Ticketmaster and ticketing in general - a cloud opportunity.

The obvious news from the last 48 hours was the death of Michael Jackson. The first thought that I gave was the obvious battering that the likes of Ticketmaster and Seatwave were going to get. Initially it was the purchase of tickets, now it's for the refunds.

Any large scale event will alway incur a spike at the time tickets go on sale. Something like:


(Apologies for my crude Google Chart example).

It stands to reason that an elastic system would be of benefit to any high volume ticketing system. Deploy n number of servers to cope with the demand. Michael Jackson's O2 shows were a good case in point. There in the region of 250,000 tickets on sale and they went in a matter of hours. If those 250,000 sales represented 1% of the hits the site was getting then you can easily estimate that the server could potentially get 25,000,000 hits in a short space of time.

There's also a maximum return on investment (ROI) from only having the servers you need available at peak times, instances then switched off during quieter periods. Saves having a server farm full of running servers.

Meeting: Open Coffee Coleraine networking event.

I've finally got the first of my Open Coffee Coleraine meetings sorted out. It will be held at Starbucks, Coleraine on Wednesday 22nd July 2009.

The Open Coffee meetings are informal get togethers for businesses, startups and creatives to network, have a coffee and even perhaps generate some new ideas.

Starbucks have kindly offered us their cafe after hours, the event will run from 7pm - 9pm, plus free filter coffee and tea if you are prepared to give a donation to their chosen charity (if you want a quad shot skinny latte then you'll have to pay :) ).

Last bonus is that from 1st July if you are a Starbucks card holder then you get Wifi for free.

The blog is at http://www.opencoffeecoleraine.com and there's also a Twitter page as well.

Hunch, if you want to learn about me you need to give some better option answers.

As Robert Fripp once said, "The quality of the question determines the quality of the answer".

I was just having a noodle around with the new startup Hunch. It was all going so well until....


Well, actually the answer is neither, I don't like chocolate full stop, it makes me barf huge amounts. Can I have a third option please, "Don't like chocolate". I'm fairly sure I'm not the only person in the world that doesn't like it (I know people don't eat it for a variety reasons).

The new Java Store and the main core of the problem.

Three cheers for the new Java Store (though I can't see as I'm in Northern Ireland, can't sign up, can't join, well not for the time being). From reading press releases and the rest it sounds good on paper but I'm far from convinced that Sun can actually deliver.

Eric Klein said,“We're building new business opportunities and are thrilled to launch the Java Store to connect developers with hundreds of millions of Java users. The Java Store will become the destination for the most interesting, useful and entertaining Java software and content.”

And here starts the main point of the issue. Not everyone with a Java runtime knows they have a Java runtime. It's all very well to say there's 2.4M mobile devices but out of those how many truely know they have Java on the phone and they can download stuff. Not 2.4 million for sure. Set top boxes are another good example, I don't know many who can download software for them, so it's all very well saying there's 800M of them.

At present the Java Store is a big marketing exercise from what I can see. It's a good idea and I desperately want to believe it will work. Everyone is looking at Nokia Ovi and a bit of a tramsmash launch. I'd hate to see the Java Store go the same way. We're going to end up with an app store deluge and the single one fact remains, Apple is doing it better than anyone else regardless of whether you like Apple or not.

The incline to a beta release.

The Open Coffee Derry meeting gained some valuable feedback on the new startup, I demoed a very rough and ready J2ME app. I'm not a great networker (fine online but will very rarely go out and meet and do all that stuff), but this meet is a good small encouraging one.

From them it was a case of go for it or back off and think of something else. I'm glad I put the time in to do the demo mobile app, talking about "the idea" well it just isn't the same. Here's the app, here's what it does and here's the benefit to you. Basic feedback was great, same ringing in my ear was "do this on an iphone or ipod and we'll talk some more".

So I went and got an iPod Touch....

Much to do but with this release the demo rollout can happen, but it's opening up some other interesting possibilities.

Open Coffee Derry meeting tonight.

The location has moved from Starbucks to Da Vinci's on the Culmore Road. Start time is 6.30pm. More updates and info can be found on the website or on their twitter.

Focus your gaze, writing little apps won't make you rich (normally).

Interesting timing, I've been thinking about this post all day, then Techcrunch have just put up an interesting article about App Store hype which reflects on a post by Stromcode.

My view has never been about selling applications (whether they be Java, Brew or ObjC) but about connecting users to the solutions themselves. I've been doing much thinking today in regards to a startup project I've been working on (I was thinking of doing a stealth launch at Open Coffee Derry but I think I'm still going to keep it under my hat for a little while longer). Mobile applications should be a gateway of connecting users, as websites do with the browser, offering solutions and benefits along the way.

Games are games and people will play them and there will be games developers, but whether those developers will make a living from their apps seems a bit of a long shot to me. I have to admit I got caught in the make-me-an-iphone-developer mantra with the possibility of $$$ but reading I got put off.

Mobile phones are about connecting people, their applications should do the same.