Archive for category Technology
Startup Event With Bill Liao: Listen To Users
Posted by Jorge Alegre in Startups, Technology on June 1st, 2010
Today I had the pleasure of meeting this man, he is huge in knowledge and human values. He told us his beginnings in business as human needs for getting money to solve humanitarian problems, as well as advice on lessons he learnt over 20 years of business. Apart from metting a very interesting person with great stories about entrepeneurship, I would focus on these points:
Listen to what your users “use”, don’t ask them what they want
This is a nice thinking, specially after metting about A/B testing. I agree with this since generally people will not tell you what they want. Even more, they don’t even know what they want many times. But when they use some service over and over again, then you listened to them, even if they never told you to accomplish this or that.
So feature requests and requirements from partners and users should be put in a can and consider them but no more than your own intuition and the trends in your users: what they use, how they use it, etc…
Skills change over time
He undervalued people resumes, since changes happen fast and what someone did great 2 years ago may not be good to what he needs to do 2 years from now in a new venture or start-up. Also, reward people when they deliver not for having a great resume or cv.
His philosophy of funding businesses and start-up companies can be found on the book he wrote, will have it in my wish list, must be great reading.
Also agree on the bootstrapping as long as you can, and start getting income as soon as you can, forget about investors in eraly stages, stating that we know many sucess stories but not the fail stories.
Ah, by the way, this guy helped to make Xing a great success, investing and delivering a product along with the founder in 90 days. He likes to develop software globally with people in India, Pakistan, Canada, US, and use Ruby On Rails. I think this is ok, but would not focus on language, just development philosophy, does not matter in my opinion which language you develop on, but have a great software development team.
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Impressed with Zoho, Business Applications On Demand
Posted by Jorge Alegre in Technology on May 15th, 2010
I started to use GoogleApps in the last work project, where everybody is using gmail for corporate mailing as well as google apps, etc… So I dig deeper into google apps to host by domain there and dump the Exchange mail hosting solution I have now. It ended up that instead of paying 10€ a month for exchange+blakberry bed would pay like 4€ a month with GoogleApps. But since this crisis made me very cautious about spending money, I said to myself to search deeper in the net.
Zoho Mail
I reached Zoho, where I could host my own domain mailing at 0€, having IMAP and POP, therefore being able to sync with my iPod, Blackberry, from any browser, etc… Sounded like a great deal. I have 1GB for first 3 users, which is a great proposition for start-ups. Their spam filter is way cool. Believe me I have tons of spam every hour, the zoho spam folder as I am writing has 8,000 messages and that in a few days only. It catches spam pretty well, at least the kind of spam I get. And finally I can send my personal email from Yahoo to the same account with label personal so have all email organized in same place. I get 25GB paying small fee like 3€ when my mail grows which will not happend soon, so I am OK.
Zoho Apps
Now this is the one that rocks. I get Calendar, Tasks, Notes, Forums, Link Management, Contacts, Notebook (MS OnNote style), Wiki, Project Management, Meeting Software, CRM (Like SalesForce), Share App, Invoice App, SpreadSheet (GoogleApps compatible), Planner, Writer, Chat, Marketplace, People (Human Resource Soft), Recruiting Software, Slide Soft, Reporting Software, Remote Desktop, Document Online Disk (1GB) and Creator (Web site creator) totally free. This is really awesome.
Their application are not crappy apps, they are nice applications, usefull for everyday use. And the number increases like monitoring soft, polls, etc… So I say: “This company delivers”. This is the reason why I moved to Zoho and plan to be there. When need more proyect management will pay very low on-demand fees, the same for the other services. So seems to be much better for me that GoogleApps. And as I said, they have compatibility with GoogleApps and their calendar application so no problem with that.
I set up a public calendar that will publish into this blog with the online events I go and public stuff I go, etc…
Also, besides all this I can choose mail account name and not be jalegre8726@gmail.com, which is not very compeling to me.
