Pablo's blog

A bit of this, a bit of that and a lot about computers

Archive for the tag “business”

16 Mar 2011
4 Comments

What is a "startup project"?

I’m (hopefully) creating a term: “startup project”. A startup project is a project done on the side, not setting up a company, with or without partners, with the intention of one day becoming a startup.

I don’t have a startup, but I have many startup projects. Many silly little ideas with great aspirations. I need a term to separate that from non-startup project (like writing free software or build a house for the dog).

My startup projects are:

Many of them are dead or inactive. With .gitignore and .hgignore I believe I’m already getting as many visits as I possible can and it’s not that many (understandably, it’s extremely nichy).

RadioControlPedia is there, providing the information it has and open to anyone to contribute. I have some plans for it in the future but for now, I’m putting my time in other ideas. I really want to stay away from content for now.

Restraq and Hear a Blog deserve posts of their own, so wait for it.

Meanwhile, what do you think about the term “startup project”?

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10 Mar 2011

Idea: selling beauty products for males online

The beauty industry is made by women, for women. They learn everything very young and for most of them, it’s just natural. For most males it’s intimidating and confusing.

I had a very hilarious episode when I asked for “a beauty product” and my wife was tanding next to me and even though I was dead clear that it was me asking for a product for me, the sales rep would not speak to me. She directed all her answers to my wife, she was looking at her, almost ignoring me, while my wife never said a single word.

Anyway, I had an idea how to sell those kind of products to males. First, you have to do it online, because apparently males are more comfortable buying online and they are definitely not comfortable buying retail beauty products. Second, you have to make it simple, because we don’t know anything about it.

To make it simple my idea is this: you take a picture of yourself, or a couple, specifically of the problem you want to fix and upload it. Five minutes later you get a list of products that you could use for that. Boom! Sale guaranteed!

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14 Feb 2011

My idea got validated

Some time ago I had an idea for a web application. That idea was essentially Gist. I couldn’t convince people to go after it, thankfully because I wouldn’t like to compete with a Brad Feld backed company. It’s nice to see that the idea was good, as Gist got bought by RIM. Congratulations Gist!

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11 Feb 2011

A mistake for Nokia

I think this partnership with Microsoft was a mistake for Nokia. It was great for Microsoft though.

Every time you show an old Nokia phone you get the same comment: “Oh, those phones were built to last, I went through 3 iPhones and the Nokia still works…” or “That is the only phone that will not blend”.

But Nokia’s obsolete software is killing it. They need to provide truly smartphones. They had three options:

  • build their own
  • use Android
  • use Windows

I think they already tried to build their own and failed. That’s very hard. A giant like Microsoft tried to build their own and failed. It’s very hard to build a software platform.

Apple did it by being the first ones and providing the coolest product ever. Google did it by doing it for free. They are both a success because they have thousands and thousands of applications on their platform by now.

Microsoft haven’t done it. As powerful as Microsoft is, they still haven’t cracked the smartphone market, and it’s very likely they’ll never do. They are up against Apple and Google and both of them have years of advantage now (previous efforts by Microsoft are useless today).

Now Microsoft has a chance to do it because of the deal with Nokia. Nokia is likely going to put Windows 7 Phone whatever on the hands of many people. Those people will get use to Windows, but not to Nokia and may switch to HTC or another provider in a blink of an eye. Microsoft wins, Nokia loses.

I think Nokia should have done with Android. I know it’s hard to differentiate yourself with Android (what’s the different between a Samsung and a Sony/Ericson phone these days? They both run Angry Birds), but Nokia could have done it by making a tough phone. There’s a lot of people today not using smartphones because they won’t last in their pockets. Nokia could build a smartphone for them.

Maybe Nokia decided against Android because of their past mistakes with Open Source projects and companies. At any rate, I think they are making a mistake right now.

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18 May 2010

If I were in charge of Adobe

Clearly, Adobe is losing the battle with Apple. There’s no Flash on the iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad and there’s no sign that there will ever be.

Apple is not a company that can be easily influenced. They do things the way they think is right even when everybody else disagrees. Even when everybody predicts is going to cost sales. They’ve been doing it for more than 10 years and it’s working very well for them, they are not going to stop now. For Adobe, Apple is a lost cause.

I actually dislike both companies. Apple is building an extremely proprietary environment. They are much worst than Microsoft. Apple’s tax not only includes the operating system, it also includes every third party application. Not only they get a part of everybody’s cake, they decide who have cake and who doesn’t by controlling which applications get approval and which get rejected. If Apple ever dominates the industry, it’ll be the dark ages of computers.

