Category Archive
The following is a list of all entries from the business category.
EclipseCon – Day 2 & 3
I love this conference so far, never saw such a lively community, the convention center is great, food is awesome :P. The rhythm is very intense, days are quite demanding but it’s a very good experience, especially being still a student; got the chance to get more focus on the industrial world.
Yesterday I was pretty much in the short talk sessions, mostly about industrial application of RCP. I gave my talk in the morning, the feedback was very good, I’m very satisfied with it.
No talks for me today, I spent the whole day making connections and talking about future works, enjoyed it very much. The poster reception was quite exciting too.
Tomorrow is the last (half) day, then long way back home.
EclipseCon – Day 1
Today EclipseCon started in Santa Clara, CA. The day was devoted to tutorials, a lot of interesting topics were discussed.
In the morning I went to the ”Building commercial-quality plugins” tutorial; I already read the book, and the talk was delivered by the authors, so I got a deeper understanding of some topics, pretty cool.
In the afternoon I went to the ”Mylyn best practices”, by Mik Kersten, and it was kinda awesome having a talk delivered by the author of the tool himself.
Anyway, so good so far, the conference is running smooth and nicely, lots of interesting topics and people. Looking forward to tomorrow’s talks…
Oh, please… Android Developer Challenge: Italy excluded
In my previous post I dealt (as the greatest part of tech bloggers) with Google Android Developer Challenge.
I just discovered in the FAQ these lines, which upset me:
Who’s eligible to participate?
- The Android Developer Challenge is open to individuals, teams of individuals, and business entities. While we seek to make the Challenge open worldwide, we cannot open the Challenge to residents of Cuba, Iran, Syria, North Korea, Sudan, and Myanmar (Burma) because of U.S. laws. In addition, the Challenge is not open to residents of Italy or Quebec because of local restrictions.
Looks like the bureaucracy in Italy is way too complicated:
Fabrizio Giudici (post 405849595839) writes:
You might wonder what are those “local restrictions”. Well, for my country:
- prizes must be assigned in presence of a notary public and a representative from an acknowledged consumer association;
- prizes that are not delivered (for any reason, including recipient not picking them) must be donated to some non-profit organizations, explicitly listed in the contest rules;
- there are some papers to fill in and the contest must be registered to two different Ministries (you know, in Italy there are a lot of Ministries, sometimes it’s hard to understand who’s doing what) and to the State Monopoly Administration.
But above all:
- the entity which is organizing the contest must guarantee in advance a security deposit
“cash loan” (not sure of the translation here, but I hope you get the point)covering the whole value of prizes.
I’m speechless… absolutely speechless.
GeekInterview.com
Don’t know how long this site has been out there so far, but I just love it. A list of all kinds of interviews questions, ranging from career goals to specific technical problems, browsable by category and company as well. Very nice.
New books
Ordered some new books from Amazon to get into my readings page (new for me actually, they’ve been out there for years 
):
- F. Buschmann et al. – Pattern-oriented software architecture (Vol. 1)
- Guy Kawasaki – The art of the start
- Guy Kawasaki – Rules for revolutionaries
- Chad Fowler – My job went to India
The first one just arrived, and I have to say I like it more than the GoF book (which I definitely loved…). Looking forward to get the others… 
Skebby.it: cheap texting (for us as well)
Believe it or not, the price of a single SMS text message here in Italy is 0.15 EUR (0.20 USD, more or less). Let’s get it a bit more impressive: a single character is a byte, a single text message is 160 characters long, so I get charged 0.20 USD to send you 160 bytes, which means transferring a megabyte of text would cost to the final Italian user 1325 USD. It looks like a lot of money, right?
Fortunately a lot of smart people live on this planet, and Davide Marrone – a 24-years-old computer science student @ University of Milan – developed Skebby, a java app to enable people texting via their mobile phones (through Skebby’s servers) at a much lower rates.
The free membership allows users to send a limited number of text message (exploiting free services) at a cost of 0.01 EUR.
The premium membership allows no-limit texting at rates depending on how many text messages you buy in advance, but you might get till a 50% 70% off the current price.
[UPDATE: You should also add the cost of connecting from your mobile to Skebby's servers. ]
I don’t remember but if I’m not wrong Skebby.it is still only in Italian (actually it was on the national TVs yesterday, so servers went down immediately, they’re moving on right now ). If so, I hope they’re going to get an English version as soon as possible.
Get a startup up in 10.5 hours
My previous post was about releasing early your application. This is what you call “early”! And the app is nice, maybe even nicer than the average product posted @ Techcrunch.
“Release early, release often”: why bother at all
Here is a very nice post by Andy Brice @ “Successful Software” about the importance of releasing early in software development. I commented the post as well, so I won’t say the same things here.
“You wouldn’t write a thousand lines of code before you tried to compile it. Why would you spend a year or more on development before testing it in the market?”
The author lists a few arguments “for” and “against” releasing early, and puts “Reputation” in the “against” list (ok, not properly, since he explains how not to get a bad reputation). I surely agree with his argument and I think “Reputation” should be in the “for” list as well.
If I release early and frequently add new features in response to users’ feedback, I will incrementally build users’ confidence in the product, acquire new customers, get blogs buzzing about the application and its improvements, and make users feel like their desires do really count and are driving future developments of the product.
On the other hand, if I come up with a late released, one-size-fits-all product, users won’t feel part of the development process at all, which is weird since they actually are important project’s stakeholders.
Anyway, some really good points are in the post… you made it easier on me to release v1.0 for my GSoC project (review coming soon) 
.
(BTW the blog is currently the “Fastest growing blog” @ wordpress.com. Congratulations. )
Traps of traditional thinking
Guy Kawasaki’s latest post points out a very interesting manifesto by Matt May (author of “The elegant solution”, which is going right away in my amazon wishlist), called Mind of the Innovator: Taming the Traps of Traditional Thinking.
In my modest experience, software development is one of the areas where traditional, conventional thinking is most dangerous and leads to failure (I believe this could be one of the factors driving India’s success in software development: I’ve been dealing with this in this old post of mine).
The 19-pages manifesto is dense of precious advises and considerations everyone who ever wrote a line of code cannot disagree with. Read it if you get the chance to.
Equinox and OSGi in web application development
I was really amazed reading this post by Chris Aniszczyk about moving webapp development towards OSGi bundles. A few Eclipse projects are active in that direction, and it is possible to embed Equinox (Eclipse’s OSGi implementation, which underlies Eclipse architecture itself) into a servlet container.
One of the original objectives for the server-side work was to look at what’s involved in launching and interacting with various server-side containers. Currently, there is actively maintained work in support of embedding in a servlet container.
This could really introduce a revolution in webapp development. Amazing.
PS: You might want to read more about the OSGi technology…
