The recent articles & discussions about the moves of LIME & Digicel to block all VOIP traffic on their network is disturbing for a number of reasons. The two biggest reasons are that it stifles consumer choice and creates larger hurdles for budding entrepreneurs (aka kills innovation). For those not familiar with the way this works, what Digicel & LIME have done is said you pay me $X per month for…
Many of my esteemed colleagues have weighed in on the latest bank taxes imposed and their potential effects. I respect their opinions and their intellect, but I would just like to address the elephant in the room. When all is said and done, the responsibility for this bank tax lies with us. The people. The silent majority. To be clear, I hate the idea of piecemeal tax implementation and would much…
I have a product launch coming up, and would love as much New Media help as I can get. We will be doing a lot of traditional PR, but I feel like this would be a wikid opportunity for the Caribbean new media scene to support one of their own. To let me know you are interested, email me at marc.gayle+launch@gmail.com. In terms of help, I would love at least 1 article from anyone that runs a blog -…
I think it is safe to agree that the 10-year tax incentives for companies that list on the Junior Stock Exchange has been a real incentive. Policymakers did a good job of coming up with a package that is enticing to small businesses that need growth capital. With the many successful listings we have seen to date, it can be deemed a roaring success. The issue now is that in this current economic…
The issue I faced was that I have an existing static site hosted on Github via gh-pages . That is just regular HTML/CSS/JS. It works perfectly. But, I wanted to add an elegant Octopress blog to that same static site - so I can have both my company site & blog hosted on Github s powerful hosting platform. This is how I pulled it off. Get the folder of your static site all setup like normal. Get all…
I am assuming that whatever you are working on, whether it is your instrument playing skills, programming chops, or a tech startup, that you want to work on it/do it for a long time. I mean many, many years. That doesn t mean that you want to continue working on the same tech startup or you want to continuing hacking away at PHP (only) for the next 30 years. It just means that you want to continue…
For months before I launched 5KMVP , I had been running experiments on Hacker News. Part of the experiment was to validate my thesis. Thesis : At some fixed price point, people are willing to invest in building an MVP. After getting some leads (and projects), over the space of a few months, from HN and talking to many people (from Twitter and HN), a few things jumped out at me. The $5K price point…
If you are getting an error that looks like this: could not connect to server: Connection refused Is the server running on host "127.0.0.1" and accepting TCP/IP connections on port xxxx? when pushing your Rails 3.2+ app to Heroku, there could be two problems at play. If that is all that you are seeing, then it likely means that Heroku is trying to initialize your app when it does `rake…
Whenever I think about our regional tech industry, I struggle to understand the disconnect between what other people are doing in the world and what we are doing. There are many exemplary tech companies from all over the world that compete well on the world stage. There are at least two from Australia , many from China, India, and many other countries. What creates even more confusion on my part…
People tend to be tribalistic. Whether it is politics, religion, football (Jamaican and American), technology (vim vs TextMate, Ruby vs Java), etc. It s very easy to be caught up in your own dogma, but at the very least (I would encourage you to) be reasonable. Before denigrating/slandering/ridiculing someone else because they prefer something different than you, be cognizant of the fact that they…
I made a comment in response to a blog post about the Apple vs Samsung case on Hacker News recently - that got a ton more upvotes than I thought it would have (and a few friends of mine encouraged me to write this post), so I thought I would post the jist of my thoughts here. Apple wasn t suing Samsung because they copied one of their products. What Samsung has done is straight up IP (Intellectual…
The next time you think I will start {X} another time. I have too much going on now . consider this. During the period when Albert Einstein wrote his 4 papers that revolutionized physics (including The General Theory of Relativity ), he had a few things going in his life .including but not limited to: A full-time job in a patent office in Bern, Switzerland where he worked 6 days - 8 hours a day…
I just came from lunch with Chad Cunningham and Gordon Swaby . We are trying to figure out, and put into words, the issues facing tech (more specifically internet/web) companies in Jamaica for a meeting with a government official coming up shortly. After going through many scenarios of issues we face, the recurring theme always came back to the small problems . Registering an LLC easily & cheaply…
Update: I re-applied with additional information about my business and financial situation and they approved the visa for 2 - 3 years. I recently applied for a visitors visa to Canada (officially known as a Temporary Residents Visa ) because my best friend is getting married in July. I went to Canada about 3 years ago for his brother s wedding - around the same time of year - and it was nice. I…
My mom just got a Macbook Air for Christmas, and I got the wonderful job of setting it up for her. I am a geek and for some reason, even though my Macbook Pro is about 2.5 years old, I get giddy just holding such a small but sturdy form factor in my hand. I might seem like a fan boy, but I am a cautious one. Even though I do development on my MBP, I still have a Windows 7 machine (dual-monitor)…
It just occurred to me that the more you actually build stuff, is the easier it is to build stuff. Not only because you get better, but because your library of solutions expands which encourages you to build more stuff (because you are creating less novel pieces of your new project) which expands your library even more and makes you even better. Creating a virtuous positive cycle. That happened to…
Had a wonderful time at Kingston Beta last night. There was a point brought up by one of the presenters that entrepreneurs should focus on cash-flow instead of profitability. There were a few questions and I don t think that the questioners fully understood, so I figured it was time for a post to try and explain (if I am still not clear, let me know in the comments). Cash Flow Simply put the flow…
The act of accumulating a number (say n ) of unread/unprocessed tabs left open in a browser window such that the next day rather than starting with 0 tabs open, you start with n. Also can be summed up as: X = X + Y, where X = the number of tabs open at the beginning of the day, and Y = the number of tabs opened throughout the day. This has become a major problem, so much so that when my browser…
Please don t get me wrong. I am one of those people that supported your nascent campaign once you declared in Illinois. If I could have voted in 2008, I would have voted for you. Even though I am not Congressman Wilson, I have to say it, you lied! You have said that you would rather be a really good one-term president , than a mediocre two-term president. As is evidenced from the way you…
TL;DR - Legalize all illegal immigrants and have an open immigration policy that makes up for the shortfall in the workforce. Long version The way Social Security works is, every dollar you pay in taxes today, goes to paying the check for a retiree. To get a full appreciation for the Social Security Problem, let s run some quick math. Let s assume that each Baby Boomer is retiring at the age of…