dgildeh's blog

Today I found out about a very interesting competition on YouTube, the YouTube Symphony Orchestra. Tan Dun, the Chinese composer who wrote the soundtrack for Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, has composed a piece which you can download as PDF sheet music for each instrument and then follow him online while he conducts you in a video. I originally thought you had to learn his peice and then record it to submit online, but fortunately (as a 2nd violin part would be very boring by itself!) you can choose from a range of famous pieces to play to show off your talent for each instrument. All you have to do is practice your chosen piece, record it and upload it to YouTube, and then submit it using the competition page for entry into the competition. The cool part is the best performers get flown to New York to perform his composition at Carnegie Hall in April.

The competition closes on  January 28^th, 2009, which unfortunately for me is not enough time for me to pick up my violin properly again for the first time in 11 years and try to get good enough again to play in this event. Too bad, I would have loved to. However if you are good enough to play, make sure you submit an entry, it looks like an excellent event to get involved in!

So much has happened in the world recently, and unfortunately the best part when George Bush got shoes thrown at him today in Iraq (see the YouTube video below) didn't work out so well and missed his head. Bush was his usual smug self pleased to have dodged the shoes and make a joke of it, as anyone would be who had managed to get away with all the mess he's cause for the past 8 years without having to pay for it.

But back to the rest of the world, who will hopefully be able to forget Bush once Obama comes into power this January, it seems when the economy tumbles, as it has quite dramatically since September and the collapse of Lehman Brothers, all the other worlds problems begin to surface. Since September we've seen mass protests in Thailand for a Government that's been in power since before I was living there last year in 2006 (and saw very little complaint), closer to home, especially for me because of my close Greek connections and friends living in Athens, Greece is now having some of the most violent riots in years, and today Russia was having protests against the Kremlin in Moscow and St. Petersburg. I have close friends in all these countries so I've been speaking with all my friends from each to make sure they're OK and find out exactly what’s going on out there.

Where have all the problems with the Governments suddenly come from? I was in Athens in September and I didn’t hear anyone, even my very opinionated friend Dimitris, complaining about the government then, I lived in Bangkok for 7 months last year and again apart from one reporter I met who wasn’t even Thai, I never heard a complaint about the government, and Russia, while not as big as the other protests it appears, I have constantly asked very critical questions about the Kremlin to my Russian friends, and usually the Kremlin is defended very passionately by them.

The fact is these problems didn’t just appear now, they’ve been around for years, the only difference is now the economy is tumbling and people are feeling the pain of a global recession, they stop being complacent and speaking out. I can now really understand why politicians place so much priority on the economy, keep everyone content financially, and you’ll have an easy ride. It’s like the governments have been paying us off to keep us quiet while they proceed with their own agenda, knowing full well someone in a good job, with money to buy the luxuries and support their family is very unlikely to complain outside the confines of their local pub or living room.

But the flip side to this is can we blame our Governments for all the current problems? Protesting to get rid of them? Why didn’t anyone protest before the recession? I don’t think we can blame the Governments for getting us here, its our complacency that got us here. Sure, making change late is better than never, but until we play an active part in our democracies all the time, we should receive no sympathy.

I too am a culprit of complacency. Other than this blog, I’ve never got political, the most I ever have was for the Shisha ban in the UK. So why don’t we all make a new years resolution for 2009 together, to complain in both the good times and the bad so that we don’t just let everything build up and require a global event (such as the credit crunch) to bring us together.

As a member of the Institute of Engineering and Technology I applied this year to become a Chartered Engineer (which allows me to put CEng at the end of my name). To pass I had to do a huge application form, followed by an interview, in which we spent considerable time discussing my new start-up SambaStream and other parts of my career.

For those of you who've never heard about Chartered Engineers before, basically its a qualification to recognise that I have gained the essential skills and experience needed to be a competent engineer. From the IET's own website this is how they describe it:

Chartered engineers are characterised by their ability to develop appropriate solutions to engineering problems, using new or existing technologies, through innovation, creativity and change.

They may develop and apply new technologies, promote advanced designs and design methods, introduce new and more efficient production techniques and marketing and construction concepts, and pioneer new engineering services and management methods.

Chartered engineers are variously engaged in technical and commercial leadership and possess effective interpersonal skills.

