Finally I can write about a Romanian company that seems to have a nice web 2.0 product or at least a demo. For the record I have to say that I found out about them from a foreign news site which is kind of sad. Anyway, below you have a video demoing their product and if you want to find out more you should go to Ubervu . I hope they won’t disappoint me 
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uberVU presentation – Seedcamp demo from Vladimir Oane on Vimeo.
Software as a Service (SaaS) is getting a lot of attention lately. SaaS has many Pros and some Cons as well. This piece outlines both the good and the bad, tries to answer the question: “By going the SaaS way, is IT just trading one set of problems for another?”, and suggests that the benefits outweigh the shortcomings.
The development of web based applications has decoupled the user interface from the business layer as well as its software and hardware. As a result, a user working at a personal computer (or a smart phone) with a web browser can access a variety of business applications for the cost of the Internet connection and the subscription to the service.
I’ve watched the Steve Jobs keynote from a few days ago that culminated with the Iphone 3G presentation. My take is that this is going to be my next phone . This being said, below you have my critique of the device and the associated software
The device seems complete and the reason for the missing things it seems to me that it has to do a lot more with the marketing part than to the real technical dificulties. I am sure that if they really wanted they could have implemented a front camera with ichat video capabilities but that would have been a direct attack at ATT.
Also the way Apple is solving the multitasking issues is pure genius. Not from technical point of view but from business point of view. Apple will be able to control what and when goes to your phone from all the apps that will run on the Iphone.
I am not at all happy with the way Apple implemented their Mesh version (btw now it makes perfect sense why Microsoft had choose to preview the Mesh in advance, even they didn’t had the mobile support implemented). It seems that Apple is not able to make up it’s mind. If the syncronisation works so well why are you duplicating Google’s work and create a suite of web based apps? At least the way Microsoft is doing it you aren’t presented with duplicated way of doing things. Also it seems to me that Microsoft has the edge on this one from technical point of view. I am sure I am not going to pay 99$ per year for something that I can have for free one way or another.
Not sure if something can be done related to the video and audio codec support. I hope that the VLC for iphone project is completely succesful. Also it seems to me that the storage capacity is too small. Because now I am sure that a good part of that storage capacity is going to be taken by the application data.
Last point that I want to make is the lack of device level encryption. I may be wrong but so far I am pretty sure that you can not have something similar with truecrypt in the Iphone firmware. I know thath you can nuke an iphone remotely but I would be happier if I know that my personal data is encrypted and unavailable if I loose my phone
Because lately I got interested in what it takes to succeed in a startup environment, I got to see this presentation by the David Heinemeir (ruby on rails creator) . A lot of common sense advices but sometimes it helps to be reminded of those advices.
After watching the Iphone SDK related presentation these are some random thoughts that come to my mind:
This post should be in romanian, because it has to do with the romanian daily reality. I choose to write it in english to keep some sort of order in the blog.
Around 2 weeks ago I went for an interview to a top 5 bank here for middle management position. The interview went more than ok, I asked for a certain amount of money, the interviewer was relatively ok with the amount. 4 days later I am getting a call from the interviewer in which he said to me that I am the person for the job, but he can not offer me more than 85% of the amount I requested. Next day I accepted the offer, and the interviewer told me that he needs to have this amount approved by a VP because my sallary is bigger than their approved sallary grid.
They called me to the office next monday at 11 to sign the papers. I was there and after 30 minutes discussion between the interviewer and the HR department I was told to come back at 16:30 the same day because the papers weren’t ready. Knowing the way things are here I suggested to them that I should come back next morning at 9, which I did.
So tuesday I met with a HR person which presented to me all the papers except the sallary which still wasn’t approved at this stage. She told me that by the end of the day, she should have the approval and she will call me to establish a meeting next day for signing the employment papers. Tuesday around 7PM she called, told me that the sallary is not approved yet but she will call me when it is ready, for me to come and sign the papers.
One week later I got a call from the interviewer asking me to meet him next day to discuss the offer. So I met him this morning in his office and he told me that the initial money weren’t approved by the VP and offered me 60% of the initial amount that I requested. I declined the offer politely.
End of the public service announcement.
PS I still have to figure out if I am allowed to make all the names public or not.
One of the reasons I started this blog was to see if is possible to make a living from online advertising. Short answer: The way I do it, it isn’t . If you browse my site without an adblocker you will see that I have a sidebar with google adsense. You will also see that the sidebar is not respecting almost all the best practices in placement, format and so on. Without going into details is sufficient to say that in the almost 2 years since I have this site, I didn’t got any money from Google yet, because there are not enough in my adsense account . Also you need to know that the site is costing me almost nothing. Is something like 25 Euros per year.
Now that you have the facts let me give you some insight.
Some time ago I got an offer to publish some adverts on my site. I told that company that depending on the types of sites and the money offered I may be interested. I got an offer back. I presume is a decent offer, but I choose not to go further.
Why? Try to spot the adverts on these sites: http://www.rubyrailways.com/ and http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2007/05/10/70-expert-ideas-for-better-css-coding/ . I did not put the actual links here, because I do not want to back link to those sites. I am pretty sure what that company is doing is legal, but I am 100% sure is not moral.
I am sure you will have a hard enough time to spot the adverts. If you can’t just let me know in a comment and I will put you on the right track.
Everybody would say because the customers want it. After I have seen a demo of the Google services page optimized for Iphone I am sure that Google is the real reason. Is clear that by using the same web browser like Iphone (webkit) any Android based device would have access to any Iphone optimized site the same way the Iphone does. Apple had to release an SDK to try to match Google efforts in this area.
Google isn’t launching products anymore, is launching platforms. Last week Google launched Open Social,this week Google launched Android. These two platforms have two things in common:
If Open Social is Google’s move in trying to beat Facebook (it seems that Facebook is going to be able to target the adverts in a much more precise way then Google), Android is potentially a paradigm shift in computing experience. Is not clear to me yet if the software stack is based on Java or J2ME but Google will have an OS that will be able to run on any computing device from mobile phones to standard desktops PC. I can’t wait to have a device similar with Asus 399$ notebook or OLPC or something similar with the Ipod Touch or Nokia Tablet which will run Google OS and access Google or google compatible web services. (you should try to remember “google compatible”)
Slowly different pieces of the Google master plan are seeing the light and it seems that they are executing their plan almost flawlessly.
The most interesting thing of these 2 announcements is actually going to be the reaction from Microsoft, Apple, Nokia, Sony-Ericsson and Facebook. Is obvious that Google is forcing these companies to play it’s game and these companies are in reacting mode which diverts important resources from trying to create something new and force Google to play their game.
If the game continues like this probably sooner or later the EPIC story will become true. Not sure if this is a good thing or not.
Read today at MacRumors that Apple sold 2 million copies of Leopard in the first weekend. At 129$ per license they got 260 millions. At 85$ per hour programmer cost they can afford let’s say 3.000.000 programmer hours for the money they got in the first weekend. This will translate in 375.000 programmer days. Assuming that the development took 3 years this means that the money they got in the first weekend allowed Apple to pay for around 500 developers during that time. I know that the numbers are not very precise and I know there are other costs beside development but I still think the magnitude order is ok.
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