After a short delay, we had our prototype Alpha walkthrough today and it really is a humdinger. It’s now at the “show it to someone and they’ll get it instantly” stage. Sure there are a few small bugs and it hasn’t had a Trinny and Susannah makeover for the design but it just feels right. We bounced a few ideas back and forth on expected user behavior but you could spend from now until eternity doing that.
I had a chat yesterday with another Irish entrepreneur about some dev shops I had investigated. Afterwards I sent him on a list of outsourcing vendors that impressed me during my research (but I haven’t used). It struck me this morning that it might be useful to create some sort of wiki or group blog where those involved in software development in Ireland could list vendors they have used and like or who have been recommended to them or who look good.
Damien, he of 1000 ideas, all of them good, asked a bunch of us for our top 5 business tips. Here are mine re-published with some extra context. Nothing too deep, just solid practical stuff I’ve learned in 14 years of working in tech, many of those in start-ups. Talk to as many people who can advise you as possible both in and out of your business area. Most people are happy to help and advise.
Just a re-direct to loudervoice.com but no harm in having it there as most of the Alpha testers are likely to be Irish. Now to get the email harvester up and running.
As I’ve said before, we are building our prototype using the TurboGears Web Application framework. Kevin Dangoor (the leader of the project), Mark Ramm and Gigi Sayfan have just released the first book about this great framework. It is currently the #20 tech book on Amazon. In addition to the paper copy, a Rough Cuts PDF version is available over at Safari Books and this is the version I have been using.
Registration has just opened for the next Future of Web Apps conference in London on Feb 20-22. I’ve just signed up to attend. I should have PLENTY to talk about at that stage. Anyone else thinking of heading over from Ireland? It’s a great line-up of speakers including Mike Arrington, Bradley Horowitz, Tara Hunt and Jeremy Keith.
I just love buzzwords and acronyms. I’m still deeply disappointed that my Tim Bray derived PECK (People Contributed Experience and Knowledge) as a replacement for UGC never caught on. Now we have an attempt to get Web 3.0 used to describe what’s coming next. There has been enormous reaction to John Markoff’s article in The NYT about Web 3.0 and the “Grand Semantic Web”. As anyone who has read the Argolon blog will know, we belong to the lower-case “upright semantic web” faction.
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.
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.
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.
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