7th
Powerflasher, a Germany-based startup is exhibiting at the FITC design and technology conference happening in Toronto currently. Their core product, FDT, is an Eclipse-based development tool for Flash developers which seemed to be getting a lot of buzz at the conference. I caught up with the Powerflasher team (Carlo Blatz, CEO; Frank Piotraschke, Product Manager and Michael Plank, Evangelist) for a candid interview where they talk about their company, the problem their product solves and a demo of how it works. Check it out:
Stephen Hurwitz, a partner at Choate Hall & Stewart LLP in Boston, recently wrote a great article on why venture funding outlook for Canadian startups is bleak and what needs to be done to improve the situation. Read the full article here (via Mike Middleton of Q1 Capital Partners). Stephen’s key points include:
Venture funding in Canada is in serious trouble
The less funding Canadian venture capital firms receive, the less they have to invest in Canadian emerging companies. The more these emerging companies are underfunded, the less competitive they are. The less they succeed in their marketplace, the worse the resulting performance of the venture capital firms that fund them. The worse the performance of those venture firms, the greater their difficulty in securing their own funding from institutional and other investors. And so this toxic downward cycle goes, continuously reinforcing underperformance for Canadian entrepreneurs and venture capitalists alike.
…and Canadian red tape deters US venture capitalists from investing in Canadian startups
Things need to start changing in Canada or budding entrepreneurs will increasingly head south. BackType and Kontagent are examples of startups founded by (ex) Toronto-based entrepreneurs but which are now based in Silicon Valley. Some amazing startups which remain here, it is unfortunate to see them being severely undervalued and underfunded. David Crow wrote a great post on StartupNorth recently about exploring the possibility of creating a Canadian YCombinator-like startup school and seed fund. But with the dismal venture funding outlook in Canada, where will these startups go beyond the seed stage ?
For starters, altering some specific laws to facilitate venture capital investment from the US is something the Canadian government can do, as Stephen suggested in his brilliant article, or Canada will increasingly lose out in the innovation space.
Came across an interesting article on why you shouldn’t use consultants for your startup, and if you must, how to effectively use them. Excerpt:
“To fully appreciate why consultants often do not fulfill a startup’s needs, it is important to understand the typical consulting engagement sales cycle.
When a consulting firm tries to get their hand in your pocket, they usually lead with their Rainmaker. This is generally an engaging, glib, attractive person that you can almost guarantee you will not see again, once the Engagement Letter is signed. Instead of focusing on the welfare of your business, the Rainmaker will be off making rain somewhere else while your engagement is managed by worker bees who are likely biding their time as a Junior Consultant before earning their MBAs with the intent to graduate and become Rainmakers in their own right.
As described in Roping In The Legal Eagles, service firms are pyramids. A handful of Rainmakers sit at the top, while most of the ‘real work’ is done by less experienced and therefore less insightful folks. The larger the firm, the larger the pyramid. The larger the pyramid, the greater the distance between the Rainmaker who closes the sales and the worker bees who have to deliver on the Rainmaker’s promises.
Thus, do not be enamored by a service firm’s size. Size does matter, but in an inverse manner. The larger the firm: (i) the greater the disconnect between the Rainmaker and the workers, (ii) the higher the personnel turnover, and (iii) the more time you will be forced to expend training each new crop of MBA-wannabe’s. Remember – your adVenture’s time is precious.”
Various compression and other techniques can make your AJAX-based web application extremely fast for the user:
1. Concatenate your JS and CSS files. Don’t send out several files over the wire to the browser - the browser can only make 2 connections at a time. Be careful about JS dependencies - order is imp. in JS.
2. Minify and then compress the JS and CSS. Use Dojo’s Shrinksafe or the YUI Compressor to do this. It will strip out whitespace, etc - make the code smaller in size (In JS, every byte counts) and compress.
3. Now gzip the above.
Write an Ant script to automate all the above on code commit and you are done. Try other methods like loading other elements in the background or after a tab etc is clicked - important to show something to the user almost instantly. Did this for Alertle.com, which was a 100% AJAX web app (no page refresh at all), and the initial size of the code being sent to the browser went from 700k to about 20k using the steps above :)
Mesh, the largest Web conference in Canada, ended yesterday in Toronto after three exciting days of great presentations, discussions and workshops. Here is the complete Techvibes coverage:
Techvibes was proud to be a media sponsor of Mesh ‘09. Thanks to the organizers, volunteers and sponsors for putting it together. If you attended Mesh, you can leave your feedback with the organizers over here. Here is a beautiful 90 second collage of videos from the conference compiled by Wayne MacPhail:
Excerpts from Joel’s latest essay (link):
Having a good program manager is one of the secret formulas to making really great software.
Henceforth, a program manager would:
divide up the product according to user activities. For example, Twitter could be divided into four user activities:
The first thing I had to do was figure out what customers needed, which I did by talking to as many customers as I could
The second step was writing a vision statement: sort of a broad document that said, this is how Visual Basic would work in Excel
started working on a much more detailed spec, which explained, down to the smallest detail, how everything looked to the user. This was a functional spec
Once the spec was finished and the development team got down to work, I had two responsibilities: resolving any questions that came up about the design, and talking to all the other teams so that the developers didn’t have to.
Typically, the program manager wants something simple and easy to understand for the users, featuring a telepathic user interface and a 30” screen that nonetheless fits in your pocket, while the developer wants something that is trivial to implement in code, with a command-line interface (“what’s so unusable about that?”) and Python bindings.
it’s absolutely critical that the program managers and developers be peers.
The number one mistake most companies make is having the manager of the programmers writing the specs and designing the product.
It helps, as a program manager, to be pretty good at coding yourself. The other way to earn the programming team’s respect is to demonstrate intelligence, open-mindedness, and fairness in any debates that come up.
Writing a functional specification is at the very heart of agile development, because it lets you iterate rapidly over many possible designs before you write code. You start at the highest level: a vision statement, no more than one page explaining the gist of the new feature. Once that’s nailed down, you can develop storyboards… mockups of the screens showing the user’s progression through the application, with detailed notes showing how they work. For many types of functionality, especially UI-heavy functionality, once you have these storyboards, you’re done. To learn how to write good functional specifications, read my four part series.
Scott Berkun’s book Making Things Happen Another big part of the program manager’s job is user interface design
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123680870885500701.html
In a lab in this Seattle suburb, researchers in long white coats recently stood watching a small glass box of bugs. Every few seconds, a contraption 100 feet away shot a beam that hit the buzzing mosquitoes, one by one, with a spot of red light…The scientists’ actual target is malaria, which is caused by a parasite transmitted when certain mosquitoes bite people. Ended in the U.S. decades ago, malaria remains a major global public-health threat, killing about 1 million people annually.”
The mosquito laser is the brainchild of Lowell Wood, an astrophysicist who worked with Edward Teller, father of the hydrogen bomb and architect of the original plan to use lasers to shield America from the rain of Soviet nuclear arms.
“Not only can the laser target a mosquito, it can also tell a male from a female based on wing-beat.
That’s a crucial distinction, since only females feed on blood and thus transmit disease. Males in the wild eat sugary plant nectar. (In the lab they get raisins.)
“If you really were a purist, you could only kill the females, not the males,” Mr. Myhrvold says. But since they’re mosquitoes, he says, he’ll probably “just slay them all.”