Whilst investigating platforms for managing Amazon’s EC2 platform, I came across a company that have a site / product called Scalr (which is interesting in itself), but once I delved into the company behind that product – Intridea I was even more impressed. These guys are really producing some quality stuff.
One piece of tech that is particularly interesting is their product called present.ly – which in their own words is “Twitter meets LinkedIn”. Now whilst I believe these guys have done a good job building the technology I have to wonder if the product will make the dent in the market I believe they would like it to.
So many questions in my head around this space…
Will corporates show interest in microblogging? I can just imagine the CEO of some large multinational just microblogging about some aggressive job cuts he is having to make given the financial environment.
If enterprise microblogging becomes something to investigate, will the new kids on the block get to play, or will twitter take that business?
Still, kudos for the build of the app – it feels and looks good; and good luck to the guys at Intridea with the project. From what I’ve seen on their site, they definitely are pulling some great stuff together, so I’m going to keep an eye out for more interesting projects from them – their labs area is a good place to start if you are interested.
posted on the March 26th, 2009 2 Comments »
For anyone who is investigating using Google’s AppEngine at the moment, would be well aware that whilst it is pretty amazing (as I indicated in a previous post) it does have it’s limitations.
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posted on the March 22nd, 2009 2 Comments »
Well John Resig has demonstrated his thought leadership in the javascript development space again. Confronted with the problem of ensuring his jQuery library maintains compatibility with all the combinations of browsers, HTML compliance modes, other js libraries, etc, etc. he has come up with an innovative solution: TestSwarm.
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posted on the March 21st, 2009 No Comments »
In my opinion Google’s AppEngine is a application prototypers dream. Up until just now I was tossing up whether to code a prototype or ConceptBuzz in PHP or RoR, even though I had a predisposition to building components of it using python. This was purely for the reason that I was being conservative with regards to economics – it’s cheap to get PHP hosting (and in general if you have cpanel hosting, you get RoR as well) so I was leaning that way.
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posted on the March 20th, 2009 2 Comments »
Background and Motivation
I find taking an idea and turning into something real can be quite a challenge. This isn’t because I struggle to technically execute the vision, but more because I require some external motivation to see an idea through to fruition (otherwise I’ll probably just come up with some other concept and divert my attention to that). In most cases, this external motivation comes through a number of others showing genuine interest in the idea or by finding an external party who will behave like a client for the project – setting deadlines, mandating requirements, etc, to help things move along.
Part of my vision for the conceptual advantage site is to use it as a mechanism to push out some of my ideas for critique on the global stage. Some might think this seems like a ludicrous concept – why would you share an idea that someone else could potentially deliver on and make themselves a lot of money with? Well for one, I know that without some of the external motivators I require, I will probably never deliver a single one of my ideas. Secondly I feel confident that I have enough ideas (be they good or bad) that I could afford for a couple to be delivered by others if that means I deliver on some of those myself.
The Concept – A website for gauging concept interest
So how do I plan on generating some of this external motivation and enthusiasm to get things done? For now this blog serves as a mechanism for that, but based on my own experience it takes more commitment from a visitor to leave a comment than it would to simply give a thumbs up or down to an idea.
So what next? At this stage the plan is to set up a website that enables someone to register and submit a concept to be evaluated by visitors to that site. Additionally, I envisage using social bookmarking style bookmarking buttons to both communicate and gather interest for the concept – for instance, if the site was up and running this article would have a little widget in the top right corner saying “18 buzz – get on board” (or something similar).
Additionally, rather than force a potential fan of the concept to register on the site also (really I don’t want to force people to register with sites more than they have to) – I would probably explore using existing social bookmarking sites to assist with aggregating buzz for a concept. For instance, I can envisage a number of urls being associated with a particular concept: an initial blog post, a project site, the conceptbuzz.net site page itself, etc, etc and the amount of buzz for that concept should be the aggregate number of social bookmarking links for any of those urls.
So what would all that buzz mean then? Well for myself, I would commit myself to a concept relative to the amount of buzz. For instance, I see a concept moving through a number of phases before it’s released as a finished product. Lets say it goes from concept > prototype > public beta > release. In that case, I would set myself some “buzz thresholds” to inspire me to move it to further phases. In the case of idea A, I might determine that 100 buzz is sufficient for me to build a prototype of the idea, but for idea B I would want to see 2000 buzz before embarking on building a prototype given the complexity of the idea.
In closing, while I think the conceptbuzz.net site idea represents some risk around exposing your concept before having something in the market and competing, I believe this can be a measured risk for someone like myself. Let me know what you think. If you think it’s a good idea and something you’d like to see then use some of the key principles that I will implement (commenting, social bookmarking, etc) and get me motivated to deliver something! Additionally, let me say I welcome critical feedback too – happy to have someone shoot holes in the idea or throw questions in the mix that will cause us all to think.
Updates:
2009-03-23:
Modified conceptbuzz.net to www.conceptbuzz.net as I’ve started using Google AppEngine for hosting.
posted on the March 15th, 2009 No Comments »
Introducing the Wireframer
Today’s tool is quite simple, but also I believe quite useful. In many respects this wireframing tool is nothing more than a glorified piece of graph paper (but with a few helpful extras – including an Above the Fold indicator to help make sure the important stuff on the site hits your visitors straight up).
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posted on the March 6th, 2009 No Comments »
My quest for productivity tools and techniques continues – today delivering a work breakdown structure planner for all to download and enjoy (well I hope at least).
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posted on the March 1st, 2009 2 Comments »
