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Visit to San Francisco and Silicon Valley

May 12, 2011 by Appwatchers

Last week we came back from a two week trip to silicon valley. The main reason was to look around for Investment and US Market opportunities for our SaaS product www.mycosuite.com that we have started in 2010.

We have joined a lot of panel discussions about IT, Emerging markets and VC and Angels. We have also met a lot of interesting people. The most interesting thing about Silicon valley is that there are many IT entrepreneurs and a whole ecosystem around it. Idea’s grow there and are taken to the next level. The stimulating environment helps entrepreneurs to get great feedback and build on that to ultimately create great products.

The VC’s and Angels are also interesting groups. Many people warn for VC’s since they will take over your business, steal your idea’s etc. On the other hand they can also give you the flying start that you need in terms of financing and network that they bring in. A good VC will not abuse its position to steal ideas. The moment it becomes public that they take over your idea, it will hurt their business a lot. There is always a balance that has to be found to establish a healthy relation with those companies. Of course you need to focus on the end goal.. they are looking for an exit. Many entrepreneurs we talked to are clearly focused on selling their business to Google, Facebook, Microsoft as an exit and do anything to get noticed by those companies.

Next to our meetings with Entrepreneurs and VC/angels we have also checked the Dutch community in San Francisco. We were lucky to see the first celebration of Queensday on Union Square.

All in all a very good trip. We learned a lot and are now working on the opportunities that came from these 2 weeks. There is a big chance I will go back in the coming month to continue with our U.S focus.

Posted in Entrepreneurship, Software, Web applications | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

Checklist for starting a web application

March 7, 2011 by Appwatchers

So you would like to start a web application? How will you begin and what are the things to keep in mind?.. I have listed 10 things that you might want to look at before you jump into your new adventure.

1. Programming language

You can choose between multiple programming languages. The most famous ones are Java .Net and PHP. Often business people are not too interested in which language the application is build. However, this is quite an important choice for later when you are having success with the application. For example the future of a programming language, or the availability of engineers for that language will definitely affect your business. Imagine you let your technical guy build a system and find out that its some kind of rare language nobody is using anymore.. Well , with the three languages from above you will not have that problem. All are very popular and capable of almost everything. Technical people often have a total different discussion which is often more a religious discussion about which programming language is best and what language is build on top of the other, etc, etc. In the end, we need to look at the business requirement of the system and guarantee that future requirements can be made as well.

Just a small introduction to .Net, Java and PhP.

- Java is the open source language. Initiated by Sun which is now bought by Oracle. In Java there is a large movement around the Spring framework community. Spring (Interface21) was bought by VM Ware for 420 mln dollars in 2009.
- .Net is the Microsoft language. It is capable for almost all business functionalities you need.
-PHP is popular because it is an easy to learn language. Many people without a programming background can build simple applications.

2. The Supplier

What kind of applications did the supplier do before and does the supplier have customer recommendations on his website? Are you allowed to call customers to do a background check? What can you find on Google about the supplier? The background of the technical team and the owners of the company all matter. Does the company have body and can it guarantee the continuity of the knowledge of your application?

The supplier will sign a contract with you about the scope, delivery date and the payment. Keep in mind that you focus well on the Copy / intelectual property rights. You are the investor of the system and should end up with the IP rights of your own application. For each new request after the initial project you will also need to have sub-contracts that mention that the IP will be yours since that is required by law.

3. The infrastructure and security of your code

Make sure your supplier works with a versioning system. This is a system in which all iterations are recorded and if necessary its possible to go back in time to find back issues. A professional company works with a versioning system and a continuous build environment which makes sure that the latest version of your code is stable (all unit tests in the code are ok). Of course everything in the network should go over secured lines and the local computers should be password protected.

Also make sure you write in your contract that you are able to request your code (IP) at any time from the supplier. Even better is to let them send you periodically the code in case something strange happens. This is of course something that you should do when setting up the contract.

4. Functional design

The functional design is the document on which the supplier has to give estimations or give a proposal. The scope of this design will be guarded by the supplier to prevent any extra work to sneak in. Make sure that the requirements are written down in detail and that your assumptions of “this is common sense or logic” could be a risk for you since the supplier might see it as extra work since its not written down. It works like this: everything not included in a functional design is considered out of scope. The supplier will mention ” you also didn’t mention a rocket-ship in your functional design, so you expect us to build it as well?” Of course this is a very childish example, but just to stress that the contract will refer to a described scope.

Often a functional design will be accompanied by a wire frame. wire frames can be simple drawings, made in Excel, or done by more professional systems such as Axure.

Keep in mind to mention in your contract on which browser you want your application to be tested. Recommended is; Firefox, IE, Chrome and Safari. For each browser you can ask the 2 last versions to be tested. Keep in mind, that if you are just building an application for a specific group in your company that only uses Firefox, it could save you some money by telling the supplier to only focus on Firefox.

5. Process and communication system

Software suppliers should work with a process. In our company we work with Scrum. A process to keep things transparent for the project team and customer. Scrum also helps by splitting up one large project in milestones (called sprints). This way it is easier to keep the project in control. Scrum also facilitates in extra work, scope setting and delivery.

But only a methodology is not enough. A project management system is needed to keep track of all the activities of the team and all the communication such as questions, approvals, etc. The system keeps a history and prevents you for managing 5 different versions of excel spreadsheets or Word documents. We have build our own project management system since it also facilitates Scrum and lets the engineers easily write their time when closing down their tasks.

