July 7, 2009
This weeks Tuesday push is cmypitch.ie - a site which offers a way for entreprenuers to pitch to investors. From the site:
Introduction
cmypitch.ie connects entrepreneurs with investors. It is the first website in Ireland to leverage video in connecting entrepreneurs with investors. It launched on 26th June 2009 in partnership with Bank of Scotland (Ireland), Deloitte, Microsoft, The Irish Times and William Fry.
Entrepreneur Benefits
cmypitch.ie provides businesses with the unique opportunity to upload their own video pitch onto the secure platform, for a registered network of investors to watch and inform their investment decisions. In addition, entrepreneurs can learn how to become “investor ready” by watching video tips from the best Irish (e.g. Eddie Jordan, Ray Nolan) and international (e.g. Doug Richard, James Caan) entrepreneurs and by downloading the best ‘how to’ guides.
Investor Benefits
For investors, cmypitch.ie has the potential to open up all of Ireland’s best investment opportunities and makes identifying the most attractive deals more efficient. Investors can save valuable time, allowing them to not only assess the business opportunity but also the people behind the proposition. Pitches can be filtered by size, sector and rating - all key considerations for investors. Investors can also receive email alerts when a new pitch is added that matches their preferred criteria.
“cmypitch Live” Event
cmypitch.ie will also hold regular offline pitching events called “cmypitch Live”, where entrepreneurs get the unique opportunity to pitch to a room full of investors. Events like these will offer entrepreneurs the opportunity to complement their video pitch with more traditional face-to-face pitching and networking.
The site allows you to upload your pitch and for investors to look at these pitches and make decision. There is also a lot of handy reference material available.
The look and styling of the site is spot on:
cmypitch.ie
There seems to be a lot of big business and high profile people involved so it looks like it could be a winner.
Well done Emmett Kilduff - great contribution to startup businesses!
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June 23, 2009
Today collab was the Tuesday Push - a big thanks Damien and Gordon at Tuesday Push and to all who tweeted or blogged about the site. Cheers especially to the guys who reviewed the site - great constructive feedback and plenty for us to chew on.
A big thank you goes out to:
Connor at web2ireland.�
David Behan - yeah we turned down an offer from Ben Dunne 
.
The guys at loopthing.
Paul M. Watson - Paul, thanks for the feedback, we made a conscious decision to keep the applications private between the parties, but it could be something will look at opening up.
The guys at blue zone.
Phil at revahealth - some great feedback and certainly food for thought for us in taking the service forward.
Thanks again to everyone who mentioned the site and big thanks to Lee Munroe for his help on the design side of things.
Martin
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June 4, 2009
We promised more details about our new project and have just got around to now.
Collab can be used to find people with skills for a project or if there is a project that you are interested in you can contact the original poster to offer to collaborate with them…! If you add a project the title of your project will get a tweet to anyone who is following collab and people can follow posts through an RSS feed. Some examples of using it might be:
- Someone looking to find a distributor for their products in the South East
- A marketer with an idea for a website that needs to hook up with a web developer
Quite a few people we know are trying to set up businesses and projects either from being unemployed or by bootstrapping a project whilst in a full time job. The problem (well one of them) is that budding entrepreneurs can have difficulty meeting people with skills to complement their own either to kick an idea for a project around or to bring something to fruition.
Collab is aimed towards those people who are pre-vc money and trying to “get going” so to speak. Anything that may or may not come between people who use the site is between them and we have no involvement in it. There is no charge to use it and all correspondence is between the project poster and the recipients.
You can check it out at www.collab.ie and you can follow collab at http://twitter.com/collabme.
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May 29, 2009
We are happy to announce the launch of our new site Find People | Find Skills | Get Involved - collab.ie Its a service for people with ideas who need help to make them happen.
Find People | Find Skills | Get Involved
We are vary happy with the result, although it was tough enough to complere as it was our first project using Ruby on Rails (another post about that to follow).
Thanks to
Lee Munroe for the designs and his usual consulting!
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May 8, 2009
While writing our SwiftStore we had a requirement to send emails from a number of points in the application. While this is easy to do it does present a number of technical issues:
- Error handling on sending mail - you normally don’t want your app to fail because it can’t send a mail
- Changing the mail content - you will want to change the mail from time to time but you would not want to redeploy your app. Likewise it can be messy to hold content in your database.
