Archive for the ‘Internet’ Category

Freedom and All That

Tuesday, March 3rd, 2009

I’ve just finished posting a new blog entry on XP-Dev.com on the definition of Stories, Tasks and Bugs from XP-Dev.com’s point of view. However, the beauty of it all is that users make XP-Dev.com their own. They end up using it for various other purposes other than software development (and agile at that!). They are free to use it whichever way they see fit.

In my blog entry, I said:

However, this article (and future ones) are only guidelines – you are free to decide on how you’d like to use XP-Dev.com.

“Free to decide” – these words triggered a memory from the past.

Back in 2003 I was doing an summer internship/job with Lec here in the UK and was rushing back to their office from Victoria station in London. I was running late and did not have enough time to read the notice board on which platform I was meant to catch the train from.

I ran to the first person who looked like he worked at the station, and I asked him which is the next train to Bognor Regis (Lec HQ). Apparently there were 2 – one that was leaving at that moment, and another that was leaving in 30 minutes. I wasn’t too sure which one my ticket was for, and showed him my tickets and asked “I’ve got these tickets – which train can I board?”.

As soon as I finished my question, he immediately replied “Take which ever one you’d like – it’s a Free country”. He didn’t bother even looking at the tickets!

With adrenaline still rushing through my heart, I thanked him, ran to the train and boarded it. The train left a minute later.

I have always comeback to this little episode whenever I think of usages of a tool or even idea – let it be a handy tool (screwdriver, etc) or even an edit (one of the team asking whether its OK to use Vim instead of Emacs). I have a 2 second flashback to that moment in Victoria station and reply to them in the same manner – “Its a free country. Do whatever you want.”

And this is the beauty about building tools that people use, like XP-Dev.com. Everyone has their own way of using it and it should be just like that. No hard rules, everyone gets to do it their own way, and everyone is happy.

There’s a saying “With freedom comes responsibility” – so, just don’t do anything unlawful.

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Posted in Internet, Management | No Comments »

XP-Dev.com : Another milestone

Sunday, March 1st, 2009

So, it has been 3 months and a bit since the upgrade to the new platform that runs the current version of XP-Dev.com, and it has been eventful. There was the release that took a whole day, and then were some functional releases as well. The latest release bring some really cool features to XP-Dev.com.

Another milestone has been reached, and the functionality gap has been narrowing drastically the past 3 months. However, I will be brave enough to admit that the gap is still there, and at least for me, there’s still a mountain to climb ahead.

Enjoy the new releases, and as usual, your feedback is appreciated. Do give a shout in the forums, or just raise a support ticket. You can contact me via this blog as well.

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Posted in Internet, Linux, Programming | 2 Comments »

Wikipedia as an Innovation Source – The Comparison Pages

Monday, February 16th, 2009

There’s no denying what Wikipedia has done for the modern world, and our gratitude for it should not stop at Jimmy Wales, but it should be extended to each and every contributor and reader. Without Jimmy Wales, we wouldn’t have Wikipedia. Without the contributors, Wikipedia would not have grown. Without all the readers, contributors wouldn’t have given the 110% into Wikipedia.

All-in-all it’s a fantastic ecosystem which harnesses a lot of the great minds of the world in one place.

Lets look at it from a slightly different angle – an entreprenuers. Entreprenuers are innovation/process junkies. Their view of the world is not the same as yours and mine. They see the world as a web of intricate systems and they tend to look for improvements and ideas to make things better. Inspiration is found everywhere, whether its to improve the current systems (innovation) or build something brand new (invention).

Here’s where Wikipedia comes in. As it has already been establised, Wikipedia is a big source of information, and I think it can be used as a good (not fantastic) source for market research. Say you’re thinking of entering a certain market, chances are high that Wikipedia might have a comparison page of the various products on the marketplace. You could use these comparison pages, annotate it and it could be the base of your innovation strategy – to bridge the gap between various products in the market place.

