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Monday, 28 January 2008 00:00 |
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This weekend I attended Seattle Startup Weekend, which I blogged about earlier. What a rush! It's really amazing how much a group of people can get done when they are motivated. The weekend started off a little choppy. Friday evening, we spent the time deciding on what we'd do. Keep in mind that when you're doing a years worth of work in around 52 hours, each hour equates to a week spent developing the business. So Friday was Jan - Mar. At then end of March we had researched our idea enough to realize that it wasn't feasible. Too much competition, and not enough opportunities for revenue. So, we scrapped it. We decided on a different idea. One that was not beaten to death already and had great potential for revenue. It would be a tool to help organizations catalog the skills and talents of their employees called "skillbit". Here's the pitch from our genius marketing team: Small businesses, project teams, and DnD weenies are missing out. They have incredible skill and talent among their members, but the team leaders simply don’t know what resources they have access to within their own group. Money is wasted on consultants, bloated knowledge management software, and simple inefficiencies of communication. Of course, the team members are missing out, too. They have coaches, assistants, mentors, and friends sitting next to them and they don’t even know it. What if a tool were created to help these teams of people build up a database of team skills? Searchable, lean, flexible, and powerful: You know your employees but with skillbit, you can also know what they know.
The design team did a wonderful job on the skillbit logo. For me, that was like seeing a newborn baby for the first time, except cleaner. Skillbit will be a valuable tool for medium to large companies since it is often hard to know all about the employees. The beauty of skillbit that sets it apart from so many other options is that it is so flexible. For example, many software packages ask canned questions that get a slice of skills that a company could use. Those skills may not be a good fit for all companies. Another package might leave it up to the users to list all the skills they have in a big empty box. Skillbit on the other hand, allows the users to ask questions for the rest of the group to respond to, allowing the collected data to grow and mold itself to the companies specific needs. If you've never done business internationally but are growing quickly and one day you get a call from a potential client who speaks French, they may need to know if they'll be able to communicate easily with your company. You could say 'of course' and then scramble to bring on a consultant who speaks french to help with the sale, spending large amounts of money in hopes that it will satisfy the need, OR you could use skillbit to create a poll asking if anyone speaks French, if so, how well? As employees respond, you find that there are a couple of employees that lived in France and speak it fluently as well as some who took french class in high school and still remember some of it. Now you don't have to bring anyone else on board, and the french company feels confident knowing you have people on staff that know your product as well as have the ability to answer their questions when needed, in their native tongue. That's the beauty of skillbit. Sign up for the waiting list to be notified when it's ready to take customers. The more you use it, the more you'll know. Skillbit was created through a process that was found to have some potential legal challenges. As a result, the company has been dissolved.
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Tuesday, 22 January 2008 00:00 |
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Last night was the Flex 3/AIR Pre-release tour event here in Seattle. The event was a success! We had around 70 people show up, many of them new to Flex. Ryan Stewart gave a great presentation describing what Flex and AIR are and why the community should take notice. He gave some great demos, including some sample applications he made himself. Ryan is full of energy and delivers a great presentation. People were listening. After Ryan, we gave away prizes, including an iPod Nano, an iPod Shuffle, a Logitech NuLOOQ, Flex backpacks and t-shirts and more. There were great questions afterward about Flex and AIR, which said to me they were inspired and wanted to learn more. One of the participants emailed me: I'm a Flash Developer whose been on the fence about Flex for some time and the presentation by Ryan Stewart was just what I needed to push me to learning more about the world of Flex. The evening also armed me with some points that are sure to help to sell my boss on the idea of migrating over to Flex (in particular the Deep Linking, Framework Caching, and HTML integration as demonstrated by Ryan's Geocaching app).
I'm excited to see the growth of Flex developers after events like this. If you attended, please give some feedback to let me know what we could have done better, what you liked, and what knocked your socks off. We love to hear about it.
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Wednesday, 16 January 2008 00:00 |
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 I had a great time speaking at the Flash user group last night. The group members had some great questions and there was a lot of people who benefited from the discussion. We talked about the relationship between Flash and Flex, the differences and similarities and a little intro on how to create a Flex application.
Here's the presentation slides: Flash & Flex - The Chemicals Between Us I promoted the idea of getting more designers involved with Flex. I've always felt that since Flex was created to appeal to coders, the designer is intimidated by it and therefore doesn't adopt it as much. What we see as a result is a bunch of really cool application out there that look so-so. Let's face it, most developers aren't designers. I'm excited for the announcement of Thermo, the application that will make Flex development more appealing to designers. There's a lot of really exciting stuff on the horizon in the world of Flash, Flex, and AIR. I feel pretty lucky to be a part of it. I think we'll see a trend on the internet of a movement to Rich Internet Applications. Recently, there was a poll done of a number of companies and of those polled, 75% planned on creating a Rich Internet Application in the next year. That means a great opportunity for Flex developers to make themselves available to fill that need.
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Wednesday, 09 January 2008 00:00 |
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There's a lot of stuff happening this month! First of all, tomorrow night (the 10th) we've got the SeaFlex meeting. We'll be hearing from Richard Rodseth as our main presenter. He'll be talking about MVC in Flex. I'm excited to hear about that. MVC is a coding pattern, it means Model View Controller. The post about the event can be found here. On the 15th is the Flash user group meeting where I'll be presenting on the relationship between Flex and Flash with an intro to Flex. On the 21st is the Flex 3/AIR Pre-release Tour. Ryan Stewart, a Flex evangelist will be speaking. There will be tons of great prizes and lot's of food. It will certainly be the meeting you won't want to miss! The post for this event is found here. Register for the event here:
http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/398836.
Registering is necessary so we know how much food to purchase so please register.
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Thursday, 03 January 2008 00:00 |
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 There's an event coming up that is already sold out but would be a blast to attend in the future. It's called Startup Weekend. Essentially, you get together with a group of people and in 3 days, start up a company. Everyone of the "founders" gets stock in the startup.
I don't know just how the ideas are generated or how they decide on what gets chosen or how it's put into play (I've never been to one before) but it looks like a great time. It takes place in other cities all over the country. Check it out, even if you're not in Seattle and see if you can sign up before it sells out! It's a great opportunity to be a part of something that could become big. Make your mark in the world!
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