6. Server.

You will start on a small server in the beginning since you will use it for testing purposes only. But before you want to go live you really should consider in upgrading your server to make sure you can handle the new visitors in your application. You can just make a deal with your server provider. They can easily upgrade. The other thing is that when you want you application in the Cloud you can select various upgrades from the Amazon or Google cloud servers.

It could happen that your application becomes very big and you will need a clustered environment (multiple servers). Your software supplier will be able to inform you about this.

7. Performance

The performance of your system is often in the beginning very good. But as you add more data in it and functionalities increase as well, you might one day come to the conclusion that you want to do something to make your system faster. This is possible by using a larger server, but it is smarter to look for improvements in the code, do caching, etc. Keep in mind that performance is just a new bottleneck that needs to be killed. It is wise to keep this in the back of your mind and reserve some budget for that.

8. Security

Security is of course extremely important. Make sure you understand the kinds of security measures that are taken by your supplier. Security of data transfer, but also making the application only accessible for the people that have the rights to use it. There are very good security frameworks and encryption methods available. Just make sure that you know whats going on in your application. By testing you can also keep extra focus on the security of the application. Test different roles and the expected outcome for example. There are also specialised companies that can help you with testing your application.

9. Design and SEO

Many people expect the software company to make designs as well. Some software companies can do that, but keep in mind that the design of your commercial site and product is more a marketing skill than a software skill. There are many companies specialized in web design. It doesn’t have to be very expensive, and is definitely worth the investment. The moment the design company finishes the design. The deliverables are often Photoshop documents. The software company can take over these documents and implement them. If you are building an application for your internal company use only, you can ask the software company to make a simple corporate layout. This is always an easy solution.

SEO is yet another skill. You will need to promote your web application if you have a web application that targets customers on the web. You will need to keep in mind that the public pages are SEO friendly to attract more traffic to your website. If you are building an internal company application you will not have to worry about this when setting up the application.

10. Delivery

So when the moment has come that you are able to deliver, you will get a lot of feedback from your potential customers. Try to have a group of people available to help you with testing and communicate their ideas to you. Make sure you are not building functionalities that nobody wants to use in the end. This is exactly the reason why you should keep the milestone periods small and try to get feedback from as many people as possible.

Hopefully this post will help the people that are considering building a web application. It is a very cool experience, but there are many pitfalls on the way. Maybe by reading this post you will be able to prevent some trouble and move with full speed to your final goal.


Posted in Entrepreneurship, Java, Software, Web applications | Tagged , , , , , , | 1 Comment »

Taxi-Book iPhone app released

March 5, 2011 by Appwatchers

iPhone and iPad applications are hot! I often surf around in the iTunes store to see if new interesting apps have been released. I am also looking from a research/producers view, since we are working hard to, have our own MYCO Suite app released soon as well. But for now I would like to present an app that one of my friends released last week.

Entrepreneur Peter Kuppens is already working for 3 years (in Chengdu) on the Taxi-book concept which started as nice promotion material for companies. Chengdu companies can print their logo on the front and back cover and hand it out to their contacts. We actually also bought a batch last year. Very handy to give to friends and customers visiting us in Chengdu.

Now the iPhone app has been released and to my opinion a very handy tool to have around here. Maybe its interesting to explain why I like the concept. Here in Chengdu, Taxi drivers can’t speak English and they will also not always be able to understand you when you try it in your best Chinese. Of course, you can practice and they will understand. But for the foreigners visiting the city, it could be quite a hassle to make yourself understood. At least you don’t have to flap your hands like a bird anymore when you want to go to the airport ;)

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In the Taxi-Book you can find about any location you would like to go to and let the taxi book pronounce it in Chinese to the taxi driver. You can even complain to to the driver in Chinese by telling him to go faster or to obey the traffic rules (which might save your life one day :) ) .

The moment you push on the yellow button, the screen will change to the black screen displayed below that the taxi drivers are able to read. If they can’t read, you can click the black screen and the iPhone will say the address in Chinese.

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taxi book screens
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So If you come to Chengdu I suggest you to spend a 3.99 EUR on this life saver and let it drop you off at any destination without a problem.

Its easy to find the app in the iTunes store by searching on “Chengdu”. You can also go to the below link:

http://itunes.apple.com/de/app/chengdu/id420381244?mt=8
I understood from Peter that other Chinese cities will be released soon as well. So keep a close eye on the iTunes store!

Posted in China, Entrepreneurship, Marketing, Software | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment »

Basics to programming for business people #1

March 1, 2011 by Appwatchers

Do you have a web application or are you thinking about building one? As a non technical person it might be something you want to leave to your supplier or technical guy. But you will be amazed that, when you put in some effort to understand the technical side (not specifically coding), that you and your technical person will find many benefits from a more smooth collaboration. Of course business people are busy, I am also not telling you to start programming. But try to spend some effort to understand the engine of your system. And of course if you like it, you can make the step to learn more detailed information every time.

I have seen the guys doing their trick for almost 4 years now. I am always interested to learn more and to understand the way things work around me. I see it as a privilege to have the chance to dive deeper in the programming world since normally nobody wants to take the time or patient enough to share this information to some business guy.

Being close to the production is according to me a real benefit for the entire business. You learn to understand the programmers their obstacles and can help them by taking decisions that save work or help them by preparing for future functionalities. As a product owner you will also need to know what security measures are taken and which of your decisions have more impact on performance for example. Actually all managers/entrepreneurs who own a web application should read into the basics of the technology and know which types of frameworks, security, application server, database their application is using.

