Unemployed to Managing Director in one easy step

Here’s a good tip for anyone out there hoping to make it to the top without much effort; you can become a Managing Director in just 1 day so long as you have access to a debit card and £12.

The gov.uk website makes it really easy to start up your own Private Limited Company in a step-by-step tutorial that explains all the technical terms to you as you go along. In just 15 minutes and with just £12 you can have your own separate legal entity for conducting business that provides you with limited personal liability. Then you can call yourself a Managing Director 😉

Obviously this is not the actual use-case and wouldn’t actually fool anyone but it is a nice way to illustrate just one of the ways the United Kingdom is the 8th best country in the world in which to do business according to the World Banks “Doing Business 2020” rankings.

Having spent the last 2 years running defty day to day I had been wanting to fill in the missing piece of the puzzle — registration. Recently I have been considering doing some contracting and consulting alongside trying out some business ideas of my own so now seemed like the perfect time… and for £12 and 15 minutes of effort, why not?

Danny

Evil Squash for Windows Phone 7 Usage Statistics at (just over) 100 Downloads

I’ve always quite enjoyed reading Rick Brewsters usage statistics blog posts for Paint.NET so I thought it might be interesting to write a similar post about Evil Squash on the Windows Phone 7 Marketplace. I reached a milestone earlier this month of 100 downloads (not bad for an application that was originally intended to only be part of my coursework.) So here it goes:

Downloads by Market (Country)

Unsurprisingly most of my Downloads are from the United Kingdom with 56 out of a total of 112 coming from the UK.

Just behind this is the United States with 51 Downloads.

The third and last market with any downloads is rather surprising, Hong Kong with just 5.

Interestingly enough, though the app is available in Canada and Australia not a single download has taken place in either country.

Downloads by Day

As you can see from the feature image of this post most people downloaded the app immediately after its availability, probably due to being high in the “new games” section of the marketplace. Since then downloads have slowly trailed off, but this is to be expected.

The Future

Having started the application off as a Silverlight based app I have decided to move over to XNA which will more easily allow me to more easily implement some more of the features I want to be in the game (including the AI doing their own moves, Animations etc). The only issue is, I’ve never used XNA… yet. So I’m steadily learning from Rob Miles XNA 4.0 book.

The next version of Evil Squash will also have social network integration so you can boast of your wins.

Thats all for now,
Danny.