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How To Compete With Google With Low Economic Resources
Posted by Jorge Alegre in Technology on April 28th, 2010
Content from a search engine is very important to have a quality search service for users. A few months ago, I started to think that unless I had the chance to have funding, I would not be able to compete with the big guys due to lack of infrastructure, etc… The funding failed but seems it is not that critical at all.
Current Data
My startup is a new search engine. I have now like 6 million web pages in spanish. Content is very low with respect to Google and Bing, to name a few. But on testing I did, I have average 50% of the content Google has on first page for popular queries. I assume this is not that bad considering that so far I have no modules to get only authoring or popular content.
Fetching Popular Content Module
I am testing a module that creates a database of all the links outbound from those 6 million web pages (which are reasonable relevant). The db is building now, in a few days will have the results. I assume I would be getting like 10 million links. After that point, B+ will only index content from these web pages, leading to a higher percentage content. Anything above 70% will be good, and figures like 90% would be great. This improve will lead to better search results for users.
Why First-Page Google Is Important?
I am not focusing on giving results on first-page from google, but this factor is important to tell how much relevant content B+ has in spanish. The personalization technology and preferences feeded into B+ will allow nice search quality for communities and groups of people. So first page analysis gives me a pretty good estimate that I have most quality content and lack of funding is not ruining the evolution of this search project.
Soon will publish on the blog results
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How To Motivate People In Our Teams
Posted by Jorge Alegre in Startups, Technology on March 14th, 2010
It was nice to watch this video. Daniel is a great communicator and as allways TED content has great quality. This event was at Oxford, would be great to attend to these events life.
Panda CEO some months ago was talking that stock options and so forth creates merchandisers instead of a good team of talented individuals. I had my doubts at that time. Watching the video I agree on Dan terms. While working 100% on my start-up the three motivators mentioned in the video got me moving. These three are:
- Autonomy: Desire to direct our lives.
- Mastery: Desire to get better and better in something that matters.
- Purpose: Participate in something larger than ourselves.
I think these three motivators can work for most people. I think that this will depend from person to person the level of motivation for each point. For overall will work for most people. People that value security and belonging would go with #3, active people will love #1, etc…
Working as consultant in software development for clients I found that people I talked about this they were not that much interested in better salary but rather that their opinion counts, they are listened and influence, etc…which would go to #3 becaouse if you are working on a project and have no level of influence then “you can no purpose”, right? becaouse you are not really participating.
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SimpleSaas Design – Remote Objects & SaaS
Posted by Jorge Alegre in Technology on March 12th, 2010
I started the open source project simple-saas a few days ago, hosted at Google Code. The idea is to help my start-up processing times and provide a multi-language remote processing system with cloud computing in mind.
- Client/server software with JSON serialization with objects support. We use jsonpickle for this under python. Idea of any client communicate with any server. For example, PHP frontend communicating with a Python or Java server calling a service.
- No need to change anything on existing classes.
- Map&Reduce type of processing with less overhead.
- Objects are mapped in mapping servers running database software OctopusDbm with those mapping being in memory and therefore pretty fast. We mapp against application name, which can be any string you choose, defining domains in string, etc…
Last night I was in process of how to map the services and objects, so came up with the following design to connect to a server:
from simplesaas.client import Service myService = Service(sHostName, 'module.package.MyClass') client = myService.getClient(iClientId) print client.Name |
You can add any arguments and keyword arguments to the Service() instantiation and calling of method that the class and method on remote server needs. The module in the server just needs to be in the python path.
and this to connect without having to define a server to connect to:
from simplesaas.cloud import ServiceCloud myService = ServiceCloud('module.package.MyClass', sApp='myDomain:myApplication') client = myService.getClient(iClientId) print client.Name |
sApp is a string that can be anything, so we can define just application name or a combination of domain, application, language, etc…
The mapping server will have:
sApp => sHostName
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