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 
.
uberVU presentation – Seedcamp demo from Vladimir Oane on Vimeo.
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.
One of the biggest problems that appear during development of a piece of software is getting the requirements right. If you do a mistake at this early stage you will have big problems down the road. I found a site where you can develop prototypes and creating requirements whilst getting feedback from your customers and engaging them in the business requirements development process. The best thing on the site is that it allows the stakeholder to create the requirements himself if he chooses to. You should really take your time and take a look at the videos on that site. It is amazing how easy it seems to develop full working prototypes and in the same creating a full business requirements document (use cases and nonfunctional requirements included). I do not know how the guys from Simunication dit it but I really like their product. Most probably if I would have to manage a software project again I would pay the 129$ per month which is their most expensive plan.
Another problem that needs to be taken care of during development is creating and maintaining the project plan. The best web based project management software that I found is www.devshop.com . I really like the way you can control the software development using this site. Again take your time and watch the screencasts. I am not sure if there is a non manual way to transfer the requirements from Simunication to Devshop but I think this would be a minor annoyance anyway. The Devshop guys charge 24$ per month per user which is ok if you are going to create accounts for your project managers and team leaders only.
Add to this a secure subversion hosting service for 10-20$ per month and Skype based communication for every member of your team, and I am pretty sure the location of your programmers does not matter anymore.
PS The post above is not a payed post .
If you talk about web 2.0 sites (applications) from the point of view of an IT business related professional, these are the applications that are most used : Email, Instant Messaging, Calendar, Tasks, some sort of Project Management, a Document Management System, maybe a CRM and a sales funnel and a Dashboard. in the web 2.0 space there are a lot of application providers some big one like Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and some small ones like 37 Signals, Zimbra, 30 Boxes, Devshop. I am not talking here about the infrastructure providers like IBM, Oracle, Sun which allows all the “front end” applications to be developed and hosted.
From a small business point of view, the are some issues that are stopping a wider spread adoption of these apps:
If you take a look at all these applications you will see that all these sites offer a limited free version, and then a feature complete paying version. After I looked at all these sites I noticed that most of them are asking anywhere between 2 to 4 $ per user per month for the services that they are offering.
Assuming Firefox 3 will help alleviate the issue of off line access I am sure there is a big opportunity for a company to offer all these services under a single sign on and a common interface with a pricing scheme like this:
You could have let’s say Email, Calendar and Instant Messaging with 4 GB storage space for 5$ per month without the lack of privacy or adverts in or around your email. I know I would pay these amounts for this kind of services if I would be sure my data is private and encrypted at all times.
Waiting for your comments
This morning when I did my digg routine I stumbled upon a link which was pointing to Photosynth software (which development I followed in the last 6 months) from Microsoft labs. To my surprise I was able to install the Firefox extension from live.labs.com .
I won’t comment on the Photosynth software. I will just say that is strange, beautiful, and without a doubt I am not able to get a useful thing out of it other than the kind of fun I get when I am playing a nice game. I would really like to see what’s behind the software (the magic that makes everything happen).
The most interesting part is the fact that if I am not mistaking this is the first piece of software from Microsoft which can be run in a browser other than Internet Explorer. Is something similar with Bush and Bin Laden having a coffee together. It is the first sign that Microsoft is recognizing the life outside their empire. I wonder if this extension is running on Linux also. My laptop is an Ubuntu Linux machine, but the video card is too weak. That would be even more interesting.
The question to ask is what are the real plans of Microsoft? Why are they writing an extension just to make sure that the 80% users of Internet Explorer and the 15% users of Firefox are using this software?
For months I was trying to figure out the best way to improve Gmail and integrate google calendar into it. Last week I came across a very nice firefox extension called gmail skins . It does all that and more. You can use this extension with the portable version of firefox 1.5 on a USB stick. And because a photo explains better, take a look at how my gmail looks like:
For more than a year now we are living in a web 2.0 marketing hype. No matter the product, now everybody is adding the web 2.0 at the product’s name or description.
I was thinking what makes a product to be considered part of the web 2.0 trend and what comes to my mind most of the time is collaboration between people. This is the main feature of web 2.0 . Then automatically the next question that needs an answer would be: what is the smallest number of people needed, for the product to start creating value. You know I was watching Brainiacs on Discovery a while ago and they had an experiment regarding how many people are needed, and how they need to be placed around a stadium to be able to start a mexican wave. I think you got the ideea what I am talking about here.
Continue reading »
Follow Me