December 13, 2009 by Viktor
Day after LeWeb in Paris there was a really nice event organized by Seedcamp in London called SeedSummit. Sasa and I took an opportunity and went to London couple of days earlier to attend meetings with potential customers, VC’s etc… I will tell you more about that, when it is closed. This is all you get for now :)
Those were the great three days, full of meetings and afterwork partying :). In between all that we accidentally bumped into world premiere of Cameron’s Avatar as well. I will never understand how Londoners manage their private lives.
Here is a short overview of Seedcamp summit on ShoutEm blog. At Techcrunch Uk you can read thoughts from investors who’ve been there.
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December 6, 2009 by banovotz
User stories
Lately, in software development lifecycle, vastly formalized requirement documents are being replaced by more agile, so called “user stories” which are actually short software requirements formulated in users own words. User stories are created by the customer or it’s representative preferably in the meeting with developer. User stories should be short and have in focus only one aspect of the software which is to be designed. For example:
"As a user I shall have a profile which I can edit."
"User profile is consistent of Name, Email, Location, Title, Homepage"
Easy and clean. Both developer and user can reformulate the user story until agreed. But, problem can occur with interpretation of the user story. Let say developer took the profile shall be editable in this way:
But customer had in mind something more traditional, with only one link to “edit my profile” which then look like this:
So, user was not satisfied with the implementation. Comic artist draw this to depict whereabouts of this process in funny way:
Who knows is it a accidentally or with purpose, but on comic above there are no software testers mentioned. And if quality assurance is taken seriously in product development, those are the guys which can help the product is building right.
Acceptance test
Luckily enough for end users, there is a way out of the mess depicted in the comic. One way we already outlined at the start. Monolithic requirement specification documents we replaced by user stories which mean we will discover problems much earlier. However, process of developing software cannot live solely on user stories. Many of us read some book before watched the movie based on that book. From each reader perspective some movies got the book just right and some not. Why? How to escape that in our user stories case? Easily. Each user story has to have its Acceptance test. Acceptance tests are ideally written by the customers representative and software tester. Those tests are high level test which test completness of the user story.
Traditionally, acceptance tests are considered to be the final barrier of quality assurance before the product ship. However, in agile way of developing software, features are implemented rapidly so battle on this barrier is fought more intensive than in traditional software development models. This battle with defects, misinterpreted features, tight release schedule and big quality demands are fought every day by software testers.
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December 2, 2009 by kalabic
HTC Hero is my first Android phone and I’m using it for a month now. First minute impressions were very good and that is mostly because of its user-interface, the latest version of HTC Sense™ and applications that are bundled with it. Looking from the outside, device itself looks very nice but still not that elegant like an iPhone:
- Front side has a trackball and six buttons (‘Call’, ‘Home’, ‘Menu’, ‘End call’/’Lock screen’, ‘Search’ and ‘Back’). This makes it look a bit geeky with too many hardware buttons in my opinion. Some other Android devices have just three of them (‘Menu’, ‘Home’ and ‘Back’).
- Up top there’s a 3.5mm headphones socket and at the base it has the ExtUSB port which is compatible with standard mini-USB. No complains here. And yes, it will recharge the battery when connected to computer with USB cable.
- Left side has volume controls and on the back there’s the 5-megapixel autofocus camera. There’s no flash and no dedicated camera button.
- To access microSD card it is necessary to remove back cover.
It is instantly usable as a social-network client since it comes with preinstalled Twitter application and Facebook bookmark in the Browser. There are handy shortcuts to them right on the homescreen in the shape of pretty looking widgets. The homescreen has seven panes and you can switch between them with a horizontal swipe across the touchscreen in either direction, or using the trackball. To add even more flexibility and space to the homescreen, HTC has created ‘Scenes’. ‘Scenes’ allow multiple homescreen layouts which will be used to differentiate between workday, social use, travel, etc.
Since I was new to Android and Sense™ user interface, it at first impressed me with its smooth user interface. Then there was a period of confusion in managing applications while I was learning my way around Android system because I was new to it. That didn’t last long and now I can certainly say it is an excellent smartphone with very modern user interface and operating system. Android application store is now offering paid and free applications and it had around 5,000 items in May this year. And it is growing strong, very probably passing 10,000 mark by end of this year.
You can read detailed reviews of it here:
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October 16, 2008 by Viktor
Ok here are some good news.
ShoutEm is selected into 7 minutes competition at TMT.Ventures’08 Zagreb. FIve companies are selected from 35 companies. That’s what I’ve heard.
