Date: Wednesday 16 Oct 2013
Time: 19:00 – refreshments from 18:30
Speaker: Gianni O’Connor – Founder & architect micsu.net
Location: EC 1-12 New Engineering and Computing Block – Coventry University
Abstract:
The “official story” was that following a flash of inspiration during a finance exam, Gianni O’Connor realised his dream to create a music sharing website; the result is miscu.net which now has over 50,000 users. Fortunately he passed his exam, despite designing the code for the site on his exam paper and having to copy it before leaving the exam hall.
In practice Gianni had been working on his idea, “borrowing” effort from the Computer Science undergrads at Coventry Uni; he knows the CS block quite well as he visited it frequently: “do you know HTLM5/PHP?”, “Do you know how to build a database?” for almost two years…the problem was getting it viral; getting the uptake. It was only after some nasty surprises with how much PR would cost that the idea came to him. He was taking a finance exam and realised the questions were all small stories, and that people enguage with a story …so he wrote up his story of how the idea came to him in the finance exam and he wouldn’t leave … or variously the idea came to him in the finance exam and he ran out …depending on which national ran the story! You had to be there to get the full machinations ..e.g. Solictors charge by the hour(!!), cheap programming: helps if you can speak Hindi, because Google translator can’t!!!.