Adobe is not much different with Flash. Flash is a proprietary and it works well on one and only one platform; if it does at all. Everybody else is left out. Flash has been making the web inaccessible for ages. I would be very glad if we can get rid of Flash.

If I were in charge of Adobe I would do something that would help the company remain a leader on the web and at the same time make Flash good: open source it.

I never understood why Adobe hasn’t open sourced Flash already. The specs are more or less open, there are alternative implementations, and they are not making any money by selling Flash. They make money by selling the tools to build Flash web sites and that’s not going to stop if they make Flash itself open source.

Before or while open sourcing I would make agreements with two companies: Google and HP. Make sure Flash is going to be included in Android, Chrome OS and Web OS. I would also put those phones and tablets in the hand of my developers (that is, Adobe’s), for free, as a gift, with the goal of making the Flash experience is absolutely thrilling.

I think that is Flash’s only hope.

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05 May 2010

iPad, the good and the bad

I consider the iPad a very negative force. Apple is taking the close system of iPhone and moving it up to tablets. What’s the next move? Desktops? That’s very scary! Imagine a world where Steve Jobs is the final word on which programs people can and can’t run. If that happens, the dark ages of computers will have started, and who knows how long they’ll last.

Now there’s a very good side effect to the iPad. People is starting to spend a lot of time on non-Windows computers. No, this is not a rant against Microsoft.

There was a time when we had many operating systems and people use to choose. Different machines came with different operating systems. Then Microsoft dominated the market and there was one and only one operating system. For a time there was even only one browser. That hinders innovation.

Microsoft Windows obviously failed on phones and tablets. Apple, first with the iPhone and now with the iPad, opened those markets. Now people is talking about how great WebOS (Palm’s operating system) would be on a tablet (made by HP). Nobody would have though of a non-Windows tablet if Apple haven’t done it before. Also Android tablets are coming. Microsoft is rebooting its phone efforts, without Windows this time; and maybe they’ll reboot their tablet efforts too. At any rate Microsoft won’t dominate that market and certainly not Windows.

The only company capable of dominating phones and tablets is Apple; and they are not set to dominate it. Apple makes one and only one product, with no variations. If you want something different (a USB port, a memory card reader, a camera, porn, a cheaper product, whatever) you go to a competitor. Apple makes a lot of money by making the luxury products, not by selling it to everybody.

I think it’s going to be a lot of fun to watch a very competitive market where four players are so will be constantly innovating trying to win users over.

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02 Dec 2009

Breaking the Monopoly-design monopoly

monopolyI am talking about the game, you know, Monopoly! There are so many versions of it but the other day I’ve seen the most interesting one. No, not the Esperanto one: Monopolo. A do it yourself Monopoly, or a Make it yourself-opoly.

From that I’m deriving the idea, why can’t you design your Monopoly in a web application, or even in a desktop one but that ultimately submits it to the web and you get the finished game delivered to your home. You add pictures, you pick themes, you pick the title, the language, the currency. It could make a perfect purchase or a magnificent gift.

Why can’t you sell it to other people? Like you do for stuff in CafePress. Hasbro would take some earnings but all the design is ultimately crowd-sourced, the designer also gets some money. I find one reason why that may not work and that’s because most stuff for which is worth it to make a monopoly are also copyrigthed. Average Joe wouldn’t be able to make a Monopoly of his favorite movie without striking a deal with the movie makers, which is not likely for average Joe.

But the movie makers could make them in a self-service way. That’s also unlikely to happen. But an xkcd Monopoly? That’s likely to happen and sell quite a few copies. Companies with a sense of humor or with a good PR would have some employee doing tha. Do you imagine Microsoft or Google Monopoly with each property being a product. Do you want to buy Office? Do you want to buy Chrome? Do you want to play as Bill Gates? Steve Ballmer? Larry Page? I know some geeks would stack them up and have one of each of those.

I thought about starting to make the web application for designing a Monopoly. It could generate PDFs that you download and print and paste in a normal board as an interim while not having any production. But there’s only one company that can legally do this: Hasbro, and having only one company as your potential exit is not a good idea. So it was dropped from the ideas board into here, my blog.

