This Week in Tech - The Foundations of a Technology Startup

Founding a company in the high-tech industries requires a lot of technology know-how in your startup. It is a core competence you should value. Always focus on delivering a cutting-edge product that sits on top of the best and often one of the newest technologies and services in this area. This enables you to gain significant advantages to competitors with regards to short development cycles, a scalable infrastructure or flexible feature sets.

This week our business department is working in China, so it is time to speak about the geek topics or let's say about Internet and Web technologies, software engineering issues like scalability, software architectures, best practices in software development and of course testing.

So how can you develop a cutting-edge web application as a bootstrapping startup? First of all, throw away the believe that everyone else has more resources and can do a far better job. That's theory, same is the believe that large companies know everything better, have the best technologies, the best tools, the best work flows or the most valuable experiences. Reality is that you have the big advantage to set up everything to perfectly suit your organization, your work flows and your software development methodologies. In a startup there are no legacy systems, no dependencies on software contracts or "preferred or de-facto standard" technologies.

Sascha and me, the IT department ;-), already made a lot of experiences in the area of software development at our studies, in research environments and in large companies. Combining, rethinking and discussing all these experiences and we have a pretty good starting position where you can do more with less which should be the goal of every startup.

So here are the things we play with everyday after our development call, when we discuss the next steps and the latest commits.

Mac OS X, Git, Textmate, Terminal, autotest, Sphinx, Firefox + Firebug, Opera, Safari, IE, Campfire, Redmine, Skype, PostgreSQL, Postgis, SQL, Ruby on Rails, Ruby, Rake, RSpec, a dozens of plugins and helpers, Google Maps API, (Reverse) Geocoding API, Prototype, Scriptaculous, ReCaptcha, (X)HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Http, REST, API, XML, JSON, KML, RSS, GeoRSS, AWS, S3, EBS, EC2, SSH, Linux/Debian, Shell scripts, Administration utilities, Cacti, NewRelic, Monit, Mongrel, Nginx, haproxy, load balancing, Starling, memcache, capistrano, scalr, staging, Splunk, SNMP, Selenium, Agile Development, Test Driven Development and many more


Naming & Caching are always the hardest problems in computer science. Sascha complains about my naming of variables, file names or markup ids and I complain about his, so we are having a lot of discussions about appropriate names and we spend the extra hours to make everything seem logical and easy to understand. Tagcrumbs is not a project where you have a deadline and you don't care about what happens afterwards. So we avoid all dirty hacks and "solutions" that solve some problem just temporarily. At one point we will write about our key learnings and what worked best and what not.

There are just too many websites who are driving into a one-way street after some months of development. Web applications have to evolve and adapt as any other product, so halt is your death.

To conclude, keep an eye on the technology side of your startup and it will become a lot easier to market a product that just works and what your customers love.

The other side of the world

I came across an fun website named antipodr. It's got a simple proposition: it lets you find the other side of the world. Dig a hole from where you currently are, straight through the core of the earth and on to the other side - where would you land?

When starting from my place in Paris I would burst out very close to the international date line in the South Pacific. New Zealand wouldn't be too far either. From where are you starting? And where do you land?

Discovering China

On Friday I (that's Ben) will be heading off to a 9 day trip to China. As I'm flying there within the scope of my studies it is not really a Tagcrumbs mission but of course I'll be on the lookout for our project - trying to speak to locals (this will be interesting: all I can say is "ni hao ma" and "xie xie"), see if the social placemarking concept makes sense to them and if there are interesting use cases to be discovered.



Everyone who works on the realization of his or her ideas of course knows this feeling: seeing the world through the lens of the project you are currently working on. For me this is a great experience: feeling driven every day by the wish to create something that you and hopefully many more people from different countries and backgrounds will find useful.

On the other hand let's not forget our general appetite to see the world. Discovering new places, meeting people and learning about different cultures is an amazing opportunity for everyone of us. I haven't been to Asia before so during my days there I'll not sleep much, keep my eyes open and come back with a bag of memories. And of course you'll find my recommendations for Beijing and Shanghai on Tagcrumbs as soon as we open the system up. If you want to be notified when this happens please click here.

Anyone knows Chinese and can tell me if my translation for social placemarking as 发觉 位 (public/social + place) would be correct? The amazing image of the Great Wall is by robysaltori.

The Art of Tagging

Tagging, assigning keywords, labels or tags to content items, can be a powerful way to organize a vast amount of personal information where keeping a strict fixed structure or schema is just burdensome. We see tagging as an enabler for our users to share, retrieve and explore content created by other users. More definitions can be found at define:tagging.

You can also do a lot of fun stuff with tags like the following visualization created with wordle.net.

The Spirit of 'Why Not?' - An IdeaLab Sum-up.

Landed in Dublin, sitting in the bus back to Galway. Perfect time to collect and organize all impressions of the IdeaLab in Vallendar. It was an amazing event, as good as last year when I visited it the first time. Thanks to the WHU students who organized such a large event with a great atmosphere and interesting speeches. Thumbs up!

The IdeaLab was all about ideas, emerging thoughts, lived creativity, startup life, and of course business as usual, especially a strong focus on financing. On Friday evening when everyone was having exhausting parties in Koblenz or Vallendar, Ben and me went to the one and only Korova Bar and talked a while about our product, new market trends, the Internet economy and where we see the future and how our internal roadmap reflects everything. Actually we did the same the next day until 3:30am. There have been some good discussions about strategies and we recognized how hard it is for everyone to understand our elevator pitch because we already imagine a world where Tagcrums is used in everyday life and where it already provides the full customer value. Same holds true for the business model (ad-based revenues) which relies on assumptions not transparent or intuitive for all participants. For investors we have clear answers, of course.

