From May 16 to 20 I'll be in San Francisco. If you want to meet up, simon@semacode.com?subject=san%20francisco">email me .

I recently prepared a "SR&ED" filing (pronounced "shred") for Semacode Corporation. The idea is that the government of Canada will reimburse you for salary that you have paid to R&D workers who are doing "experimental development" -- you can get back something like 2/3rds of the qualifying salary. Here is a sample of our SRED "technical narrative". This is actual copy from the SRED claim that Semacode filed.

Selected examples from Semacode Corporation's SRED technical narrative (PDF) .

In order to make a SRED claim and get back 68% of the salaries you paid, you have to write up this technical narrative. It explains in precise detail just how and why your employees' work is experimental development. You can't just file for any old work, it has to be advancing the state of the art.

Anyway, it's all in the PDF.

It's been a while since I did a semacode update that didn't have something to do with my ramblings on business. Well, thanks to Eberhard Blocher and a mysterious benefactor, here is an article in the German tech magazine CHIP that talks about Semapedia , Semacode, and other things. I just love the big photo. The caption reads: Pisa-studies: The Semapedia Project links sights like the leaning tower of Pisa with the appropriate Wikipedia article.

In case you haven't already seen it, Semapedia now has an international google map that shows locations of known Semapedia tags. But I notice that they haven't got a label on Accra, Ghana, yet.

Curious choice of location? Not really. Guido Sohne put up the first Semapedia tag in Africa a few weeks ago at the Kofi Annan Centre of Excellence in ICT when he gave a talk on Semapedia ( slides available ). He noted that himself and a fellow Ghanaian programmer were involved in some of the earlier software development for Semacode which is absolutely true. Guido's talk has made the news in South Africa's Tectonic . Semapedia's blog has a complete summary of what Guido said at his talk.

On a third continent, a yearly San Francisco event is coming up and I will be at JavaOne to demo Semacode's JSR-257 functionality on May 15 in Jaana Malakangas'(of Nokia) session Touch a Phone, Touch a Friend: Using RFID and Visual Tags With JSR 257 Contactless Communication API . Thursday, May 18, 9.45 am in the room Esplanade 301. I'll at the conference from May 16-19, and I'm scheduling my time now, so if you want to meet up, get in touch.

TV-land requires me to pay it dues as well. I did an interview taped for the cult IT show Call For Help with host Leo Laporte. Man does that guy have a lot of energy. Amber was sweet as well. They film "live to tape" which means that barring an extra-special effort to keep me off the airwaves, I'll be appearing in a show that will air within the next month. I don't know when exactly, but I have this vague memory of hearing Leo say "episode 364" so that could be in the next few weeks. I was too distracted to take photos except for this picture of the shows "green hallway" . If for some reason you don't get G4TechTV you can get the torrents right here.

(I also spake at Torcamp DemoCamp in Toronto on March 28. Here's a photo .)

OK, going on Call For Help was a funny experience . First of all, I was totally spaced out because I had a really busy day ahead of me. So, I kind of zoned out in the corridor and just listened to Leo and Amber (the hosts) on the closed-circuit TV. To try and get their personality, and style. Then someone dragged me into makeup, where they insisted on powdering my face to make it look more real or something. Fortunately Amber was in there so I got to chat with her and find out what the show is all about. She's actually from Toronto, while Leo is from the States.

As I sat in the "green hallway" a bunch of crew came out and had a little footrace down the hall with Amber (who is apparently a runner...) ... subsequently I was taken into the studio to wait my turn on the stage. Again I zoned out and listened to Leo chat with a caller, trying to get his number (my lingo for trying to figure out someone's style of talk and way of thinking and all that). In which I did well but I think I scared the crew a bit :-)

The studio is really tiny, compared to what I've seen of TV sets before. There's these three desks which are the three sets, each in the corners of a square room. It's otherwise full of cameras, crew members, and computers. They stuck a mic on me and then I pretended to talk to Amber (OK, we really did talk) while they filmed a pre-commercial break thing. Then, I showed Leo how to make Semacode work, which was trivial since he's a smart guy, and we did the segment. I have no memory of what I said, but afterwards someone told me it went well.

I'm sure other interesting things have happened since I last posted a general update blog, but that's all I can remember right now. Auf Wiedersehen.

PS - Oh yeah — some updates to the hardware list and thanks to the contributors , both listed and not. Keep those test results coming!

Money inside a corporation is special. It has one function and one function alone: make more money. This is not just a silly thing to say, it's the law! (I'm serious... have a look at "The Corporation" if you don't believe me). But more than that, business people see and react to corporate money in a much different way and that opens doors to "accelerate" the money and make it turn magically into more.

I'm assuming this whole series that you're a technologist who has a product idea you want to turn into a business. Let's say you put some money into the business. You are converting your "personal" money into "corporate" money and it undergoes a transformation and enters the ... secret life of money!

Once inside the corporate account, Every dollar must be spent be made in a way that can reasonably be expected to bring about a return in more dollars. There are many many ways to achieve that goal. Think of your dollars as little entities with a life of their own, trying to reproduce in a hard world. You've got to direct them carefully down the road to success.

One really obvious way is to spend the money on something called cost of sales or COGS which resolve into an immediate revenue. But quite frankly, if you're at that point you probably don't need my help any more. When you're starting out you need to take the money that you personally invested plus any lucky early customers and accelerate it, make it turn into as much more money as possible, as quickly as possible, to keep the company operating.

Your biggest expense right away is going to be Research and Development . R&D costs can sometimes be recouped directly from the customer by doing it as a consulting job or an NRE . Most of the time though, if you are making revenue, you've got to build in a price premium to cover your R&D costs indirectly.

Fortunately every dollar you spend on R&D is valuable not only to you, but to the overall economy in your area, and governments recognize that. In Canada we've got two programs called SR&ED and IRAP (your country probably has similar). Before you start your engineering, get these people to kick in $$$ . In Canada, IRAP will effectively match funds with you, if you can convince them what you're doing is going to "create wealth" for the country. SRED is even better because given that you write up your work properly, you can apply after you do it, and they are obligated to give it to anyone who qualifies. (I just finished a SRED application which will nicely help the bottom line.)

Then there's future money. Let's say you have a signed purchase order from a customer but it's going to take you a month or two to deliver the whole contract. A good bank (that understands and lives with your industry) will often loan you upfront some amount of that PO. So you can turn future money into present money . Find a good bank in your community by the way. There will usually be at least one bank that specializes in tech entrepreneurs or else you're starting your company in the wrong place. These are the people you should be banking with.

Investors are also a good money accelerator. Investors like to give money to companies that are already making money. Does that sound strange? What it means is that if you get paid by a customer, you should immediately go around and see who will finance you now that you are "making revenue".

(Incidentally, this is also one reason investors tend to move in packs. They like to see their money get accelerated as well.)

One last sure-fire way to increase the acceleration of your money was something that I never did until recently: make a budget . Now I can actually plan what I'm going to spend on ahead of time. What a concept. It also helps me figure out how much I need, and I can compare that with other people's conceptions to see if I'm in line or out of line. Finally, by showing my budget to other people, I have both discovered that I paid too much for something, and that I left out something that's very important. Better to find that out now than later.