Time to leave the corporate nest?

A little over five years ago now, my wife and I arrived back in Australia from a year over in the UK. It was a great year, and I’d enjoyed the work I’d being doing over there (coding at a smallish Biotech) as well as the ability to travel. Additionally, I’d left on good terms with my employer and had the opportunity to do some work with them from Australia. Great, I thought – an opportunity to get my own software development business started; which I guess has always been my dream.

While, I think the idea was good in practice, it wasn’t the right time. My current struggle is attempting to determine if now is the right time.

Read the rest of this entry »

The OpenHub and Coworking

I was surfing around the blogs of some Australian consultants recently and came across The OpenHub in Melbourne. This is a coworking environment in Melbourne which sounds like a really great place to be if you are an independent developer or consultant.

The coworking movement looks really interesting to me – eventually I hope to go out on my own and create a successful startup, and what better place to spend the infant years of your startup that doing that with like-minded individuals. It just makes sense. I mean most of my ideas come to me when I am driving home from a day of work, so whilst at the time the ideas is formulating I am on my own, the idea is generally related to a conversation I have had with someone that day.

So, therefore, if I went out on my own and worked from home then firstly I wouldn’t be driving anywhere (and thus get my thinking time) and secondly, I wouldn’t be mixing with people from different backgrounds and experiences. Thus I could potentially get stuck in a rut… coworking seems like a great way to combat that. Not only that, but it’s an effective way to set up shop somewhere without the massive initial overheads.

Stupeflix – API Enabled Online Video

Online video is something that helps to make a product or website standout from the rest. Whether it is a screencast tutorial or a promotional video for a product, the presence of video can help your offering stand-out from the crowd.

Stupeflix is a site that enables you to automatically generate video from a series of images, and apply text and a backing track to make a video that is quite compelling. In the past I have used Animoto and recommended it to friends as a great and simple way to put together a great video from existing static images. Honestly, I will continue to recommend Animoto as an excellent tool for generating video online – the effects and overall feel of the video coming out of Animoto has an edge over the end product Stupeflix creates (you can do a side-by-side comparison of their demo videos and you’ll see what I mean).

What makes Stupeflix different, however, is that it exposes a RESTful API for generating the videos. This in turn opens up some amazing opportunities for websites that already have a large amount of static imagery they would like to present in a more compelling way. Mike Butcher in his techcrunch post suggests a few application possibilities around generic eCommerce sites which includes some potential uses of the generated videos to assist with monetization of your own sites.

One of the most useful real-world examples I can think of would be on property sales / real estate websites. Nothing would showcase a property better than a video of the still images taken by the property photographer. It would certainly be more compelling than the clunking slideshow mechanisms most of these sites currently offer. The same of course could apply to car sales sites and the like.

Image hosting and stock image sites are another obvious big area that could put Stupeflix to good use. So the next thing to do is to get some time get mashing with their API (I’ll post any updates on this post).

Twibes, Twitter and Viral Propagation

As I do each night (it’s not something I have access to during the day) I fire up Twitter, and today (thanks to @Yoshi123 of Intridea) I discovered Twibes.

Now Twibes is a good idea, nicely implemented and all that, but the real gem here is how much viral activity it creates in Twitter. I created two groups WebConcepts and ShinyThings which cover a couple of primary interest areas for me (WebConcepts being serious and useful web applications, and ShinyThings being gadgets and generally cool distracting techs). In creating those two groups, I probably sent out about 10 tweets which would have drawn followers back to Twibes to start their own groups. Now I have a limited follower base at the moment so the impact would be minimal, but for some Twitter users the reach for a new application is incredible by using this mechanism.

It really is very impressive. The application utilizes twitter as it’s communication layer to handle creating new groups and sending invites, which in turns creates viral traffic that will pull people to their application. Excellent use of both Twitter’s existing infrastructure and dedicated followers.

I was putting together a similar concept for trying to coordinate small events using Twitter (I’ll try to post about it soon) so was very excited to see an application doing this kind of thing very effectively already. If there are other web applications using twitter as a comms channel then feel free to comment here or join the WebConcepts Twibe and let me know.

Prezi – Visually Compelling Online Presentations

This one is a goody, and in all honesty I thought I was on the tail end of find it. Apparently not. I’ve seen both lifehacker and techcrunch blogging on this particular application recently and have to add my two cents.

Read the rest of this entry »

Present.ly – Twitter for Corporates?

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.