Are there any dot-com entrepreneurs on WP?

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I took Salvia once... but it made my house keep rotating clockwise. Realizing that it probably wasn't good for the foundation, I haven't tried it since.

I thought long and hard about starting a social networking site in '99. I simply didn't have the experience to make it feasible, and too many other things in my life were distracting me.

Ours/mine went bust.
C'est la vie.

I hope to become a programmer soon, I'm learning C and plan to make iPhone applications (for the App Store) because someone made $250,000 in two months from a 59p game... In the middle of the current financial crisis!

There was an Australian company, Tycho, back in the 1970s and 80s that was writing assemblers, operating system and other languages for the first Australian microcomputer - of course, that was before the PC launched...
Then, later in the 80s, a little South Australian company, Syntax Systems, wrote a multi-user accounting package for the Apple III, Mac and later the PC.

Another Australian company, BAM Software wrote a Mac project management package - KeyPlan - in the later 80s. And a little later another South Australian company, Graphic Notes, launched a music typesetting product to the world - the Macintosh again.

Not a zac (Australian colloquial expression for a small coin) of profit in the lot. Still, things are better now. Open source exists, the web exists, Aspergers as a diagnosis exists... Go for it - just don't bank the profits till they're yours.

i am too stupid in a business sense to ever be able to benefit in any great way from my work.

this is not a "dot.com" tale, but one of unperceived opportunity.

i used to work for a company called infohouse (one word) as their only programmer. i had no experience of what to expect. they sacked the other 2 programmers after a while leaving me to do all the work.

the company produced electronic reports for suppliers of grocery products. the data was collected as point of sale scandata from around 1,200 stores for about 20,000-30,000 grocery items per store per day.
there were 500+ suppliers who wanted various reports on their categories of products.

i rewrote their system because i did not like the stale and rigid sytem that was in place
.
i wrote all the data import programs, and the processing programs that prepared the data for the reports, and all the report programs.

the most complicated part of the process was the error detection and resolution module for the import stage.

clients used to ring up claiming their reports were wrong sometimes.

eg: the sales of their dry cracker biscuits (jatz) went up by 20% on tuesday and wednessday, but they did not put them on special, and there were no special events on those days.

so i used to trawl for reasons that their data showed what it did, and i wrote a module that detects "cross categoric synergies".
from this i could find that (for example) : cheese slices and olives were both on special, and that was the reason for the spike.

but that was only possible after running an entire sales history examination of waveforms of sales categories (much like sound waves) that correspond to a regular degree.

i needed a way to quickly check to see in a graphic sense, whether my program's predictions were correct.

i designed an interface where i could see with ease, a graph that i could construct using 4 analytical dimensions (1. market (choose the shops or the area etc) 2.product (choose single or multiple selections of products to show) 3. time (choose the time frame and specify the increments) and 4. measure (a long list of functions (eg: correlation coefficients) and also the basics measures like "value$" and "volume" etc)).

one day, the owner of the company was in my office and wanted to know what was on my screen.

i showed him and he became excited. later, all the directors came in and wanted to see it.
then they asked for a copy for themselves.
i obliged.
after that, they all started using it all the time, and then someone had the idea that they could sell the software to our clients (i was oblivious to this at that time).

they kept asking for extensions and enhancements (like batch processing, and others like "file output of reports").
they saw the potential of this tool as being a way that non computer minded managers could quickly generate a report of their whimsical notions (i also did not know this at the time).

then the sister company called "south and walker" got hold of it (same owner).
a while later, i happened to pick up one of our brochures from the reception (i do not know why) and i saw my familiar screens in an ad for a product called "goldmine". it also had that little "c" in a circle next to the name.

i thought "huh???".
i went to the owners office and asked if he was selling my private program to the public.
he said he was "giving it away" only to clients who buy our services, and that the copyright is so that our competitor "A.C.Nieslen" could not copy it.
i was satisfied.

i continued to develop the system at their request and it became very elaborate with "what if's" and "prognosticators" etc.

then, "scandata" was made private because of some government rule, and our company had to cease (because we had no access to all scandata anymore).

they moved to england and i would not go there to live so i resigned.

since then, they have renamed "goldmine" to "cipher" (there is another claim to "goldmine" by a US software firm).
it has been developed and expanded and then it was renamed "decisions made easy".

and i am horrified to know that it is now the core analytical software of A.C.Nielsen!! !! !.

my company's owner obviously went to nielsen and flogged my idea and must have made a lot of money for it.

that is the biggest loss i ever had of potential.
i had no idea i was a goose that was laying a golden egg for them.

so i have not the ability to outwit an NT when he is greedily deceptive.

Been a Technical Coordinator at the High School I go to since my Sophomore Year.[Its my senior year now.] I now also use my very own office to fix computers for the students and staff as well as community. Its a small business but it sure as hack got me in the newspaper as well as being a well-known guy on campus.

i've always had a self-built project of some description on the back burner, mostly they fizzle out or go bang quick due to circumstances beyond my control - economy, buying habits etc.

anyway, current project has been on the "coding bench" for about 2years now, i've done a large amount of work on this so far but its stalled in recent months due to other priorities which is annoying

still, one day im sure it will make it out onto the Internet but whether i will have any success from it... who knows!

i do tend to complete the technical bits fine and then just get bored with the reality of turning something into an actual real business though