I went a little further than that and start to understand more about different frameworks, search engines and front end technologies as well. As a last step we had a nice first session (well actually we had about a hundred of them already, but this one made most sense) of what is under the hood of a Java application (coding). Of course, its not a scientific or 100% correct or complete overview. It is a mind map I have put together while listening to the explanation.

Java Mindmap

Posted in Entrepreneurship, Software | Tagged , , , | Leave a Comment »

The lean startup

February 27, 2011 by Appwatchers

In my search on experiences from other entrepreneurs I came across the term “lean start-up” which confirms many of my previous assumptions and way of thinking. It seems that the lean startup way can be very interesting for small companies working on their web applications.

- Winners are those who can move faster than their competitors
- Winning requires constant assessment of change and ways to mitigate risks
- Winning is about agility
- Continuous customer interaction
- No scaling until revenue

A great presentation about lean startups:

From another article (1*) a couple of lessons learned on Lean startups:

1) Don’t ask what people will pay for. They lie!
2) Nothing beats getting a customer to actually pay for something
3) You have to learn the customer’s language
4) A customer stating a problem is more valuable than a customer agreeing with a problem you present
5) Be precise in your Hypothesis

Definition from Wikipedia

Lean Startup is a set of processes used by entrepreneurs to develop products and markets, combining Agile Software Development, Customer Development and existing software platforms (usually FOSS).[citation needed]

Lean Startup initially advocates the creation of rapid prototypes designed to test market assumptions, and uses customer feedback to evolve them much faster than via more traditional software engineering practices, such as the Waterfall model. It is not uncommon to see Lean Startups release new code to production multiple times a day,[1] often using a practice known as Continuous Deployment[2].

Lean Startup is sometimes described as Lean Thinking applied to the entrepreneurial process[3]. A central tenet of Lean Thinking is to reduce waste. Lean Startup processes use Customer Development to reduce waste by increasing the frequency of contact with real customers, therefore testing and avoiding incorrect market assumptions as early as possible.[4]This approach attempts to improve on historical entrepreneurial tactics by reducing the work required to assess assumptions about the market, and to decrease the time it takes a business to find market traction. This is referred to as Minimum Viable Product.


Collected links on this topic

(*1) http://greenhornconnect.com/blog/5-lessons-learned-lean-startup

Posted in Entrepreneurship, Software | Tagged , , | Leave a Comment »

China’s most popular web applications 2011

February 17, 2011 by Appwatchers

Almost everybody is actively exploring/using the web and familiar (or getting familiar) with web applications. The applications most close to the general public are of course Facebook, Twitter, Google.com, You-tube,  Yahoo, Hotmail, etc, etc. These applications have integrated themselves in the daily lives of the internet user and are used by people for both social and business purposes. But how do web applications work in China? How is the Chinese internet usage and what are most popular applications in China? It is still a bit unclear for foreign companies what to expect of the Chinese internet market. The joke of earning a dollar of each inhabitant of a country makes China an interesting place to look at. But as many large companies already have experienced, its quite difficult to get successful within this market. So.. what’s there already?

Internet usage:

In 2011 the internet usage in China grew at a fast rate again. At this moment there are about 457 million internet users (Netizens). The interesting thing is that 66% of the internet users are accessing the internet by mobile phone. (2*)

Search engines:

Baidu is taking the lead in the search engine market. Actually it’s the only interesting search engine in China at the moment. Baidu takes (1*) 74.1 % marketshare (1st of Feb 2011) of the Chinese market and leaves Google, Yahoo and Bing far behind. Baidu was founded in 2000 by Chinese founders who have worked and studies overseas. Other services of Baidu are: Maps, News, MP3, Image search, Video, social networking, TV, Games, Dictionary, and many more.

SEO in Google is not too interesting if you want to reach the Chinese Netizens. Baidu works slightly different than Google by the way. Companies can buy their listing in Baidu on both sides. The sponsored links part and also the left search results part. Prices are about 1000 EUR for a top listing per month and going 100 EUR down per lower position (last time I heard). The listings that are bought can be renewed by the current owner who has first priority of renewing.

the interesting thing is that Baidu works actively with offline sales teams. Sales people meet customers offline and try to sell website optimization services. Baidu even provides companies free or cheap website development with it as well. This is of course a smart strategy since in China there are still too many offline businesses. To invest in sales employees and basic web design (templates) is of course not expensive in a country of  1.4 billion people.

Communities:

QQ (Tencent) Q Zone QQ is the largest internet community of China and maybe in the world. It was founded in 1998 in Shenzhen. The company has many more services than only the community and originally started with a chat application like MSN Messenger.  The platform is fully integrated with payments systems which are probably already more frequently used and mature than the payment systems in the western world. Almost all age groups have their QQ number and have bought virtural money to pay for different services that QQ provides. The Q Zone is as mentioned just one part of the company. The others are: Games, Virtual pets, Chat, Music, blog, etc. At this moment QQ has about  636 Million users (worldwide).

Online communities with more than 100 million active users.

Name Active user accounts Date
Tencent QQ 636 million November 2010
Facebook 600+ million January 2011
Qzone 200 million February 2009
Twitter 190 million January 2011
Gmail 176.5 million December 2009
Orkut 120+ million August 2010
Windows Live Spaces 120 million August 2006
Bebo 117 million July 2010
Vkontakte 110 million May 2010
Myspace 100+ million May 2009

Source: (From Wikipedia *3. original sources are mentioned there)

QQ is a very strong company in China and people have mixed emotions about the platform. One one hand everybody uses it and it brings convenience to the lives of people. On the other hand it receives a lot of criticism by overtaking new successful business platforms by building these concepts themselves and flooding their own service with their enormous user amount which makes it instant success. On the other hand, this is exactly what Google and Microsoft also try to do in the western world by adding new popular services.

