Getting Real

I'm reading Getting Real (37signals's ebook) and - while it's written in a very minimal style - it's got some great suggestions.  I'd really like to get started writing some candidate workflows.

Another landing page selector

Here's a code-free landing page builder that gives you the ability to let customers select a pricing model preference during their interest registration.

Dark, dark

SOPA as a ransomware virus.

I should note - again - that I have no intention of writing a ransomware virus or instituting any scam to make money.  It's just that a pattern language for business structures should be able to describe these as edge cases - not only in terms of how they work (both technically and from a business process perspective) but also how they use peoples' expectations to propagate.

Speaking of dark patterns

Here's a great one: Roulette Bot Plus.  It's simple: in return for Paypal donations from your winnings, these guys will give you a free roulette-playing bot for online casinos.  It allegedly takes advantage of the fact that their random number generators aren't actually random, which is pretty darned plausible!

But it turns out it's actually a scam by some of the online casinos.  It'll look like it works for a while, then when you put your actual money into play, it'll go all-in and unfortunately lose.  Ah, well - better luck next time!

On the one hand, I'd love to play with bots of this nature now that I don't live in the States (of course, my bank is still in the States...). But at the same time, this scam fascinates me.  I know there are lists of scam patterns (like dark patterns) but it remains a goal of mine to encode them in a machine-readable and -executable manner. (Yes, I'm working towards humanity's demise.  Ha.)

Leanpub self-publishing

Since I'm kind of embroiled in writing book-like things lately, here's a way to monetize them on a really small-scale basis.  Worth a shot.

Business plans

This was the post to SP that made me think I was getting outside the box over there: an outline of a standard business plan.

Repurposing, a little

It's been bothering me for a while now that my Semantic Programming blog has some startup-type information in it.  So I'm moving all that over here - back dated to its original date of publication.

The idea of most of that is Startup::Declarative, a semantic domain for my Decl language that describes the structures of a startup business, its business processes, actions to be taken, strategies, and so on.  A full declarative specification for a business is, in fact, its business plan - in machine-readable form.

Since this blog is about startup ideas, I've decided it should be about startups in general. I may end up specifying some of the ideas formally or something, if it should ever get that far.