Software views

Eli Portnoy talks about his travels on creating Emerging Demographics Inc which has properties much like jobloft.com expect targeting the Latino market.

Startup ceo

HireWorkers.com
LatinoHire.com
BuenaChamba.com

Nisan Gabbay has been writing one review a week on some of the popular startups and their history. Much time and effort is spent on his reviews which produce a good end result. See his posting on why you should subscribe.

Some of his reviews include companies like MySpace, Flickr, Craigslist, Rent.com

Start up Reviews

All of the developers I have hired have different skill sets and abilities to produce softwave. Some developers on specific tasks would take half the time of others. Some could handle clients directly well and some not.

Just as I avoid taking on projects which will fail, good developers will avoid working on projects which have poor infrastructure or choices of tools.

Paul Graham writes up on how choices of infrastructure and languages affect who you can recruit.

Great Hackers

Jobloft.com has created a job site specific for the Retail, Food Services and Hospitality & Tourism. There are some niche requirements for this market and it will be interesting how things play out for them.

About Jobloft.com

JobLoft.com

Bill Burnham post on Walled Gardens brings up some issues which are taking place in the market. Currently users are moving away from Walled Gardens towards free alternatives or to publishing packages suited more for their needs.

The way things are going now is that ebay and similar sites will go threw some hurting times as the people who prefer free listings or cheaper ones. That does not mean ebay will simply die out as there will aways be a demand for paid services where there are free ones. Has
The Village Voice brought the end to New York Times

There is a free bus in Halifax, Nova Scotia called Fred, though it may cut into taxi cabs business it does not stop those who want or need a cab. Just like a free bus will not destroy the cab business a free listing site will not destory ebay. Ebay has all ready made its direction clear by cutting out the lower paying customers and will most likely improve services to suit the ones who stay.

Human nature does not change much over the course of time and what we are seeing on the Internet is the market re-balancing its self tell the pendulum swings the other way again.

Bill Burnham on rss and google

The Walled Garden “Hit List”

In the latest battle on distros, Ubuntu has been started by using Debian source code as its foundation. For a long time Debian has been a great product expect its developers are more concerned about development then marketing.

The weaker marketing from Debians standpoint has opened a spot for Ubuntu and other distributions to copy from them. This is what open source is all about. By Mark Shuttleworth starting with Debian, Ubuntu has an instant set of users and developers.

From the source code Mark Shuttleworth has been building a new community which will provide the product with the help of Mark Shuttleworth's investment. With any investment there is always demaind for a return.

His plans are to generate revenue by handling the installation and escalation support. There is a fair amount of install and escalation support needed for Microsoft and this would not change if users switched to a Linux desktop. The only thing that changes is the initial cost for the Operating system its self.

With that in mind, this is a really a battle of call centers and ubuntu is the carrot.

http://ubuntu.com

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MarkShuttleworth

http://www.forbes.com/home/technology/2006/09/05/linux-ubuntu-opensource_cz_mr_0906shuttleworth.html

Currently many business being created on the Internet today are simple combinations of existing ideas.

1. Subtraction: Removal of components (Simpler content management system tuned for a specific niche.)
   


2. 
   Multiplication: Add modified copies of existing components (More hosting space)
   


3. 
   Division: Separate product into individual components (Google maps api allows for the creation of sites which only need parts of the whole)
   


4. 
   Unification: Extend the use of an existing component so that it provides additional value (Otherwise known as Mashups - Google maps and a crime database to display crimes on a map)
   


5. 
   Dependence: Change the relationship between the product and its environment (Load balanced web sites, backup and fail over systems)
   

This is known as “Systematic Inventive Thinking (SIT)".
Paul Eisenberg has a post with some classic examples

The last time I did a review on Stephen Colbert's web site it had some issues. Stephen mentioned on his show it was due to a server crash, which on the Internet often happens. This made me just a little disappointed in his online performance, or lack of.