In the mean you can apply for our private beta testing at www.shoutem.com.
Next week we are at Web 2.0 Expo in Berlin so you can meet us there if you want short demo of ShoutEm.
See you,
Viktor
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September 9, 2008 by Viktor
ShoutEm team will go for a group visit to Web 2.0 Expo in Berlin. It is a famous O’Reilly’s conference which takes place in New York, San Francisco, Tokyio and Berlin.
I guess that all European geeks will be hanging around. Nicole Simon had posted some info on other events taking place around Web 2.0 Expo. It seems that it will be very exciting during those days in Berlin.
Few of those:
I’m really looking forward meeting German geeks. I heard that Berlin is really a hot spot and that there is lot of interesting startups. we already met guys from aka-aki at Mobile 2.0 in Barcelona.
In the mean time read some interesting links that Zemanta suggest to me while writing this :)
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August 27, 2008 by Viktor
Well, we went for a Short visit to Slovenia. To meet Andrej from Noovo, guys from Zemanta and friends we met at business angles in Ljubljana Sosed.
Andrey show us Noovo in action and I really like what I have seen. Lot of features and pretty inovative stuff. I like those news agregation services because it is already very hard to follow all that infrmation and it will become harder and harder. Company which can provide best software for that purpose will be very sucesfull. I just hope that it wont be Google or some other large rotten company.
Also we have heard lot of first hand experience of doing business in Palo Alto. Pretty interesting stuff. Good luck to Andrey.
Zemanta guys are young full of energy. We have heard a lot from them about their technology etc… They develop mostly in Python. My favorite language :). They have a long road to go yet. But it seems that bloggers are adopting their plugin a lot.
And finnaly Sosed. Well these guys impressed us with knowledge and enthusiasm. That was the highlight of the day. The way how they pulled of Sosed business is quite impressive. Sosed is a service where you can get your computer fixed at home at no time. Nothing revolutionary but very very usefull :). They have applied all those Seth Godin tricks in promoting their busines, that we all have read.
And with Sosed we are considering few business options. So we will se what will happen out of it.
And at the end for your info we have not been shortlisted in Seedcamp. But that will not stop us. We are 100% sure about ShoutEm sucess. And all that good feedback so far keep us motivating. We will get more feedback from Seedcamo too. But I guess that competition was really tough.
See you all, stay tuned.
Tags: English
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August 14, 2008 by Viktor
We did small research on Fire Eagle. It is a great service with
really cool features. I was so excited about retrieving location via cell tower id. It feels so great that you can avoid any business with mobile operator.
However we have tested it in Zagreb and it does not have info on our cell tower ids. I guess thay need some time to gather data about it first.
Second thing is that you cannot use it as a white label API but your users have to have account on Yahoo FIre Eagle and let you use their data. I think that we will support that in Shout’Em but besides that we will use their geocoding and zonetag services internally for users which does not have Yahoo accounts.
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August 11, 2008 by Viktor
So we have finished our Seedcamp application. We worked pretty hard in order to have functional prototype.
For that purpose we have recorded short video on Shout’Em current features. http://www.shoutem.com/video.html
And inspired by the Back of the napkin guy I have sketch this. I really like it. I guess I could work on that sketch for years :). Like Google on this video.
ShoutEm on the back of the napkin
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August 7, 2008 by Viktor
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July 16, 2008 by Viktor
One of my favorites services Last.fm started to compensate artists. If this works out and I don’t see why it should not, it would be the greatest thing ever happened in music :). After Punk of course :)
http://blog.wired.com/music/2008/07/lastfm-compensa.html
Imagine that bands can avoid labels completely. On Last.fm they have it all. Promotion, distribution, sales…
When I was a teenager I was listening music mostly form independent labels. We were putting money in envelopes with list of albums I want to buy and guys would send me back packages. And these days you just buy your music from Last.fm directly from artist. Nice :)
Other nice post from Seth Godin on Amazon kindle explains how the costs of music and books 
can dramatically be lowered this way. Also he predicts great future for Amazon Kindle and I agree with that. I think that Kindle is great device. It is not so hyped as iTunes or iPhone but it is definitely not a geek device with limited market as iPhone.
So conclusion. Books and music cheap and at any place. Isn’t that great. When I remember that I had to wait for two weeks to get Nirvana album on a tape:)
And it is a nice way to make publishers run out of their business :)
Tags: English
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