Today I wanted to highlight one success story which touched me.

Meet Esterlita, a 58 year old lady from the village of Malibangcao, Ozamiz City in the Philippines. At an age when many of us in this country might be thinking about slowing down or retiring even, Esterlita is busier than ever – with good reason, she has seven school-aged children to support.

Esterlita received a loan of $125 from Kiva to get her agricultural business, growing and selling coconuts and bananas, off the ground. Had she not been able to access a startup loan like this then Esterlita would not have been able to expand the business in the way she has which would have had an impact on her ability to support her family, Esterlita expanded her venture by planting and growing more coconuts and
bananas than ever before. By increasing her volumes, she now earns around 5,000PHP or approximately $115 per month which has allowed her to pay off her startup loan and more importantly she is now able to support herself and has dramatically improved the standard of living for her family.

If you want to find out more about Esterlita, you can see visit her page on Kiva.

I personally think it is fantastic to see a woman entrepreneur creating a profitable enterprise to lift themselves out of poverty. Really inspiring stuff I’m sure you’ll agree.

A guest post by Liz Goldman for Wonga.com – the UK short term loans provider and one of
the biggest corporate supporters of Kiva.

I’ve chucked in a few images to break up the text here but otherwise these helpful tips are all his!  I am hoping for many shiny pearls of wisdom from Mr Black over the coming months so watch this space….

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So you’ve decided to have your web site/business cards/logo redesigned and you’re going to hire a professional designer to do it. But how can you get the best from this strange, tieless, jeans-wearing creature?

Well, there’s no doubt that designers can be odd, and the design process can seem impenetrable and arcane.

But there is actually method in the madness and there are things you can do to help your designer create something that’ll both do what you want and suit your tastes. So here’s our quick guide to briefing a designer…

Describe Your Target Audience

Your designer needs to understand who buys your products or services since they may not be one of your customers themselves.

Quickly summarise a target audience – how much do they usually spend per person? What countries are they from?

Set the Design Aims

What do you want the design to do for your business? Do you want more customers? Fewer customers paying more per person? Do you want to look like a bigger company? A friendlier one?

Put down some aims – they’ll really help your designer fit the design to your company’s needs.

Brand Neighbourhood

You probably know a few of your competitors. In fact you may even daydream about strangling one or two of them. But they’re probably not all idiots…look for two or three of the ones who have designs you really like and give a reason why you like them.

Designers often work with customers in a lot of different sectors and may not understand your industry well, so it’ll help if you can show them who the leaders are.

The No-nos

If there are colours you really hate or companies your design must absolutely not look like at any cost, tell your designer.

Designing for someone you don’t know is a lot like buying a present for a stranger: it has to be really nice but that’s difficult if you don’t know the recipient very well.

Sack the Committee

Design is highly personal and very subjective.

Be careful who you ask to look at a design. Ask enough people and eventually you’ll find one person who really, really hates it.

Restrict your review team to the real decision makers and pass changes to your designer in batches, not one at a time.

Remember the Triangle of Truth

There are three things every client wants: they want their design cheap, they want it to be brilliant and they want it soon. Unfortunately in this universe a client can only have two out of those three at any one time.

So the design can be brilliant and cheap – but you won’t get it until doomsday.

It can be brilliant and you can have it tomorrow – if you don’t mind a bill that’d embarrass a pelican.

Or it can be cheap and you can have it right now – but it’ll look like a dog’s dinner.

The Golden Rule

Above all else, designers are by and large sensitive about their designs and they really, really want you to like them. They can be thin-skinned and sulky but you can avoid this by following one easy rule: be constructive.

Being constructive doesn’t mean pretending to like things you don’t, it means that if you do dislike something, you say so – but at the same time you supply a better idea of your own for discussion. Just saying, “don’t like it” isn’t especially helpful – say why you don’t like it and what you’d like better so the designer can address those points.

You can ask the others who help you choose a design to follow this rule too. Everyone knows a colleague who picks holes in everything for the sake of it (you know who I’m talking about) and this rule can defuse disagreements which can end in partnership-ending screaming matches.

The Money

No one likes to talk about the bill. But it’s crucial to have a realistic budget in mind and be honest with your designer about it.

Don’t turn the budget issue into a guessing game where the designer has to read your mind (or wallet), hoping not to either underprice himself or price himself out of the running. If you don’t have a lot to spend, say so. A good designer who likes your company will always find a way to do something for whatever budget you have.

