The glass paradigm

To make this possible, Glassific exploits the power of well known  algorithms of marker detection to simulate the presence of a virtual glass between the camera and the user. Basing on this metaphor, the system recognizes a set of very simple gestures to allow the interaction with the glasslets, the special applications that can be loaded on top on the platform to perform specific tasks. We published a quick start video tutorial to help users making their first steps with the virtual glass.

After this first release, our team is working in two directions. The first target is the completion of the communication part; the second one is the development of a starting set of glasslets to cover some specific areas. More details about that will be covered in the next days. The most interesting thing that we can anticipate from now is that both topics will have interesting implications in the opensource community.

For any questions about Calameda and its projects please visit www.calameda.com or send us an email at hello@calameda.com

How much bootstrapping is needed before being able to have a product capable of providing the cash flow needed to run the company? It seems that coming out for the chicken-and-egg recursion is quite tough. Developing the product takes time but bootstrapping also requires lots of resources that lower the priority for the product.

The obvious answer to the question above would be to use the time needed for the development of the product to maximize the impact of the tasks to be completed and tune these tasks so that the result is the sought-after minimum viable product.

But again, what if the minimum viable product is not minimum enough and is lacking the functionality that could allow it to succeed? This goes back to business acumen and focus inside the company.

Calameda is now facing some very interesting challenges that might bring us to complete our first mobile application before the end of the year but as said before, there is a lot of chicken-egg-bootstrap going on.

Something interesting is currently happening around the Silicon Roundabout in London. The UK government is planning to help the development of technology-related companies in the area between the Old Street roundabout and the Olympic Village as statistics show this is a sector in constant growth both in terms of market and especially in terms of employment. The initiative has been named “East London Tech City” and since we got the news, we began thinking about how it could affect us or even better, how it could prove to be useful for our plans.

Here are a few things that could really benefit a young company, especially if coming from overseas:

• A common place where to meet people needed in the development of projects: designers, intellectual-property lawyers, print facilities are better off when only a few meters away. In such a dream environment startups wouldn’t have to spend any time searching on the web for a contact or asking around as they could have who they need at hand, therefore saving huge amounts of time in bringing their projects to life. Could this take the form of a startup-table where all interested parties gather every day for lunch?

• A way for easily finding customers that can help startups bootstrapping during the early stages. Startups could sell their skills and dedicate part of their time in offering consultancy services in the areas where they are more efficient and knowledgeable. The government could act as a mediator and allow startups to access the program until their third year of life and at the same time it could attract customers into using the services from the startups by offering them discounts on taxes.

• A stable and well established information reference that keeps startups up to date about events they might be interested in. This point is also aimed at optimizing the time it requires for startups to be aware with what’s happening around them. If these events could be held directly where startups are located, it could help a lot. Efficient communication systems (i.e. no twitter) and nearby venues are the answer.

• A sustainable setting could be also a plus: young entrepreneurs are more then ever aware of the environmental costs of modern societies and are therefore often better off cycling while commuting to and from the office. This means that secured bicycles racks and better cycling paths could be welcomed.

Our provisioning profile recently expired and it took a few hours to track back how to replace the old one in XCode in order to have the program compiling again. Here is the procedure to follow:

1. Go to the Apple Developer Central and click on the “iOS Provisionig Portal” link;
2. Click on the “Provisioning” menu entry on the left hand side of the page;
3. Next to the expired provisioning profile there should be a “Renew” button: press it. The status should change to “Pending” and after a while it will go to “Active”;
4. Download the renewed profile and add it to the Organizer in XCode by dragging the new file onto it;
5. Delete the expired profile from the Organizer (if you try to build the application now, you should get the error “Provisioning profile can’t be found”);
6. Double click on your project name in the Targets section of the Groups and Files panel on XCode (somehow it seems to be different from clicking on the name of the project and getting the Project Info!);
7. Select the Build tab and scroll down to the Code Signing section;
8. Click on the value for the entry under the Code Signing Identity and select the right profile.

This should make the trick.

One of the nice sides of the Product Manager role is that it covers many different aspects of the development of an idea.

During the last week we had to decide what kind of testing strategy we wanted to adopt in the development of our next web service and we came up with JBehave for acceptance tests and  JUnit/JMock for unit tests. In particular, the first is a library that allows test cases to be expressed by using phrases in natural language, giving business analysts a good way of defining the conditions by which the functionality delivered is going to be assessed.