So you may now call me David Gildeh, MEng CEng and respect my authoritayyy

It’s been a long time coming, but finally my two business partners,  Ale and Clarence, have taken the big leap to join SambaStream full time, leaving their full time jobs in Accenture. To celebrate, we took this photo in front of an Accenture Tiger Woods poster in St. Pancras. No longer will we all be able to walk through airports and say we work for the company on all the posters, but perhaps one day we'll be able to walk past some of our own posters and say we actually founded that company ;)

The last couple of days I’ve been at Olympia in London for the Business Start-up event 2008. Every year thousands of people interested in or presently running a business descend on the event to see 100’s of exhibitors offering services and seminars with some well known UK entrepreneurs. I managed to pop in to see Levi Roots (check out the photo left, his Reggae Reggae sauce is actually pretty good!) and James Caan from Dragons Den. But to be honest they were there for more inspiration rather than useful information on starting a business.

The one seminar that did stand out for me, was by One Fish Two Fish, a marketing agency that helps businesses with their marketing strategy. Their seminar was about marketing to businesses, something particularly interesting to me because of SambaStream. They have a free eBook you can download from their site with a lot of good material so check it out.

For businesses planning to exhibit next year, one piece of advice I got from another SaaS start-up promoting themselves there, was that the people on Friday tend to be the serious buyers and leads, whereas a lot of the people on Saturday were just people thinking of starting a business and probably not good leads to follow up on for a while.

Today I went with my business partner Clarence to a FREE full day seminar on starting a business by the Enfield Enterprise agency. It’s not the first one of these types of events I’ve been too, the government sponsors loads of these agencies to promote entrepreneurship and support new businesses through their critical first few years. In addition to the British Library, Business Link, and other government initiatives, we also have very favourable tax and laws for starting up businesses in the UK.

For example, in the UK I don’t have to ask any permission to start a business, I just have to declare within 3 months I’m self employed, or register a limited company, and until I hit £67,000 a year in revenues, I don’t even have to worry about VAT. Compare this to Spain, where you have to register for VAT from day 1, and on top of that 13 other agencies before you’re even allowed to start trading, or France, where the town mayor has to approve all new businesses, which is difficult to get if him or his family have a competing business, the UK is really easy to just get up and trading!

All in all, I’m really starting to appreciate the UK as a great place to start a business. You have no excuses if you really want to start one here!

It is with great pleasure today we finally got our site, http://www.sambastream.com up online! Small steps towards something much bigger! For those of you that don't know, I left my job with Accenture in July to found a start-up with 2 workmates, let me take some time to introduce you to our team and what we do.

After months of waiting and speculation, my favourite to win the US elections, Barack Obama, HAS WON!! I've been following him closely since I was working in the US (Baltimore, MD) earlier this year and my co-worker Sri, who was one of his biggest supporters in Seattle, kept going on about him and how great he was! I wrote a blog here on why I though he should win and what he should do to make the world a better place back in January, and was fortunate to see him speak live in Baltimore in February (see here). He definitely is very charismatic and inspiring, and most importantly SMART (not retarded like GW Bush) but I guess now we will have to see if he can live up to his hype. He has a tough ride ahead; a world economy tumbling, 8 years of damage to repair after the worst, most retarded world leader ever to get elected (but like my Murphy's, I'm not bitter :p) and a huge amount of foreign government borrowing (I believe is or is projected to reach 60% of GDP).

Anyway, I wish him all the best, while I may not be America's biggest fan, a well run and prosperous America is essential for the rest of us.

Tonight I presented at the Drupal for NGO's event in London that I go to sometimes. Its basically an event to connect Drupal developers to NGOs so us developers can help NGO's build sites and online applications (using Drupal of course). Obviously with my Accenture Development Partnerships background, this is of great interest to me, especially as I am probably the only consultant in Accenture to ever deliver 2 Drupal projects while I was working there for Ashoka and EITI. While you can checkout the EITI site on the link provided, we actually built another site for Ashoka (not their main one) to connect social investors to social entrepreneurs around the world, kind of like a social networking tool with a greater purpose than photo sharing!

Attached is the presentation I did in PDF format (crap quality as I use cutePDF which puts a line through everything) which should explain the project and how we went about building it in Drupal. Interestingly for this project, we needed to connect to another database where all the profile data was stored so that the profile data could be shared with other sites Ashoka plans to do in the future. The site also includes Google Maps integration for plotting fellows on maps in search results and profile pages.

In the project, my part was acting as project lead, acting as technical architect and project manager overseeing and training our excellent team in Bangkok! Because the site hasn't gone live yet and is under test I used screenshots to present the site, but hopefully by the time you read it, the site will be up and running properly here: http://e2e.ashokalab.org.