Simon Edhouse: adventures in the entrepreneurial mindset

This entry was posted on
Thursday, November 26th, 2009
at
12:30 am and is filed
under Consume!.

I’ve been funnelling most of the ‘diverting links’ content through my Twitter channel lately, but it will take a smidgen over 140 characters for me to run you through this so you get the full benefit, so for the first time in a long time…

I started by reading this post from David Thorne (a man who does not have any pets and once tried to pay a bill with a drawing of a spider):

David Thorne – Please design a logo for me. With pie charts. For free.

No, no, no… don’t read this yet. Go up and read that first. Then come back here. I’ll wait.

(waits)

Done? Good. Onward…

David Thorne’s encounter with Simon Edhouse made me want to know more about the man, so I looked him up in Google. The first thing I noticed was that – within hours of his post – David had already placed third in Google for Simon’s name. Without trying:

poor-simon.gif

The top search result was not Simon’s personal site (edgepolitics.com) or his business site (virtusoft.net), but this listing at naymz.com, which informed me that Simon has the following qualification from the Entrepreneurship, Commercialisation and Innovation Centre of the University of Adelaide (and no, I’m not making any of this up)

Master of Science and Technology Commercialization

I have highlighted this qualification (the result of a two year* course) so you can stare at it for a very long time, like I did, before moving on to Simon’s Twitter page and comparing it to David’s:

oh-poor-simon.gif

Admittedly, Simon has published over 6 times as many tweets than David, but if you’re going to commercialise, bums on seats is the slightly more vital statistic, and the margin is pretty clearly in David’s favour. Like 36 to 1 in David’s favour.

Now, most of you who know me know that I have very little time for stat-porn and associated willy-waving, but given Simon’s interest in the web and networking thingamajigs I’d say it’s a fair stick to measure him by, so I find this difference in Twitter performance telling, and a reliable indicator of how polite and respectful I might be in Simon’s position if asking someone like David Thorne for a favour… especially when there is a considerable risk of David saying or doing something that might result in many, many people pointing and laughing at me if I muck him about.

On that note we move on to where David Thorne is wrong; it is not Twitter (with a coin slot) that Simon Edhouse has invented, it is BitTorrent (with a coin slot)… and I have discovered on my travels that Simon appears to have gone about building the project in much the same way as he went about commissioning the logo for it:

BotTorrent commercial project, needs help
Simon Edhouse [simon at virtusoft.net]
Sat Jan 15 03:56:27 CST 2005

Hi,

I am new to this list. So I hope this invitation is OK. I am looking
for people to collaborate on a project to design a commercial
BitTorrent application. Specifically I am looking to find someone with
advanced maths skills who can assist with modelling various scenarios.
All interested parties are welcome to email me to discuss. –
simon at virtusoft.net

Simon

Still, Simon Edhouse has played a vital role in some pretty high-flying high-tech successes in the past (and you can be the 266th person to hear all about them here on YouTube), so who knows? We may yet live to see David Thorne begging to be a part of his success as Simon rocks with laughter on the deck of his yaght yacht… especially now that David has foolishly awarded him all this free publicity and I’ve unwittingly fallen into his trap as well.

In fact, if Simon is half the man I think he is, then he’s already worked out eight ways to make mockery shit money.

All he needs now is someone to build the gubbins… maybe fashion a logo… knock together a few pie charts… and paint his fucking house.

UPDATE – I was in two minds about publishing what I had found, but this removes any doubts I may have had about how much this guy deserves to be mocked. Most of you who know me will also know that I have NO time for this kind of crap:

tut_simon-is-a-dick.gif

Don’t feel at all bad for laughing at this guy… he is clearly a dick.

*UPDATE: 1.5 year course, I’ve found. Pardon the inaccuracy. All other updates have unfolded in comments.

UPDATE (27 Nov) – Lots of words down there. Here is a picture summary, issued after much discussion, and a complete failure by Simon Edhouse to follow through on any of his sound and fury about the exchange being faked:








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