The best thing of a system, that is so much integrated in the culture, is that businesses all use it for chatting with customers (customer service) , online ordering, information sharing, etc. Everybody has a QQ number and QQ numbers are often earlier exchanged than telephone numbers.

QQ numbers started with 6 numbers and the latest (current) numbers are already 12 numbers. The first numbers are worth a lot of money and are sometimes sold. A recent sell was a couple of million RMB for the number 888888. 8 is a lucky number in China. Also the number 4444 was sold for millions (it actually means die, die, die ,die in Chinese :) )

kaixin001.com Kaixin (which means “happy” is a very popular community which has become popular because of the flash game portal it started with.

renren.com is the Chinese clone of Facebook. Funny how they copied Facebook almost entirely (even the UI and layout) and competing with for example Kaixin by using/owning the www.kaixin.com domain name which directly redirects to the renren community.

Update 21 feb: http://www.nu.nl/internet/2450661/grootste-chinese-netwerksite-plant-beursgang.html

Infotainment web portal

Sina.com (NASDAQ: SINA) is one of China’s most popular sites. At this moment it has about 95 million registered users and about 3 billion page views per day. Services are: news, mail, games, blogs, SMS, etc.

One interesting development is that the Chinese Twitter is developed by Sina.com. The service is called Weibo and growing extremely fast (about 10 million new users per month). There is something new in the planning, it will be voice Weibo. You can post your voice messages and listen to it online. Via your phone you can quickly post voice messages. This will be easier to post your opinions. This platform can help ordinary people to express their talents. For example good speakers, singers, etc.

Online video

Youku (NYSE:YOKU) is the largest online video site. On Youku you can add movies like on You-Tube the benefit of Youku is that it accepts large videos and even entire movies. At this moment it is possible to see popular TV Series and even hollywood movies by streaming media. Youku has an interesting position they have closed many partnerships and share part of the income to TV production companies etc. Maybe this is why there is still a lot of content on which is pretty doubtful in terms of copyright protection. Another thing that is still unclear to me is that even while listed on NYSE, there is still some material online which should be considered in a very (dark) grey area.

Tudou is the other large video site in China.It was Co-founded by Dutchman called Marc van der Chijs who is now active for Spilgroup Asia. In Tudou you can also watch movies and tv series. There is a lot of advertising, which is the core business of the company.

Marketplaces

Taobao Is owned by the Alibaba group and can be compared to Ebay. It is the largest Chinese online marketplace on which you can buy about everything. Its a nice place to look around on when doing sourcing in China. Many households are simply buying their clothing, computers, mobiles, etc from Taobao. It is often cheaper than in the shops and the delivery services in China are surprisingly fast. From all over China you will have your purchased products within 1 or 2 days. In the High tech zone in Chengdu it is always “high traffic” on only courier services that deliver products the entire day to the busy office people. Since the high tech zone is far from the city center and people work quite some hours, the whole system of internet buying is fully integrated in the population. The biggest benefit of buying on Taobao is that the concept works under the escrow principle. That means that people have their credit and when something is delivered well, the actual payment is released by the Taobao company. The reason is that in China the trust is not so high. People want to do their own quality control before paying their purchases.

Alibaba.com is also owned by the Alibaba Group. The marketplaces of Alibaba are huge and covering the necesities for all businesses and end customers. There are various marketplaces e.g.; www.1688.com , Alibaba.com , aliexpress.com.

Online antivirus

Qihoo 360 (online + desktop) is one of the largest online antivirus systems. It is a free software system and very secure. Their biggest benefit is that it can update the computer without even needing to do the latest windows updates. Since many households and companies still use pirated versions of windows, Qihoo 360 is taking good advantage of the situation.

Only recently there was a big conflict between Qihoo 360 and QQ Tencent because Qihoo accused Tencent to steal users information from the  computers of their users. The action of QQ on the accusation was updating their software to totally ban Qihoo. So the result was that you are either able to use Qihoo or QQ. This was of course a very bad thing for Qihoo since the user base of QQ is so huge. On the other hand Qihoo actually won the battle from a customer point of view. The sympathy vote of the Chinese consumer goes to Qihoo. Also the name Qihoo has become pretty famous. The conflict is resolved and both systems can be used at the same time again.

Online Dating

Online dating is very popular in China. There are some large platforms where people can meet.

Jiayuan.com is one of the most popular meeting places and making good profits. They are expected to go IPO soon. The VC’s are still cautious in this market.

Online travel sites

The top online travel booking websites (by revenue) are:

  • Ctrip: 55.6%
  • eLong.com: 9.9%
  • mangocity.com: 6.2%
  • 118114.cn: 5.8%
  • 12580.com: 3.2%
  • etpass.com: 3.1%
  • 17u.com: 2.7%
  • aoyou.com: 1.5%
  • Others: 12%

Source *4: Chinainternetwatch.com

Jobsites

51jobs is according to us the most popular job site in China.

Zhaoping.com is also growing rapidly and is part of the Alibaba Group

Chinajob.com is just another

Payment providers
Alipay is the largest online payment provider in China. Alipay and Taobao are both owned by the Alibaba Group. Alipay provides payment solutions for e-commerce sites. Most domestic Chinese banks are represented in their cooperations.

There are of course more payment providers in China. Below a small overview of a market research I found. I cannot guarantee the correctness of the data but it will at least show you the top providers in China.

