NotableApp – a webdesign feedback tool

Every good product irrespective of their base industry is a result of great feedback. There are tools to review word documents with comments and feedback from each reviewer.  Google Docs makes it even easier as you can share the documents on the web. Similar tools exist for reviewing software code with comments.  However, one was missing for web designing.

I have myself tried to give feedback on website design & layouts or even share my idea visually by using a Photo Editing tool and then emailing the picture to the respective team members.  It did work, but was clumsy and time consuming, and the exchange of feedback via email between multiple members will make it complex to digest the feedback as well. However, in the New Tech Meet up I was delighted to see a the demo of a tool called Notable App, that seems to address most of my issues.

Notable App is a product by Zurb that makes sharing web page design and assimilating feedback really simple.  Hunter from Zurb gave a really good demo of the product. It comes with a firefox plug-in with which you can take a screen shot of the page currently open in the browser and then send/update it to your account in NotableApp.

Some of the notable features:

Screenshot/Annotate: The ability to take a screenshot of the page and then annotate any part of the page with comments.

Workspaces: Create separate workspaces for multiple projects.

Collaborate/Share: The ability to share your workspace with ‘certain’ team members. You can also create a PDF document as well.

Track: You can also track which member has seen the document but is yet to comment on it.

I am sure there are some other features in the tool, but these do the basic job for me. They are currently offering a 2 weeks free preview after which you will have to pay a monthly charge to use their services.

ScreenShots

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Kachingle – support your online content provider.

Kachingle is an upcoming company that is making it easy for readers to contribute and appreciate their gratitude towards the numerous blogs, news sites, etc for the content they provide to them.  Cynthia, the Chief Kachingler calls this crowd funding, which I think is a great idea and huge potential of growth.

I personally read a lot of blogs, ands news site consuming a lot of content everyday.  I am a frequent visitor to a few blogs that are making descent revenue via adds, events. On the contraray there are also single person blogs that provide good content and their perspective on topics. These are some of the blogs that I would want to stay afloat, and Kachingle provides me with an option to  Kachingle (aka donate) them a few dollars.

Kachingle let’s users create an account and deposit some money into it for kachingling it across the web.  So, every time a user goes to a blog or content provider of his choice, he can Kachingle on it using a Widget that the content provider has placed on their site. At the end of the month, Kachingle will distribute your funds (say $5) to the respective content providers based on the number of visits to each of them.  Currently each visit is weighted equally, but they intent to make it more smarter based on certain other parameters as well.

Kachingle will take a 20% cut on the donations in lieu of their service. So, from a $5 monthly budget they will earn $1 and your Kachingled sites will get $4 distributed among themselves.

I definitely see this as a good model for both the content provider and the reader, as the contributions are purely voluntary.  In a way, getting Kachingled is almost equivalent of being Digged but with real money.

Video Demo

Jobs:  Kachingle needs a Ruby on Rails Developer.

Announcement: Kick-off meeting – iPhone Intensive(May 20, 2009)

Plug And Play Tech Center is sponsoring an iPhone Intensive meetup for Developers on May 20th, 2009. 

WHEN

Monday May 20th 
6:00-9:30pm

WHERE

Plug And Play Tech Center

440 N Wolfe Rd
Sunnyvale, CA 94085
408-747-7332 

 AGENDA

6:00-7:00pm Arrive &amp and socialize 
7:00-8:00pm Intro to native iPhone App Programming – Julio Barros 
8:00-8:15pm Break 
8:15-8:45pm Using the iPhone as a Prototyping Platform - Bob Free 
8:45-9:15pm Next Generation iPhone Game Development – Travis Hopkins

Hope to see you all there.

Registration($10 for Refreshments): Click Here

Announcement: Monetization Meetup (May 18, 2009)

 

Peanut Lab’s is sponsoring a Monetization meetup at Google Hqrs on May 18th, 2009. 

WHEN

Monday May 18th 
6:30-9pm
Network for the first 30-45 minutes then have a few speakers speaking for 10-15 minutes each with Q&A time after each speaker.

WHERE

Googleplex (Bldg. 43)

1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
Tunis Conference Room
Mountain View, CA 94043

 

SPEAKERS

The speakers for the evening listed below will discuss best practices around monetization in their respective companies :

• Jonathan from EA
• Michael from Justin.tv
• Ali from Peanut Labs
• Sergio from Norwest Venture Partners
• Shanti from Three Rings
• Lars from Frogster
• Paul from (he’s too cool to be associated with any company… just yet) 

Hope to see you all there.

