Week #374
Friday again… week is over. This week has been really hard but we are quite happy with what we have accomplished.
Stage: In the past few days we’ve had a lot of activity in Stage. Our biggest event to date, The Offf festival (4000+ attendees) took place and other events with a high demand, like New York’s GORUCO, started to sell their tickets. That means a bit more of support tasks than usual, but as we have said a lot of times, supporting your users and customers is as important as rewarding.
Bazaar: Project bazaar has achieve it’s first milestone and the first intranet features are already in production. That means that we have found some flaws and poitns that need to be changed and improved. But everyone involve in this projects seems to be happy with what we have delivered.
Verkami: On tuesday we released Verkami’s new product: Verkami+, a tool for marketing specific crowdfunding campaigns. The first project using this new tool is Fermin Muguruza’s Zuloak documentary film. Don’t forget to take a look at the live map.
Qstion: Yes, you have read it right, qstion is still alive. We had to make a decision about its future, since it has been stalled for one year. And we finally made it. We have sold it. A couple of months ago a potential competitor came to us asking for it’s situation and after a few weeks of negotiation we sold him the product. Since we really love the idea behind this product, we are supporting its new owner, both technically and commercially.
Minor tasks: We have also added a new feature to Steel Stock Exchange and started the development of another project (codename: plankio), but nothing remarkable.
Not bad for just five days, right?.
My recommendation lecture for the weekends is Des Traynor’s post The fallacy of funnels. Maybe you don’t agree with everything, but I think it’s a good read specially if you have a SAAS product.
Have a nice weekend.
Week #373
Tired, exhausted and still working. The final launch of one of the projects we have been working in for the last 2 months is getting rough and it’s taking its toll. We keep fighting back… as usual.
Without time for writing a better summary but wanting to share something, I’m going to reuse a link to one of the most fascinating projects I’ve heard in the last years: Kumaré - The True Story of A False Prophet.
While might seem a simple satire at first, it raised on me a lot of questions about what is true and what is not, what makes us believe in others… or in ourselves.
Have a great weekend.
Week #372
Friday again, Linking Paths week #372 comes to an end.
We have continued working on our projects and we’re one step closer to the first production-ready version of Bazaar and Verkami’s sideproject. As usual, we have been working with Stage’s customer to make their life easier and finishing a new feature for Eingang, Stage’s check-in app. Starting next week, our customers will be able to create eingang-only users.
The Europa League’s final match we talked about 2 weeks ago was played, and Bilbao’s team was painfully defeated by Atletico de Madrid. Well, we’ll have better luck next time!
My lecture recommendation for this weekend is Tom Howard’s Reality check: part 1. It’s pretty long for blog’s standards, so be sure you reserve more than five minutes to read it completely. Even if all the VC-related stuff doesn’t apply to you, like it doesn’t to us, I think it’s a really interesting lecture since I can identify myself in many parts of the story. We have also go through all the fears, doubts and uncertainty for the past 3-4 years. In fact, we are still there, you are always there while trying to build something by your own.
Have a nice weekend.
Week #371
Week 3³+7³+1³ brought more sunny days here in Iceland and mixed feelings. We’ve reached first design milestone in Bazaar and coded a few new features. Verkami’s sideproject has proved more difficult that we expected initially but we’re making progress anyway and additionally we advanced some steps in small projects. However, there are so many things in our plates these days that we don’t have time for celebrations (a bad thing in the long term). Keep fighting.
On the sunny side of the street, a few weeks ago I applied to CIID Summer School 2012. For a long time this institution, Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design, has been recognized as one of the best places in Europe to learn interaction design and in a very surprising movement someone thought it would be nice to have me in its Summer School this year. I fell in love with Denmark many years ago after my first visit to the -now discontinued- Reboot conference. It’s a small and beautiful country, that even with its small flaws, shares the high quality-of-life standards common in the nordic countries. Copenhagen is a superb city too, specially in the summer, and I’m very excited with the idea of attending the School.
Finally, my link for this week: Made in the USA. The documentary shows the current state of the manufacturing industries in USA. Core message is that although the number of jobs decreased constantly in the last decades -partially at least due to technological unemployment- USA is manufacturing more and better than ever. Of course it’s an optimistic approach to the issue but at least it’s an approach.
I think that Spain -and Europe in general- have given up on many manufacturing industries. Making shoes? No way, you can buy a crappy pair made in China for 5€. A solid good-for-decades wood table? Too difficult, let’s go to IKEA. Yes, Spain is still creating some products but the general trend is appalling (and I’m 100% sure the curve is far worse if you include more years and the 2010-2011 data):
So I find very refreshing that there are countries reflecting on how can they improve their industries and get back in the manufacturing markets after decades of cheap outsourcing. Even if it’s in other continents.