Housing and real estate

Soufang A housing database to which most real estate and construction companies are connected to. Many local real estate companies have a Soufang profile instead of their own website. Also individuals can find everything related to housing there.


Summary

China’s internet adoption is growing fast. Faster than its fast growing economy and there are numerous opportunities in this market. Knowing about China’s internet applications can help both application developers and also business people that want to do other types of business in China. When you want to do business in China you will need to know how to do your internet marketing, where to find your people and how to source materials. I believe that the above companies keep growing with a fast rate. Keep in mind that the international market is almost not touched yet since many applications simply dont even have internationalisation yet. Imagine that with the already high interest of the world in China, what will happen if the marketplaces, jobboards, communities and internet marketing tools are easily accessible. This is one of those times that opportunities are in front of you. The same as when simple domain names where still available, the start of communities etc. Imagine that you will be the one that has created China’s newest successful web application company.

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*1   http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-02-01/baidu-jumps-after-4q-profit-sales-beat-estimates.html
*2  http://www.chinainternetwatch.com/926/china-internet-users-2011/
*3  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_virtual_communities_with_more_than_100_million_users
*4 http://www.chinainternetwatch.com/519/top-chinese-online-travel-booking-websites/
*5 http://www.sinocom.org/showthread.php?t=65

Posted in China, Marketing, SEO, Software | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment »

Is reverse Ajax going to be the new trend in business applications?

February 4, 2011 by Appwatchers

Is reverse Ajax going to be the new trend in business applications? Reverse Ajax (technology for updating your browser with latest server information without having to refresh) exists for quite a while, but when analyzing most business applications,  the result turns out that almost none of the applications support it, causing users having to refresh all the time to get updated information. Even the use of normal Ajax is not taken that far yet in business applications which means that in the coming years, users will enjoy many benefits of more user friendly business applications.

What is reverse Ajax? According to us it is the new way to make the browser even more user-friendly and interactive. Reverse Ajax / Comet is relatively old; about 3-4 years. It starts to become mature by having enough libraries, documentation and books coming out in the last years. The server will send push signals to the browser only when something is updated. Then only the affected part of the browser will be updated. Think about the push messages in your twitter page for example. Or the “new email loading” of Gmail (Facebook, Google have all made their own solution already). The most important win is, that it brings convenience to the user.

Wikipedia: “ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comet_%28programming%29 - Comet is known by several other names, including Ajax Push,[4][5] Reverse Ajax,[6] Two-way-web,[7] HTTP Streaming,[7] and HTTP server push[8] among others.[9] “

Imagine that in your business application such as a CRM or Sales system, that when sales reports are filled in, they popup directly in the managers face. Or when a new order is placed, that the user responsible for completing the order gets a sticky note in his/her dashboard with the action on it that needs to be taken. Well there can be numerous examples of using the technology. In our product we used it for example in the online Scrum board. It’s a task board on which project teams are processing tasks in full transparency within the team. The moment somebody moves a task on the board to a new status or changes the assignee, the specific part in the Scrum board will be directly updated without the users needing to reload the entire page. This way the team always knows that they are working with updated info.

We believe it’s only a normal evolution of web applications. It all started with just basic desktop applications, then many moved to actual web apps, more integrated with social tools and other systems, to more interactive meeting places where customers can directly being helped (web-chats) , project teams on different locations and management getting real time notifications when needed.

From a technical perspective, Reverse Ajax is killing for your server. Only with the latest Libraries and frameworks it will work well. This is also the reason why it is still something new while existing for such a long time. It finally gets mature and supported.

There is an important specification of Sun on the way. The Servlet 3.0 specification. This specification will equalize all application servers (e.g. WebLogic, Tomcat, Jetty, etc.) so that they all get a standardized way of handling reverse Ajax. The Jetty application server is doing this already by using continuations. We expect that all the latest versions of application servers will support this within a couple of months. For example, Tomcat 7.0.6 is released on the 14th of January 2011, and “the first stable release of the Tomcat 7 branch”. Tomcat supports this new Servlet 3.0 spec. Larger companies will not make the jump to an Apache that is just 2 weeks stable. This could create many opportunities for new companies. 

The interesting business aspect is that many existing business applications will not implement this or will have large delays in implementing it in their original code. This creates advantages for the new business applications coming out. No legacy, no restrictions because implementation decisions and technology choices from the past. The most important thing is that the business user will start to understand the benefits in time. The new trend will be that everything you look at in your system is up to date, creating a jump in user friendliness of business applications.

There are more technologies that support this type of user interaction. DWR (Direct Web Remoting) and GWT (Google Web Toolkit) are the most frequently used technologies nowadays.

Please share your vision on this.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment »

Lessons on SEO strategy

February 4, 2011 by Appwatchers

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is very important and everybody knows that. The effect on your sales should not be underestimated. If people can’t find you, you have no business. To make it even more serious, I believe that the CEO or marketing manager himself should be involved with this key aspect of marketing and sales. SEO is actually not difficult. It just needs the right understanding of setting up your website(s). It needs strategy in getting to the top. There are 5 key areas in SEO:

1) your external web presence
2) your site setup
3) your content (part of site setup but needs special attention)
4) results and statistics
5) receiving your visitors

1. External web presence

There are many ways to make yourself known on the internet . There are communities, blogs, yellow pages etc. For your web ranking it will be very important to get links from other sites. Especially the sites that are considered important by Google and have a lot of traffic (these will boost your ranking). Examples of the most frequently used sites for external links are Facebook, linked’in and Twitter. In all of these sites you are able to register your company name and URL. so if you didn’t register to any of these, do it! It’s a quick win. The win for others is that Facebook and Twitter for example still have quite some resistance from the especially middle aged and older users. If you still think that Facebook is only used by schoolchildren you need to check again. They started a marketplace, recruitment services, etc. I talked to many people who think that Twitter is just a hype without ever having logged in to try. I must admit, it can be quite boring and you need discipline to use it. On the other hand, you don’t have to use Twitter for every little personal thing in your life. You can use it for many different ways. Let me try to list some benefits I have found:

1.1 when meeting new people on network events or exhibitions ask for their Twitter of try to find them and follow them. When you follow someone, they will often start following you as well. The real benefit is that when they tweet something you see their picture and “status” , the more it happens the more you think you know them. The same works the other way. If you tweet often about your specialism or interests, people with start to remember you the next time and might contact you for business or to recommend you to their network.