To come to the point of this post, as I studied at the University of Waterloo in Canada they had the slogan "The Spirit of 'Why Not?'" for their 50th birthday. A good fit in an entrepreneurial context.

"As George Bernard Shaw used to say: Some people see things as they are and say why. I see things that never were and say why not?" As often used by Robert F. Kennedy

As entrepreneurs we have to look into the future and try to shape it. Explaining your product's purpose requires returning back to reality and making it clear what exactly can be achieved and how value is generated. Customer development is a difficult topic but with all the great feedback from the IdeaLab we learned a lot and are really looking forward to invite the first beta testers in a few weeks.

P. S.

Because the future cannot be predicted many startups fail during the process. But hey, everything in life demands some risk to succeed! At the Osbourne Clark workshop with excellent lawyer Konstantin Ewald, two of the anwers to my questions ended in something like "...to become successful you often have to risk something!". True.

P.P.S.

I liked the pitch of Play & Build who really put the focus on ideas and cool projects, less the business side. I think with Tagcrumbs we combine the best of both worlds.

P.P.P.S

Some more link love to Barcoo.de which seem to have a great product with a technological foundation (that's what I like as an IT guy). They mentioned semantic search which sounds familiar for me working at an Institute that explores in large scale how semantic technologies can influence people and businesses. Their product seems well-suited for this kind of technology but focus, focus, focus!

Let's stay in contact!

Private Beta Coming Soon

We are making good progress on the development of our web application.

As we surely didn't get everything right just yet we want to invite you to a private beta test in which we can remove any remaining technical, design or usability problems. Your feedback will be crucial to help us make Tagcrumbs the best web application for remembering, sharing and discovering places.

It would be great if you could leave your email below in case you are interested. As we hate spam too we will only send you ONE email with the invitation.

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Tagcrumbs - Social Placemarking

More and more people ask us what Tagcrumbs is about so we'll give it a try and explain it here. We are about placemarks - personal places that you would like to remember and share.

Let's look at two use cases to illuminate our point:

Lisa, a young professional, is doing a variety of business trips to beautiful cities like Paris, Berlin or London. She uses Tagcrumbs to remember the location and the services offered in her favorite coffee shops - the ones with a cozy atmosphere and free wifi. As she loves Thai food (it shouldn't be too expensive though) she remembers those places and goes for a quick walk after lunch visiting a sight-seeing spot close to where she is. By following co-workers doing similar trips, Lisa sees the city through their eyes at the same time. She's already looking forward to her next trip.

Edoardo moved to San Francisco recently and you are planning to visit him soon. You know that by then he'll know the coolest places in town, amazing spots to take pictures (he's a photographer), the best outdoor events (he loves rock-climbing) and the club where the crowd rocks longest. He created a collection of placemarks organized by tags and places, to share with you and his other visitors.

It's your turn now. Get creative, think about different places you feel connected to (place of your first kiss, best hostel in the world, an amazing view at a hiking trip, ... ), what they mean to you and how you would best remember and share them - and let us know about it!

So, to sum it up (for you web folks): it's like social bookmarking (ah, del.icio.us, oh, tagging) but for places. We like to call it social placemarking - storing, organizing and sharing of personal places enriched with your memories and messages.

IdeaLab - German Startup Scene Gathering

Tomorrow the Tagcrumbs team is heading off to peaceful Vallendar near Koblenz in Germany. The German start-up community, entrepreneurs, investors and entrepreneurial companies, will be there for the IdeaLab. The conference on entrepreneurship, organised by students of WHU is mainly focused on web and technology startups.

All three of us are very much looking forward to this weekend as it will allow us to bounce our ideas off the community, discuss our thinking on the rapidly evolving geoweb space, meet fellow entrepreneurs and learn from them as well as participate in a couple of interesting workshops.

See you in Vallendar!

Set sails to a trip around the world.

Ever since I learnt to sail at the age of about 10 near Munich on the Ammersee, I've been fascinated with this sport. Today, the Volvo Ocean Race starts in Alicante, Spain. After the 10 legs during which the 7 boats (a crew of 11 on each boat) will cover a grand total of 37.000 nautical miles, crossing the world's most treacherous seas, they will arrive in St. Petersburg, Russia in June 2009.

In each of the 11 ports where they will be stopping over, a huge crowd of sailing enthusiasts is expected to welcome them. They will all be looking for information on the best lookouts for watching the in-port races (the one in Alicante starts in less 2 hours), where to rent a sailboat themselves and maybe to discover some of the historical sailing logbooks that are kept in museums, archives and libraries. The information is all there - and every one of us discovers a tiny bit of it. Wouldn't it be great to be able to share your discoveries?

300 years ago the focus obviously lay on other details. I found those images at the Cartoteca Digital, a great resource of ancient maps, while researching the changes at port of Alicante during the last centuries:

How Many Countries Can You Name in 5 Minutes?

What do you think? I tried the well-done game while watching TV. For non native English speakers it can be a lot harder to match exactly the English country names but none the less I named 45 countries. I could do better considering the fact that we are working day in and day out with a map application... What are your scores?

P. S. This is a call for action to my co-founders! ;-)