Archive for the 'innovation' Category
Google Summer of Code 2011
As you may already know, Umit Project is in as a mentoring organization for Google Summer of Code 2011, and it happens that we just got through the selection process, and earlier today Google announced the winning students!
This year, Umit received 42 proposals, from 40 talented students from almost all continents in the world! We were absolutely astonished with so many talented students willing to work with us this season. So many proposals took us a long while to evaluate, and all of them involved a long process interacting with the student and assessing their capabilities, time commitments, etc.
Personally, I loved to interact with all of them, and just figured that they’re all very talented and probably a good fit for helping us out at Umit, but our resources aren’t infinite and we had to make a choice!
We were extremely happy to figure that Google has granted us 8 slots this year, and we’re very excited with how much we can do with that. Thank you Google!
Please, join us welcoming the students that will code with us this season at Google Summer of Code 2011!
- Zubair Nabi is from Pakistan, and is going to help us change the world in the coolest summer project of his life, developing the Internet Connectivity Monitor mobile agent for Android devices. He had a very tough decision to make when he figured that all three organizations he applied for have accepted him (Apache, Umit and Globus Alliance), and we were astonished to figure that he chose us to stick with for this Summer! Luis Bastião is going to mentor Zubair this Summer.
- Diogo Pinheiro is from Portugal, and worked with us in the past, during GSoC 2010, providing several improvements to our Network Scanner. This time, he is aiming at making a dent in the world in the coolest summer project of his life, developing the Internet Connectivity Monitor Aggregator, that will provide people with real time information about any connectivity issues in their regions. Adriano Marques will mentor Diogo this Summer.
- Zhongjie Wang (Alan) is from China, and challenged us with new concepts and ideas on how to better implement the Internet Connectivity Monitor Agent in the coolest summer project of his life. Alan told us about his great desire to develop a challenging project like this, and hey… you got it! Adriano Marques will mentor Alan this Summer.
- Dragoş Dena is from Romania, and he is going to implement the Next Generation of our Network Inventory, making it more useful for large networks. During summer, he helped us in one of our hackathons to deliver a new release, and showed a great talent and desire to help our community. Kudos for Dragoş! Guilherme Polo will mentor Dragoş this Summer.
- Gaurav Ranjan is from India, and he wants to bring our Network Scanner to the next level, by adding ipv6 support and several other nifty features, aiming for a 2.0 release by the end of this Summer! Gaurav showed a great desire to participate, technical knowledge and was capable to debate and adjust his proposal to comply with Network Scanner’s goals. Hey Gaurav, take good care of our beloved Network Scanner! Bartosz Skowron will mentor Gaurav this Summer.
- Guilherme Rezende is from Brazil, and the second Guilherme in our team. I Bet this is a good sign
He wants to alleviate the pain out of debugging VoIP networks by implementing auditing tools for the SIP protocols to be integrated in our Packet Manipulator, using our Audits Framework. Guilherme has worked for telecoms for a while, and he surely knows the pain it is to audit and keep a large network running. Francesco Piccino will mentor Guilherme this Summer. - Angad Singh is from Singapore, and he proposed us a very solid approach on how to port our Network Scanner to Android devices. He fought for his idea, and we bought his vision. Now, by the end of this summer, network scanner will also give you nice scanning results while in your mobile. João Medeiros is going to mentor Angad this Summer.
- Piotrek Wasilewski is from Poland, and the third Polish to join own team (yeah… bet it is a good sign also) and his goal for this summer is to deliver a full featured real cloud based Network Scanner, that will allow for easily storing and searching though results, scheduling scans, receiving results by email and much more. Rodolfo Carvalho will mentor Piotrek this Summer.
Open Source To The Rescue
Open Source is the key to innovation.
Innovation requires a lot of effort and while most companies rely on a limited amount of experts to develop the things they need, others open source whatever they develop and get a crowd of experts testing, using, debugging and contributing to their software in a scale that no company can afford to maintain.
That’s why Linux is the most advanced operating system in most of the areas that really matters. It is flexible, easy to extend and adapt to whatever environment you want: I’ve even seen a linux distro booting from a 1.44MB floppy disk! Today we have it running on a wide range of environments and machines that goes from mobile phones (guess what’s behind Android?) to large clusters and servers. Though I enjoy to work on my Mac, we all have to admit that Linux is the overall winner.
