A: For a quick background I was working with Cisco, Hitachi Data Systems and Morgan Stanley Bank on three continents ZA, UK and Malaysia mostly in IT, Technology, Finance and Sales. Born in Germany, having a Masters of Science in Information Systems.
A: At Spirofrog we wanna help people to find global transparency in the internships and the job market.
Q: What is the main difference with the other services in your market?
A: We deliver Global Reach, cool and good jobs and internships in dynamic, growing companies ranging from Clean-tech to Social Commerce & Communities. More on Spirofrog blog.
Q: What is new and great technologically speaking in your project?
A: The Content, content is still king! We have Dynamic Jobs and Internships at global companies, real jobs with real people.
Q: What technologies are using within your project?
A: The Design was done by Freddy fkh-design and the system is programmed by Hanno and Martin.
Q: Business model?
A: Our old school Business Model is: that we are easy, and cheap compared to others. We publish all jobs, internships and the company profile for 1 year at discounted price (700 USD / year or 500 EUR). Revenue is generated two ways: 1-1 matching, some people call it recruiting and stable revenues through listings of company profiles, jobs and internships. A must say is that wegenerate revenues from the very beginning, not much, but we do!
Q: How do you finance your project: Angels, VC, Plastic?
A: Plastic and a group of business partners, mostly self funded.
Q: Where you see your project in 5 years?
A: We will be the monster.com for the younger generation offering jobs in more than 50 countries with 3-5 Country Franchisees or Partners.
Is time for you to get a Job 2.0. Trust SpiroFrog and you career and future jobs are in good hands.
A: I’m an freelancer interaction designer and database developer working for a research organization based in Munich, Germany. I studied Computer Science with business orientation and gained interest in the usability area. I have been into the real estate business for some years as my family runs a real estate bureau.
A: People need an easy way to find real estate properties. Mapoot is the easiest and fastest way to post and search properties directly on a map. Mapoot is better than other real estate websites because it starts the search from the most important thing for a property: the location. More on the Mapoot Blog.
Q: What is the main difference with the other services in your market?
A: Location is the main price-setter of every real estate property; the reason for that is that location is the most important thing at the moment to decide the buy. Designing Mapoot we thought that the location should be the most important search option, not a secondary one. If you look at most real estate portals, they show a map as part of the property ad, as something just additional. At Mapoot we represent the business and user mental model placing a map right at the homepage.
Q: What is new and great technologically speaking in your project?
A: The integration of Google Maps right at the homepage is straightforward. We also try to make the whole interface as simple as possible eliminating distracting elements.
Q: What technologies are using within your project?
A: Our PHP framework is the open source CodeIgniter. Very important for our web site is the integration and customization of the Google Maps API.
Q: Business model?
A: Our aim is to keep the interface clean and easy to use, in that sense we will place advertisement in a limited way. That should be a good beginning as the CPC (Cost Per Click) in the real estate business is high. In the future premium services will be offered to real estate agents.
Q: How do you finance your project: Angels, VC, Plastic?
A: Mapoot is privately founded.
Q: Where you see your project in 5 years?
A: I see Mapoot in the top 3 real estate websites in Germany offering solutions for property ad posters and searchers. Mapoot is currently available in German, Spanish and English; we will for sure expand into new markets and languages.
That was the interview, now my 2 cents. I have take a look to Mapoot and is indeed easy to use, but the design is to simple for my taste. Mappot make great use of external resources and APIs like Panoramio’s to fetch pictures taken around near the property. Also I notice that the number of properties listed is increasing at good rate and I even found something interesting for me, so if your are into real state, take a look.
The model of pay what you want seems not to work in the end, Treznor more complete offer was a win-win and pointed the possible way to go, even when the content of “Ghost I-VI” was not that great, is important to make a precedent like this. Also on “Ghost I-IV” you can choose between great options to fit into every taste and pocket. Today’s torrent generation only know music as free stuff you can get on the net to feed your iPod, but is willing to pay 5 bucks for a download, that is the most important thing of the “Ghost I-IV”, they proved the concept. You can say that Treznor and NIN are really known and the result is likely not so easy to replicate on a unknown band, but hey there is a opportunity to a new business, think a little and you will see the gap to be cover.
Now the RIAA and such are trying to get the Internet Music Fee, but… not everybody will understand why they are paying for somebody else’s music. That is just as crazy as the random lawsuits. The truth is that the current music business model is dead and now they are struggling to keep their status of Gate Keepers.
The new Gate Keeper? Apple, with the iTunes Store, they control one of the main distribution channel of digital content which and getting more important at fast pace. Is really easy to find and buy music on iTunes, even now with iTunes WiFi Store is possible to get the music direct on your device which is even more pleasant. More people are likely to buy music this way than drags their asses to the next music store and wait in line to pay for some CD.
