launch48

Had a chat with Hugues last week and he mentioned an idea about a mobile app' -brought the idea to Launch48, pitched it, was voted in top 6, and without realising it find myself involved in quite a cool little project (has got potential though!), supported by a great team.

been captured on video by the lovely Hermione, presenting what the application is about... well I tried to anyway.



More about the actual team, and the project later.

contacts manager

Digital age allows us to have many friends, much more than we can deal with really. You can meet them on forumsn, through online connections, facebook, etc... and it is becoming increasingly hard to keep up with all these connections.

CRM tools (Customer Relationship Managament) have been around for a while. We now start seing what we could call FRM tools (Friend Relationship Management).

LinkedIn, Facebook can be used to keep an eye on what your "friends" are doing. But these online applications are also networking platforms, so not real "RFM" tools in my opinion.

Gist and Xobni are the real thing. These tools allows you to collect automatically information about your contacts, the way they are interconnected, the conversations you have with them thr0ugh many social channels, information about them on the internet, etc...

These are vey valuable tool, which I now use on a daily basis. They save you time, let you focus on other aspects of your business, and automate relationship management.

Debating the role of innovation

Providing innovative products and services is top priority for over 80% of marketing directors in the technology sector. Although a study from Forrester (Being Innovative Means Beyond The Hype) indicates that the way innovation is managed by these companies is usually not process driven, and do not support innovation efforts with proper management.

The definition of innovation according Chris andrew (author of the article) is:

Innovation is a combination of both invention and commercialisation.

This definition insists on the fact that to be innovative, an invention needs to have commercial value.


Companies such as Google or 3M take innovation very seriously. Members of engineering development teams at Google for instance are actively encouraged to allocate and spend 20% of their work time (one day per week) on projects that interest them.

I think that this model can work for for SMEs as well (interesting discussion here), and is worth considering. For a web development/design company, this can include: working on improving production processes, developing plug-ins for open source software or work on open source projects, developing new services, setting up micro websites or online social communities, etc...

There are many challenges to address...

- ensure that staff don't become too "passionate" about this side projects, and end up spending more than 20% of their time on them
- try to fit in these projects into short term strategies, whereas they should on the contrary contribute and be in line with comapny's long term strategy
- running the scheme for a couple of weeks and then forget about it as soon as new product/services deliveries are due.
- etc..

... However I would find it difficult to encourage big corporations improving the way they manage innovation if I could not demonstrate that it can have a very positive impact on my own company's bottom line.

Buy to standardise, build to compete

There is an interesting article about the choice between building an IT application or buying one.

This can apply to websites, which are online IT applications. And I often comes across clients or prospects who ponder whether it is worth developing a website from ground up, or use existing software available on the market.

Here is a first pointer given by the article:

Everybody knows that the more standardised you are and the more you buy off-the-shelf, the more cost effective it will be for both implementation and ongoing maintenance

This is true, especially for trivial activities such as the ability to update your website. Updating a website should be as easy as giving a phone call. And it doesn't really make sense nowadays to build a content management system from ground up. The objective is to find the right product for your business.

And an other pointer:

On the other hand, executives such as Bob Laird, IT chief architect at MCI (now part of Verizon Business), sing the familiar refrain of in-house development: “Where we tend to invest is where we can get incremental revenue … or competitive advantage,” he says.

Well I tend to agree as well. It makes sense to choose a Content Management System already available in order to give the marketing team the ability to update the site without depending on the IT team (internal or external), at lowest cost possible. However it is also important to consider developing some features from ground up, specially the ones which can give you a competitive advantage.

We recently released a stock photos website. The website is a combination of:

1) open source content management system: allows administrators to update the actual content of the page (about page, disclaimers, etc...)

2) open source frameworks (Zend, Doctrine): allows programmers to use a familiar environment, and speed up the development process. It makes also any custom development more robust and reliable.

3) custom programming: makes the website unique, with features matching exactely the business model. As business model evolves to meet new challenges, the website can also evolve rapidly to meet new requirements.

In my view, custom development is only justified when the website is intended to provide a competitive edge to a business (especially for an online business for instance). In case a website act only as a support for an exisiting communication strategy, it is preferable to select existing products.

I believe this view is in line with the conclusion of the article:

When evaluating whether to buy or build, it’s critical to thoroughly understand total costs during the software lifecycle -- typically seven or eight years. This step is important, Lutchen says, because 70 percent of software costs occur after implementation. A rigorous lifecycle analysis that realistically estimates ongoing maintenance by in-house developers often tips the balance in favor of buying.

Bearing in mind that it can become very costly (if not sometimes impossible) to customise a commercial (or open source) software to match new business requirements in case these requirements are unique, and not covered by "common features".

Google: Vertical search - secret weapon?

Targeting profiles
I think one of the reason Google is providing a better search experience than other rivals is its ability to deliver very relevant results to specific profiles of searchers.
E.g. 1: businesses or individuals looking for local suppliers



If you search for "printers london" for instance, Google will combine results with google map, and display directly a list of local printers in the results page.

E.g. 2: definitions

If you are looking for a definition of a word or expression, Google will return a series of definitions in search results.

Always adding new "vertical" results.
And Google keeps adding new "vertical add-ons":

E.g. 1: people looking for information on a specific site (large portals)




If you are looking for a book on amazon, you can use their search box directly for Google search results.