- Tracking of mails sent - you could use an application logging system, but its more code
- Application performance - sending mail from the application is another step in your process and so will slow performance
We were using SQL Server 2008 so we decide to investigate getting it to send our mails. We found this article really helpful in setting it up. Once we had it up and running we then started to build on it. We scheduled a number of jobs to run at different intervals (from minutes to hours). In these jobs we execute stored procs which query on created date minus our interval. Using a cursor we then send emails to the various receiptients we require. Here is an example proc:
Once we started to use it we found more and more uses. Not only do we use it for transaction application emailing, we are now using it to handle our application trial expiry and all follow up correspondence.
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May 1, 2009
On Thursday 23rd April I ventured out to the iPhone developer conference DevDays 2009 which was organised by the Digital Media Forum and Create Ireland. This was to be my first view of Apple from a development viewpoint and wanted to share my musings on the subject.
Bear in mind my background approaching this – I am of a vintage to have worked on p.c’s when DOS was the operating system and Windows 3.1 was a mere application running on top of it. My development experience has been almost exclusively on Microsoft technologies so I was arriving as a virtual blank canvas.
One theme that ran throughout the day was reasons to develop for the iPhone. Apart from the wow factor of running apps on this very visually appealing device, the business opportunity is immense. There are currently over 37 million devices sold. All marketing, sales, payment processing and distribution is handled automatically via the app store. This leaves developers to do what they do best – develop great applications. For a once off fee of $99 (and the price of a Mac ) all of the business side of things is taken care of. 70% of revenue is retained by the developer.
Paul Burford – Apple Developer Relations
One of the first comments from Paul was to reiterate that Apple allow no blogging regarding their speakers! Therefore, I’ll leave it there …
Dermot Daly – Tapadoo
Dermot, on the other hand, was more than happy for attendees to blog away! He gave us a great overview of what its like from a developers point of view to work on the toolset and develop for the device. He also had some great tips on how best to work with Apple to ensure you get your app on the store in the shortest time.
His enthusiasm for the platform and its potential was obvious. I must say it was the most interesting build of a “Hello World” app I have ever seen.
Dermot introduced the environment and toolset required to be an iPhone developer, some of which were not as expected. The low down is:
- You need a Mac!!! Funny as this sounds I didn’t even realise you needed a Mac. I assumed I could run a virtual mac on my VM Ware and have the best of both worlds, but apparently not. Upon further investigation, Apple insist you use their hardware to run their OS.
- Development language is Objective C. Having dabbled in C# I assumed that this would be intuitive but apparently not so! Its got a steep learning curve and memory management is not taken care of with automatic garbage collection. Thinking about this afterwards, it makes sense given the limited hardware on the iPhone in terms of memory. However its still a bit of a throw back to yonder years! (remember typing mem at a dos prompt to see what was available and worrying about loading HiMem on boot). By all accounts the syntax is a bit funky too.
- iPhone SDK library. An extensive set of class libraries.
- Development tools:
- XCode. This is the IDE. Looks quite nice and is the development environment the Apple developers use themselves for the iPhone.
- Interface Builder. As the name suggests allows you to design the user interface for the app. It is used for the Cocao touch interface.
- Simulator. A very cool iphone simulator so you can run your app virtually on your Mac.
- Instruments. Provides performance data to help optimise your application. If it takes too much memory, Apple won’t even release it!
Some resources that Dermot suggested for use are:
Giacomo Duranti – Keywords International
Giacomo made some interesting points around the area of globalisation and localisation. His advice was that its easier to design for this from the start rather than as an add on. Another interesting fact is that localisation encompases other items over and above mere language translation. There are cultural differences and sensitivities to take into account as well e.g. the use of an owl (you had to be there!). Another tip he had was to allow more space for translation as typically translated text from English to another language expands.
Des Traynor – Contrast
By the time Des took to the podium the audience were wilting somewhat. The number of people that had pulled out their Macs and were developing had increased alarmingly! However Des soon shook everyone up. This is the closest I ever got to a boot camp! He is obviously passionate about his chosen field and extremely focused about what does and does not constitute a good app.
Some points from Des:
- Make one solution for one user base. The app should be focused.
- Make choices rather than having configuration possibilities in your app. He re-iterated the need to make choices and the fact that we had all made a choice to develop on the iphone (I was a bit nervous that he might find out I actually hadn’t made that choice yet and I was liable to get detention!)