Dealing with a designer should be one of the fun things you do and a lot more interesting than most tasks!

Pick a designer whose work you like or even better just a designer who you like and follow the above rules.  You’ll stand a much better chance of enjoying the process and getting a result which will do your business some real good.

Good luck!

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It’s 1.13am Wednesday the 23rd March 2011 and realisation that ‘that Twestival thing‘ I got involved in is iminent!

Well we’ve certainly been ambitious with EdTwestival this year! We’re looking to build on the success of previous Edinburgh Twestivals with even more people there on the night, and if all goes to plan; more cash raised!

As ever the mix is pretty electic. We have bands, cupcakes, a mind reader, drinks (of course), prizes galore (a hell of a lot of prizes), a DJ, a Foursquare Superswarm attempt (very geeky), boardgaming, a photobooth, goodiebags, silent auction, even an opera singer! This doesn’t even cover half of it!

The twitter noise is certainly ramping up now too, @EdTwestival is seeing a whole load of attention and excited twitter-type-people!

The team have all been hard at it. Sponsorship and prizes have been flying in left right and centre. The tech is all coming together. Things are looking good! Personnally I’m having trouble keeping track of everything going on, all I know is that I have a carload of stuff I’d quite like to keep! Unfortunatly though, I can’t, this lot and more will all be up for grabs on the night.

Ok, enough of my babbling nonsense. There is only one issue remaining: Have you bought your ticket? I’m done with the soft-sell, just buy it! NOW! It’s only £10 (£8 if you’re one of those people that gets to sleep till midday), it all goes to charity, and you get a load of stuff in return. What’s the problem?

I hope to see you all there if you can make it!

Geoff
@idle_bull

About the author: Rob Clymo writes on behalf of www.officegenie.co.uk, the UK’s first proper online marketplace for desk space and shared office space.

Starting up a new business involves sorting out all manner of priorities, not least of which is finding office space where you can run the operation. Of course, many start-ups don’t require an awful lot of office space, and individuals are probably happy working from home initially.

However, if you’re the sort of person who doesn’t fancy a solitary existence working from a domestic environment, or you have more substantial office requirements, then renting desk space in a fully-fledged office block can be a great way forward.

What is it?

Renting office space is fast becoming a priority for many new start-ups as it is possible to find keenly priced working areas to suit just about any kind of business. From single desks for one-man band types through to offices with multiple workstations, rented desk space is hugely popular right now.

Depending on what you plump for, there are a variety of different services that will come with the rental space that you’re looking for. A simple desk in a shared office will give you a working area, plus things like an internet connection. Managed office environments, meanwhile, could feature all of the bells and whistles including a receptionist and a fully-fledged post room.

Who offers it?

The concept of shared offices and rentable desk space has become increasingly popular in the UK as it allows people who want to start their own business enjoy a professional working environment without many of the overheads. It also means that office owners can make normally dead office space earn its keep, so everyone’s a winner.

What’s more, if you’re working on a start-up business then you’ll often find that rent-a-desk schemes and shared office space is generally available in prime locations, either in the centre of a city or on a business park. This instantly gives your new venture a seal of credibility and the services and amenities are all at hand too.

If you’re looking for a cheap but highly practical answer to your new business workplace needs then the prospects for using desk and office share opportunities have never been better. And, with money still tight for many of us, saving some cash going down this route can make all the difference to a brand new business.

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As a co-founder of Syncplicity, a service that competes with Dropbox, this question has been on my mind for years. We launched within a few weeks of Dropbox, we had multi-folder synchronization & read-only sync, and we were a few years older than the Dropbox kids. I’m very proud of the service we put together and am happy to see the service shift towards businesses, yet Dropbox kicked butt. Here’s why:

Before launching their service, Dropbox created a video that had tons of geeky references. It showed off a product that wasn’t finished and had a few flaws. It showed a binary diff sync of an image… binary diff is great, but it only works if the file isn’t compressed. So, it only works on bitmaps and who the heck is sync’ing bitmaps? The video spread quickly and got their name out before anyone heard of our company. Instead of making our own video, we were upset that binary diff wouldn’t do anything for JPEGs or other compressed formats that consumers tended to use. Who the heck is sync’ing images saved from Microsoft Paint?

