Andalucia Steve

Most new businesses fail. Google the stats as they are in your country but it's a big number - 90%  of businesses starting in 2013 won't be here in 2018.

The fact is that new business startups are vulnerable risky ventures. If you're starting up a new business it helps to do a risk assessment as part of your business plan.

Risk can be divided into four main areas, product risk, financial risk, team risk and market risk.

The trick is to realise that the first three are much more predictable and controlable than the latter. Of the four types of risk, market risk is more volatile.

Financial risk can be managed with budegeting, team risk mitigated with flexible empoyment policy, even product risk to a great extent minimised with good R&D and QC. The market knows no master, so it's dynamics will always be the one thing you can't control.

The logical thing to do then is to test the market as soon as you can before you spend much on product, team or borrow finance. Use models and test extensively before scaling up your product offering so you can determine the size, shape and demand of the market place as early as you can.

Unless you're particularly interested in the innner workings of the Internet, you probably won't be aware how the IP address system works. To cut a long story short, there are only a finite amount of numbers in use and these are allocated in a per country (and per organisation) basis, so if you know a particular IP address you can be fairly sure where the user's computer is located.

One of the smallest countries to be allocated a range of IP addresses in the Vatican. The ever curious team over at Torrent Freak just looked at addresses for downloads coming from the Holy See and Holy Shit, guess what the Holy Saw - porn and pirate movies!!

  http://torrentfreak.com/priests-watch-dvd-screeners-while-pirates-download-filth-in-the-vatican-130407/

It was Romeria here in Olvera today. Romeria is a kind of picnic in the countryside that celebrates the event that happened in 1715. The story goes that there was an epic drought that caused huge losses of crops and livestock. The towns people decided to take action. They marched with the float of the virgin to the sanctuary of the los remedios, a church just outside of town,  held various religious ceremonies (and had a bit of a party by the sound of it) and henceforth it rained.

Now this is all very well if you buy into it. The issue I have is that we've just had one of the wettest winters I've seen in my life, so to re-enact a rain dance is the last thing you want to do - how about walking very quietly in the opposite direction?

As subtitled above, this is the first post of this new blog. I do have other blogs but they're all to do with one company or other, so I can't always say what I want to say.

What I want to say today is adios Thatcher. Everyone has their personal view and as we're seeing in the media these vary from dancing in the streets to making comparisons with Churchill.

At the end of the day though she did what all western politicians have done since the second world war which is to do is to impersonate king Canute. The inevitable decline of the West and movement of power and money to the East is the elephant in the room.

All Thatcher acheived with her destruction of manufacture, mining and industry and the creation of a raft of financial regulation to protect the city is to create a greater disparitiy between rich and poor, a more divided and unequal society and ultimately the seeds of the UK's eventual destruction. By creating an environment where borrowing is easy and cheap, where wages are frozen and where money can travel from one side of the world to another in the blink of an eye, there is a disaster brewing in the UK economy that will erupt one day like a volcano, and there is nothing anyone can do to stop it.

"Let all men know how empty and worthless is the power of kings. For there is none worthy of the name but God, whom heaven, earth and sea obey"