- Significance of choices decreases over time. This was an excellent point delivered well. The design choices at the start of a project are the big ones. Further down the development path are tweaks rather than major direction changes.
- Decide on what type of app you want to develop – productivity (business app), utility (weather) or immersive (game).
- Des suggests sketching out 5 ideas to come to a decision on the final one to accept.
- Use a sketching tool to do screen mockups.
Finally he emphasised the difference between developing for an iPhone and agile web development. Although I’m sure he ruffled a few feathers while doing this I think his point was made well. Agile development methodology with constant revision and refinement will not cut the mustard on the iPhone. This is because without a well polished fully functional version 1, you never get to version 2. There is just too much competition on the platform vying for limited app installs on the device.
David Doherty - 3G Doctor
Davids presentation was more general in its scope. Rather than focusing on the iPhone he spoke at length regarding the possible application of mobile technology in healthcare. Some of his ideas regarding the interpretation of sensory data by the device were really interesting and the stuff of the not too distant future.
Ron Immink – SmallBusinessCan
Rons slot was very informative regarding smallbusinesscan.com. This looks to be a great facility for developers to showcase their work and get exposure in the science gallery. The website has a wealth of resources to assist emerging businesses from marketing to general business advice. It was great to have this aspect covered at the conference to assist developers in how to promote their work commercially and enable them to earn a living from their passion and creativity.
General Points
Overall the following points I took from the conference regarding what ingredients are required for great iPhone apps:
- Needs to be fast. Average app usage is only 30 seconds.
- Develop for finger use rather than a mouse.
- Redesign apps from other environments to take advantage of multi-touch e.g. rather than left and right arrows, the users can merely swipe left or right.
- Reduce keyboard input as much as possible – virtual keyboard can be tricky to use.
- Reduce UI clutter to take account of the small screen.
- Need to optimise your app for memory.
- Reduce features in the app – make sure it is well focused on one main task.
- Updates must be substantial rather than mere bug fixes.
- Localise your app to take into account the global nature of the app store.
So what now?
I’m glad to have had the opportunity to have attended. Congratulations to Matt Johnston of Momentum NI, Fred Herrera of Create Ireland and Anton Mannering of Digital Media Forum for organising this event in Dublin.
The question is, am I tempted to become an iPhone developer? It has certainly given me plenty of food for thought. I naively expected the development environment to be a bit slicker than I saw. I was also surprised at the apparent steep learning curve to produce an app. Having said that, the possibilities of a global market on the app store and the direction of technology toward multi-touch screen is compelling. So overall I would say I am definitely considering this as an alternative to pure web development. I’m not convinced the iPhone in its current configuration is powerful enough to support data driven business applications, but this will come in the not too distant future. As multi-touch extends to windows and other operating systems, development in this area will only become more important.
As a final note, the move towards a richer UI that is always connected to the web is one of the most encouraging aspects of this. It seems to me to be the best of both worlds. You get the connectivity of browser based apps with the richer UI and responsiveness of a desktop application. Therefore I expect to be at DevDays 2010. If I will be there as a developer though probably depends on iPhone 3 and what Apple pulls out of the hat before then!
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March 22, 2009
Yesterday we saw the Irish team complete a Grand Slam in a stunning display in cardiff, looking on the ropes at 78 minutes gone the Irish team got themselves back up the pitch and worked a drop goal position, took the points and forced themselves back into the lead. Watching the game and the reactions afterwards got me thinking what could we, and other Irish start-ups, learn from these rugby giants.
Team work - Ieland have an unbelievable team ethic, O’Driscoll and O’Connell are the leaders but everyone else pulls their weight.
Never give up - 18 months ago in the world cup as Ireland were nearly beat by Georgia no one could have envisaged that they would be winning a grand slam this soon after. I’m sure lesser players would have thought that any lofty ambitions would be past them, but not this bunch.
Work with people you can trust - Deep in the second half Mark Jones pounded his way through the Irish defence and was facing Stringer. Stringer bounced off Jones as if he wasn’t there, but as Jones headed for line Stringer got back again to stop him. O’Connell commented afterwards on this particular incident and made a point that in the team people are always there for you and they keep coming back.
Position yourself to take advantage of luck - After O’Gara had kicked a later drop goal Stephen Jones had a kick to win the game for Wales, having not missed a kick all day the odds were on him getting it. He didn’t, the whistle blew and Ireland were champions.