Next, we had issues getting the press excited at launch. We built a fantastic Windows client. 3 years ago, everyone was running Windows*. We were so excited to show the press, yet they *all* had Macs. Walt Mossberg wouldn’t write about our product because it was PC only. Months after we hired our PR agency, we found out that they had never even used our product… because they too only had Macs. It’s pretty hard to pitch a service when you haven’t used it.

* Actually, I had a Mac and wrote all my code in a Parallels VM on my Mac. It always made me a little sad that we didn’t have a native Mac client for a long time. Thankfully, the company has a Mac client today.

For a while, we couldn’t believe Dropbox was so viral while we weren’t. We opened our beta so anyone could sign up while people had to beg for a Dropbox invite. The closed beta worked incredibly well for Dropbox. We opened up our beta at the insistence of our PR agency — “No way the New York Times will write about you if you have a closed beta”. (It turned out that the NYT also doesn’t write about you if you’re PC only.) If your service is really popular, having a closed beta helps you create pent up demand and control the number of users joining on a regular basis so you can scale the backend appropriately.

In the end, it really came down to one incredibly genius idea: Dropbox limited its feature set on purpose. It had one folder and that folder always synced without any issues — it was magic. Syncplicity could sync every folder on your computer until you hit our quota. (Unfortunately, that feature was used to synchronize C:Windows for dozens of users — doh!) Our company had too many features and this created confusion amongst our customer base. This in turn led to enough customer support issues that we couldn’t innovate on the product, we were too busy fixing things.

After I left Syncplicity, I ran into the CEO of Dropbox and asked him my burning question: “Why don’t you support multi-folder synchronization?” His answer was classic Dropbox. They built multi-folder support early on and did limited beta testing with it, but they couldn’t get the UI right. It confused people and created too many questions. It was too hard for the average consumer to setup. So it got shelved.

If you’re starting a new company, the best thing you can do is keep your feature set small and focused. Do one thing as best as you possibly can. Your users will beg and beg for more functionality. They will tell you their problems and ask you to fix it. My philosophy is that they’re right if their feature request is right only if it works for 80% of your customers. Until you have a lot of resources, stay focused on your core competency.

The best part about having a simple product is that it’s easy to sell & easy to support. If your product is too complicated, you’ll spend all day on customer support & bug fixing. I’ve been there — it’s no fun.

In closing, I want to give props to my previous Syncplicity co-workers. They worked their butts off competing against Dropbox. They’re crazy smart and we built a great service together. They’re still working on it and they’ve got a great business solution. As for Dropbox… Drew, Arash and the rest of the team are absolutely brilliant. Their success is no accident. File synchronization is incredibly difficult. Building a product that millions of consumers can easily understand without RTFM is even more challenging. They’re my inspiration for my current company.

If you want to understand more, read everything you can about the lean startup movement. And have at least one seriously amazing product person on your staff if that’s not you.

1. Kitchen table kick off
2. The wheel deal
3. Look after number 1
4. Connect and Protect
5. What could go wrong?
6. Well hello clients!
7. Team building
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1. Kitchen table kick off

Many start-ups have humble beginnings – a spare room, a kitchen table or even a shed in the back garden. If your start-up is home-based, it’s probably a fairly small operation at this stage and insuring your business will probably be the last thing on your ‘to-do’ list. However, it could be worth checking your situation with your home insurance provider, as most standard home policies will not automatically cover you if you’re using your property for business purposes.

You may be working from a desk in your bedroom, but you might still have expensive equipment – such as a laptop, I-pad, printer or fax machine. This equipment is probably essential to your daily work.  To financially protect all these assets, you could need some additional cover.  You may also want to look into business insurance too, as this could help cover costs if your work was disrupted due to damaged or stolen equipment.

2. The wheel deal

Depending on the type of business you undertake, your start-up might need a vehicle. This could be to visit customers/clients or transport goods from A to B.  As with your home cover, a standard car insurance policy will probably not cover your vehicle if it’s being used as part of your business.  If you chat to your car insurance provider, they’ll be able to advise you on how to get your car fully covered for business use. There are also specialist van insurance policies that cover business usage.

3. Look after number 1

When you decide to set up your own business, you’ll obviously be a key player in the progression and success of that business. In fact, it’s quite possible you’ll be the only player. Not to be too doom and gloom about it, but if anything happened to you that prevented you from working – would you be okay financially? If you’ve set up your own company, you won’t be covered by statutory sick pay.

