But how early is too early?
At the moment I am wrestling with the idea of releasing very early. The prototype will have about 60% of what I view as the “full” functionality. It will have the core features of the service for the individual but will be missing the community features. The current plan is that we get the full drop of the prototype, go through a test and fix phase and then ask in a bunch of friendly faces to try it and and tell us what they think. Part of this would be a discussion on the planned features for the full system to see what made sense to them and what did not. We would then go for the full scalable development for wider release in Q1 followed hopefully by public release later in Q1.
Great idea over at TechCrunch UK & Ireland (TUKI?)
Mike Butcher has just written about Money Mondays which is a wonderful idea. In his words:
Each Monday for a month, starting on Monday 20th November, we’ll showcase, and publish contact details for, a web or mobile startup which has yet to secure formal funding. They will have to have either an application of their idea up and running (e.g. a live web site) or a working demo or beta we can look at.
The technology under the hood
When we first kicked off this new venture, I made a few simple decisions on technology. The first was that we were going to take an agile approach with everything and particularly using agile languages and web frameworks. Over the past ten years I’ve had major success with projects which used Tcl, Perl and Python where the accepted wisdom would often have been to build some monster C++ or Java app. Most of those projects were not web related but some of the more recent ones were and the productivity of the developers was often gob-smacking.
Simple addition to the landing page
It now has an embedded hCard with our minimal contact details. There is also a link which you can click on to grab a VCF for import into Outlook. This obviously won’t be the only use of microformats on the site 😉
Oh and, cough, it now passes the W3C validator.
The design over at loudervoice.com
I just commented over at Eirepreneur that you should pay no attention to the design of the landing page at loudervoice.com. That is literally the default page in any TurboGears app with the text changed. In fact the server is not even running TG yet. We’ll do that when we add a sign-up for beta facility in the coming weeks.
A bunch of identity tasks completed
We’ve had LouderVoice.com since the name was decided. BTW feel free to comment on the name, we purposely avoided the current obsession with madey-up nonsense names and went with something descriptive. Since then I’ve added the usual bunch of .org, .net, .co.uk and even .biz because GoDaddy were doing dirt cheap deals.
Of course .ie had to be just that bit more difficult and had to wait until we fulfilled one of the criteria. We achieved this today by successfully registering LOUDERVOICE as a business name with the CRO for €20. I was pleasantly surprised to get notification that we now have loudervoice.ie a few short hours after we purchased it over at Blacknight.
First pre-alpha release delivered
Last Thursday was a pretty momentous day for LouderVoice. The first code drop was delivered and installed. We have finally moved from talking and speccing to actually having functional code. It is still very very early days and the code just has the bare bones of the required feature set. But even at this stage, the potential is obvious. I was buzzing for days afterwards and I’m hugely impressed with the progress in a few short weeks.
We have our logos
Let us know what you think. Thanks to Elance and Lanoel Studios for coming up with a first-time-right design. We’ll now start doing the colour scheme for the blog and the site based on these logos.