1.2 you can use Twitter to post your company news. New product releases, upgrades, discounts, support updates, etc. The powerful search in Twitter might cause new potential customers or press to find you. post tweets with news and add direct links to your website.

1.3 follow what your competition is doing. Absorb and learn. Stay up to date about their new products.

1.4 talk to your friends or network. You can also send more direct messages to 1 person to give congratulations or give them advice. Also by retweeting you can help your network to spread their message while being recognized by others that you are helping out as reliable source.

Be careful that you don’t become one of those people that says that you are too old and that it’s not for your generation to use this kind of Internet stuff. Keep in mind that it is just as difficult for younger people to use it and actually spread some meaningful news. Older people should even have it easier since they have more experiences to share ;) . But seriously, if you still have 5 to 20 years to go until you retire, you will have to pick this up for your benefit. Build a Internet strategy. If it sounds to difficult for you, you can do two things. Read blogs and learn, or talk to people you know that use it. If still too difficult get an consultant that helps you out for 1000 to 1500 Euro to implement the basics and put you in the right direction. Make sure you keep up with competition and build your Internet presence.

Another thing that works well it to ask friends or opinion sites to write about your company or products in their blogs. This will help potential customers to learn about your company. Almost everybody who goes to your website and could become a potential customer, will also search around on the Internet to learn from other people’s experiences with your company. The more references you have the more reliable you look. Buying is all about trust. Again Twitter may reinforce this. Now, the personal tweets could come in handy. When somebody has to deal with you and learns that you are an actual human with family, hobbies, etc, the trust factor might go up.

But what about negative news on blogs and twitter? Accept it. It is also not normal when all news Is very good. It might look suspicious. It is better if you have a case that something went wrong and you handled it fast and friendly. You might even get some compliments from the original ‘complainer’ afterwards. Learn how to deal with criticism and try to improve the situation. If you get emotional, just as with emails.. Wait a bit to react and think it though. If you complain in a restaurant about the food you also don’t expect the waiter to shout back at you and making a fool out of himself ;).

There is also another way to get more attention. This is by publishing white papers about topics in your field. In my search I have seen that some companies are surviving on 1 to 5 white papers for years. You can ask downloaders to leave their contact details so you can contact them later about the topic. You know their field of interest and can classify them as a warm lead.

A last advice is to register for marketplaces. For example the Google marketplace is a part of Google apps or at least something connected to Google apps. Many google apps users will get direct advertisement in their environment on tools in the Google marketplace, this is of course mainly used for web applications.

2. Site setup

Yes Google looks at many things. You have to follow these tricks or you can call it standardization for better website writing :). You are not allowed to cheat, otherwise you will be punished and fall down in rankings. Some rules for improvement:

2.1 Make sure all your pictures have an alt name tag. This is the name in which google recognizes the picture since google cannot see that otherwise.

2.2 think about the semantics. Make sure your website works with HTML h1 for your main title, h2 for subtitles and h3 for less important subtitles. The ranking weight of the words in the title will be pushed up when it has a h1 tag. if you are not familiar with HTML don’t worry. In Word from Microsoft office you use the same structure for your chapters. It is also called h1, h2 and h3 if you want to setup an index in Word. Now the rules of google say that you can only use 1 h1 per page which makes sense. Don’t cheat or you will be punished.

2.3 page titles. Page titles can only have a max of 64 characters and 15 words and should match with the text on your page. Each page of your website has a different title. The title can be read in the top or your browser and in the tabs of your browser. These are very important for Google to do the indexing of your site.

2.4 recently google started to look at the loading speed of your website. They say that faster sites give the users a better Internet experience. So make sure your pictures are not too large in size and take out big java scrips and flash components that are not essential.

2.5 limit JavaScript and flash use in general. Websites using flash may look very cool but they are terrible for your SEO. This is because it is difficult or impossible for Google to get names out of the web components.

2.6 meta keywords and meta description. The keywords are not used anymore for your ranking. In the past it was an easy way for helping your ranking on words. But the algorithm got a bit more advanced and looks now at the content of your website instead of your self produced list which is more sensitive for cheaters. You are still able to fill these in. Up to you.

2.7 internal links. Make you website link well internally so Google can easily index it.

2.8 use the right url structure. The URL is very important for Google. The best way is to use a minus symbol between each word. For example www.Greenpiano.com/our-special-and-new-pianos; Will make sure that your url pops up in google searches on each word independently or combined. Underscores for example will not have that effect.

2.9 short URL paths. don’t make your site too deep. Make the link structure easy and short.

2.10 use a XML and HTML site-map. This helps google again to index your site better and faster. There are free XML generators you can find on the Internet.

2.12 try to start with a small adapted account. Go to adapted and start experimenting. You can set the maximum budget on 100 EUR to try it out. There are also tools of google to check what keywords have the highest search rates. The moment you know that you can play with the amount of money you want to pay per visitor.

