Early tomorrow, we will be leaving Brussels to attend the Future of Web Apps event in London.
The event is one of the major event in the apps industry in Europe.
Well known names are joining the party: Mark Zuckerberg from Facebook, Kevin Rose from Digg and many others.
Just leave a comment if you plan to attend the event and we might try to meet each other.
When we redesigned the PURE website, we’ve had intense debates about adding ads or not on the main page.
I was against it mainly because when you give something Open Source, you give it for free and shouldn’t expect any financial returns.
However, I had nothing against donations.
Using ads as an easy way to donate got me convinced.
When you click on the ads, you don’t need to take your credit card out of your wallet but money goes to the provider.
Still, the reality is different. 35000 visits later, the amount of money raised thanks to the ads reaches 15$.
Are we the only one doing this for projects we like ?
At least, Seth Godin, a well-known marketer, thinks the same way
But in the long term, it can only corrupt the ads system.
And, as Google prevents you to encourage clicks, it is maybe something for Donation Sites like Pledgie to look into, a one click support badge.
3000 is the number of unique visitors, in two days, who read our last post: Why Erlang ?
In comparison, our last busiest day was 82 unique visitors.
So, just a bit of self-hugging, thank you Hughes for the great post !
I guess, it is some of those startup momentum’s that give you the will and motivation to do better.
And guess what ? We have better incoming !
More precisely, this week will be an important step for us, so…
Stay Tuned.
We also made a few changes to this blog and added two new features:
When you build a system based on people, at a certain time, you need to fill your system with data for mass testing.
If you need hundreds (or thousands) of people, finding names can be a painfull moment to go through.
Here is a spreadsheet that generates as much names as you want.
It comes with 1000 random names (English) and each time you change something in the list, it refreshes itself with new names.
With your favorite spreadsheet editor, you can then generate, for instance, a JSON dataset, emails,… simply by using basic formulas.
An important part in the creation process of a new SaaS offer is of course about technology choices.
You need to choose a language for your back-end, for the front-end, you need a DataBase, you might want to develop everything on an existing platform, …
In some extent, you may even want your technological choices to mirror a certain corporate philosophy.
In the coming weeks, Mic and Hughes will share with you some technical posts about our findings, thoughts and decisions.
We don’t have the pretense of coming out with an absolute winner for each choice that we make. In fact, we think there is no such thing. Each technology has its pros and cons and even those might change depending on the context.
When we started looking at technology to use for our BeeLit solution, we had the following issues in mind:
We might even have a little surprise in store when it comes to the technology we use for the front-end…
Stay tuned.
It is my great pleasure to announce that this post has been published at the same time on the blog Diversity.
Ben Kepes, founding director of Diversity, has been very inspiring to us even before becoming a reader of our blog and I thank him for his trust.
Enjoy the reading !
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Every morning when I stop reading the last big news from about 30 blogs in Netvibes and switch to my countless SaaS Business Apps such as Gmail, Basecamp, Highrise, Remember The Milk, Google Docs, … I wonder why aggregation of information like news was present so fast in my day to day life and why Business Apps, when it comes to integration, are still in the stone age.
If I had to define the perfect Business Application, it would certainly be user-centric:
Even with such powers in my hands, I would still expect quite a lot from the software provider: security, maintenance, performance, scalability and innovation.
There are obvious barriers to reach that point.
First, I doubt we will ever have some kind of a single universal DB with information about persons, friends, contacts, habits, projects, … They will probably continue to multiply and spread as new web solutions will appear.
Secondly, I doubt a single provider will ever meet all my needs. Moreover, I believe innovation comes from diversity.
So, looking at how SaaS providers are responding to this demand, we can find:
1) The me-only providers. They often provide a wonderful tool for a specific domain but are not integrated with others.
2) The API players. They believe in information aggregation and easily pass the barrier of the constantly multiplying and spreading sources of information.
Centralized and external data is combined not only to avoid redundancy for the users, but also to provide better and more complete results.
Good examples:
API followers would usually also provide API for their own data.
3) The SaaS Platforms. This new feature in the SaaS industry is more than probably going to be the battlefield in the in the coming months and years (McKinsey: Emerging platforms war in enterprise software).
Taking the same naming convention than McKinsey, Development Platforms and Application-led Platforms are good candidates to help the user pass the second barrier.
Providing a single interface for the users and elaborated systems for developers, this might be the solution we are looking at.
It is definitively one step further in the direction of a user-centric approach. Still, there are in my opinion certain downsides you need to consider:
First, the lock-in it creates for developers. When you choose a platform, you basically choose for a complete environment from A to Z at the disadvantage of complete freedom in innovation and technical choices.
Secondly, the real possibilities for the end users are still quite limited in terms of interface customization and flexibility.
4) True Aggregation in SaaS or the Browser as a Platform. The idea is to be able to empower the end-users and at the same time to leverage providers’ efforts and innovation without creating any lock-in.
While running their business applications through a web browser, the users can customize their screens adding or removing services offered by various providers.
Using the buzz semantic, these users are in fact running SaaS applications through a Mashup interface based on SOA architecture.
I recommend the excellent post about Enterprise Mashups written by Brian ‘Bex’ Huff.
Mashups are usually packaged by developers or Mashup specialists. But, just like Netvibes did for the RSS feeds, you could let them be created by users.
The real challenge for the software providers will then be to rethink applications in smaller blocks that could work independently AND in collaboration with other unknown services.
So we are finally seeing a move into federation in SaaS Business Applications. Aggregation of information and aggregation of features should be on the mind of everybody who plans to start a new SaaS venture.
