Wrapping up Microsoft Remix SEA 2007
Attended mostly the design tracks today since most of the Orcas and Atlas stuff can be quite easily found on the web. Was interested to listen more on the video aspects of Silverlight.
Had been reading Lee Brimelows’s WPFBlog since having a deep dive session into WPF last year so was keen to hear him talk and also showcase some of his prototypes.
Another area of interest was PHP and IIS7 since I’m also a huge fan of developing using PHP for web applications vs ASP.Net since its just easier to have an application that can move from a LAMP to Windows platform. Virtual map showed how they could (without writing any code) just port over their applications tradtionally hosted on LAMP to Windows Server 2008 (Longhorn) and IIS7.
Beau Ambur from Metaliq also did a session on their prototype built for MIX’07 earlier in the keynote so they expanded a little more on the lessons learnt in the afternoon session. Was quite technical in how they delved into the various technicalities of video aspect ratios and bitrates.
The last panel discussion for the day was on the Social Networking scene in Singapore. I’m pretty interested in this since helping out with SportsKaki has given an addtional incentive to look out for new opportunities for social networks. Strait’s Time’s Stomp was present as well as Singtel and MediaCorp. (Had to miss this session WHEN customer called in the middle of it!! Sigh…)
Only comment was that for an event to bring designers into the Microsoft solution platform, there didn’t seem that many sessions or topics that catered to address the huge base of designers that are mainly using Adobe tools at the moment. I think for now, Adobe Photoshop CS3 would still be the prefered choice of tool for pixel pushing while Blend would slowly edge into the web RIA space currently dominated by Flash.
Microsoft Remix SEA 07 with a focus on Silverlight
Attending Microsoft’s ReMIX SEA 2007 at DBS Arts House. There’s some pretty interesting topics on Silverlight usage and the ease of deployment. It should be interesting to develop a application since have been coding using Visual Studio for some time. I think especially for businesses with huge consumer focus would benefit from a richer user experience on the internet as we cross the threshold from static web sites to rich interactive ones.
Interviewing for the right Sales Person (Why its important for Small Businesses)
Being in a small business means having to wear a few hats, one of which is to screen and hire the right people for the job. Since I’m mainly a technical person, the interviewees I’ve had to handle are mostly for Developer roles. Its pretty easy to gauge on a technical skill level what type of developer a person is but its not always fool-proof as we’ve encountered some bad hires one to two months down a project. Especially in small businesses, bad hires are detrimental to the company’s cashflow and morale once people have to leave. Its also a huge waste of time to have to keep up the constant cycle of looking for the right person.
While I am currently more involved in the sales process, I haven’t conducted interviews for sales people before and so had to quickly do some research on the types of questions that can gauge a sales person’s abilities and personality. I would say the questions asked aren’t that much different from a developer’s role although it is probably more skewed towards personality, ethics and creativity at selling a product. Have prepared a quick guide for myself so let’s hope its useful to hire the right sales person for the company. Already have had some bad experiences with disastrous sale people so anything that can help avoid mistakes is a plus.
Some links that helped a lot in my research and preparing a hiring guide:
http://www.mediaselling.us/MSM_AppendixB-InterviewingGuide.htm
http://www.3r.ie/resources/sales_articles/hiring_sales_people.htm
http://www.sitepoint.com/article/care-feeding-sales-people
http://www.recruitersnetwork.com/articles/article.cfm?ID=1516
http://software.ericsink.com/bos/Closing_the_Gap_Part_1.html
Uncategorized: GeoRSS Google Mashups Microsoft Wordpress Yahoo
by michael
3 comments
Battle of the Mashup Editors (Yahoo Pipes – 1, Microsoft Popfly – 0, Google Mashup Editor – 0)
When Yahoo Pipes first got released, I didn’t really think much of it and didn’t even attempt to look at the mashups being created. Then Microsoft got into the fray with Popfly and I tried my luck and got an invite into the Silverlight creation. Next came Google with their Mashup Editor and since I use so many Google apps, I dropped my email for an invite too. Finally got it yesterday and seeing it as a good chance to try out creating a mashup from the perspective of a novice creator, I got my hands dirty and did some tweaking to make sure Where2Makan? had a proper geocoded RSS feed (I had already been tagging the posts with custom fields named ”Longitude” and “Latitude” so the job was a little easier).