Stephen Colbert has said he hates the Internet, maybe because the Internet Business is bit by bit taking over his world even if likes it or not. The good news is it is my opinion that the talented people like Stephen Colbert will been the main show soon enough.

Currently the show has a massive potential for its online counter part which may come to bear fruit. I am placing my bets on a upstart like rockboom.com taking the audience vs Colbert being able to keep his.

Hopefully the changes keep coming as this battle will be interesting fire fight between the old and the new.

Evan Williams made a round up of the podcasting segment. Podcasting site Roundup

Om Malik explains the Microsoft method of product development with a comparsion to Macy's.
http://gigaom.com/2005/11/04/what-do-macy-and-microsoft-live-have-in-common/

In the fashion world, haute couture designers like Tom Ford and Dolce & Gabana create eye-popping outfits, that impress the fashionistas worldwide, and generate gushing headlines around the planet. A few hundred of them are sold at prices high enough to pay off the debt of some struggling nation. However, a few months later, pale imitations of that daring vision start to show up in mainstream stores like Macy’s, and thousands of consumers buy them. That’s when the real money is made.

Simple storage


Simple messaging

These types of services are great for decreasing development time and makes things easier to manage for larger scaled sites. The problem is reliability and backup.

Amazon may have 99.99 % on their network, sadly when running a site with millions of users you notice when a certain geographic area or network can not access your web site. This happened due to every network does not have many routes and many providers. Saying this amazon could easily become inaccessible by the server causing down time. Add that on to regular downtime caused by random events and your site is starting to look unreliable.

Worse case I seen for Internet failure is providers in the financial district after Sept 11 Terror attacks. With the power out and the servers hot every thing cooked at a nice 120 F.

Of course everyone promises that they are going to be 99.99 % there, what happens if you are that 0.01 % and all your data is lost ? Once again with large sites this WILL happen at one point or another. Therefor you have to have backups.

Worse case I have seen for backups is having a data center destroyed. I had the customer setup with three backup systems in place. Two where on site and the third was remote site. Only the remote backup server was active, in a 24 hour period the customer went from four copies of their data to one.

On the flip side, these services do make things faster to develop and if you do have a backup of what is on amazon you are all set tell you need to move in house. For many sites this will never be needed.

Amazon has released a beta of their Elastic Compute Cloud (or EC2) for you to outsource computing power. This service appears to be another form of virtual private servers. The main benefit is that if you use this service in joint with previously mentioned ones your site could be as reliable as amazons assuming they assigned the same priority to this system as their own.

EC2

The Amazon Mechanical Turk is an interesting spin on managing small projects. It allows people to enter tasks which are easily done by people and not quite worth it to automate. Small tasks like this are often difficult to get done if the infrastructure is not there. This is why sites like Elance where created as well.

This model of business appears to have its roots in the temporary agency. Where workers signup and people with tasks post their jobs to be done.

Some call centers handle things like this as well, they have a certain amount of computer stations and the workers are all given the same training. It is up to them to choose which desk to sit at and login. Once they are logged in the computer starts feeding tasks from the queue.

With Amazons Turk system is it looks more like an api the all ready had internally and someone said, hey for a little bit of money we can make this public and it may or may not work out. As for working out it appears to only created press and blog attention, the cost to pay for this awareness is most likely more then it cost to make this system. In that sense it is a success and does not really need to go any where else.


Before thinking of making a business on the temporary agency system, make sure you have a source of people with projects of value and people who can do the tasks.

Today million of people run small businesses and want to develop income on the side. Both google and ebay first created a great site with good traffic. Then with their traffic they empowered businesses to earn money rather then attempt to hoard it. The result is they receive more traffic then otherwise.

By prompting people to create web sites and providing a way for income people and businesses of all sizes exist. Google and ebay have inspired people to create new products and services. By inspiring others to startup new businesses both these companies have added plenty to their bottom lines.

Is your next business idea going to inspire others ?

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