Have a nice weekend.
Week #370
Another busy week comes to an end. So busy -again- in fact this week I’ll write a quick and small report before going to the swimming pool with my son.
Aitor has continued working on the design of Verkami’s first side project and in project Bazaar. And for me, I’ve been working on Bazaar’s codebase but also had to do some maintenance work in two old projects and had to restart a frozen project we signed 8 months ago! (codename: blueprint). Luckily this project is small and shouldn’t affect other tasks.
This week I’ll recommend you to read Why Is Business Writing So Awful? from Jason Fried. The article is pretty old in internet time (May 2010) but still relevant. Of course your customers moderate your tone, but don’t forget that you choose your customers!.
One last thing. As you may know, Linking Paths’s roots are in Bilbao. It’s also public that we are not big football fans, but still I’m very happy that Athletic Club, will be playing Europa League’s final on May 9th. It really means a lot for a small city like Bilbao and its very special team.
Have a nice weekend!.
Week #369
Summer. Work. Sunny days. Hard work. Not usually good combinations.
This has been one of those weeks when you bust your ass… and the results are just ok. I keep working in Bazaar and Verkami’s new sideproject design and Alberto has been working on Bazaar’s client API. A small victory: a few days ago we sent the first emails to people interested in Stage’s new payment platform beta process. We’re tentatively using May 1st as start date for the beta.
And that is all. No big insights this week aside from the fact that in many cases effort and progress are not so directly related.
Before wishing you a great weekend… my link. For the one I offering you this week you’ll need a whole day: http://videos.liftconference.com/. Lift 2012 videos has been published and all the talks are amazing, but if you want a recommendation, I’d start with my beloved James Bridle’s: We fell in love in a coded space.
Have a great weekend.
Week #368
Week is almost finished. Back to routine after Easter Season. Well, I should say “routine”, since I’ve had one meeting every day of the week. Too much for me.
Aitor has been mainly designing for Bazaar and a new sub-product for Verkami. In the time left after all those meetings, I’ve lived one of the most ridiculous situations in my career. I’m not a system administrator. And problably I’m not a devop either, even when I’ve installed and managed an interesting amount of servers and applications. But trying to fix the Ruby stack of a Red Hat 5 server using gTalk… Yes, just gTalk, that’s all. I have no idea about the other services or apps the server hosts, neither do the guy on the other side of gTalk. Pretty funny.
Regarding our products, this week we have migrated Stage to a new host following a bigger upgrade in our provider. It was pretty easy, the folks at Slicehost did a great job helping the affected customers with the migration, so in around one hour all our systems were up and working properly again.
The bad news come from Payout. The legal framework is really a nightmare. We always suspected that the entry barriers were the cause of the lack of competition in the baking & payments sector. And we were right. We have reduced our choices to two alternatives, but both of them force us to be part of the banking sector’s spider network. It’s not the we hate banks, but becoming one or partnering with one of them is not one of our dreams. Let’s see how it evolves.
And finally, my weekly recommendation. This week has been a lot of buzz about Instagram, but I want to recommend you a different reading: How will the new law on cookies affect internet browsing? from The Guardian. As many of you know, the grace period the EU gave member states to transpose the e-Privacy directive -also known as “the cookie law”- finishes next month. Most members states have left their homework for the very the last minute, including Spain and the UK.This article is very informative. But to be fair, I don’t see many sites using cookiesdirective.js in the coming weeks.
Note: Don’t forget to click the ‘Click to discover how the Guardian uses cookies’ button below the image on The Guardian’s article.
Have a nice weekend!.
YouPorn hosts “over 100TB of porn”, and serves “over 100 million” page views per day. All told, this equates to an average of 950 terabytes of data transfer per day, almost all of which is streaming video. This is around 28 petabytes per month, which means our 29PB estimate for Xvideos is on the low side; it probably serves 35 to 40PB per month.
It gets better! At peak time, YouPorn serves 4000 pages per second, equating to burst traffic in the region of 100 gigabytes per second, or 800Gbps. This is equivalent to transferring more than 10 dual-layer DVDs every second.
Week #367
367 is finishing… happy number, happy week. Easter is here -foggy and rainy in Iceland as you can see in the picture, slightly better in Burgos- but work at Linking Paths continue. This week we did a bunch of work:
Starting with our semi-secret Bazaar project, Alberto made a rather big number of commits to the repo, while I kept working hard on its design. Hard to feel the progress when the project is so massive but we’re slowly recovering from the delay.