In the other hand we have the piracy gang, but your know all I’m going to say about it, then, let’s move on.
Along with music there are few project aiming to make something passive as music listening in something more exiting. We have seen NIN Remix and now the copycat Radiohead attempt. That is a good way to go, keep your public motivated and get them spread your content.
Of course they are retrogrades-lazy-mediocre-self-called-artist who can’t see beyond their next CD sale or the next concert profits. Those will certainly pass away like the generation who make them famous. The others, who can think (or hire someone to think for them) will prevail and be rewarded for that.
A Business plan! My kingdom for a Business plan! no wait! If I have a kingdom… no need for business plan… Anyway, this down to earth list will tell you the first steps. Thanks to Sequoia, now we know how to get a business plan, even if we are not looking for venture capital, is always good to know the final goals, a business plan also help to keep the focus on the project and not divagate looking for the colored fishes at the end of the bright rainbow.
Bullet proof Business Plan - Underpants Inc.
Define your purpose: write down what do your business in one sentence: “We will collect old underpants”.
Know your customer’s problem: define the problem of the public you will be targeting: “Every 3 of 5 people loss 1 underpants a year”. Also find out how they solve the problem today: “Then they buy a new ones”.
Your amazing solution: now write how your business will solve the problem: “We will help our customers to save them money in new underpants”. Drop some users cases: “Cuco lost 3 underpants this year, now have to buy one pack of five new underpants to keep going”.
Why your solution is useful right now: describe how you will solve the problem in this very moment: “Now, with our business people will have not stress when their underpants get lost”. Also give some market info like: “People are buying very expensive underpants in the last 5 years”.
Describe your customer: self explanatory: “Our customers never remember how they lost the underpants, also where. Our customers are suffering of Memento Psychosis, Shampoo Paranoia and Gnutella Effect”.
Know your competition: list their advantages and weak points: “The garbage truck always get all lost underpants but they don’t know what to do. Also they are many and work at night though”.
Draw the development roadmap: How you will, step by step, getting more customers. “1. Collect underpants 2. ? 3. Profit!”
Show me the money!: Describe how you will make money solving the problem of your customers: “We will charge the half for every underpants”.
Select your team: look for the right people to work and make your business successful: “A Dog to lead us to the underpants, Crazy Gnomes to collect them, Pretty ladies to the sales department. etc”. You may also may need some one with experience in the matter for advice: “Anacleto, who have lost 100 underpants in his live, but found 10″.
Describe you finances: like this: “With every 10 underpants sold we will buy a bone for the dog, beer for the Gnomes, clothes to the ladies and will invest 40% in find new ways to get more underpants, and save 5% for hard times”.
Mystery Solved!
Collect underpants
Sell the underpants at half price
Profit!
Was not hard at all, what you think? If I miss something you are welcome to point it in the comments. Keep flowing.
With all the frameworks for web developing floatingaround today is very easy to make a web application or the next social thing in a weekend. Even they are things like this, also flames like this one, but the truth is the web development today fail, is fast but still fail.
The development process is expensive than hardware, so the development flaws tend to be solved dropping more hardware to the pile. That’s not the right way.
To get to a good web application many things must be in the right place, first you have to stick to standards, good practices and design patterns, you don’t need to reinvent the well once again.
I know, I’s the libraries stupid, but along with easy to use libraries you need some others tools like good IDE and a good debugger to solve the problems you get when your application is moving away from what your framework is designed for.
I miss my times of application development (for the desktop) at that times we got our IDE with all tools in the place, today we have to choose from Eclipse, Aptana, Zend Studio, Coda, Textmate, etc. And no one of these have all the features we need.
Is just me in this position or this things are a common place out there? What happen in the Enterprise development teams? I have nothing against the rapid web development but feel something missing with the web development today, some things have to change, or maybe not.
What are your thoughts about this matter, are using Ruby or PHP or Phyton or C++ or ASP.NET… what frameworks… what IDE… what tools… are you using design patterns in your applications, standards maybe?
Apple was pushing the last update of the Safari Browser 3.1, But this version come packed with a exceptional tool for developers: the Web Inspector.
If you are familiar with Firebug for Firefox then you will likely been waiting the same for Safari long ago, Well the wait if over now.
This tool will let you look inside the code, css, images, javascript, net requests within a web page. This is very useful when you are debugging a AJAX application or are making the markup in XHTML/CSS.
Here are the instructions to activate the Web Inspector on both OS X and Windows. You have to install the last update of course.