Turn disappointment into success - In last years 6 nations D’Arcy took a tackle against the Italians with an arm that was already broken, he thought he might never play again. He recovered and this year he was back and putting himself on the line once again.
It doesn’t happen overnight - It look Ireland a long time to emulate their last Grand Slam and build on recent Triple Crown victories, but they got there in the end.
Ireland won with a display of courage and composure that had been chiselled out over the years from a number of dissapointments and in the end, like everything in life, the line between success and failure was a fine one. In business we expect success too soon, too quick and are not prepared to win the hard yards. Successful businesses get their customers one by one, fight to retain them providing a service that is better than the opposition through commitment, hard work and dedication, just like sport.
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March 13, 2009
I am still surprised when I meet system designers who are not using web services, for me its a no brainer. Most organisations with a serious IT department have a large number of systems handling a different number of processes. What happens is that systems are developed that access the same data and the same code is developed multiple times resulting in a duplication of code and processes.
We have seen the following scenarios in how common data and functions are shared:
- In the worst situation you have disparate databases, often there may be data loads between these. E.g. duplicated customer tables in multiple databases.
- The next step up is a common database with applications using their own SQL or O/R mapping tools, getting a bit better with the one data repostitory but still separation of code.
- Next up we have procs and shared libraries i.e. DLL etc., moving towards shared code.
- At the top of the stack we have web services.
The big benefit of using web services is on the bottom line, its not immediately apparent and in the short term may cost more, for instance, if we build a customer web service it will take more development initially because you are essentially building a second application. However the payback comes when you subsequently have another app needing to access this data then it can consume your service, thus saving development. Over time you build a suite of services which encompass all you data and, hopefully most of the logic of you processes.
Ultimately your systems are enmessed, using the same data and the same logic. If a process or the associated data changes then you have one location to update (with applications just updating their proxies). We have been building web services for a number of clients now, and in all cases have found that it has saved us development and maintainance time. More importantly it saves the client money.
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March 9, 2009
Three of us from SmartCube went to FOWA on friday and really enjoyed it. The day started Well with Ryan Carson giving tips for new businesses based on his experience. One or two points were surprizing, such as the fact that putting free on your site can put users off! Among the highlights were Simon Willison, Morgan McKeagney, Contrast and, at the pinnacle was David Heinemeier Hansson.
Simon’s talk about internet security was very interesting, and certainly gives one food for thought. It can be all too easy to forget about security. Thanks to Chris here we noticed that we were allowing people the potential to enter javascript on our SwiftStore app.
The guys from contrast, Eoghan McCage and Des Traynor, were very entertaining and informative too. I found that maybe they crammed a lot of information into their presentation which might have been too much, but their point was interesting. They really communicated a sense of energy to the room and gave off a feeling that they were passionate about their point.
Morgan’s talk was short and hit well. IQ Content are now offering a €10,000 prize for the best business plan for a web app. I really liked the thread of argument about U2 and the Blades (you had to be there).
Unfortunately for the IQContent prize, the day ended on David Heinemeier Hansson berating business plans and the like with his talk. David’s style is very direct and I would imagine does not allow for much gray areas in his views While many of the people talked about applications, David was also interested in the creation of paying businesses. Some of his points definitely gelled with our experience here at SmartCube. I would definitely go out of my way to see him talk again.
I had mixed feelings about some of the other talkers. Emma Persky’s talk really just annoyed me. The thrust of it was that if you are using the wrong tool then use another. Emma was using Ruby on Rails but needed to get more visceral with the code. She then decided to use Ruby… what about any other language?!!!?? Is the programmer’s choice between Ruby on Rails or Ruby?!?? What about Java, .Net, php etc? What about using more than one language? Blaine Cook’s talk just kind of meandered. Robin Christopherson gave an interesting talk about accessibility issues with web applications. He used a screen reader which was very distracting when it came over the PA.
All in all, fair play to Ryan Carson and the Carsonified gang for arranging an excellent day.
Posted in Events’ Opinion | 2 comments
March 5, 2009
Really looking forward to going to the Future of Web Apps event tomorrow. Have heard great things about the previous events held in other countries.
Some great speakers including David Heinemeier Hansson from 37signals and Blaine Cook who worked on twitter… should be good place to get some tips.
See you there!?
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