iMedia Ventures » admin

Put the Fun in Social Media

admin — Sat, 31 Mar 2012 14:58:42 +0000

For a few years I’ve been a big user of social media sites from Facebook to Twitter to Google+. At times it can be discouraging when you don’t get many comments or related sales. And the pressure to keep posting can be intense. But yesterday I decided to post a funny image of a fridge shaped like a guitar amplifier and got over 60 likes, 21 comments and 15 shares. For me this is a massive increase from the usual few comments and likes that I get. I usually post guitar lessons of mine and others and often don’t even get a single comment.

It can be discouraging at times to not get any engagement and tempting to quit the whole thing. Often though it’s something you can improve. So the idea is to mix up the type of posts you do. If they’re always videos requiring a lot of attention, try mixing it up with some fun photos, quizzes, etc. People are visual creatures and images are a quick way to get attention with little effort on the viewers part. With the recent changes in Facebook people’s ‘likes’ are showing up in the main news feed which should help grow your audience. If you don’t have a nice size, engaged audience it’s likely you won’t have accompanying sales as well.

One-man Show vs Having Investors in Mobile Development

admin — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 12:41:38 +0000

I just wanted to take a brief moment to talk about startups, entrepreneurship and lifestyle. As I’ve been working on my mobile app to help the bullying problem, the common wisdom is that I should get investors and build a company. The company would sell the software and/or sell the data that is collected to schools.

I recently read an article that said the rough ‘burn rate’ per developer is $10k/month, so with 4 developers the burn rate is $40K/month or roughly $500K per year. That means you have to make $500K per year just to break even. With varying amounts of staff, experience levels, and roles these numbers could be less or more of course.

Another option could be to team up with a group of people who are partners and perhaps don’t draw a salary at first. But at some point the revenues you earn would have to be split, and therefore increasing the revenue requirements (4 partners = 4 times the desired revenue).

These options aren’t that attractive to me because you’d have to spend a lot of your time chasing investors, being subjected to their direction, having high overhead, having to earn huge revenues and so on.

Another option that also incorporates a desired lifestyle and control is to develop a software product on your own and either try to sell it (to clients or in the app store), or release it open source. An open source project could result in a lot of consulting work as you help businesses or governments, install, configure and modify the code.

I like this option for a few reasons. It gives me full control, it keeps me coding, and developing my software skills (which is good for future contracts), and it helps society by providing open source software to the world. This may be ‘thinking small’ to some people, but at this point it makes a lot of sense for my particular situation.

How To Learn Mobile App Development

admin — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 17:45:51 +0000

I started out my journey to learn mobile application development by using Google to make sense of the landscape. Because I didn’t want to learn a myriad of different platforms (for each type of mobile device) I persistently searched for a better way.

Eventually I found out about PhoneGap which allows you to write mobile apps using HTML5, CSS, and Javascript which is great because these are standard technologies. While I have some experience with them things have changed quite a bit.

So I bought a few book on these topics (including jQuery) and read the books to get an overview. But when I started coding I realized in general the books aren’t that helpful. I was still pretty clueless. It’s hard to find what you’re looking for and they don’t have examples for your specific problem.

So my basic workflow is:

come up with an idea for an app you want to build
build it with HTML5 and view it on a browser. I’m using jQuery Mobile for styling the app
search Google and often StackOverflow.com to find an example of what you’re trying to do
search these sites again when something doesn’t work, describing the problem ‘jQuery mobile how to pass parameter to another page’, ‘jquery mobile how to append li to ul’ and so on
sometimes blogs have examples or tutorials that help. Nettuts is a good site for tutorials as well.
jQuery Mobile is where the main help resides

I set up my xCode environment on my iMac and purchased a Developer licence so I can install the app on my iPhone for testing. But for the most part I am building the bulk of my app using HTML5 and viewing it in a browser (as a separate, small window to mimic the phone). You can also ftp the files to your server (I use hostgator) and view in on your phone in the browser.

This post is about ‘how to learn’ most effectively. It is ‘exception based’ meaning we learn when something doesn’t work. Many people love ‘The Khan Academy’ videos but some have found that there are critical misconceptions even after watching the videos. So merely passively watching videos is not enough. Solving problems that will reflect these exceptions are key to learning. Anyone can do a very basic problem that is similar to what was in a lesson.

So in summary, if you are in a new area for yourself then read a few books and do some tutorials. But the real learning happens when you attempt to actually do something, in which case Google is your best friend.

Programming Creatively

admin — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 15:05:50 +0000

They say being lazy is a good thing for programmers. This laziness will cause you to avoid reinventing the wheel by finding an existing solution out there. I spent weeks trying to find a better solution to mobile programming than Objective-C (and related languages for other platforms). Luckily there are things like PhoneGap, jQuery mobile and HTML5.

As I think about mobile apps and worry about scalability (perhaps prematurely) I’ve been trying to find creative ways to leverage existing services. At a basic level, you could use Google’s App Engine but you’d have to consider the languages they support (Python, Java, Go).

With the recent Vancouver riots, police have been using YouTube videos and pictures to arrest people that committed crimes. In the Middle East, people were using Twitter to post events as they happened or to set up meets. This got me thinking that I could use Twitter as my application instead of building my own. It’s essentially a database with rich RESTful APIs and handles the scalabliity issue for you.

So instead of using your own app and database, you could use Twitter for apps that require geolocation. You could post information to Twitter and leverage the geolocation capabilities, Places, hashtags. You can use their REST API to POST information and query the results using GET requests.

Posterous is a weblog site so you could use that to post photos, text, videos for a community site where content is user generated. Many of these apps do things already that you would have to spend a lot of time creating yourself. Foursquare is another location based service. Can you leverage their APIs in your own application?

If these sites can not be leveraged it is at least a great exercise to impose constraints on yourself and see what you can come up with for a given problem.