Sometime along the path you’ll get to the bridge that takes you out of that place you’ve been for so long. It might have been long enough to forget that the whole city was built by yourself, or that the bridge was part of the project.
Now, the bridge is ready and there is some walking to do…
I feel like it was yesterday when a very dear friend of mine at that time, circa 2007, told me one of those simple frases that stick with you forever… I don’t know if this is going to work he said, this warehouse is almost 10 times what we have now, but I have to do it, because if you don’t grow you die.
Five years later he is still proven right and growing, and that simple frase said out loud in a small appartment in California still resounds in my head.
Now that my own company is embarking in new adventures, many time there have been where decisions had to be made, and a simple guideline like that has made all the difference.
When time goes by like water down the river, and I’ve not written a line of anything meaningful (besides the million emails that goes by every week) in such a long time, there is a feeling that starts to happen at my fingertips… It’s like black ink trying to get out of them, liters and liters of it, just for the sake of saying something, anything.
Many times it’s walking or driving or just staring the horizon out from my window. Those times are the ones that an iPhone (with ia’s Writer) would make sense.
It’s hard to tell what they want to say, as Stephen King says On Writing, it’s something you must practice every day not only to improve but to not loose the ability. I’ve been part of the second group for a long time now, we probably need to get acquainted again.
After a while you realize that there is no point on playing to catch-up with the big guys. After a while you realize that your product must provide real value on its own to be competitive. After a while you find out that innovating is the only way to achieve your goals.
We are all so full of ideas, additions, killer-features that many times we get lost on that game.
Perfection is another big issue innovators have to deal with. Trying to achieve the perfect thing is not only impossible, but also an illness. “Perfection is an infection”. Maybe is hard to draw the line between “not finished” and “done”, but having it be near perfection is most probably going to kill your project instead of making it stand out.
Have you ever wanted to send SMS messages from your PHP Application? I have!
After analyzing what’s on the market of SMS’ gateways, I decided I wanted to give Clickatell a try. Their coverage seemed like the most complete one (at lest for Argentina) and their API simple and straightforward. But the examples they provided for PHP where a little bit “simplistic” and the PHP classes available on the web outdated, so I decided to develop a class of my own.
This is what I’ve come up so far. It’s complete, simple and ready to use!
Download Clickatell API – PHP Class v1.0 (It’s dual licenced LGPL and BSD so anybody can use it with the licence they see fit)
Just in case you don’t know who’s Clickatell I’ve borrowed this description from their product page: Clickatell’s messaging gateway allows you to send messages to almost any mobile phone in the world. Its high powered platform ensures reliable delivery of all messages, and our global coverage means that you can reach 819 mobile networks in 220+ countries.
If you give it a try let me know how it goes 
Enjoy!
Testing posterous! FTW xD
Innovation is a big deal.
Many ideas have to be tried and fail to have just one that succeeds. When your company is small and your ideas go far beyond your R&D capabilities it’s always difficult to find a balance between what you feel like might be successful today, and what the market will require in a couple of years, probably the time it’ll take for you to build it.
Also, as an entrepreneur, many times we try to guess what’s best for the market, but when done, the only thing left is experience, valuable one, but not a home run. And sadly the market has taken a very different path.
That’s the when many jump out from the ship, and embrace other ways (easier ways) of making a living…
Experience, measurable by lots and lots of interfaces, UX, and LOCs widen the gap between you and the next entrepreneur, every day a little bit more. And that is what nobody tells you.
That’s why is not about who can copy your idea, it’s not if your idea is great or lame, or if your timing is correct or off by a decade…. Steve Jobs made the NeXT computer almost a decade before the market was ready for it. Same thing happened to Bill Gates with the Tablet PC.
When Facebook went public, MySpace was the king of the world, some years later and MySpace is almost “a thing of the past”.
Btw, great ideas are all over the place, many of them never succeed.
So, it seems like, those who give advice might be right: It’s all about execution. My personal opinion: 95% execution, 5% luck.
So, when building a (software) company you can take many paths: You can reuse/resell (open source or corporate), copycat, build cheap stuff, build expensive stuff, be unique, be an specialist, be a generalist… etc.
My vision is this: A company must invest (heavily) in R&D, eat it’s own dog-food and avoid reinventing the wheel, conquer it’s clients and be feared (in the good sense) by it’s competitors.
But most importantly, you have yo share your dream, and let the people working with you embrace it, expand it, and bring it to life.
And that is 99% of execution, but nobody will tell you.
Apple has created a new miracle, but very few have noticed it yet: After more than 20 years finally someone got rid of the “Desktop metaphor” for good. Say hello to the “Book metaphor”.
To be totally honest, it was Microsoft who first came up with this idea, a long long time ago; but they where too early in the game, and the hardware wasn’t capable of doing what the software was trying to accomplish.
This is the opening chapter of a revolution that will change the whole “computer experience”.
There are yet some gaps between this conception of the new metaphor, and what people are expecting from such a device. As time goes by it’ll improve, and we’ll get more used to it, this is a two ways street after all.
Changing the way we’ve been using computers for so long is not going to be an easy feat, but as productivity goes up, and rejection down, we’ll be every day nearer to what Sci-fi writers have been envisioning for so long: Gorgeous looking PDA’s that can hold more information that we can produce in a lifetime with endless communication capabilities & allowing every human to have at it’s fingertips the whole knowledge since the beginning of times.
Enjoy the revolution, embrace it & talk people into it.
There has been much hype about “Google Chrome OS” the last few weeks, I’d like to state my opinion about it while is still fresh and clear.
It won’t work.
Ok, that was harsh, let me explain myself.
We all know, or think, that cloud computing is “the way of the future“, and that a lot of what’s today considered “desktop applications” will be inside the cloud in the near future. But we can also see that data storage & processing is every day cheaper and physically smaller.
So, if storage and processing is getting cheaper each day, why would anyone like to have all it’s photos, docs, and stuff, in Google’s cloud (or anyone’s else for that matter) and not in it’s pocket?
What first comes to my mind is availability, but that’s not a great answer. I’ve been carrying a cell phone that can store much of my digital life for a while now, and, if the trend continues, in a couple years I’ll have a device capable of storing many times my life on a gadget the size of a wristwatch. So, if it’s always with me, and as my cell phone, it can always be online… why would I prefer “the Cloud”? I don’t see a clear answer.
Well, I do see one: So they can mine my data, know what I do, and profit from it. Like GMail and its “ads”, but in a much larger scale. I’m not so sure people will fall for it.
Also there is another problem: An OS is not “a thing you use to surf the web, read your emails, listen to music and watch videos”. I think that’s a myth Microsoft has made all people believe to keep their dominance in the desktop arena. When I was younger I was involved in an open source OS called Syllable, and even if my participation was very small and sporadic, I really liked it and spent many hours using it, toying with it and hoping it’ll defeat Linux (I have to confess I’m a linux anti-fan). It had all the things I mentioned previously, but you have probably not even heard about it until today. That’s because when you start using an OS that is subpar in features or capabilities, you start missing those in a blink.
To finish this futurology session I’ll say that, the way I see it, the iPhone is much near of becoming “the future of desktop computing”, than Google and it’s Chrome OS are. At least for now. There is always time for improvement, and Googlers are not stupid by any means.
Notice: This article talks about future events, and it’s ideas and opinions might not correlate to reality in the long term.
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