Persistence will still rely on our annotations-based Ammentos library.

We have also recently been busy in dealing with the concept of Intellectual Property and in particular with Patents and Trade Marks.

Trade Marks are words, logos or images that uniquely identify a brand or product. Trade Marks can be useful in case somebody else attempts to “pass off” and gain by using a similar name, logo or image. Thanks to the Madrid Protocol, it is possible to register a Trade Mark in one of the participating countries and have it recognized in some or all the others (even though an explicit application from the local IP office still has to be filed and fees apply to each different country).

AOP is a programming technique that allows to apply some side-functionality to a system (e.g. security, transactions, coarse grained logging) without affecting the core business logic at its base. Transactions, one of the examples cited above, could affect various parts of the system: applying transaction logic to each of these parts could be cumbersome as it would require keeping this logic through class-derivation and therefore leading to a complex class hierarchy or, alternatively, to repeat the same code again and again in all classes where it is needed leading to overweight classes and boilerplate code.

This is where AOP comes to rescue: the functionality to be spread across the system is defined through Advices and applied through Pointcuts. In the AOP theory, Advices could be applied both at method invocation level and at property assignment level. Spring allows only method invocation level Advices that can be applied at different moments of the method invocation:

• Before the method is invoked: the actual invocation of the method can be avoided only by raising an exception. The parameters of the method cannot be replaced but it is possible to operate on them;
• After the method is invoked: as in the previous case, the actual method invocation can be avoided only by raising an exception. The parameters cannot be replaced but only updated;
• Around the method invocation: differently from the previous two cases, it is possible to avoid calling the target method at all and its return value can also be replaced;
• When an exception is thrown: if the target method raises an exception, the Advice intercepts the flow of execution and performs its tasks. The exception cannot be suppressed ;
• By actually adding new methods to existing classes through Introductions. Introductions are a delicate and sophisticated way of adding functionality to an existing class and they work optimally when the target class implements an interface. It is still possible to use introductions on normal classes but this approach involves the usage of the CGLIB and this affects the way the jar files are deployed.

Pointcuts can be either static or dynamic. Static Pointcuts are applied each time the target method is invoked while dynamic Pointcuts take into consideration the state of the system at runtime and can therefore severely affect performances. One of the predefined static Pointcuts available on Spring is the NameMatchMethodPointcut while the only dynamic one is the ControlFlowPointcut.

In addition to these concepts, the AOP in Spring includes Interceptors, classes that put together Advices and Pointcuts. The ProxyFactoryBean is a FactoryBean (in Spring a class that allows the creation of beans defined in an XML configuration file) that actually creates the proxy classes around the real business-logic classes according to the rules defined in Advices or Advisors.

One final note regards the power of auto-wiring: Spring also provides some special factory-beans that can also automatically associate business-classes to Advisors according to different criteria like the names of the target-classes or the rules defined by the Advisors themselves.

The final thought coming with this promemoria post is about how AOP is going to help us in the CalaBoard project: hopefully this will translate in a better architecture of the system where the distribution of the responsibilities is clear. Starting with such a base, it will be easier to add features and stay in control of the whole.

Now in 2010 it’s maybe even a bit late to publish it but there is something in its character that makes it interesting: it is based on the understated goodwill available to human beings since birth. Contrary to some theories that claim that human beings are greedy by nature, this application leverages on the attitude many have in helping the others.

We haven’t disclosed anything about the application itself yet and this prevents me from writing more about its details but we are about to release it and this makes me curious about the reaction it will cause among users. Many free collaborative initiatives proved to be successful on the web – among them Wikipedia is maybe the most popular – and this is the background assumption we made when designing our goodwill-based mobile app.

The idea of the name of the application comes from a movie released in 2001 where little details in everyday life encompass the strength of a feeling stretched across distances that go over horizons. What the director managed to represent through his camera work, we tried to develop with modern technologies based anyway on mobile technology.

Th next step will be the announcement of the first release for the iPhone and I’m looking forward to it!

Everything started at 6:45 AM. At 7:45 I was in the water at the Highbury Swimming Pool for my daily kilometer. I’m still keeping distances short because I went back into regular training only a few weeks ago and I don’t want to overdo in the first months. Luckily things are getting much better in the water now since my friend Davide pointed out to me I was making an error in my crawling style. My stroke was not parallel to the body but it was going transversal making me waste some of the power. Now I can happily keep up with other swimmers in the fast lane avoiding to move out of the way at the end of the lane.