As the owner of a start-up, personal accident cover might be worth checking out. It could pay you a lump sum and/or weekly benefits if you were unable to work through injury.

4. Connect and protect

Internet start-ups are particularly prevalent and seemingly successful at the moment. If your business is online, you may require some very specific cover for certain elements.

Unfortunately, cyber crime is becoming increasingly common. If you rely heavily on online systems, specialist business insurance is available to cover you for a number of online risks. This could involve your own cyber liability (i.e. if you do something naughty online) such as breaching copyright or unwittingly transmitting a virus to a client’s systems.  Some policies can also cover cyber attacks against you, such as virus damage or a hacker attack on data.

You’ll need to weigh up the potential damage cyber issues could cause you to see if it warrants some financial protection. You may feel you could handle the financial implications of your site going down for a week – as this is quite a measurable cost. The cost of a claim against you for a data leak or copyright infringement is not so easily predicted.

5. What could go wrong?

Now, it’s obviously not pleasant to think about things going wrong when you’ve only just started, but it could save you some heartache in the long-run. Not all the business insurance out there will be applicable to your business. For example, if you run a flower delivery service you probably won’t need cyber protection. If your work doesn’t deal with the public in any way – it’s highly unlikely you’ll need liability cover in case you injure someone.

If you offer any professional service – such as consultancy advice, design or financial planning, it could be worth thinking about professional indemnity cover. This covers you if your business has a negligence claim made against it. Whether it’s a confidential email sent in error, a piece of flawed consultancy advice or a missed critical deadline – this insurance can help meet the cost of a claim.

Even if you’re a goody two-shoes who never makes a mistake, you could fall victim to a spurious claim. In this instance, professional indemnity cover could meet the expenses incurred in defending yourself.

6. Well hello clients!

If all goes well, you should start acquiring clients or customers fairly quickly. If clients visit your office (even if this is your home) or your work deals directly with the public – you may need to think about public liability insurance. This could help you meet the cost of a compensation claim if someone was injured due to your work. Depending on the type of work you do, some potential clients may request proof of public liability before agreeing to work with you.

7. Team building

As business booms (hopefully) it’s likely that your workforce will grow too. If you run a business singlehandedly, you’ve no reason to even think about employers’ liability insurance. As soon as you take on just 1 member of staff – this cover then becomes a legal requirement. There are some exceptions to this legal obligation and these can be found on the HSE website. Employers’ liability could help you meet compensation claims if any of your employees became ill or were injured because of their job.

By Emma Jowett, resident writer at Policy Expert

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What do you think? Any experiences with insurance you care to share, or anything insurance-y that troubles you? Here’s your chance to ask!

Our Stanford REE

Learning from failure is not an unfamiliar theme in the context of business. Heidi Roizen, who is the founder of Skinny Songs, a former Venture Capitalist and a role model of fearlessness for entrepreneurs, provides an insightful explanation and many practical examples in her talk on ‘Lessons from Failure’.

The greatest lesson on failure is that of trying to figure out why, most of the time, the product is great but the company fails. We expect failure but we need to avoid making the same mistakes. All of us know that it is a tough job. John Cleese once said “I’ve learned from my mistakes: I’m certain I could repeat them exactly.” What we can learn from coping with failure is how to experience yourself and go through the failure, and sensitize it so that you may response to it quickly. The essential and right attitude towards failure is to see difficulties as a turning point in the business. No-one likes to make bad deals but people learn from losing huge amounts of money. Why do great products collapse? There are three main sections of questions that we need to ask beforehand.

Capital structure:

Questions to Ask:

• Does the structure align all stakeholders as closely as possible?
• If the capital is insufficient, will one stakeholder have excessive control over future fundraising?
• Has anyone put himself or herself in a situation of personal financial crisis if things don’t go perfectly?
• Are there hidden agendas among stakeholders that might change their management of the investment in the future?

Instead of putting emphasis on evaluation, entrepreneurs shall notice the importance of terms, the real outcome, the capital structure and the process. Since the business is neither a total failure nor a total success, taking the same route does not lead to absolute success.

Partner structure:

Questions to Ask:

• Does the department make financial sense for the company? Even if some of the assumptions prove incorrect? In this case, look at your assumption and check if it is wrong. When it is wrong, move to another direction.
• What are our partner’s expectations, and how are they going to judge success? We need to know how to get out of things that didn’t work.