E.g.2: Programmers looking for code snippets
This one was added only very recently. Just type in some random code, and you'll find files containing this code



Some articles pointed out that Google was upsetting large websites such as amazon with their embedded search bar:
"[Google] has absolutely crossed the line because it's so blatantly about commercialisation and not user experience."
Richard Gregory, COO of Latitude

I personally don't think that these features are driven from the marketing department. By improving its vertical results, Google improves the user's experience, and keep them on its results page.

This is of course a matter of concern to all publishers (Amazon complained about the search box, and got it removed for instance), who get their number of page views reduced, and consequently their advertising revenue. But Google's mission statement is to offer the best results to its users, allowing them to find the right product/service/content directly from the search results, and the addition of these "vertical features" are going in the right direction, keeping Google ahead of the game, and definitely improving the overall user experience.

Accounting for small web design companies

I recently decided to pay a bit more attention to our account, and start learning about how to use accounts for management.

And it is amazing the impact of understanding your accounts can have on your business, regardless your turnover.

And the benefit of using a web design business is that it is quite straightforward to keep your accounts in order, without the need for sophisticated accounting software - 3 spreadsheets are enough.

1) Bank statements:
Download your bank statements on a monthly basis, and keep them on one sheet. And flag each transaction with a category:
1.1 for debit transactions
bank charges, transport, entertainment, telephone/internet bills, office supplies, call handling/virtual secretary, hosting, domain names, events fees, online tools cost, cash, VAT (if you are registered) , suppliers cost (try to specify which type of service they provide, such as offshore development, accounting, translation, etc .. )
1.2 for credit transactions
invoice (try to write down the reference if possible), cash back

You may need some additional categories for odd transactions, but categories above should cover pretty most of your transactions.

Important Note: Try to keep business account separate from your personal account. If you buy a tube ticket, and need to record this as a business expense, use your business card, not personal account. You then have just to worry about the statement you download from your online business bank account.

2) P&L
This is how you find out if you are doing things right, or if production is costing you too much , if you are spending too much in advertising etc ...

2.1: Revenue
The revenue is the sum of all the credit transactions - cash back

2.2 Gross profit
revenue - sum of all cost related to sales (suppliers cost, call handling/virtual secretary) - deprecation expenses **

use a 25% ratio. If you have bought a computer worth £1000 this year, it is costing you £250 in deprecation expenses this year, and will cost you £250 each year for 4 years. Don't ask me why it is considered as a cost related to sales...still cannot figure that out.

2.3 Net profit
Gross profit - sum of costs + cash - cashback

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If you keep this in order, it will save you loooooads of time in the long run. these are useful data, but you need a balance sheet to start running proper analysis about your business... which I will write about in the next post.

sharing large files

It has always been an issue to share large files for projects involving third parties - difficult to use emails for 50 Megs files, cannot expect everyone to be fluent with FTP, messengers/skype makes it a veeeeeeery long process to transfer files, and you usually loose version control on the way - The best solution so far was YouSendIt, limited to 100 Megs transfers though (free accounts).

Just came across a nice bit of software which may sort this out: http://www.collanos.com/

Free to download, it uses P2P technology, which is specially suitable for large files transfers. Worth checking out.

new blogger

Upgraded to the new version of blogger. The new version was around for a while, but no migration service was available. Here we google, they have now released the migration wizard, so ready to test their new version!

Google article on sitepoint, providing some insight about us, web develpers. The results of "the State of Web Development 2006" provides with interesting results such as which programming languages are commonly used, use of CSS, technologies used for web projects, etc ... a free preview of the document is available here.

The most interesting bits I found were the anylisis, crossing data in order to extend the profile. Example:

That's not a particularly radical idea, but the survey data actually lets us identify some of these clusters of related practices. As we explored the data, we found that the clearest clusters represented stereotypes of different types of web developers, so we gave them names:

• The "Guru" is strongly motivated toward technical excellence, actively tracks new technological trends, and is interested in learning how to use them to improve the quality and functionality of web sites.
• The "Entrepreneur" is strongly motivated toward building and retaining an audience, and is less interested in using technologies just because they're new.
• The "Designer" is strongly motivated toward the timely delivery of visually appealing web sites that meet the business requirements of clients.
• The "Corporate" is strongly motivated toward reliable, stable performance; the "Corporate works in a larger organization, and faces the unique mixture of constraints and opportunities that the corporate environment offers.

We can't make absolute predictions about what these different groups think, but we can identify clear trends. Our "Entrepreneur," for example, is most likely to say that he or she:

• runs an ecommerce business
• wants to learn about email marketing and search engine optimization
• develops with Dreamweaver
• is planning to get into blogging and podcasting

And the same person is least likely to say that he or she:

• works for a design firm or manages a company web site
• practices versioning, MVC, or OOP
• develops with a text editor, Visual Studio, or Zend
• uses AJAX, wikis, or Microformats

• 
  

What strikes me is that you probably need these 4 different profiles in your company. If you haven't got 4 staff already, well, you need to combine a bit of each. When we started Jazar, we were only 2, but had certainly to ensure that:
- we knew about online marketing, and websites monetisation: I took on the role of entrepreneur
- built a strong, reliable, and performant code: Olivier took on this role
- track new technological trends and decide on which ones should be implemented: I took on the role
- pay attention to design, and offer appealing visual solution: Olivier took on this role

In conclusion, the survey provides with an excellent insight on the state of webdesign today, and what skills are needed and what technologies/tools are available in order to set a succesful web design business.