Q: Who started BootCycle?
Jonathan Markwell – here’s some links to find out more about him:
Blog – Mad Motive
Company – Inuda Innovations
Twitter – @JonMarkwell

Q: What is BootCycle?

BootCycle is a new approach to providing peer support to early stage technology product developers. We help developers turn ideas into products that are ready for either investment or revenue after just 10 weeks. – http://bootcycle.com

Q: Where Is BootCycle?
Participants are based in London & Brighton ( UK ). BootCycle runs out of an affiliated creative office space in Brighton called The Skiff.

Q: Does BootCycle fund startups in return for a share of their company?
No. Bootcycle is like YCombinator without the funding. We instead focus on the other benefits of YCombinator and as such we have industry experts advising us, peer support, weekly progress demos, shared office space, private discussion lists etc.

Q: When Will It Go Live?
All set for a September rollout. This will probably be a rolling invite structure (e.g. all members can invite a few friends to be members) until mid October. As a bit of a teaser there’s a screenshot from the site used as the picture above this post.

Q: What’s Behind The Scenes?
Symfony PHP Framework & MySQL
Facebook Connect
Twitter Auth
Amazon EC2
Amazon S3

Q: Is There Any Funding Involved?
The venture thus far has been bootstrapped and not applied for or taken investment. Investment will be the next step after the initial public release.

From the inside looking out, with nary a tad of bias I can say that from the 8 teams accepted into this first BootCycle you can expect some interesting, passionate ideas hellbent on making the world a better place and earning some Benjamin’s in the process (they all darn well deserve it!).

BootCycle is currently 50% complete (five weeks into the ten week project development cycle). http://bootcycle.com

With the recent spate of IDN (Internationalised Domain Names) being bought that utilise the unicode character set I wanted to bring back the issue of homophone spoofing / phishing with these domains.

It is still possible to spoof domains using unicode character sets.

Domain registrars have not done enough to prevent similar looking domains from being purchased, this is something that can be vastly improved with little effort.

Apple’s Safari browser has not taken on board the same precautions that other browsers including Mozilla Firefox and even Internet Explorer have to warn the end user that they are not using a standard domain.

I have tested the following proof-of-concept on a number of people including some technically orientated peers, not one was even aware of this kind of spoofing attack. This post is intended to spread awareness of the technique.

Domain purchased: http://ebɑy.com/ (click to visit proof-of-concept site)
Domain cost: $7.00

The domain above has the Latin unicode character ‘ɑ’ that closely resembles a standard ‘a’.

Comparison of domains side-by-side.

The spoof site currently displays a warning message and pulls down a live copy of the requested e-bay page to demonstrate it’s viability for a phishing attack (limited to just the home page).

Spoof site alongside the real site. Click to enlarge.

It is easily possible to spoof content for each and every E-Bay page and save users login data (due to most people reusing the same password there is a high chance their E-Bay password will be the same as their e-mail, Paypal, Twitter accounts etc).

It should be noted this spoof has nothing to do with E-Bay. This is purely an example of the technique that can be applied to almost any domain.

Genetic algorithms are a search technique that utilise the speed of computing to ‘brutishly’ locate or find a match/optimum solution.

The one idea that really resonated with me whilst working on this topic was the idea of a self optimising website that would continually modify itself within the boundaries I define.

To clarify, the optimisation would be in the form of design and layout. There are a number of design/UX testing methodologies (e.g. Test multiple designs on site users by randomly sending them to site design ‘A’ or site design ‘B’) to monitor which design best fulfils your objectives by checking over the resulting conversions/visit duration etc.

The algorithm I’m working on uses the principles of genetic algorithms / evolutionary programming combined with the aforementioned testing methodologies (A/B Testing / ‘Bucket Testing’) to accomplish and process the same result.

So, from the top;

The site when built has a number of defined regions very similar to what a basic page layout wireframe looks like:

Example layout containing five regions.

Using these defined regions instead of following standard web principles and statically placing content we would define rules that allow the site’s advert for example to appear in region 1, 3, 4 or 5 and that the searchbox remain above the fold (regions 3, 4 or 5).

We would also define some styles for the site, maybe a yellow oriented colour palette and a black oriented palette.

Finally we must define some targets for the algorithm e.g. ‘User visit duration’, ‘Advert clicks’, ‘Average pages per session’.

Using the resulting statistics, each time the algorithm is called to render the page it can take into account aggregated results from previous generations and decide which combination of placement and styles gains the best results.

I expect to find some patterns occur over time e.g. User visit duration increasing when the dark colour palette is used at night time and the lighter palette used in the daytime (grouping of visitors from similar timezones would better this).

I also expect to see the ads move down the page to region 5 if they were just standard Adsense style ads and maybe up the page (region 1 or 3) if they contained a fantastic offer on a relevant and well liked product etc.

The algorithm I’m working on will be tested on a separate site over the coming months after which I will write a conclusion post with the results and code.