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18 Nov 2009

The tracker for movies

For showing what music I like, keeping track of what music I listen to, discovering new music and finding people with the same tastes I use last.fm. For doing that but with books I use aNobii. Is there anything like that for movies? If not, there’s a market.
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05 Nov 2009
2 Comments

Papers books are going away, and so does signing them

Free as in FreedomLet’s face it: paper is dying. It’s going to be a slow death, but for some purposes it’s dying faster. Newspapers find themselves not being able to print anymore due to costs and books are starting to be digital. I’ve recently got a Sony PRS-505 which I love (and my wife does too). And of course there’s the Kindle. With the death of paper-books, a fine tradition is going away: authors signing books.

It’s very likely that the tradition will continue with paper books for a very long time after our book-shelves were replaced with one little device. After all, a signed book is not a book but a collectible item, like a signed baseball or a signed t-shirt. They are stored and displayed differently than their mundane non-signed counterparts.

Eventually the books being signed will be custom-printed because there won’t be any more mass production. But what if we could replace signatures with something digital, and better?

At first I though that you could have your digital book signed. That’s possible, to have a PDF that has the signature in it. That’s trivial to generate automatically so it doesn’t have any value. If it has dedication, that is, your name hand-writen by the author, then it gets trickier to generate; and more valuable. But this is the digital age, the future, we can do better than that. What if you have a PDF where the picture of the cover of the book is not the usual one but a picture of you with the author.

Now, that’s something! The signing booth would now be a photo booth. After you take the picture they’d generate the PDF which you could download instantly by bluetooth or with a code they give you. Now suddenly the digitally signed book is something even more valuable than the usual signature.

Free as in Freedom - dedicated

If you plan on developing the software and do the hardware integration for this, let me know, I might be interested.

Posted in Personal and tagged , , , , , , , , ,
08 Oct 2009

Almost losing faith in a product

cakeSeth Godin wrote an interesting blog post titled “Two ways to build trust” in which he says that, to gain someone’s trust, you have to either be very professional, or very human. You are either like Apple: everything just works because they are super professional, or you are Joe the Baker who would make a custom cake for you.

The problem is when you try to be like Apple and stuff doesn’t work or you try to be like Joe and your cake says “Made in China”. I’ve never thought about it consciously, but I’ve felt it, and it makes perfect sense.

I was using an application in my Android phone called BeyondPod. It’s basically a podcast grabber. I liked the application and I wanted to buy it. I was using a limited version. They offer you two ways to buy: through the Android Market, the usual way; or if you live in a country where the paid applications are not available, like me, you could buy a license on the web site. That’s very professional.

Also the application is quite good. So that was another hint that the maker was a very professional team.

When I was ready to buy I went to the web site and it looked so 1998ish. Oh-oh. Not good. I’ve looked for a way to buy outside the Market and I’ve found two. Buying it on-line and paying with Paypal or using an alternate Market. The Paypal link didn’t work. Double oh-oh. That alternate market was hard to use, so I’m not totally sure if this is correct, but it seemed the application was not there. Strike three?

By this point, I’ve already tried to buy the app through several days, failing each time and just going back to whatever I was doing before. The only thing that kept me coming back was that I was using the app, liking it and wanting the unlimited version.

There was no contact address for support. One day, fed up, I signed up in their forum and said “I want to pay! How?” I wasn’t expecting any answer really, but about 42 seconds latter came a reply “Oh, the link was broken, try again.” That looked like the developer of the app, although he never mentioned that. That’s good. It may not be an Apple, but a Joe the Developer.

I went to the site, clicked on the Paypal link and was redirected to another web site, a Paypal-clone. That’s it, too much. I’ve dropped a bomb on the forum: “I’ve clicked the paypal link and it sent me to another web site, looks very scammy, I’m not putting my credit card number there”. And I proceeded to search for another podcast reader.

4.2 seconds latter came “My apologies, that’s my fallback merchant account, the Paypal one is working again”. Having a fallback account? That’s very professional. I know many companies working with Paypal, moving thousands of dollars, and not having a fallback transaction system. In a sense, this guy showed a lot of professionalism in some respect, and being a human being willing to solve the problems for the parts not very well done. I paid right away.

I almost lost my faith in the product and company, but the owner wasn’t afraid of acting like a little company and that bought me over. I don’t expect a podcatcher for a niche platform to be developed by a corporation full of things with “Enterprise” in their names. I expect it to be developed by a guy on a basement and that doesn’t mean I won’t pay for it.

Reviewed by Daniel Magliola. Thank you!

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