Verkami is doing better than ever and we’re working hard with them creating two amazing mini-projects that can have a big impact in the crowdsourcing community, not only in the local context but globally. Exciting opportunities ahead!
For our own products this was a maintenance week. We only did support work but apparently it was not bad at all (thanks Thomas for your nice words):
Seriously impressed by stagehq.com ‘s customer service. It took them about exactly 5 minutes to fix the problem I had.
— Thomas Fuchs (@thomasfuchs) April 5, 2012
As we mentioned last week Steel Stock Exchange was launched publicly in one of the best steel related events: Tube.de. The feedback that the founders have shared with about its reception has been über-positive. There is a lot of commercial work to do in the near future but market looks prepared for SSE. If you want to understand in just 2 minutes what is the app about, watch this beautiful intro video made by Transistoria.
We finished a proposal (after many rewritings) for an interesting project related to Open Data & ODA. Even in 2012, many industries are still managing heaps of data manually and NGOs world is not different. Usually the best tool they can provide to allow people to browse & understand this data -and why this data important- is a huge PDF. Maybe we’ll be able to help them to improve this soon.
As some of you maybe read in twitter a few days ago our old blog was hacked by some bastards exploiting a bug in Wordpress and/or its plugins. They were using our blog to setup a phishing site. We received a notification on what was going from our hosting the day after the hack was made and fixed the problem quickly.The attacked served was used only for a few static sites and none of them was affected, but since we don’t want to put more effort maintaining a blog engine than using it, we’ve moved to a new platform.
My list of links-to-share-with-you this week is pretty big (maybe we should copy another initiative of our beloved Berg and start a “Saturday Links” series) but I would like you to focus in this one: An Essay on the New Aesthetic.
The New Aesthetic concerns itself with “an eruption of the digital into the physical.” That eruption was inevitable. It’s been going on for a generation. It should be much better acculturated than it is. There are ways to make that stark, lava-covered ground artistically fertile and productive. Lush, humanistic, exotic crops will grow from that smoking, ashy techno-rubble of ours, someday. I live to think so. I’m all for that prospect. It’s exhilarating to see such things attempted, especially in a small auditorium before the straights catch on.
Bruce Sterling does a good job describing all this New Aesthetic “movement” that has been going on for a while and that is one my current obsessions. I just can’t stop thinking about how future’s leakings are all around us. As someone creating software this is probably the most exciting moment in History.
Have a good weekend and a better Easter!
Week #366
Week is over. This is a special week since we’ll celebrate our 7th birthday on Sunday. 2555 days of Linking Paths. I had no idea in 2005 that we will last 7 years. I didn’t thought about it by the time. Now I really want us to stay at least 7 years more in business.
Unfortunately this time there is no list of things we have learned during this time like we did 2 years ago. But if you want to read a bit about our goals and ideas you can take a look at the interview that Ana Martinez from masquenegocio did us and published on Tuesday.
Anyway, thanks to all of you -family, customers, enemies, friends- for being there supporting us along all these years. We really appreciate it.
Aitor is back in Iceland. A last minute problem prevented me from attending codemotion but according to some reviews (spanish links, sorry) Aitor delivered a great talk. That’s not a surprise for me.
Steel Stock Exchange, one of the projects we have being working on with our friends of La Personnalite, went public on Monday after a closed beta. This is one of those projects that puts you in front of reality. We usually think that internet is only made of social networks, newspapers, gadgets and our email inbox, but that’s far from true. Reality, even internet’s reality, is much bigger than our small context.
We have also continue the work in Bazaar. Aitor continued working on its design and I focused on API and systems integration, since ours is only a part of customer’s enterprise systems. We are still behind schedule but since next week is one of those special weeks where everybody seems to be on holidays, I hope we can fix it.
Next week I’ll be working from Valle de Montija, a small village where my parents live now, which population is even smaller that my already small -our building has only 3 floors!- neighborhood in Madrid. In the remote case anyone reading this spends his Easter holidays in the area, I’ll very happy to have a couple of beers.
And now my recommended reading for the weekend. This time is not a single item, it’s a whole site. I would like you to check Hiut Denim:
This is a great story from a city in Wales which used to make jeans. I don’t want to reproduce the whole site, so, please, check their story but also take a look at their blog. Really inspiring, specially in this week of General Strike in Spain.
I wish them all the best.
