The only rule of Start-Up Club is that there are no rules. I paraphrase Fight Club and I have included a picture of a bra stuck on a wall, you’re going to have to bear with me on this post which contains a lot of mixed metaphors.

We’re 6 weeks from a beta version of Qajack, which is 6 weeks away from needing to raise necessary finance so that we can see it to the next level. But how do we find this fabled finance? Bootstrapping has gotten us this far; relatives, credit cards and organ donation have kept us in second hand laces, but now the boots are starting to fall apart.

What we need is a stranger in a suit to buy us a new pair of trainers and tell us why they’re good for our cardio workout.

An Angel Investor, a pre-VC, a new-VC, a rich dead Uncle prepared to die in 6 weeks time.

This picture is a good representation of the UK start-up post-bootstrapped dilemma.

The Start-Up is the whistling boy, the Investor is the large bra and the down pipe is the Blogosphere, the buzz that lies between them. Currently the boy has his back turned, not wanting to look too keen for fear of frightening away the bra, but whistling so as to attract just enough attention to himself. The bra has one cup lifted towards the down pipe, listening (let’s posit bra’s can hear in this scenario) for the whistle in the buzz, or trying to ignore the buzz and listen out for the clearest whistle with a view to helping it get some buzz.

I shall be seeking to propagate and regularly detail the Qajack buzz, be it inane pictorial stunts such as this one, or genuine traction with key influencer blogs.

Having the idea, and the really useful ‘video’ game is a great idea (it’s even got a business model!), is only a part of it, the early adopter crowd have to take to you and have to be courted, conferences and coffee mornings attended and a risk taking, high net worth tech investor uncovered.

But just like Qajack, you got to gamble with what you know…

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… in a picture.

Picture credit: Lise Harlev

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Qajack is still a hormonal surge in Google, Seesmic, Facebook and dastardly Poker’s collective bosoms, but already I have been whoring myself to it’s cause, such is my belief in it’s game changingness (if I can whore, I can make up words).

I committed myself to video late last night, with a lemon tea induced witty quip to try and win free entry to the Being Digital tech conference.

I’m here to say it all got out of hand and I have just now covered myself in post-it notes and my daughter’s sellotape (stolen), added another 2 videos and a text comment all in the vein attempt to get people to take notice of the world’s first, really useful ‘video’ game.

As the only entrant, Techcrunch Mike, who is in Barcelona, which is where I should be because that’s where the office is, but I’m not because I live in London and commute, said:

‘Fat Man - Nice one! Let’s see someone beat that…’

So some albino dog breeder takes a video of his pooch barking, no doubt whilst being taunted with the neighbours thigh bone and I’m looking like a good second place! Damn you hound man I’ll find you!

I’ll get Qajack into Being Digital with a Qajackhammer if I Qajacking have to!

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I read a lot about stealth start-ups, which kinda sounds like a start-up crossed with a ninja Vincent Price, which is plain weird.

Shouldn’t you want to tell everyone you can about your start-up? Excluding the long game of the semantic web which would seem to be Artificial Intelligence, then I think I’m pretty safe in saying let’s focus on using existing technologies and build on the rise of the social web to create new businesses.

To my mind we’re at a heady confluence on the web, video/entertainment merges with social networking and search still dominates, even as the results become increasingly spamish and irrelevant. Micro-blogging and You Tube compels us all to crave the attention of our communities. Read the rest of this entry »

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Seesmic provides the booze whilst Google gets drunk and ends up in bed with Poker and Facebook, nobody is quite sure who inseminated who but one thing they are sure of, one of them is pregnant.

8 weeks later (Gestation 2.0) and beautiful, brawling, kinda edgy bad ass Qajack is born, heralding the worlds first really useful ‘video’ game.

After digesting too many bad start-ups we’ve decided to regurgitate our own, a social ‘video’ gaming community that let’s you play with what you know and meet like-minded people along the way making it the sorta bastard offspring of some sites you may have heard of and a game you’re old man is addicted to.

Please sign-up to ‘better’ test the social ‘video’ game experience in 8 weeks and become healthily addicted to another web phenomena.

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How do you choose a name for your start-up? Where do you begin?

Most often the name reflects the offering; Digg, one assumes dig.com was long gone and way too expensive to buy so Kevin & Co just added an extra ‘g’ for good measure and thus was born a hip social news aggregator, ‘yeah man, I Digg it’.

It seems to help if your name can also be used as verb, ‘I Googled it’ and ‘I’ll Twitter you’, ‘I’m spending the next 3 minutes Yahooing’… hmm perhaps Yahoo’s lack of verbage explains it’s current predictament?

Web 2.0 is splattered with dropped vowels; Flickr being the champion of them all. YouTube sticks to the basics, with a name that sort of reflects the product but is grammatically wrong. Read the rest of this entry »

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Metaphors, parables, analogies… anthropomorphism… Star Wars. I stumbled across this story via the inanity of Digg:

‘A UK man has confessed to dressing up like Darth Vader and attacking two men who founded a church based on Jedi teachings. He beat them with a crutch, but to be fair, they were asking for it: The victims had been playing with light sabers and filming themselves while doing so.

Mrs Lloyd said: “He was wearing a black bin bag and a cape and had a metal crutch in his hand.” Mrs Lloyd said he was shouting “Darth Vader”
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