Now that people figured that Open Source is the key to innovation, we’re beginning to see companies and groups of people open sourcing their hardwares, like Facebook and Open Source Ecology.
Facebook just open sourced the technology they developed to build their datacenter, which involves all necessary info to build the server chassis, motherboard, power supplies, etc.
Open Source Ecology is a community trying to come up with the specs for easily building from scratch “50 different Industrial Machines that it takes to build a small civilization with modern comforts“. They even have an open source proposal for vehicles!
4 Years of Factor e Farm in 4 Minutes from Open Source Ecology on Vimeo.
With a world evolving so fast, I can’t imagine another model to cope with our ever growing needs and challenges. Now, let’s take part of this crowd, jump in an give a hand!
No commentsLoyalty Mobile
It looks like cell phones today have so many features that it is becoming less phone and more everything else. The new trend, when it comes to transforming your mobile phone into something else, is turning it into a Loyalty Card Collector. Startups like CardStar and CardBank already offer business a solution that uses barcodes to virtualize loyalty cards and store them in mobile phones. There are plenty of others, like Foursquare, Loopt, Shopkick and Gowalla, and they all aim basicaly on the same target, though using different techniques.
After reading about this subject, I just realized that most of these tools almost always requires users to act in order to redeem cards or register their presence in a given place, and that’s a real show stopper. Sometimes, we just don’t have the time or don’t remember to use our mobiles to redeem the cards. I think that the contender that come with an idea to skip this process will gain the biggest market presence.
One idea is to combine all possible informations about a customer, his credit cards, bluetooth ID, mobile phone details, phone number, etc. And whenever the customer uses his credit card, the cash register would try to connect via bluetooth to the customer’s phone to store his loyalty card automatically and register his presence in the store and keep a log of whatever he consumed or bought. This would be a really good catch, and would encourage people to leave their bluetooth receiver activate all time.
The Loyalty Card redeeming system can take advantage that customers’ bluetooth is active and send in relevant advertisements based on what he has consumed or bought lately in that store, or suggestions on how to redeem the loyalty cards he gathered.
We could add integration to other social medias (like facebook, twitter, tumblr, etc.), but the core goal is to avoid user from the need of interacting with his mobile phone in order to redeem the card after purchase.
When it comes to Technology today, Usability and Relationship are the king. If your system offers good usability and is capable of relating stuffs and people in a very usable manner, then you’re half way to success, and that’s what I think these guys are missing at Loyalty Mobile Systems.
2 commentsSoftware Patents not worth the effort?
This week I read an article from Erik J. Heels, where he states that patents are not always worth a try for startups, mainly when it comes to software patents.
Well, it happens that I have being reading about this subject lately, and sometimes I do agree, sometimes I don’t.
Although being expensive and time consuming, patents do give its owner a reasonable advantage over competitors avoiding them from stealing the idea. Ok, I agree that it doesn’t always avoid that. Sometimes, enforcing a software patent isn’t that easy, and if they steal your idea early, then they may gain a huge advantage over you before you even get you patent aproved.
It takes something between 5 to 6 years to get a software patent aproved. That’s just about the life time of most technologies!
If your technology is good enough to strive through and live longer than that, you probably managed to gain the biggest piece in the market share. Then, would you really need a software patent to enforce competitors?
It happens that there is no easy answer to this. It is very hard to predict the future, and patents are assets. If you’re more conservative, then patents will certainly bring you some peace of mind. If you’re the type that doesn’t fear competitors and trust in your bat, then patents may be a waste of time and money.
But never forget: patents are assets. Though you may never use it, whenever you need it you’ll have it.
And no, I’m not going to start working as an IP lawyer or consultant, in case you’re wondering I’m being biased. It simply happens that I have a special interest on this matter.
What do you think? Is it worth investing on patents, or is it better to use that money and time trying to overcome competition?
No commentsSeeing What’s Next
This book features some in depth study of real world industry changes, and how they happened, explained from a point of view that most of us have never thought before.Nevertheless, if you want to understand more about your consumers, both books are a must read anyway and both concepts works together.
The most important thing about all this is that you not always need to overshot your customers. Some customers are just doing fine with what you provide currently, and maybe trying to overshot them with fancy additives can drop your profit range or even incentivate them to go for another undershot product that fits their needs. Basically, that’s the point of view from which most part of the cases studied in this book are seem, and I believe that should be the point of view from which you should analyse your business. Good reading, I recommend.