Zappos CEO – It’s all about Happiness

Tony Hsieh, CEE of Zappos, gave an opening Keynote at Tiecon 2009. It was a refreshing start for a long day at the conference. He attributed that the magic sauce behind the great success of his company are:

1. Company Culture 
2. Customer Service 

He talked about how he tries to have a company culture where every employee is treated as a friend. In fact, the hiring process has a mandatory Cultural Fit interview conducted by the HR which needs to be passed apart from the technical interview conducted by the relevant department. All new hires go though a 5 week training where they are taught about the company’s history and customer service. The customer service representatives are encouraged to have a bonding with their customers and often create a ‘WOW’ factor by helping them and often surprising them with a Free overnight delivery. It’s all about making your employees happy who in turn make your customers happy. I definitely recommend going over his PowerPoint embedded below :

Twitter: We Will make money by the end of the year

Santosh Jayaram, VP of Business Opertaions at Twitter was a panelist at a Social Media Monetization Session at TieCon 2009. He talked about Twitter’s huge growth and how it has become a part of a a 24-7 bi-directional(or multi) communication. He says ‘Engagement’ is the central mantra and that they owe a lot to the developer community that has build hundreds of applications on top of their platform.

In terms of a revenue model he mentioned that they just started to collect data and are experimenting with about 4 or 5 different ideas. He confidently said that they will be making ‘Money’ by the end of the year. One of their monetization strategy is to have ‘Promotional’ Accounts.’  These accounts will be able to establish communication with their customer and fan base.

Santosh cited a lot of examples where consumers who vented out frustration about about a service/brand by tweeting were often directly contacted by the concerned brand to make up to them. He thus a sees a lot of bi-directional communication between the consumers and the services that could be tapped by Twitter. I hope they do make money. Good luck to them. What do you guys think ?

Experience at Startup Weekend SF 2009

Startup Weekend hosted a event from Apr3 – Apr5 for all the tech minded and entrepreneurial people to come to one place and start working on a product to deliver a prototype by Sunday Night. There were about 200 people that had showed up for the event. I was among that fortunate list to have participated in the event.

The venue had started to gather people from 6 pm onwards.  I was amazed to see the number of people that had turned up for the event. Andrew Hyde (founder of Startup Weekend) kicked off the event around 7pm and introduced some of the well known VC’s from the Bay Area. They all had some good suggestions for the audience of about 200 people. 

It was a great learning experience for me. I had primarily gone with the intention of developing an application based on either facebook platform or the Twitter Api. There was more interest with respect to Twitter, and so I mingled around and talked to people with ideas related to Twitter.

Team Structure

    1 Idea/Business Guy ( php/mysql experience) 
    1 Sales/Market Guy.
    2 Back End Developer (1 Full Time 1 Part Time )
    1 Front End Developer with Flash.
    1 Front End with Java Script. 

Day 1

There were a couple of ideas that we pitched to each other. Among the group it was apparent that not all members were very familiar with the features/power of Twitter. Also the level of engagement and used cases were different for the people that already had accounts on Twitter prior to the StartUp Weekend. The positive outcome of this arrangement was that we were getting different outlook for the same service. However, the drawback was that as some people were not very familiar with Twitter, it seemed that there was no scope for the project to be developed beyond Sunday. I and another member needed to catch the train to South Bay, so we and the group dispersed without finalizing a project but sticking between two ideas.

Day 2

The day started late for the team. There was a little confusion regarding the timings of our team to show up the next day. There were only 3 members of the team around 12 Noon, so we decided to just stick with one of the Idea (Analytics) and start working on it. At this moment the team comprised of an Idea Guy(with some php/mysql experience), Back-End(me) Developer, and a Front End Developer. I had been playing with the Twitter Api using Python(for App Engine) for my own Twitter based projects over the last few weeks. As, currently it seemed like a 3 member team, I decided to use PHP and use some of the Php Client Libraries listed on Twitter (Bad Move).

Soon, the other Developer also came in and then I discussed with him the project we were working on and my decision to use the Php Library available from the Twitter Docs. He was familiar with the Perl library and mentioned about it. So there was a slight confusion if we should now move guns to Perl. Finally he suggested that as he will be working on his another project for the Startup Weekend, that I should continue with Php and he will help us as and when needed.

Finally I downloaded the Php library to my Macbook and started to look into it. But, unfortunately by now we were having connectivity issues as all the DHCP licenses created by the wireless router at the venue were full. Thinking it will get fixed soon also cost us a lot of time. We then decided to go to some Coffee Shop but could not find a single Free Wireless place to go. One of the team members then offered to take us to his work place. More time lost.

Finally, at his office, I started to test the calls to the Client Libraries. Soon, it was apparent that the libraries need Pear to be installed. So, I downloaded Pear to my machine and was trying to get it working. It was having some issues; the other developer also was not much familiar with Pear. Search after Search for solutions in Google, we finally decided to move to Python (context switch) and I started writing code in Python. In the mean while, the Idea guy who was at the Venue pinged us and said that Internet is finally working.  We communicated to him that we will be using Python, but he interjected saying why can’t we just call the Twitter Api’s in XML format and just parse it (Good Point). However, the main reason we were trying to use the libraries were to leverage code reuse and authentications.

Finally, we had the leave the Office, as this team member had to leave by 7pm or so. We then walked back to the venue and then we were back to using PHP but no external libraries. I started writing the code and was done with functions that would parse, compute and the then return the output to the Front End Developer (using Flash). He would then use the output from my functions to display it on the page. In the meanwhile, when I was writing more code, the other members decided that since the Twitter Api returns the output in XML format, maybe let the Front End Developer handle and display it directly while the rest brainstorm for other possible metrics for the demo. At this junction, we called it a night and decided to meet up early in the morning.

