G’day. In early November I am heading to Melbourne, Australia for week to work with a start-up there I am advising. If anyone knows of other interesting start-ups I should check out while down-under please let me know in the comments or email me at warrickt [at] gmail dot com.
Moving on….
October 8, 2009
For a little over a year I have been at Zuberance, initially as an Advisor to guide and support the company through its first venture round, and later as VP Business Operations, where I managed pretty much every aspect of scaling a company from 2 employees and 1 customer to what it is today; several Fortune 1000 customers, around 20 employees/contractors, new offices and a new exec team.
Its been a fun journey but despite the ongoing economic gloom, I have decided to strike out and beat a different path. As a I write this I am sitting at home, working on a very cool new start-up that won’t change the world, but will make it a little more fun.
Thanks to everyone at Zuberance – I have made some new friends, learnt a lot and gained the confidence to do what I am doing now!
Surreal video. Happy? Then go shopping.
October 2, 2009Makes you squim in your seat, but give it a few minutes and you’ll see its worth watching.
UK Road accidents actually 3x higher since cameras installed.
September 28, 2009Goes to show that all that public money spent on cameras was worth it!
For the past several years, the UK Department for Transport (DfT) has heralded the drop in the number of serious traffic accidents as evidence of the success of its speed camera policies. For the first time, the agency admitted last Thursday that injury numbers have dropped because its statistical method is incomplete. Although DfT reported 230,905 injury accidents took place in 2008, the agency now believes the true number of accidents is actually three times greater.
Source: Reported Road Casualties Great Britain 2008 (UK Department for Transport, 9/24/2009)
Want to know the cheapest way to reduce your utility bill?
September 22, 2009We recently bought and installed a Hills Supafold clothes line on the side of our house. It has ample room for two washes, and given the weather here in N. California it’s at most an hour before we have lovely dry, fresh-scented clothes. All for almost $0. Which leads me to the point of this post….around 36 people live in Califonia in approx 12m households and yet very few of those have washing lines. My exhaustive research, which entailed asking a sales clerk in Bath and Beyond how many packets of pegs they sold each week, leads me to conclude that virtually no one has clothes lines (BTW just finding a store that sells pegs is a challenge!).

What with the rising cost of utilities and increasing awareness of our carbon footprint its deplorable that more people haven’t ditched their costly clothes dryers. I reckon a clothes dryer costs around $2 in electricity per load – which means that we only have to do around 120 loads before we are saving money – or about 14 months in our 4 person household! The ROI is far better than pretty much any other attempt to lower utility bills. Maybe the govt should have a program to encourage folks to help the planet rather than one to help them buy new cars which only harm it.
Kseniya Simonova sand drawings…
September 21, 2009Beautiful sand drawings from Kseniya Simonova – star of Ukraine’s version of ‘You’ve got talent’!
Something to get cycling data geeks excited
September 18, 2009For all of you cycling geek billy goats out there, here’s a great resource for visualizing the elelvation of Bay Area climbs!

Technology to make bad parents even worse.
September 15, 2009I’m not at the TechCrunch50 conference going on this week here in San Francisco but have kept abreast of the companies pitching their business via the TC site and others. Two companies launched yesterday that made me wince; Story Something and Toybots.
Story Something allows parents to create customized bedtime stories featuring their kids names, pets, favorite places, etc. and have them delivered to their iPhone. Toybots is a platform fpr connecting toys to the web so that parents can get the toy to tell a story (for example). One of the presenters (can’t remember which) pointed out that parents spend only around 5 minutes reading to their kids each day…and so how do either of these help us become better parents exactly?
Story Something allows parents to use their iPhone as a proxy parent whilst Toybots mean you can now get a damn Woozee to do the talking for you (which looks like a scary version of Yoda). Mr. and Mrs. Couch Potato, who are already glaring examples of absentee/disinterested/dysfunctional parenting now have another way to be even less effective – great.
Posted by warrickt
Posted by warrickt
Posted by warrickt