Company design:

When Microsoft gave out their software for free during the mid-nineties, Heidi was trying to synthesise her company structure, distribution channels, and platform relations. In spite of this, most of the time, “Your investors don’t like you, they like their money and they want it multiplied and returned by a certain time” says Heidi. Therefore, if company is a product and the buyer is another company the company needs to be designed.

Questions to Ask:

• Do we own as many rights in our products as possible?
• Are our products synergistic?
• Does our company itself hold together form a “product marketing” perspective?
• Is there an acquirer into whom we will be a natural and complete fit?
• If not, how do we get into or out of products in the best possible way to create a better company from a “product marketing” perspective?

Learn from failure. One should always check and verify your capital structure, partner structure, and company design during the entrepreneurial process to lower the risks of failure.

Perhaps it has been the level of tactical detail bolted to social strategy commissions; perhaps it’s the vacuous social networking research which gets crowd-surfed around Twitter or perhaps it’s the pressure to maintain numerous social profiles, but I am so over social media.

It’s frustrating that a territory so fundamentally about people and human behaviours gets shrink-wrapped as a web technology. We haven’t changed how we communicate; we’ve just got more flexibility in communication channels. The flow of words may increase or decrease depending whether they travel by landline, mobile, call, text, instant message, tweet, Facebook message, email, letter … but the dialogue structure is pretty consistent.

I’ve met a few “old” people who regard social media as the playground of the “young”. What a sad point of view (!) given the depth of experience and language that “old” people have accumulated. Poor Digital to suffer from such prejudiced thinking. It’s actually older friends, contacts and relatives who sometimes contribute more interesting views because they own a richer database of content. The cross-pollination of cross-generational experience offers far greater opportunity for original content.

We should be moving past Digital and Social as territories: they’re a state of mind. We have to stop thinking about “having something to say” for a blog and Twitter (sadly Facebook doesn’t generate the same pressure). There are times when I just don’t have anything to contribute to the world. On such occasions, it’s far better to sign-post to a video or article from someone who is saying something interesting, than post for the sake of it; even accounting for the pressure of feeding Google (SEO, SEO, SEO). We don’t have to be “on” all the time, we just need to think about the information and tools and find a way of working that suits our lifestyles.

I’m a “digital immigrant”. I didn’t grow up with Facebook, I was 21 before I got my first email address and mobile phone and was approaching my late twenties before I caught up with social networking. Yet I have to act “digital native”. My family make friendly jokes about my digital social life; when the alarm goes off on my mobile phone each morning, the next thing I see are social network updates as they get “pushed” to my attention. News from the rest of the world comes through social and RSS feeds, hand-delivered by a variety of contacts. I even jest that my work in digital adventures, keeps me half a decade younger than offline friends. I’m generally exposed to more information, more events, more tools and technologies, which arguably forces me to be more agile and mentally flexible than people who aren’t hit with information at the same rate.

Digital immigrant values are permission-based: we’re cautious, less comfortable with self-promotion; social networks are layers of complexity added to our busy lives. Digital natives have grown up with the technologies, so they don’t need permission; it is second nature to them to sculpt their social image and to digitally document their lives in a seamless and convenient fashion. Digital natives just do it, they don’t risk-assess the situation before releasing content. They jump in there and then surf the flow of content. The advantage of just digitally doing it is that you evolve beyond the platforms. It’s no longer about Apple, Android, Facebook or Twitter; it’s about the ability to deploy the diversity of tools available to us in order to backpack around the Web. By essentially driving at speed, gauping at the blurred scenery outside, the only thing we experience is travel sickness, not to mention the danger of losing sight of where we’re going. Get over social media; Digital is a lot more exciting without it.

Although Chris now lives in London, he’s an ex-Edinburgher who still keeps an eye trained on northern affairs.

1. Work out how much money you want to make, then make a plan to get it.

Having a goal for how much money you want to have in your bank, and when, is the first step to planning how you get there.

Be realistic with your plan—it’s much easier to have and execute a £1m or £10m idea than it is to have a £100m or £1b idea. Tech businesses are not a good idea—the vast majority fail—and if you are serious, you need to make damn sure you’re going to succeed.

The amount you decide will dictate the kind of plan you draw up. If you want to make £1m or £10m, most ‘normal’ ideas will be just fine. If you want to make £1b, you probably want to start an oil company instead. [Editor's note: He's right.]

