Cash and Kites

We’ve been up to quite a bit recently. Work and non-work.

Work

The biggest news is that we’ve now got cash in the bank from some investors in England. We’ve got a list of people who wanted us to get back in touch when a round of funding was coming together, so we’ll hopefully be able to close down some more investment over the next week or two.

We were also featured on the Firefox “Recommended Addons” list, which is a pretty big deal for us as it pretty much solves distribution up to a few million users, so long as you’ve got a great product and you can scale the backend…

The product obviously needs more work, but as always, we’ve got lots of good ideas! The backend is a more measurable thing; we know for a fact we can’t scale properly yet as interest spike totally knocked over our servers. That’s what I’m working on at the moment, and really enjoying it.

Non-work

There’s also been lots of fun stuff happening. We’ve been kite-surfing a couple of times now. The first time was a bit grim, as it was pretty cold and I spent about half an hour untangling lines. The second time was awesome, however. I started with a small ~9m² kite, just flying it on the beach. The things pull so strongly, it’s amazing. Even with that small kite, you have to clip it into a harness, and it was easily pulling me along the beach and up into the air.

It went pretty well though, so after a while we put the wet suits on and I tried it for real, with Pat’s behemoth 19m² kite. I did manage to get upright, being pulled along, but I had very little say in which direction I’d be going in next.

After that, we went to Pat’s friend’s office. This office is awesome for a number of reasons:

• it’s on an abandoned air base
• MythBusters is filmed next door
• it’s in the disused air traffic control building
• it’s got 6” naval guns outside it (they don’t work)
• they bought a fire engine, which is now in the back yard
• they’ve converted the ATC tower into a bar, with 4 glass walls

I’m really looking forward to a party I’m planning later this month. The next version of Firefox (the browser we’re targetting) is being released mid-June-ish, so we’re having a launch party… with a difference. The first screen you see after installing the browser is this. So, we’re going to get a bunch of people together to re-create the scene in a park in San Francisco. Artist’s impression on the party wiki. I actually can’t wait.

I am now going to go and eat some watermelon with balsamic vinegar. If you’ve not tried it, you’ve never lived.