Unfortunately, GeoRSS was having a server migration so the WordPress plugin that was supposed to make life easier wasn’t available for download. I managed to track down an earlier build at Ravi’s Blog and so added functions to the plugin that could work with my custom fields.
Had to hack wp-rss2.php in WordPress but managed to get
<item> …
<georss:point>$lat $lon</georss:point>
<geo:Point>
<geo:lat>$lat</geo:lat>
<geo:long>$lon</geo:long>
</geo:Point>
</item>
to show up properly in the feed. Frustratingly, both Firefox and IE refused to format it. Banged head a few times before realizing the namespaces weren’t being recognized and so added two lines at the header and it finally worked.
xmlns:geo=”http://www.w3.org/2003/01/geo/wgs84_pos#”
xmlns:georss=http://www.georss.org/georss
Now that I had a good feed (looked at Flickr’s example just to be sure), it was time to create a map with the editors.
Test #1 – Yahoo Pipes
User interface upon logging in was great. It was my first time but pretty easy to understand that you need to drag a module onto the workspace, quickly configure it and drag its output onto another module. I used “Fetch Feed” -> “Location Extractor” -> “Pipe Output”. Noticed the debugger pane below and quickly looked through the data to make sure it had parsed the feed correctly and hit “Run Pipe”. The map overlay with my posts and titles popped up pretty quickly and presto, I had a mashup of Where2Makan? with Yahoo Maps. Total Time : <10 mins with practically not much to do other than configuring the feed URL!
Test #2 - Microsoft Popfly
Moving on to Popfly, you’ll notice that the user experience is entirely built in Silverlight for the editor. Cool effects like having the background change when you drop a relevant block into the workspace makes it look all rather snazzy. I initially tried to drop a RSS feed block onto the workspace and just hook it up to the Virtual Earth block but couldn’t see the Lat/Long values being parsed. Was about to give up when I realized I should should search for a GeoRSS block.
Thankfully, GisLi0 had shared the block created and I thought I was off to a good start. Configured the feed, went to Virtual Earth’s block to modify the Lat/Long mapping and hit “Preview”. A great nice map of USA zoomed into view and after scrolling to Singapore, no pushpins to be found. Hit the console to check the debug errors and seems that Lat/Long pairs were not parsed. I had to start looking through documentation to see if there was any way to edit the code of the GeoRSS block but it seemed that shared user blogs are private. Attempted to download the BlockSDK but that meant having to fire up Visual Studio, understand the SDK docs, write code and lose sleep! Total time spent : >15 min with no results to show for.
Test #3 – Google Mashup Editor
Finally came to the last editor. As usual, Google’s simplified interface and cool blue theme was in full effect. Here you don’t even get drag and drop modules to configure. This is for the power users, if you understand a bit of HTML, CSS and JavaScript, this will be the app to empower you. If you don’t, its going to look like a whole mess of a foreign language. I opened the sample “Maps Mashup” and did a test run. Looked great with the sample feed. Naively, I replaced it with Where2Makan?’s feed and did another test. Same result. Nice map of USA with no pushpins. This time, there was no debugger to view the parsing results although I highly suspect it didn’t even read the feed properly since I couldn’t see it loaded in the feed browser. Time spent : < 5 min with no results.
Summary and Conclusion
I can’t say I took a great big dive into all three editors but went into them with one purpose, to create a Map Mashup of Where2Makan? and the maps provided by each company. Based on the initial experience and my goal, I would say Yahoo Pipes has a definite edge with a slick UI, intuitive modules. It is slightly lacking in the customization of modules area but the fact that I practically only had to paste a URL in for the mashup to work just gives it extra points.
Microsoft Popfly with its Silverlight offering feels a bit bloated and although it offers some customizations at the block level, creating a block definitely takes a fair bit of understanding and an IDE! Also, not being able to output results like Pipes makes it a little short on reusability.
The latecomer Google Mashup Editor has a bit of catching up to do with its rather simplistic UI although I think it might be the most powerful of them all with what its samples look like (Calendar, Tasks, Map Wikis). Look forward to evaluating it again when it matures a little more. For now though, shall look into how to use Yahoo Pipes to create some other interesting mashups.