I am not sure what this could be, but in the words of David Storey “I do think that, in my opinion, it is the most important project we have on going at the moment, and probably since I’ve been at the company. It wont directly affect everybody, but will hopefully become invaluable for those that it does”.
What you think this will be: just a re-branding of the opera browser or something completely new? Looking forward to hear your opinions in the comments.
Paraphrasing Techcrunch: “boring social networks that won’t find you a date but may land you a job” are cranking interesting features. Like yesterday LinkedIn launch the Companies Profiles in their site.
Also they are presenting it not as a cold press release but in a blog post with a youtube video of the features in action. LinkedIn is also drop others useful features this year, you can remember their redesign, profile photos, one to one messages and the statuses. All those features where introduced ages ago by popular social networking sites and now are making their way into the corporate world.
Is interesting see how the companies profile differ from network to network based on the audience that network have, just take a look to the MTV profiles at FaceBook and LinkedIn.
Take a look to the video from product manager Maisy Samuelson showing the new features.
Internationalization is one of the complicated stages in the live of a web startup, mostly cause developers not think from the beginning and then when the boom come you have to hurry to internationalize your stuff. All that can be avoid when you use a framework with support for internationalization, or make yourself a solution for it.
Having a niche (also finite) market is really good, but what happen when they get bored (everybody does) and go away. Then your have to reinvent your thing to make recover or save the day, but you must be able to see those things before they happen, otherwise you are doomed.
Lately we have heard that countries like China and Russia are having they own homemade top sites, not surprise here, since they and they only, know what’s interesting to the people on this nations, and are able to get first hand information about the trend is the society to adapt their services, but all that is all water and anyone should know it, right?
They are markets really hard to penetrate like, Japan, China, Korea, etc. but is not impossible at all, you will need some native help to get into it. You can always trust your users to help you with getting the service international, if your critical mass is getting into it, once again your web analytics are your best friend here, but this is painful if you have to adapt to get this done.
No matter how small your niche is, when your have a internationalized service the chances of increase your circle grow exponentially.
Almost everybody on the intertubes are participating in a social network of some kind, yes, the forums are social networks too (sort of) since they bring together people with same interests. But the real network… where is all your social information stored with all kind of details is… in your email and your cell phone.
Let’s go in parts, in your email you have all the addresses of people you communicate and interact, right? Also there is in a way how important are these people to you and what you do with them. The email is the next frontier for social networking. Who will win in these race (that is not even started), the email services providers like Microsoft (Hotmail, now Live Mail), Yahoo (Y! Mail) and Google (GMail), these are the 3 major players in the email service market. They are actually trying to take advantage of this, releasing features that interact with the social graph that reside quietly on your inbox.
Now, your phone, yes in your phone is a more intimate social graph, but almost no one is getting in to it. You remember the migration from your last phone to the new one, was a pain right? But once the pals at DataPortability get thing a little bit further all your data can flow limitless anywhere you allow it to go (hopefully).
That will be a huge step in the social part of our daily activities cause your social graph will be not only people you are never seen or even talked on the phone but people that you interact with, in a daily basis.
What is the key? Communication! What you need a cell phone in the first place? Mainly to be available to any new information that your social graph generate, no matter what is, a SMS, a phone call, an email and lately a twitt or a pownce. This information come to you and mostly flow back to your social graph modified by you. All this interactions occur without been noticed, but is interesting once you start to watch it, from a little distance.
The future of Social Network and how interact with your social graph is not in FaceBook or MySpace, is you pocket, more exactly in your cell phone. And is likely to wait for the next generation of applications taking advantage of this, let’s not call it social applications cause the term is just overused.
Q: Thomas, tell us something about yourself?
A: Spirofrog – Start Your Global Career.
Q: Alexis, tell us something about yourself?
Music and the music business is changing, we have seen interesting things like 
A Business plan! My kingdom for a Business plan! no wait! If I have a kingdom… no need for business plan… Anyway, this down to earth list will tell you the first steps. Thanks to 
With all the frameworks for web developing 
Apple was pushing the last update of the Safari Browser 3.1, But this version come packed with a exceptional tool for developers: the Web Inspector.
Opera is secretive working on something called Dragonfly, but they are 
Paraphrasing 
Internationalization is one of the complicated stages in the live of a web startup, mostly cause developers not think from the beginning and then when the boom come you have to hurry to internationalize your stuff. All that can be avoid when you use a framework with support for internationalization, or make yourself a solution for it.
Almost everybody on the intertubes are participating in a social network of some kind, yes, the forums are social networks too (sort of) since they bring together people with same interests. But the real network… where is all your social information stored with all kind of details is… in your email and your cell phone.
