Presenting PutPlace.com

PutPlace.com is the first company in the Tuesday push initiative by Damien Mulley.  Hopefully it gets some companies some needed attention and hopefully some exposure to investors and customers.  I know not many are reading this space, I havent put much effort into it lately, but to family and friends who are, well, let me say this simply.  BACKUP YOUR JUNK!

The whole premise is this, 2GB free space. What's not to love about that.  It also has a few more nifty features:

• Set and forget automated backup
• Access your files from anywhere
• Quick and secure
• Full backup of all your changes
• Share files with Family and trusted friends

It's not a sexy business, it has a lot of competition and everyone should be backing up. After the catastrophe I faced a few months ago losing 1TB of data it is something that should be really pushed out to normal computer users.  I really hope they do well...

Hitting the mainstream market

It was something that Robin mentioned that got me thinking about this blog post.  

"If your idea is technology for technologists it probably won’t go anywhere. Go find a real problem that real people have and solve that.  Move away from the computer - socialise with the 99.99% of people who haven’t heard and don’t want to hear about Flickr, Twitter or RSS."

I agree with him 100%.  Here's the thing, there are so many applications which are tailored for the same small niche of geeks out there.  It's not until something is tailored to the mass market of technophobes out there that things truly do explode.  Take Bebo as an example, it's easy to use, horrible to look at and people out there just love it.  I can't explain it, the whole thing just seems voyeuristic to me, but yet I still have a profile there because all of my non-techie friends have one too.  I'm not saying that website is a socially responsible one, or even that it is solving a real world problem, but it is so easy to use that even the most non-techies out there can just use it.  

While out at CrunchLudd a few weeks ago I managed to bump into Daniel Becker of GlowDay.  Although much of that night is a bit of a haze from the free bar available (Thanks Anton and dotMobi) I do remember quite clearly much of our discussions about developing a beta app for a new startup.  The main drive from him was to keep things unbelievably simple, if people need to do things with 4 or 5 clicks, then it just won't be done.  Why not have them do it in 1 click?  Anyhow the anagram KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid!) is now firmly engraved in my head.  Focus on one simple thing that would be popular with users, thats the aim.  

Lately I have been thinking about developing applications my family would perhaps like and use, (3 sisters), I've been looking into various area that they would generally be interested in, fashion, travel and music having figured highly in my thoughts lately.  Are these things interesting from a technological standpoint? Probably not, but at least my family might use the app, thats all that matters in my mind.  Once they can just get the idea with minimal explanation, then that's where success begins.  When ever I look at sci-fi TV shows, I always see everyone adapting to their environment, using cool gizmos and gadgets. 

Our environment is always changing with new technology coming out every day, there are always early adopters to this technology, at this stage it is considered niche and techy but for some reason a breakthrough is made.  It's when your technology hits the mainstream, when your family are using it, when your friends are using it, when your friends technophobe granny is using it, thats when you know you have suceeded. 

I've been seeing hundreds of Twitter clones the past few months, with the new Apple application store coming online this week we are going to be inundated with thousands of geo-location applications coming on stream too.  Are these applications socially responsible? No! Are developing them fun? Hell yeah.  Most of the developers of these applications are designing these platforms for their own tech friends, not for the mainstream use.  We only need look at Twitter for an example of such an application, it was only once it became popular that issues cropped up with it's architecture every other day.  Discussing the ins and outs of twitter is beyond the scope of this post which has become something other than what I expected but what the hell...publish!

And so the great migration to Australia begins..

So what does the future hold?  Some may argue that the future is set in stone, some sort of cosmic karma dust flitters throughout our day and steers us towards a date with destiny.  Me, well, I just believe that whatever happens, happens for a reason and so it is with great excitment and intrepedation that I announce my voyage to Australia.  

The plan is to get up, board a flight and somehow through some strange magic of tubes land in Sydney Australia on the 29th August.  I'm heading there on the working holiday visa and the Australian government in their infinite wisdom has decided that due to living with the Chinese for a number of years that I may have the plague.  I believe it is definitely something to do with protecting their sheep population.  It may do it for the Australians but beastiality just ain't my bag baby....

Anyhow, the idea of what to do when I get over there is a bit hazy at the moment.  I have an expectation of working on an idea that has been slowly forming in my head this past month, however ideas, well, they just don't pay the bills.  So I'll be chancing my arm contracting at any number of establishments, doing 100+ hour weeks all the while working to my end goal of starting the mythical startup.  

So wish me luck on this epic voyage of self-discovery, hard slog and beautiful bondi beaches.  I'm going to need it...

It's just a difference of opinion...

As so often happens in the world of software, someone aquires a version of Dreamweaver and instantly think that the website that they have spend hours working on is now the bees knees.  Everyone has gotten this feeling at one time or other, I certainly have (blinking lights and ms clip art was all the rage back in the 90's).

A guy I knew during my my time in Dalian, China, got back in contact today proclaiming that he now has an outsourcing team asembled working as soldiers of fortune. Their mission, to crack open the mythical giant of the US & EU software industry and reap the rewards.  Anyhow, we get to chatting about the venture of his and his plans for world-wide domination, he then shows me his website.

My eyes are still bleeding, it looks terrible, it is terrible, small children would run away from this colourful behemoth, grown adults would roll into the fetal position and cry out for their mother.  Let's just say it was bad.  So anyhow I proceed to give him the benefit of the doubt, I remember saying that blue backgrounds full of ships and bright yellow links have no place in an outsourcing website, that the 90's want their webpage back, that messages to their customers should never contain the phrase "Just do it ,man!!!" and above all that practice of harvesting links pointing to the 90% of the worlds spam resources is just one very bad idea.  

To top it all off, during my browsing of this site (I was wearing protective glasses at the time), I was infected with a number of nasty trojans and viruses.  My friend has become a spam king.  He was wondering why he had no US & EU clients, so I gave it to him straight.  Every company, usually gets to give their first impression via their website, getting infected with anything is always a negative in their view.  These days so many mediums of information are are all inspected before a deal is done to ensure that the opposite party is legit.  My first google search for my friends page yielded results of Viagra, Erectile Disfunction and JS_DLOADER.JS, it's a very weird combination.  

One thing I always noticed was a huge divide between website design in the western world and design in China.  It's not a bad thing, it's a matter of culture.  I always equated it with walking down the main streets of the respective cities, in the middle kingdom you are faced with glaring neon lights proclaiming KTV bars, electronics and noodles, Ireland, thankfully, is a bit more quaint in that regard.  So when I see websites in China with all the bells and whistles I don't particularly pay much notice but do spend a lot of time trying to see past the junk for the nuggets of gold that are off to some side.  In the western world, things are much more minimalistic, each page focuses on a specific are, one which automatically draws the attention to the users point of view.  At the end of the day, it is chalk and cheese, I would have great difficulty designing any Chinese site and vice versa.  

I do hope that he takes some of the advice I gave him, but I doubt he will.  I'm a minimalist type of guy, I like clean lines, some curves and good content.  Flash, FLEX, Silverlight, well those are things I am not into, sure they have their uses, can look very eye-catching but mostly they are just used for evil purposes.  I know what I like and can definitely tell you what I hate.  Bells and whistles = FAIL.  Spam url's = EPIC FAIL....