Final Notes
Yahoo announced samples for Maps Mashup couple days ago. And with Google’s announcement that GeoRSS and KML feeds will be supported by the Google Maps API, this is going to another interesting way to show map overlays.
Pros and Cons of Working for a Small Business
My work often lets me deal with small businesses and its a pretty interesting experience since their needs (and budget) are often very much different from huge corporations. However, I’ve also recently thought about how its been like to work in a small business seeing as I’ve been in one for over 3 years now.
Its definitely a huge challenge to have to oversee more areas to run a business as compared to a specialist position in a large company. Also, hiring is a major problem since most people don’t really fit into a small business even if they say they would enjoy the challenge of juggling multiple roles (HR, Accounts, Project Management, Developer, etc).
Reading a recent article, Ten Pros for Working for a Small Business, I would agree that I definitely enjoy not having to play the office politics game since the team is small (#4). I definitely also enjoy the freedom of not having to report to the office at a fixed hour since I can work virtually anywhere nowadays (#10).
Of course, all is definitely not rosy in any situation and so reading Ten Cons for Working for a Small Business also made me realize its true that with lesser pay (#1) and sometimes increased workloads (#2) makes me think about days when I was on-site at larger corporate customers doing consulting work. Having just one job and project on hand meant less overtime (and yet more $$!) and more personal time also once I left the office. Definitely an interesting bit for those in (or planning to start) small businesses to ponder on.
Are you charging too much? Singapore gets a mention!
Gotta love how Singapore gets mentioned in a humorous take on project charges 
The #1 reason got me laughing .. $700,000 ?! I definitely would like to see a showcase of the rejected logos!
Number 7: Clients ask if you are perhaps quoting in Singapore dollars even though you live in Ohio.
Were you at MEDC @ Suntec?
Was a little late attending MEDC today but nevertheless managed to register myself at Suntec after running from Bt. Merah to Jln. Peminpin to meet customers. I’ve been developing Windows Mobile Applications for businesses for close to 3 years now and its been pretty interesting. Was rather excited to attend MEDC this year since Windows Mobile 6 is being released.
Unfortunately, work has kept me pretty busy this week so was unable to register for the Sumo-Robot competition that uses Roomba’s to duke it out on a mat! Saw the final where #5 (Popfly) won but think micromouses in my JC days was a bit more interesting to watch 
I think the more interesting session I managed to catch was the one where Wei Meng presented on Networking Programming with Windows Mobile. Have always toyed around with the idea of creating a mobile app coupled with GPS that would warn of the traffic cameras in operation in Singapore. Anyone interested in such an application?
Wondering if blogging is a good way to market your company?
If you’ve been wondering about whether to take the plunge into blogging as a medium for spreading the word about your business, take a quick read through the article below. Most useful for small businesses who might not have the financial muscle to engage a marketing guru but yet wants to kick something off. All you need is a website (preferably with your own domain) and a blog!
The best quote in an article is from your customer telling the world why they love your product. The worst is you telling the world why they should love your company. That is unless the quote is from your mother telling the world how hard you work, that you are such a nice boy/girl and that her greatest wish is for a grandchild.
Source: 10 Startup Marketing Commandments – Startupping Forums
Thanks Aaron for the Popfly invite!
Don’t know if it was my impassioned plea for an invite but I got an email from Aaron on the Popfly team the very next day! Had a chance to login and take a quick look around a rather unique mashup builder utilising Silverlight. What with Yahoo Pipes and also Google Mashup Editor getting on board, it sure looks like a rather interesting battle of the mashup builders is gearing up.
Google goes offline (for Apps!)
Finally! A way to get Google Apps offline. I’m an avid user of Gmail and GReader and also often need to travel around. My complaint with web apps are that they need connectivity ALL the time! With a flaky M1 Broadband modem, it is just bearable but when it goes offline for no reason, I can’t do much emailing or reading. So Google Gears sounds like a great solution.
Google Gears (BETA) is an open source browser extension that enables web applications to provide offline functionality
Source : http://gears.google.com/
Downloading the application took awhile but upon installation and loading Google Reader showed a dialog box asking for permission to store data locally. Tried this on my desktop so can’t seem to see any offline caching going on. Shall try on the laptop next.
