Archive for the ‘General’ Category

Extreme Makeover

April 20th, 2009 by Yves | Posted in BeeBole, General | No Comments »
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During the week-end, our blog has been through an extreme makeover.

  1. The design has changed. If you can’t see those changes or if the design looks weird, just hit the refresh button of your web browser.
  2. The re-design includes a lot of new features, mainly in the side bar: direct access to the recent posts, pictures, videos, … and at the end of each post you will find a list of all the related posts.
  3. The URL has also changed. Instead of http://beebole.com/blog/, it is now http://beebole.com/en/blog/. The old URL being redirected to here, it shouldn’t be an issue for the old links you might have in your favorites.

Don’t hesitate to give us any feedback about the new design/features or to report bugs via the comments hereunder.

@beebole on Twitter

April 8th, 2009 by Yves | Posted in General | No Comments »
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Our BeeBole account on Twitter is back from the limbo. So you can start now following our daily activities:

http://twitter.com/beebole

For some reasons, the account was deleted 6 months ago and the “undelete” feature of Twitter was not working for the last 3 months.

BeeBole Interviewed by Globe Corp/Entreprise Globale

February 5th, 2009 by Yves | Posted in General | No Comments »
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Two weeks ago, I was back in Brussels and, with Mic, we’ve had the chance to meet Jean-Yves Huwart for an interview.

Jean-Yves is the economic journalist behind the blog and think tank Entreprise Globale or Globe Corp in its English version.

He tries, through his articles and interviews, to define how deeply globalization is changing the culture inside companies, from large corporations to start-ups like us.
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Sandbox Your Cross Domain JSONP To Improve Mashup Security

January 27th, 2009 by Mic | Posted in General | 2 Comments »
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JSONP is a very neat way to get JSON data from other domains. The concept was brought by Bob Ipolito in 2005, and today it is widely available from API providers.

The big issue about JSONP is security. If you inject an unknown script in your page, you give to the script author a potential way to read the entire page content, scripts, cookies and data.

So, if you think, like us, the cool way to build web apps today is about building services and aggregating them with external APIs in Mashups, you have a problem. How can we securely fetch these nice services available everywhere?

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We Are Ready To Listen To Your Feedback

December 15th, 2008 by Yves | Posted in BeeBole, General | 2 Comments »
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As the first release of our application is getting closer, it was time for us to set up a nice tool to hear what you will have to say.

From now on, a feedback button will appear on the left of your screen on beebole.com and on this blog (as you might have already seen).

This button will also be part of our application and will allow you, at any time, to submit feedback such as ideas for new features, bugs you’ve found or just general thoughts on the application.

All those information will be centralized in a dedicated Feedback Forum

BeeBole team members will actively participate to this forum, commenting your feedback, upgrading the status of your ideas, … but also submitting the team ideas to your vote, …

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London Calling – FOWA 2008

October 8th, 2008 by Yves | Posted in General | 1 Comment »
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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.

Are Online Ads The Easy Way To Donate ?

October 7th, 2008 by Yves | Posted in General | 5 Comments »
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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

July 27th, 2008 by Yves | Posted in General | 2 Comments »
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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:

  1. Now you can directly share our posts in your favorite social bookmarking application, clicking on the Share button at the bottom of each post.
  2. You can now ask for email updates when you let a comment in a post, just to know if someone has answered you or if the discussion simply keeps going on.
  3. Minor design changes.

People Name Generator

July 21st, 2008 by Mic | Posted in General | No Comments »
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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.

SaaS Startup Creation – BeeBole Technology Choices

July 15th, 2008 by Yves | Posted in General | 2 Comments »
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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.

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