“Don’t vote for Hillary; it might break FreeBase!”

Open it back up again …indeed, the facts are hidden.

(NB: I find this completely amazing. Why the hell would it do this?)

I wonder… How many distinct musical sources can a human ear distinguish? Does it help if they are different genres? How many iPods are required to create perfect whitenoise?

Exactly what I need to let users define their own layouts of mobile device information web parts.

Oh… did I just give away a secret?

 - approximately 2 weeks before I leave the area to go and live abroad.

So I guess I can’t help them be more than just them

Hilariously, I was in “Ultra First Class” – which is preumably where the 7-foot+ basketball players sit. I did in fact have 10 feet of leg room. Thank you Mark Cuban.

Less impressed were those ‘business class’ travellers who were relegated to the economy seats at the back of the plane (for the physiotherapists and score-keepers?). Oh, and we did arrive fairly late and I had to run for the connecting flight.

Coming home even my humour didn’t last though… at the JFK check-in desk: “We’ve got bad news; the flight’s just left the UK”.

Well, there’s no way I’m waiting eight hours for a departure at 4am, and a wrecked weekend. So, a nifty hop onto the monorail, a phone to the travel agency, and two hours later I’m flat, asleep, and on my way home – no thanks to my scheduled carrier.

So a skeptic proven right I guess. And I still don’t know what a MaxJet plane actually looks like.

Now, there’s a direct flight from Gatwork (45 mins away) to Charlotte. But it’s a bit pricey this late in the day.

So we’re trying MaxJet. MaxJet appears to me to be to business class what EasyJet is to economy. But let’s see. I’m game.

But they fly from Stanstead to Washington, and then I connect down to Charlotte. So I’m already grumpy. It’s at least 2 and half hours to Stanstead, and then I have to change. It makes it almost like a 3-leg journey.

I get to check-in. Oh dear – their plane’s out of action. We’re having to use someone else’s. Lots of people complaining that their seats don’t recline (and so on)

I’m not cheerful at this point. I could have been half way to Greenland by now. (And I’m stuck in Essex – the horror of it all!)

But… someone’s smiling down on me. They’ve reassigned all the seats. This other plane has different classes and I seem to have been put right up the front in “Ultra Premium Business Class”. Well; that sounds interesting.

I struggle past hoards of package flights to the MaxJet lounge. At least I can get some peace and quiet.

Oh. Whoah. They have free wifi in the lounge.

I love MaxJet

Say what you like about the UK health service – all that matters to me is that the bedside telephone doubles up as an internet terminal!

So here I am cut off from the real world, but completely immersed (as usual) in my on-line existence. The only downside is the lack of mobile, but I think writing my blog from an NHS bed trumps Dan Applequist’s Blackberry.

It was broadly agreed that we had been ‘ahead of our time’. The bubble came and went, mobile data didn’t spring into life as we’d all hoped it might, and the idea of stimulating a community was just a few years early for the web 2.0 excitement of 2004 onwards. The company got bought (admittedly in two / pieces), and most folks moved out.

Now it’s nearly 7 years on, the mobile web appears to be entering some sort of a renaissance, and communities (and developer resources) are all the rage. The valley is still climbing the side of a new bubble (or is it a spike?), and one wonders how AnywhereYouGo.com would have been riding that were it around today.

Since then, at Argogroup, the trick has been to to keep the momentum of interest in mobile data (and its quality) going. As a member of a very exclusive club of mobile startups that existed in both 2000 and 2006, Argogroup had to learn how to survive the trough between two bubbles.

Did we do it by being ’ahead of our time’? Well yes, to a certain extent. To keep investment coming, and to keep the company focussed and motivated, it’s very powerful to be developing products and propositions that are unique. And of course it’s the only way you’ll ever get an exciting valuation.

But at the same time, you can’t do that in an ivory tower without disappearing into a technology-oriented world of cool products that don’t pay the bills. So while we worked hard to build exciting new technology, we put a lot of effort into building up commercial strength and going where the dollars were. And yes, of course, always being prepared to adapt a utopian vision of one’s product roadmaps towards what customers are actually asking for. So that’s about being ‘on the time’.

Finally, after a while of making an apparently lucrative market, no-one is surprised when competition springs up – and that’s an important factor in driving a successful business too. As we all know, only the paranoid survive, and it’s not unusual for a competitor to rise fast to match some of your capabilities in the market place. In some cases exceed them – and that’s when you realise you’re ‘behind the time’. The level of concern – or paranoia – that that engenders can be a great catalyst to motivate a company to succees. (Watch Intel and AMD go at it).

Conversely, if you are late into the market, having a pace-maker to aspire to overtake also seems to be a recipe for success.

So… I think you need to be all three:

1) Ahead of your time – providing thought-leadership, entrepreneurialism, pioneering world-class R&D, and a sales channel prepare to operate outside of a comfort zone

2) On the time – providing products that people need hear and now. Listening to short term requirements and catering functionality to meet tactical needs; a.k.a. ensuring revenue

3) Behind the time – not entirely of course, but being stung into action by other innovators and knowing how to deal pro-actively with that threat and shortfall – or having an earlier innovator in your sights.

Take Google for example. 1) Check (writ big), 2) Check (ditto), 3) Check (but closing fast)

So what makes an unsuccessful company? Well, failing to tackle all three of these facets certainly doesn’t help. With AnywhereYouGo.com, we had lots of 1), basically no 2) and very little 3). I’ve been there – it’s not pretty – although I think we all did the best we could in the circumstances.

But companies can also fail if they forget how to do 1), or don’t know how to deal with 3). The here-and-now comfort zone of 2) securing cash takes priority over innovation and competitive leadership.

Kiss the valuation goodbye, watch the tail lights of the rest of the industry get smaller and smaller… sooner or later that’s not pretty either.