A very good tool to use is SenSEO. When you install the SenSEO tool in firefox (tools / add-ons). It will appear on the bottom of you browser and you will be able to check any page from your website with different criteria. Check my example on the NY times. The result from this tools is about the same as what you get from your SEO consultant.

What not to do:

2.13 produce the same word just copied a couple of hundred of times. Even worse, make the text color then the same color as your background to hide it for the normal visitors.

2.14 be careful with duplicated information. Google will check if you are not just copy and paste the same text on many pages or on the same page.

3. Content is king!

A very important factor and not implemented well on many sites. The main idea is to keep your site clean and easy to overview. True, but if you think a bit further, Google needs words and text to match you on. Very black and white; 10000 words have a better chance than 400 words. Its as simple as that. So, how to setup your site to stay clean and still have a lot of content? I believe that a company blog is the solution. The moment you have a blog, you have unlimited space to write in a special area in your site while still hanging all the content in your website or under your URL. Now keep in mind that all the blogs can have their own page, their own URL, their own title, pictures, semantics, keywords, etc. You can even give the blog comment functionality to get more content from interested readers.

Of course, only a blog is not enough. Also your normal pages need to have enough content. I think its about 5 to 7 percent of your text that has to show your important words. So if you are selling a CRM system, you will have to use CRM very often in your text and titles. Just search for some large companies in Google. The first rated companies definitely have used this strategy. So check on your own product/service and see who is on top. Learn from your competitors!

4. Results and statistics

To measure your results and statistics you can sign up for free accounts at:

Center for web masters: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/home?hl=nl

Website optimizer: https://www.google.com/analytics/siteopt/

Google Analytics: https://www.google.com/analytics

There are of course also many non Google tools on the market which can provide even more information about your website performance and visitors. Nevertheless, the above will be handy tools for the SEO starter. Important functions are:

Measure your visitors: find out how many visitors you have, how many unique visitors and how long they stay on your website.

Measure your conversion: measure hits on the page that users will arrive at after they purchased something or filled in a webform.

Measuring your visitors and conversions is interesting to see if your initiatives in SEO optimalisation pay off. Or if your new marketing campaign has lured many visitors. And if many of these visitors actually contacted you or placed orders.

5. Receiving your visitors

So now you have spend a lot of effort and money on optimizing your website to be found. This is the time to follow your visitors behavior. Do they stay long on the website? Do they leave after visiting a specific page? Is the conversion rate good enough? Now it is up to you to optimize your territory. Do people feel informed and relaxed when checking your website? Can they easily find what they expect to find? How are you facilitating them? Some advice:

Make sure your visitors can easily contact you. Make the “contact us” link available from every page. The moment your visitors have questions it should be one click away or even better, on the same page. Now you can also think further. If you go to a normal shop in the shopping street you expect a shop attendant to help you when you have questions. Technology allows it now to easily install a live chat on your website and proactively greet the visitors and answer their questions. I believe that in the end every website will have a live chat. It will be just as normal as a normal shop attendant. The only thing is that people need to get used to this trend again. It becomes more and more easy to get a chat tool on your website. And the chat tools are getting more and more advanced. You can see where people come from, if they have visited you before and even which browser and operating system they are working with.

Make sure that you can follow your visitors well and even better; guide them to make their purchases. It is a waste of energy if you are not prepared to receive your potential customers in your online office/shop.

I hope that this post helps people to get familiar with SEO activities. SEO should be something easy and close to the entrepreneur / marketing manager / CEO. Don’t think that SEO is a technical thing that should be done by technicians only. SEO is more a marketing strategy and can easily be mastered by the manager who is willing to learn.

Posted in Entrepreneurship, Marketing, SEO, Software | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments »

Web application product development

January 30, 2011 by Appwatchers

Being the product owner of our new SaaS product is maybe the most exiting business experience I ever had. We are working on a product for about 3 years already. The role of “product owner” means that you are the facilitator, the planner, the expert and commercial manager of the product. In the end you are guiding it based on gut feeling in combination with best practices and advise from others. The things I have learned until now on product development and product companies.

Many products start from scratching your own itch.

In our case we got tired of using a separate project management system,  a time registration system and an other CRM system. All information was about the customers but everything was out of sync. We we not able to have the information equal in all systems because sometimes an engineer forgot to write the hours in the hour registration, and therefore only recording them in the project management system. Even more annoying, the project management system had so many different statusses, that in the end is was also unclear to export the correct hours. When we finally got our own hours complete we had to show these to the customer who again had another list.. I think this is a story that is typical for many companies. And at one day you get the idea (or someone tells you) that the product is cooler than any solution in the market, and you start to consider it seriously.

A product needs commitment

The moment you start with a project you need to keep in mind that it requires quite some commitment in resources (Your time, a team, money..) . Also the focus of the entrepreneur needs to be set. Especially after the “”scratching your own itch” you need to catch up with the marketing research. Well , you already know that you couldn’t find the exact same product otherwise there was no itch.. But still there are many comparable products and a strategy needs to be defined on how to target or find your first customers. Also the development team needs quite some commitment. you cannot just draw a picture and they will make it. The nuances, the user interface and every little logic should be right. This takes a lot of time but will be a big part of the success of the product.

Understand the technical team members and basic technology

For me, I am not technical, on the other hand I have seen enough to understand where the risks are and what causes extra work for the engineers. The communication in our team is very constructive and the team comes often with very good functionality ideas that we have overlooked. I know we are looking for the most fancy implementation but need to find out what the smartest way is. The most simple looking stuff can take tons of production hours while some really cool and fancy looking gadgets can be realized in just a couple of hours. The only way of finding that out is to maintain a good feel with the team.