At 8:30 I was on the road again, cycling towards TechHub, the co-working space were I have my desk. At the crossroads by the Angel tube station, I ran into a funny accident: a guy standing in front of his Lamborghini Murcielago cursing while watching a cab driver filling up his tank… quite an unusual scene

Once in the office, I caught up with my emails and packed again my stuff to cycle to the OpenCoffee Meetup at the University College London. The event always offers a good chance to meet other entrepreneurs working on web projects and get some advice from business developers and consultants. Among the others, I met Jeff, who gave me some precious advice for CalaBoard and with whom I actively discussed about how funds are expected to be spent within a startup. My main point was that if Calameda managed to get some rounds of angel investments, we needed them to complete the development of our product and publish it. Luckily at Calameda we have the knowledge about development in-house and this translates into investing part of the funds in this direction. Jeff instead thinks those funds are usually expected to be spent in growing the company in terms of business and this is something I can’t understand: for an SaaS project, having the product up and running – even with basic features only – is the first big step to start involving customers. I’d be curious to hear some other opinions about this point.

Once back at the office around 1PM I met Marcin who had a chance of seeing CalaBoard working live for the first time. Marcin is a very active business developer manager and was able to put me in contact with @hkanji for some precious advice about our strategy.

In the evening I first took part to the SpinLondon meeting about ethics in the workplace and exchanged opinions about how ethics and law are related – something that has been actually missing in Italy in the last few years. A new kind of gathering I wasn’t used to and definitely worth going.

Just to finish the day, I cycled to Hoxton Square to reach the London Web Meetup about HTML 5 and even though I could get there only for the last half hour I could feel some very good energy around.

I was back home around 10:30PM quite exhausted.

The enthusiasm caused by the first place at the TechCrunch Summer Pitch Battle (see previous post) gave us a boost in confidence and allowed us to heavily improve the CalaBoard project prototype. Here is the list of what we achieved up to now:

• Now CalaBoard features a pointer tracking functionality (the technology that allows the program to follow the finger while it is waived in front of the camera) that proves to be reliable also in scarce light conditions;
• The pages containing the sketches drawn with the finger can be surfed back and forth through the virtual flip-chart functionality;
• The colors of the pointer can be changed through the color palette available through a specific icon.

In the meanwhile we have already been developing the communication channels for the video and the audio streams that provide a real video-conference experience and – most of all – show a completely new way of interaction between participants. But this is not all and soon we’ll publish a new video with a huge step forward in the precision of the lines drawn. Stay tuned!

The idea for us was that of having only one of the team permanently located at TechHub and the others mainly staying in Sardinia and popping over to the fresher northern latitudes from time to time. And the beginning proved to be quite hectic: events for startups in London are quite frequent as TechHub itself,  Meetup and others like the XTreme Tuesday Club organize something for almost every day of the week.

In particular the TechCrunch Summer Pitch Battle, held at TechHub on Wednesday 14th June 2010, revealed a surprise as our CalaBoard project, the video-conferencing tool based on augmented reality, was awarded the first prize from a panel of 5 judges coming from the venture capitalist world (Katy Turner and Ben Tompkins of Eden Ventures, Eileen Tso Burbidge of White Bear Yard, Wendy Tan White of Moonfruit and Paul Jozefak of Neuhaus Partners).

And here is what happened:

• 44 companies coming from various countries in Europe (France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Spain and UK) presented their projects;
• 30 companies were selected to hold a 1 minute elevator pitch promoting their idea;
• 10 were admitted to the second round consisting in a 3 minutes slide presentation going a bit into more detail;
• 3 projects were selected as the most interesting ones.

CalaBoard was on top of the list of the three final projects and this was something we didn’t expect at our first presentation of its business model. Since a few months ago we have been making presentations at conferences (mainly technical ones until now) and we immediately started appreciating how stimulating it is to make our ideas available for the general discussion. This provides us with a very interesting feedback and gives us a way of checking our direction.

In five days that followed the Summer Pitch Battle we were able to greatly improve the overall user experience transmitted by our application verifying some key features that could be of interest to the end users. Definitely positive to get some motivation!