Now go look at this long list of comparison pages and you’ll know what I’m talking about. See those comparison pages ? Pick something that you have an idea on, that you’re inspired about, that you want to improve on and innovate around one of those comparison pages. Look at offering something that the current marketplace does not offer. In those comparison pages, there are plenty of gaps in the marketplace. You don’t really have to make sure your product fills in all the gaps, but you could try filling in most of them.

Got a great idea for a Wiki system that you can easily monetize ? Have a look at this and go innovate!

Got a great idea for a file hosting system ? Have a look at this and go innovate!

Got a great idea for an instant messaging system ? Have a look at this and go innovate!

I can carry on with this for a long, long time.

So, what are you waiting for ? Grab a coffee/tea/beer/whatever and start innovating! There are a lot of ideas out there in those comparison pages, and I suspect that there are some really awesome ideas and products just waiting to be discovered.

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Posted in Business, Internet, Management | 2 Comments »

Hubdub, the Market Opinion and an API

Monday, February 2nd, 2009

I love the net. It’s full of information and it’s accessible. It’s even more powerful when the information is accessible electronically, through a simple mechanism.

Take Wikipedia as an example. Before Jimmy Wales began Wikipedia, the web was full of information. There were search engines that made all that information accessible and it was good enough as the search engines (especially Google and Yahoo) did dig pretty deep and indexed all that information for the general public. However, Wikipedia took it to a whole different level by two ways:

  1. Harnessing the power of millions of contributors, Wikipedia essentially cleaned up, re-arranged and re-presented all that information into a nice set of wiki pages. These pages were kept up to date via peer review.
  2. They made all that information downloadable, which is just fantastic, as now we have the potential to build on all that information that has been cleaned and re-arranged.

And along comes Hubdub. I first read about them a couple of months ago and just skimmed through it. I remember thinking “it’s just another web application, with some social networking information and a big poll database”. I was dead wrong! It’s not just another social network web application. Right now, I look at it as being the “opinions market”.

Somehow through my blog feeds, I stumbled upon a blog entry by a category editor at Hubdub who has been with them for over a year. She does mention the reasons that made her stay for a year, and that’s when I thought – “maybe I should take a second look”.

If you have a look at Hubdub, it is full of polls, and visitors can bet on a poll going one way or another. To me, it felt a lot like the beginning of the internet – where there was information everywhere but it was segregated. For example, there’s a lot of news information coming out from Google News, BBC, Reuters and all. Then you have Hubdub that captures the market opinion on these events. On top of that you have social news sites that vote on articles based on these events and rate comments. Tie all of these together, clean it, re-arrange it and you’ll end up with a pretty decently news aggregator that might be able to predict the future outcome of events. This idea is far from mature, and there are already some stumbling blocks. for e.g. (not a complete, exhaustive list) :

  • Visitors to these sites might only reflect a small percentage of the general population and will be skewed
  • Groupthink
  • Skewed ratings and poll results

All of this can be solved, but before this idea can move into a concept, Hubdub needs to provide an API. It needs to be able to make all that information sitting on their database accessible. They don’t have to provide it for free as well (I will be happy to pay for it).

Why an API ? Well, crawling and scraping websites is a pain. If Hubdub change their layout, most of the time, the scraping rules fail and you’ll end up with the results from your “prediction engine” all wrong. So, they need an API. They need to provide a nice, neat way of accessing all that information on their polls. Without the API, all that potential will be lost. Just like what Wikipedia did for general knowledge via their database download, Hubdub have the potential of doing the same thing for opinions and polls. We as entrepreneurs/developers/ideas-people will be able to stand on the shoulders of giants and build amazing things by leveraging on the work that Hubdub have done in gathering a community around polls.

If they play their cards right – increase number of visitors (compete.com puts them around 60k users) and provide a decent API – I can see them flourishing. I do have a few ideas on small niches where the information they provide might be useful when aggregated along with other information sources.

They do mention on their FAQs that there is an API coming up and I can’t wait. Hubdub – bring the API on!

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Posted in Internet, Random | 2 Comments »