I lent a book not so long ago to a friend who, for the duration of this post, shall remain nameless. It was Founders at Work, a collection of interviews with the founders of tech startups.

If there’s one line of wisdom threaded through the book, it’s summed up at the end by Michael Dell when asked what the most important quality in an entrepreneur is. “Persistence” was his one word reply. (I prefer the phrase “fucking a terrier” as in “he’s a fucking terrier”).

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Very occasionally, on an evening, cooking, talking to your wife in the kitchen, you have an idea that, when you walk around it, over it and under it, when you look at it from all 360 * 360 degrees, strikes you again and again with its potential to change the world.

A simple practical idea that resonates with the threads and memes you’re consuming. That’s interwoven with the trends of your time and solves the problems of your time.

This post is about one such idea.

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The 30%+ Apple takes on every purchase in the app store is a significant disincentive to sell through their platform. Because it’s a new service, a new deal, it’s one that we’re all too aware off and scrutinise before grudgingly making our cocoa devil’s pact.

But it’s worth remembering that we operate within just such a system every day of our lives.

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I was talking to Mamading Ceesay recently about the Gallup World Poll, which tells us that what people really want is a good job. He pointed out that it was interesting people equate fulfilling work with a decent job: are there not other ways to be satisfied?

The next night, a Friday on the sofa nursing a cold, I watched this talk by Umair Haque. I had been reading his response to the comments on his Generation M Manifesto and spotted a link purporting to explain what “doing meaningful stuff that matters” means in detail.

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It’s amazing how often I find myself solving the wrong problem. As you may see from my last post, over the last few days, I’ve been trying to wrestle trust metric calculations onto App Engine. However it turns out that for one reason after another that it just isn’t practical (the solution I outlined in the post, Tav points out, is trivially game-able).

So the penny drops and it’s back to the drawing board. All the time I’ve invested figuring out which model entities can go in which entity group and how we can maitnain db consistency and so on is simply a waste.

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This is a dump of my thoughts on how to use Google App Engine for the back end of Trustmap. I’m no expert on data and this may not make much sense if you’re not me.

From a data store perspective, a user’s immediate trustmap looks like:

class Trustmap(db.Model):
    user = db.KeyProperty()
    context = db.StringProperty()
    users = db.ListProperty(db.Key)

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Effective time management is about setting priorities and meeting deadlines? It’s about organising your day and minimising the time you waste?

Wrong. These are tiny marginal factors that barely affect it.

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Following some recent discussions on the esp Google Group, Tav emailed in this clairification of Pecus. I thought I’d reproduce the email here as it relates to my previous post It’s about Actualisation and means there’s a permalink to the documentation.

Over to Tav…

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I’ve been hugely impressed with Umair Haque since coming across his Users Guide to the 21st Century and his recent blog post on Unnovation resonates, with its assertion that “strategy can only be described as an innovation if it results in (or is the result of) authentic, durable economic gains.”

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In the summer of 2007 around a hundred people gathered in a large room in East London. They were there to find out about and take part in 24 weeks. As evidenced here 24 weeks was a project to create an “evolutionary platform” to “enable communities to communicate and work together”. It was, in short, a gathering of well meaning folk who wanted to make the world a better place.

I was only there for a few minutes but I caught a vignette during which Mamading Ceesay perked the crowd up into spontaneous applause.

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