Vyrotek|Bridging the gap between code and wealth

Today you can find quite a few sites that list off random ideas for startups, but how often do you find a list of ideas from a venture firm that are all web2.0 related?

Check these out. They describe what they’re looking for and why. Do any of them sound interesting?

http://ycombinator.com/ideas.html

1. A cure for the disease of which the RIAA is a symptom
2. Simplified browsing
3. New news
4. Outsourced IT
5. Enterprise software 2.0
6. More variants of CRM
7. Something your company needs that doesn’t exist
8. Dating
9. Photo/video sharing services
10. Auctions
11. Web Office apps
12. Fix advertising
13. Online learning
14. Tools for measurement
15. Off the shelf security
16. A form of search that depends on design
17. New payment methods
18. The WebOS
19. Application and/or data hosting
20. Shopping guides
21. Finance software for individuals and small businesses
22. A web-based Excel/database hybrid
23. More open alternatives to Wikipedia
24. A buffer against bad customer service
25. A Craigslist competitor
26. Better video chat
27. Hardware/software hybrids
28. Fixing email overload
29. Easy site builders for specific markets
30. Startups for startups

I recently published an article over at Neude.net about an interesting concept called The Distributed Observer Pattern. Since then, I have been giving this idea a lot more thought because it wasn’t enough to find a solution to a problem. Now I want to see if I can squeeze any money making ideas out of it. This is one idea i came up with…

A Push Service Hub

Here’s the elevator pitch:

A central hub that connects people that have data they want to push to multiple subscribers with people that want to have data sent to them only when certain criteria are met. The criteria could be only when there is new data, at timed intervals, etc. Essentially elimination the need to make multiple requests for data. Both sides benefit by having an intermediary since neither has to expose their destinations or webservice information to eachother. This service would manage all the security and authentication as well as provide a wide range of possible destinations that could include email, sms, post to url, invoke webservice method, twitter api, instant message, etc!

How does that sound? There isn’t much meat to the idea but that’s because its really just about enabling communication through the means that users choose. It might resemble SMTP or Twitter in some aspects. Perhaps to understand it better, think of subscribers as followers. But instead of just 144 characters you can basically send and receive any kind of data. It’s like SMTP in that you send data to one server and the service will figure out how to get it to the subscribers. Some might want to be notified through email while some may want to have data actually posted or pushed to their own webservice for processing.

Today, many sites and services exist to help users exchange information, status or content with eachother but each one ends up implementing their own api’s and notification systems. This system could be used professionally between businesses as well as socially between users and allows each party involved to choose their own method of sending or receiving information. All this while still adding a level of security between the actual endpoints involved in the communication process since neither side communicate directly. Features such as re-pushing data again later when a destination is unavailable or perhaps the ability to charge for subscription access could be implemented.

Some Examples

Sharing your status and other bits of information quickly with friends is all the rage these days. But there is a bit of disconnect between the various services such as Twitter, Yonkly, Jaiku. It would now be possible to broadcast one message to the service hub and have it push the message to all your accounts on each of these services as well as enable other people to programatically subscribe to your new messages. Your friends could now choose to have your new tweets pushed to their own destinations such as a webservice to be used in an entirely different application if you allowed it.

A business that deals with inventory could use this service to broadcast new inventory count when new stock arrived or when items have been purchashed or are out of stock. This data could be used to track trends and events as they happen as opposed to waiting for a weekly report.

 The service could also mimic push capabilities for webservices that do not support it. This service would be responsible for making multiple requests throughout the day to constantly check for new data while only sending notifications to subscribers when there is new data.

A wordpress plugin could be created that would enable push RSS capabilities. Whenever you write a new article on your blog, subscribers could now be notified of the new post instantly without having to check their feeds over and over for new content.

Research

As I discover sites and articles related to this subject I’ll post them here.

Web Hooks
PUSH RSS
Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP/Jabber)
Distributed Observer Pattern with REST
The Publish-Subscribe Framework with WCF
Beyond REST

I’ve been diving into some new .Net frameworks and libraries lately and thought I should share some of the cool stuff I’ve learned. I’m going to share what I’ve learned while using PostSharp with the new ASP.Net MVC framework.

I have already posted a few things about the new MVC framework so I won’t explain why Im excited for it. But, I havent talked about PostSharp so lets go over that really quick. First, you NEED to watch this video. It goes over exactly what I am using PostSharp for and shows off its power in just a few minutes. Next, you need to read up on what Aspect Oriented Programming means. The wiki article is pretty complex though. What you need to take away from it is how it helps programmers ’separate concerns’, modularize your code, easily apply ‘aspects/modules’ to various parts of your code and avoid maintenance problems. Another good link is http://www.postsharp.org/aop.net/.

Let’s talk about the sample project now.

Read the rest of this entry »

I just learned that the ASP.Net team has released their 3rd preview of the new MVC Framework. Things just keep getting better and better!

http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2008/05/27/asp-net-mvc-preview-3-release.aspx

If you’re the kind of person that likes to just dive into code to learn new things then I highly recommend that you check out the open-source twitter clone called Yonkly. The source was just made available here and was written using the ASP.Net MVC framework. I’m playing with the code right now!

http://www.emadibrahim.com/2008/05/29/yonkly-source-code/

Lately there has been a lot of discussion about creating a distributed twitter network because of how often Twitter seems to go down. Some people say it will solve the problem because it eliminates the single point of failure. But, who is going to want to host such a thing for free?! If you start distributing your data then you start depending on those endpoints on being online. So what’s the solution? Think about this…

Isnt twitter just restricted email? 

