Glassific is online!

Glassific, our augmented reality video conferencing tool, has finally been deployed as a beta version, just on the last working day of 2011. The first application based on this system is a simple Paint-like utility that allows users to draw a picture in the air, record a video of the creation and upload it directly to YouTube. All this stuff, without even touching your computer!

Bootstrapping, the chicken and the egg

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.

Our dream Startup Roundabout

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.

Renewing the provisioning profile for an iPhone app

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:

Product Management is colourful

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

AOP promemoria

We are working hard towards publishing our new service for web-conferencing with augmented reality (project name CalaBoard) and among the programming features of the framework we adopted, Spring, there is Aspect Oriented Programming (AOP).

Pushing the concept of social web app

In 2005 I had an idea for a mobile application that couldn’t be implemented for 3 reasons: mobile web connections were not popular enough yet, they were expensive at the time and the application in its core isn’t supposed to bring money.

A Thursday in London

Moving to London from a quiet place like Frankfurt is a kind of a shock at first and in fact life seems to be quite different here. Last Thursday was a very busy day and I thought it might be nice to put my day in writing so that I can remember about it in the future.

A step forward with the CalaBoard project

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:

Swinging London

A few months ago we got news of TechHub, a new co-working space aiming at putting together technology companies from all over Europe in the heart of London and we thought this could have been a good chance for us to get better involved in the European  startup scene. Eventually on Monday the 12th July TechHub opened and we finally started working in Bleaky.