Day 3

As planned, 4 of the members met up early and after grabbing breakfast, we headed back to work. I was now partially working with Front End guy regarding the logic that needs to implement in his Action Script code. In parallel, one of the other team members also developed a version in PHP. So, by the end of the day we had TWO versions of the same application.

Lesson Learned

-          Finalize Idea on Day 1
- Day 2 Start Early, Design and Divide Work Responsibility
- Day 3 Final Touches, if time adds more functionality.

Conclusion

Overall, I would call it a great success as I networked with a lot of people with similar interests and passion to work on technology. A real life experience building a team with strangers and the challenges involved in finishing the product. The best part is that I will now be working with one of the team member from the weekend in one of my applications for the Facebook Platform as a co-founder.

Rotzy … a social photo iPhone App

Rotzy is a photo sharing iPhone application developed by Gee-Hwan Chuang and Gee-Hsien Chuang that lets you take, upload, share, and discuss photos of life’s daily events and sightings with your iPhone. Gee gave a lightning demo of his iPhone application at a South Bay Tech Meetup.

The application allows you to take picture’s using your iPhone camera and then share and publish it to your rotzy gallery. It also allows you to broadcast photos to other sites like  Twitter, Facebook, and Tumblr. Gee described the gallery to be analogous to a twiter feed, with followers commenting on your pictures and initiating a long trail of conversation based on it. He mentioned that they had something else in mind regarding the direction of Rotzy, but it seemed to have taken the shape of a mini photo based social network with people spending a lot of their time commenting on the pictures.

Rotzy is a native iPhone Application available at the appstore. The back end for the application is  written in Python using Google’s Appengine.  They also faced some hurdles during the process of development for the AppEngine (See Gee’s Slide below). It was particularly fascinating to see their solution for working around the Location based search.  App Engine’s BigTable implementation does not allow easy latitude/longitude based searches and inequality based filters. So, they finally ended up using Geohash based hack to map up their locations.  The locations  that were geographically closer seemed to have a longer matching prefix for the computed hash value.

Overall, it seemed liked a well designed application that could even tap the social graph using the API’s of social networks.(Facebook Connect on Iphone)

Announcement: Startup Weekend San Francisco 2 (April 3-5, 2009)

Startup Weekend an intense 54 hour event bringing together brilliant tech minds (developers, designers, marketers, etc.) together to create a company (or as many as the community wants) from concept to launch is coming to San Francisco on April 3.

Read more about it on the their site.  The tickets are getting over, so buy them here before they get sold out.

Facebook Status and Twitter Updates

 

Facebook Status is one of the ‘key’ social features of Facebook. It’s a medium for the user to express themselves to their friends in the facebook social network. I have seen a few friends update their status very frequently as and as their moods or feelings change. There are other’s that update it, as they find something that they would like to share with their friends.  The status update could be about any topic, but one common theme I have noticed is that it has some personal touch aligned with the user’s emotions, like how they are feeling, what they want to do, or who they just met etc… I have attached a screenshot from my friend’s recent status updates to give you a feel of the ‘Facebook Status’. (The range of the age demographic is 22 – 26)

On the other hand a Tweet Update is the only ‘key’ feature of Twitter. Tweets are not always personal, unlike a facebook status. They tend to be more about situations and information around the user. The information contained in a Tweet could be useful to people who may or may not be your friends, hence it’s normal for strangers to follow your tweets.  I do not see myself in much of a connection with Twitter as compared to facebook. I had heard a lot about it but never ventured to care or use it till I made an account to send updates about my socialapp blog.

Age demographic is an important distinguisher between a Facebook Status and a Twitter Tweet. I would like to add that based on my dataset of facebook friends (age 22 – 26) and my interaction with other people in my personal network that the age demographic of Twitter is higher than that of a traditional (people who joined with the .edu account around 2004) facebook user. A twitter user is basically someone who graduated out of college before facebook came out, so I would put the age bracket above 28 years old.  In fact, I even tried to use the “Find on Other Networks” tool of twitter to check and prove that none of my friends use Twitter. I was able to find only 2 of my friends using Twitter. One of them is 28 and an entrepreneur, so I wasn’t really surprised. I was a little surprised about my other friend who had a twitter account, but her tweets looked almost like something she could put in her Facebook Status as well. On the contrary, in the bay area when I visit conferences or developer meetups, I often see people using Twitter and generally happen to notice that they are definitely above or around 29 years old.

It would be fair to say that every Facebook Status could be a Twitter Tweet, but every Twitter Tweet may not necessarily be a Facebook Status. However, they are definitely converging since Facebook has been made available to non .edu emails address and the traditional facebook users are getting out of college and starting to tweet. The new design and the concept of Public Profiles replacing the Fan Pages is also much more aligned along the lines of Twitter Tweets, by allowing these Public Profiles to pass out information to users who are Fan’s (aka Follower’s) of the Public Profiles.