While all-in-one heavyweight platforms such as those offered by Salesforce provide a certain comfort, I strongly believe that innovation is about freedom of choices and diversity; and it’s something that can only be achieved by embracing that diversity and not by creating lock-ins.
Last but not least, there is a last barrier that might be bigger than the two others mentioned above: the will of providers to work together and share the love!
Share the love.
Back in April, I wrote a post about how important user feedbacks were to us. I mentioned the discovery of the Get Satisfaction service, which is in its own terms ‘a place where people can get the most from the products they use, and where companies are encouraged to get real with their customers.’ (See how it looks when applied to BeeBole).
The service is also a real open debate since companies cannot hide comments from customers nor censor them.
The Get Satisfaction team has recently added a ‘Help Center‘ functionality. It is an open-source PHP application that pushes the integration of their service in your company environment a little bit further, maximizing your possibilities to customize the look and feel.
All this made me very enthusiastic even more so because everything was free. Apparently this will however change and I have been told the pricing should become public in a month or so. This raises a question: ‘Why should a company pay for a tool that is not under its control?’.
Eric Suez, Community Manager at Get Satisfaction, answered to me like this:
Yes, I know that it takes a little bit of a leap of faith. The idea is that by giving up control you can achieve more authentic dialogue with customers. It’s a two-way street. Companies aren’t allowed to censor conversation, but customers have to come to the table with patience and understanding.
I couldn’t agree more with that. Still, in the best-case scenario, an enthusiastic crowd of users creates the company and the product they like through Get Satisfaction. The company takes notice of it and wants to take part of the process. The company is then asked to pay to be able to use the data’s and actively participate (this is just a guess since pricing is not detailed yet).
As a company, I would have nothing against paying for a great service but I would have an issue with something when I have to pay for it without having a real choice.
Alternative solutions could be a free version with ads (I really don’t like ads) or working with sponsorships (like Netvibes). The Get Satisfaction open-source help center could be downloaded for a fee since it is really something that brings real added value for the company.
I think data’s should be free of use and of charge but facilitating tools such as the Help center or a data exporter can be chargeable.
On the other hand, if you start having a big community in Get Satisfaction, it means that you have a huge success and giving a few bucks per month even if you don’t have the choice will not bother you. It could also mean that your product is so buggy that you should maybe start thinking about doing something else.
I’d be happy to hear your thoughts.
Collaboration is a key element in the success of a project. In certain cases, at BeeBole for example, it is even vital; Mic and Hughes live in Belgium and I live in India.
While distance and time zone difference might seem an issue, we found that with a set of good collaboration tools, the problems were rapidly disappearing.
Time zone difference even became an advantage since we can’t talk to each others during certain period of the day, which obliges us to focus on our work instead of chatting and recreating the world constantly.
For emails, simple chat features and documents we use Google Apps. It is a free application suite and you can link it to your own domain name. There is a premium version for 50$/user/year that gives you more email storage and some other features.
While emails and chat are quite common today, we really like Google Docs. Each document created can be shared and versions are tracked. We can work simultaneously on the same document without blocking each other or having version issues.
Recently, we also adopted Google Sites (Also part of Google Apps) as internal wiki and Internet file storage. We even use it as a mini-accounting system for expenses, invoices, … but just as a way to centralize information and receipts/invoices.
For project management, we use the free version of Basecamp (from 37Signals). 37Signals provides very simple tools from project management to Customer Relationship Management (Highrise). The only issue I have today is of course the limitation of the free version and the lack of integration between their own tools. I am currently looking at Google Sites as a possible replacement.
For our meetings we use Skype. The video quality is very good (even with the lack of stability of an Indian Internet connection) and the feature is really boosting our discussions.
Since recently, we were still missing some web meeting features, such as presentation sharing or desktop sharing. It is now possible thanks to DimDim, which has proven to be really useful. The screens are still a bit buggy and the performance could certainly be improved but it is open source and there is a free version limited to 20 participants per meeting, which is quite enough for small start-ups. I definitively recommend it as an alternative to the expensive WebEx and GoToMeeting.
If you are using other tools, do not hesitate to share it with us as we are always looking for new ways to improve our collaboration.
In the new flourishing market of Web 2.0 events, we decided to attend the Future of Web Apps event.
It will happen in October (8-10 October) in London at the Excel (in the docks area).
Just like its US equivalent in Miami last March, big names from well known companies are coming: Kevin Rose from Digg, Erick Schonfeld from Techcrunch, etc., …
We will attend the conferences on the 9th and the 10th of October.
If you plan to attend the event and look for company while there, just post a comment.
I came across this article this morning. Iceberg comes with an interesting platform allowing everyone to create web applications with “zero code”. Looking at the market, you can find other competitors such as Coghead, Longjump, BungeeLabs, WyaWorks or Zoho.
There is something striking me in all the video presentations I have seen on those web sites, it is the complexity for any normal user. There is indeed the “zero code” approach but you still need to understand what is a web service, that those web services have variables or that you can link those with workflows.
There are a lot of good ideas but I don’t see the point for the following reasons:
Creating web applications is about 4 big steps:
Each of those steps requires experience. It takes years of experience to be able to listen to users and translate their needs into ergonomic applications; it takes years of trainings and school courses to be able to develop robust and stable applications; it takes a few tries and feedbacks to get an application right.
My feeling is that those platforms try to address those four steps but instead of empowering each of the actors of the process (users, business analysts, developers) they become some kind of jack-of-all-trade giving average tools for each.
Developers have to choose for a complete framework that will not give them all the possibilities they might expect, users are not guided in the translation of their needs and business analysts need to be aware of the platform limitations.
At BeeBole we have another approach.
We think the right platform should:
I would be happy to have any of your thoughts about this.