Make sure you have a place to write your new ideas and feedback at any time

The best ideas happen in the most unhandy locations. During dinners, talking to friends, in the car and even when waking up in the middle of the night. Be prepared! What I do is to have a mindmapping tool (iPhone/iPad) with me at all times. It is a basic tool that just requires some text and writes it to a jpg later. See the below example. This is an example I made 5 minutes ago for this post. Imagine that you start with a mindmap for each module, or for your launch strategy. It will help you creating a quick overview that may warn you for stuff you would otherwise forget.

A product needs to go into an “evolution”

It is very rare to get the product right in the first time. getting it delivered without bugs is one thing. But I mean getting the right flow, and feeling of the product takes time. you need time to work with it and also let others advise you if this is the most convenient way of using the system. I have seen that over time it took about 2 to 3 rounds to improve a module to have it running fine. To excel with the modules you always need to keep an eye on possible improvements. I believe that when entrepreneurs have this mindset, they will act differently during the first release and try to find the improvements as soon as possible to get to the third round.

The user interface is key!

Investing in a professional user interface is very important. Your system should look from this time and the user interaction should be easy. There are companies specialized in just that.  Often for customer projects we get the question if we can do the design of the product. We normally prefer to work with external design companies because they are specialized in that. Design is more a marketing thing than a technical thing to my opinion. We can make clean corporate layouts for internal use, but when you really like to go for a solution in which many users will work. Then invest in a designer.

Set your goals but stay flexible!

We are working with the Scrum methodology. We plan sprints and release these every +- 2 months. Its important to  continuously learn from the feedback of customers on functionality and even on your price setting. It could happen that just because of the right timing you can enter on a wave that can help your marketing. This could be having something ready for investors, for a trade-show, a presentation, etc.

Go live as soon as possible.

There are tons of companies that are building and are not going live. The launch is very often being delayed by the scope creep. New ideas and new things get into the original scope and the saying “without this functionality we cannot go live” is often heard in companies. The trick is however to release and keep improving. the moment your product is live, it doesn’t mean your team stops with programming. You will probably have the new functionality in a new release . The benefit of releasing as soon as possible is that you will learn from customer (your beta testers) reactions and the world starts to learn about you. Bloggers can add their first experiences with your product, google starts indexing. You are finally able to show something. Keep in mind with going live fast i dont mean that you should release a system full of bugs and security problems. Less functionality is better.

Gut feeling and vision

Follow your gut feeling and ideas on what the market needs. Of course these should be backed up with research and experience you have acquired. It is easier for your environment to say that something doesn’t work than tell you that it will be the next best thing. If totally nobody believes in your idea you will need to start thinking on how you are taking feedback :) . The thing is that setting up a new initiative or product is very difficult and scary. You will need to invest in it and if it doesn’t work out other people were right.. . So what! , real passionate entrepreneurs dont care about that and feel that the opportunity that they are chasing is the best decision of that moment. There are of course difficult times that things dont go as fast or even wrong. But the entrepreneur with enough agility will overcome these things and deliver his/her vision.

I will probably update this post along the way. Please let me know if you have valuable additions or comments! we are still learning everyday and are sure there are many other best practices.

Posted in Entrepreneurship, Software | Tagged , , | Leave a Comment »

An adventure in the fastest growing environment of the world

January 29, 2011 by Appwatchers

I have been running a software company in one of the most exciting parts of the world. We have an operations facility in one of the fastest growing countries in the world. Even better; one of the fastest growing cities in that country. 3.5 years ago when we started in Chengdu, China it was already a large city of about 12 million people. Many multinationals have been entering the city in the last 5 years. Nevertheless, if you look at the amount of western foreigners living here in the last couple of years it was quite limited to some students, a handfull of expats and some pioneering entrepreneurs. Now it seems that that starts to change. It is definitely not comparable with Shanghai, Beijing or Shenzhen, but it starts to grow.

Our 420 m2 office is located in the city center of Chengdu. We had the luck to get the office via our contacts and have the only balcony watching over the city square. The office location is unique since on the frontside we have the central square and on the backside we are looking over the central park. Amazing how we as foreigners had the luck to get this location.

Some changes over the last years:

-Chengdu subway opened
-High speed train to Qongqing (which is a city of 35 million people)
-The central renmin nan lu totally renewed
-About 10 new office towers around our office in the city center
-Companies like Maersk, Accenture, Wipro, Volvo, Volkswagen entering with huge plants or backoffices.
-6 new Dutch entrepreneurs opened their companies
-Belgium and German chamber of commerces opened in the last year
-Our customers who came here 2 years ago told us that the cars in the street have been upgraded. Lots of Audi’s A6, BMW 7.
-Almost every building in the city center if fully covered with LED
-International MBA’s started in collaboration with the universities here
-About 10 Starbucks and 20 Apple stores (who maintain their global pricing strategy)
-3G introduced last year

(I’ll try to update this later when i get some comments)

The above is just to show in what kind of environment we are living and working. Of course next to the Chengdu environment we have a lot to do with Europe where our customers are, and Hong Kong where we have our sales office. In the blog posts i will mainly focus on our experiences from setting up the company, the operations, software, product development, marketing and of course China.

I hope i will receive a lot of feedback that i can learn from.  Share your opinions and experiences in the comments!

Posted in China, Entrepreneurship | Tagged , , , , , | 2 Comments »

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