2. Invest small amounts of money, lose small amounts of money.

Everybody loses money. Not every decision works out the way we planned. And yet, people are usually hell bent on raising money to begin with. If you can’t make money from where you’re standing, you are unlikely to do any better after you’ve spent £100k. You’ll generally find you think much better when you are restricted. For those looking for investment, have you considered what you would do if you couldn’t raise the money? How would you then make it work? It’s this kind of thinking that helps you build a lean, powerful business.

3. There are no quitters at my dinners.

We all make tons of mistakes as we go. The difference between those who succeed and those who do not depends on whether they see ‘failure’ as failure, or a temporary setback.

At WikiJob there are no failures, there are no fallen-through sales, there are no closed doors. When something doesn’t go our way, it’s a temporary setback. It only becomes a failure when you’ve decided that. Some of our deals have taken years of meetings and many rejections. But they’ll all be signed—I’ll make sure of it. In other words, a temporary setback only becomes a failure when you’ve decided it.

Conclusion

I could write a dozen more thoughts and lessons, but I would say these three are amongst the most useful to those starting out. Hopefully you’ll learn to work out what you want, not to waste money and not to give up. It’s these tools that have got me where I am [Editor: literally, an office in Covent Garden], and I am certain they will work for anyone who cares to observe them.

Chris Muktar, WikiJob

This post is part of our “Crowdsourcing: Wisdom from the Community” feature which contains guest bloggers from the local Edinburgh startup community. This post is from Philip Roberts, developer at Float, an Edinburgh-based cashflow forecasting startup that we wrote about earlier this year.

One of my favourite lecturers from university was Dr Iain Lindsay, who taught 4th year Digital System Design.

Judged against most of the other lecturers, who droned along to a set of dry powerpoint slides, his teaching style must have seemed “eccentric” to most of his students. Instead of a projector he scrawled across the blackboard, full academic gown flowing behind him. Where others would stick to a script defined by their slides, Iain’s discussions would flow, and loop, and shoot off at seemingly irrelevant tangents, which later turned out to be deeply insightful.

But to me, the real gems were the course notes. Each week he would hand out what is best described as a non-fiction novella: pages and pages of witty prose complete with hand-drawn diagrams. Every point he made or figure he quoted would be referenced in the footnotes, such that on some pages the footnotes made up half the content of the page.

Typically these footnotes would be references to ancient books or datasheets, but not always. Lewis Carroll’s Alice In Wonderland was invoked to debate whether any two events can be truly synchronous; Buridan’s Ass and WWII trench warfare were used to illustrate metastability and there were countless poems and other delighters.

One footnote that has stuck with me, and I keep stumbling across examples of, discussed the concept of Zero One Infinity in system and software design. I forget the original footnote now, but it went something like this:

Systems should be built to handle exactly one instance of an entity, an infinite number, or none at all. Setting an arbitrary limit is foolish and will inevitably be wrong.

It is easy to underestimate how often we ignore the infinity part of this concept. This is because very few things in daily life would actually require an infinite limit, but that is somewhat missing the point. The problem is not that we need an infinite limit, but that whatever finite limit we choose, will inevitably not be large enough at some point. This will require either an inordinate amount of code & effort to deal with a mostly unusued case, or we can ignore the code and get mischeivous errors popping up.

Some classic examples:

• Storing people’s names in a database: Easy right? You probably need 30 characters, maybe 40 at a push? Then you had better hope that famous painter Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Clito Ruiz y Picasso never wants to use your application.
• Hard drive space: Supposedly Bill Gates once said “640K of memory should be enough for anybody”. Sadly it seems to be a mis-quote, but I am sure others have made this mistake in the past, and will in the future.
• Tennis Scores: When the scoreboards were designed at Wimbledon they (arguably sensibly) only left two placeholders to represent the number of games played in the set, placing an upper bound of 99 games. During the 3-day marathon game between Isner and Mahut the number of games in the final set reached a stunning 70 to 68. Sadly they didn’t quite break the upper limit of the scoreboard, but it was much closer than I imagined the designers ever thought it would get. It was this particular example that reminded me of my days sat in Dr Lindsay’s DSD lectures.

I will end with a final footnote, the start of a Monty Python song used to illustrate some chicken-and-the-egg problem with sequence design:

Horace ate himself one day. He didn’t stop to say his grace. He just sat down and ate his face…