, folks, let’s all welcome in a new era of totally shit web security. Hurrah for key-loggers! Hurrah for hackers being able to re-use old tricks without needing to think!

Good grief! :S

Many of you, like me, only use facebook as a way of communicating with people you actually know well. However, there’s no rules to how this is done and you’ve got to admit, annoying though it might be, Scoble and Kawasaki’s approach has some considerable advantages for them and (crazy though it might seem), the overall social graph.

As I see it, Robert’s using facebook to tap into an extremely valuable resource. Via facebook’s filtering features he is able to see the most important information in the daily lives and activities of a lot of people. Through interacting with them, facebook automatically hones the information he sees until it is as relevant as possible to him. Dave McClure also did a similar experiment, utilizing features such as tagging to raise his profile and tune his social graph quicker.

I’ll admit facebook’s algorithm isn’t astounding, but as I rarely communicate with Robert I never get “spammed” by him so it must work.
Actually, it’s a positive thing for me: thanks to Robert’s open policy, my team and I have been able to make (albeit fairly lose) friends with him which has been invaluable during the development of our app.

Of course, if you’re not Robert then it’s easy to feel that he’s everywhere, spamming the whole face of facebook and twitter. However, by opening the floodgates like this, he’s allowing facebook (and indeed the new version of our app Blog Friends) to potentially converge on the “true” social graph much faster. Let me explain.

When I went to university I spent the first two months making in excess of 500 friends via many clubs, societies and bars. I spent the next 4 years “optimizing” these relationships: I lost contact with most of them; some of them became business relationships; many became close friends; others become distant, but with an open social channel. The fact that we can now, thanks to the power of computer-based social networks, do this on a much faster and larger scale must only be good for the flow of information and hence humanity… it’s just a pity the tools aren’t perfect yet.

Here is an example post from me.

Lately I’ve seen quite a few articles (including this one sent to me by James Cherkoff) talking about how the most successful startups and entrepreneurs - tech startups in particular - didn’t have a business plan. Part of the popularity of this idea seems to be coming from certain VC’s who - in a perfectly reasonable bit of marketing - are trying to look “a bit maverick” in order to appeal to young startups.

However, every example I’ve seen so far proves to me the opposite; that a business plan is in fact an essential ingredient in the success of a business.

Take the example of Edison from Marc Andreessen’s blog - by the end of the article you see clear examples that Edison’s got a handle on:

• building a team: he might have started on his own, but eventually had a number of people working with him (one of which is named in the article).
• building a business: his company appears to have an income from the telegraph industry.
• appreciation of resource planning: he does not divert all resources to the phonograph the moment he comes up with it because at first it is not clear to him if it is worth it.
• cash flow planning: he understands when money is coming in, and when he needs to save

Now I doubt for one minute that Edison actually wrote his plan down - and if he did it was probably on the back of a napkin (the equivalent of the 10 PowerPoint plan) - but it sounds to me like he did in fact have some sort of plan.

What all these entrepreneurs have done (Edison, Ellison, Gates) is build strong teams that enable them to react to forced/serendipitous changes. Once they reacted, the “business plan” is adjusted and off they go on the new path. As many people have said, the reason investors are so interested in the “team” is that a good team is capable of reacting to such opportunities.
So in the end I’m with Tim Berry and Guy Kawasaki and others on this one: writing a business plan is a good thing to engage the team and enable transparency and clarity in the figures/assumptions. However, for a startup that probably ought not to be much more than can be written on a napkin - after all it’s much more useful (not to mention more fun) actually getting the customers now rather than spending time and money trying to estimate exactly how many you might get at Year 3.

After a rather nice barbeque at a friend’s house today, I thought I’d take a small diversion on the way home to snap this bit of local graffiti:

The site it refers to is not my cup of tea, but the statement it makes is really strong: “I’d like you to know more about me, and this is how you can”.

It’s great that Myspace, Facebook and the rest are so mainstream now that an unsigned rapper can reasonably assume that passers-by will know what it means, and what’s more he can do so for free (I’m assuming he owns the fence of course).

For me, this is important, because as the owner of a startup I need to be certain that the products we develop are of value to people.  I am glad that “Chalk” is able to, like countless others, find his voice through the sorts of products in which we are involved.