In general I dislike reality tv (although I’ll begrudgingly admit I have a soft spot for Ice Road Truckers (no idea why) and currently BBQ Pitmasters). However, I was thinking this morning something that I would absolutely watch (provided my Apple TV’s streaming/download speeds cooperated – they haven’t been lately) is a video podcast that chronicles a web startup.
Here’s my pitch for the Ultimate Web Startup Reality Show…
You put together a 3 person team (designer, developer and maybe someone with marketing savvy or that can design and develop), they are given a 6-month time frame and $100,000 – they can build whatever web-based application they want (but it must have a way to generate revenue once the 6 months/$100k are gone).
Of course, there’s the show part…they must also produce a 30-60 minute video podcast every week chronicling their adventures (with short video, twitter, blog updates thrown in as well of course!).
Of course, ideally I’d love to be part of one of the teams, but more importantly I think this would be a great vehicle to showcase what goes into an internet startup and the daily ups/downs of trying to make something fly.
Any takers?
This entry was written by , posted on December 21, 2009 at 9:27 am, filed under Uncategorized. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
Why would we want to build a web app to track bugs/issues? It doesn’t sound very sexy does it? And aren’t there a number of web-based bug tracking applications already? Some even free?
To answer these questions I think I first have to explain how we’ve been tracking bugs on Hashbrown projects for the last while.
For each project we create a Google Spreadsheet and share it with the given client. Each sheet contains 8 columns: Item Number, Date, Bug Location, Assigned to, Status, Priority, Task and Notes. As bugs/issues are found we add a new row, as bugs are closed those rows are marked as “Closed” in the Status column and we make the background grey. Once someone has gone in and review the closed items we remove them from the main sheet and move them to a closed sheet to keep a record of all bugs.
This has worked fairly well for us, however we constantly had a nagging feeling that there was a better way. We looked at multiple open source solutions, none quite fitting what we needed or their user interfaces were just so terrible it made them unusable. We looked at a couple of paid solutions, however none felt really tailored to our specific needs and most were rather expensive and out of our price range.
So we decided we could probably create our own web-based bug tracking application, keep it simple and focussed on the needs of companies building web-based applications and solutions and we’d end up with a great internal application that would be more efficient than our spreadsheet method – that thought didn’t last long before we decided it’s probably worth the extra effort to open it up to others to use too. So, that’s what we’re doing. We’re targeting a January beta, and based on a single tweet I sent a week or two ago we have a pretty good beta group of users (we thank all of you, and hope we don’t disappoint!) – even a software company that doesn’t build web-based applications, which should make things even more interesting as it seems, unbeknownst to us, that there is a desire in other areas for an easier-to-use system of tracking bugs.
We’re quite excited at the prospects of what Bugtrapp can bring to the table in the fight against tracking bugs/issues and can’t wait to get early beta feedback and then open up to the world!
And, to answer those questions from the beginning of this post, why would we want to build such an application? Because we’re passionate about ensuring we do the best we can in creating amazing web-based experiences! Is it very sexy? I guess that depends, we get off on web apps and processes to make them better…so to us, it is sexy. Aren’t there a number of other tracking solutions? Yes, however they didn’t match our needs – they might (and most certainly do) meet other’s needs but we’re willing to bet there are others like us too.
You can sign-up to be informed of our launch or to be part of our beta at: bugtrapp.com
This entry was written by , posted on December 19, 2009 at 12:42 pm, filed under Uncategorized. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
Near the beginning of this year a friend and business colleague and I were in Texas for SXSW, we were full of ideas and passion and proclaimed that 2009 was going to be the ‘Shiznit’ (we may have had a couple of drinks when this came out).
Him and I proceeded to do a lot of work this past year towards making it the shiznit. Did we succeed? Well…kind of.
I learnt a lot of lessons and managed to put a number of irons on the fire (so to speak), ensuring that the early part of 2010 is going to be quite interesting (more on that in 2010). Was revenue increased? No, not really. Hashbrown made less than the previous year (mind you 2008 was it’s most successful year ever), however I invested a lot of time into future endeavours and putting things into place that will be quite positive in the future. So plenty of seeds were planted! Come the new year we’ll be focusing on making those seeds grow into some pretty cool things.
So, will 2010 be the shiznit? It’s tough to say, but with what’s in place, it certainly has the potential and I’m looking forward to trying to make it the shiznit!
This entry was written by , posted on December 14, 2009 at 9:50 am, filed under Uncategorized. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
No, it’s not the latest celebrity charity campaign, Maps for tweets is just the easiest way to explain what Pwoint.me is. It’s a Twitter application/bot I put together on Sunday – I was bored and have been working on some large projects that have forced me to think way too much and quite honestly I was feeling a little burnt out and needed to blow off some steam.
Simply put, if you tweet @pwointer with a message and an address (in the format of “Message at Address”) it will send you a tweet that contains a link to a page that contains a map, your message and the ability for anyone to get directions to or from that address. It’s great for letting people know where a specific event is (e.g. concert, meeting, party, etc) and allowing them a simple, easy way to get directions from where they are.
Quick release
It came about quickly, from concept to the first successful tweet back was a total of about 5 hrs (that includes the simple home page I through together) plus another hour on Monday evening cleaning a few things up. I have no real commercial aspirations for the application (I’m working on a couple of other things that will take care of that once they get released – hopefully) but figured it was a fun, quick project that might be useful to some people.
So I’m releasing it into the wild – think of it the same way as a band will release a song between albums just because inspiration hit them, it doesn’t really fit within in the upcoming album and it keeps people thinking about them—this is my single before the album is released.
Go forth and use as you see fit
I had some fun creating it, hopefully others will have some fun using it. So, without further ado, feel free to tweet to @pwointer;, get a map and send it around for your followers/friends/others to see what’s going on where!
That’s about it – if you find Pwoint.me useful send me a message on Twitter or email me, I’d love to hear about it!
This entry was written by , posted on December 8, 2009 at 1:46 pm, filed under regular. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.