Twitter is just a blob of text you send (spam) to people. The ONLY reason its 140 characters is because thats what most SMS systems allow you to send and receive per message. When you write a new ‘tweet’ it becomes available to all your friends instantly. Then one day it hit me, isnt twitter just restricted email?! Writing a tweet is no different than me spamming my friends with an email. The more I thought about a distributed twitter the more I realized that people basically wanted SMTP for twitter messages. But why reinvent it for twitter? Why not use it!? It solves more problems than you might think.

SMTP saves the day?

Everyone knows how to setup an email account and the majority of email services offer a way to access your email (POP3) using third party software. Say I were to create an email account: twitter@vyrotek.com and I registered it at some new twitter kind of site called… AnotherTwitter (sure why not). I give this new site the username/password so that it can access the emails in this account.

Now, whenever I feel like the world really wants to know what I’m doing I basically send an email to myself! I write an email to twitter@vyrotek.com and now there’s an email sitting in there. Now this is where the new site does its magic. You have basically a public inbox! Going to AnotherTwitter.com/Vyrotek would access the emails in this inbox and display them just like twitter does. Of course the whole friend following thing could be slapped on top of this easily and when someone views my timeline the system would just request all the ‘tweet’ emails from everyone’s inbox of those people that I am currently following.

Benefits

• No central database storing all the tweets.
  • Any email service becomes your own database of tweets - Gmail, Hotmail, etc
• No single point of failure - If one email service goes down, it wont affect anyone else.
• Tweets can now have file attachments.
• People can use any email application to send new tweets.
  • Most mobile phones already support email

Possible Gotcha’s

One issue is that the email account you setup for these twitter messages might need to be kept a secret. This is because if someone discovered the email they could ’spam’ it and now they posting tweets as if they were you. This could be addressed in a couple of ways - From Address filtering or requiring a password/key on every post are just two I thought of.

Interesing Side-Effects and Ideas

- The ability for multiple people to use the same account could be considered a feature! A group of friends could all contribute to the same account.

- Or, if someone named Bob were to email twitter@vyrotek.com then maybe the system would detect those as ‘private tweets’ directed to just Vyrotek. If this were the case then you could share this email account with others and even if they didnt know what twitter was they are technically using it! (from Vyrotek’s perspective).

- What if people wanted to use their existing email accounts but not have everything broadcasted as a tweet? They could as long as there was some sort of ‘keyword’ in the subject line that AnotherTwitter could detect. This would be configured in the site to be whatever the user chooses.

- Groups could also be formed based on what email domain you are using. For example, you could easily find all students from Neumont if students used their @student.neumont.edu email accounts.

I know I went a bit random on the ideas but I just typed them as they popped into my head. I want to know what you guys think. I’m really tempted to play around with this idea and make some sort of prototype.

I dont even know where to start! There are sooo many updates and new features. I’m really excited for the new Entity Framework coming out as well as the new Asp.net Routing Engine (aka Clean URLs & URL rewriting)!!

Check out Scott Gu’s blog for all the awesome details:

http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2008/05/12/visual-studio-2008-and-net-framework-3-5-service-pack-1-beta.aspx

Sideclicker is officially turned in! We completed what we could and turned our application in to Google yesterday. I hope we do well! If not, it was dang fun while it lasted. I feel pretty comfortable using the Android SDK and it was a great way to refresh my Java skills. It was also a great reminder of all the things I hate about Java!

So, if we win, dont worry… we’ll remember all the little people who helped us get there.

So if you haven’t heard, the deadline to turn in your Android app has changed to April 14th instead of March 3rd. This is great news! Im not quite sure why Google decided to bump it back but it gives more people time to submit worthwhile apps. Perhaps they are planning on releasing some new additions to the API that they want exposed to developers before the due date… who knows.

As I mentioned in an earlier post I am actively working with the Android SDK along with some friends to create a submission to hopefully win some cash. I originally started working on one idea with some friends but most of us just got too busy and things just werent progressing fast enough. We also wasted a lot of time talking about different ideas and what to go for. This same thing has happened in the past many times though. We usually come up with an awesome idea, but then no one really takes charge and the idea and any progress dies. You’d think that you could get away without having some kind of CEO figure when you’re all good friends working towards the same goal. But, even between friends it seems you still need to apply the same principles that exist in the workplace. People get distracted, people have different opinions and ideas and without someone with a schedule and a vision nothing really gets done. Thats why its so easy to just work on stuff by yourself. Meetings are easy to arrange and your opinion is always right ;) . Even with this early fallout I was still determined to develop something new for the Android competition.

What am I working on now? Well, an Android app of course. I actually just started working on something by myself once things got too quiet with the other idea. I played with the SDK and learned a little bit of everything that I would need to get something basic working. First I went and learned how to make a REST service using .Net and WCF. I went with REST because I learned online that parsing SOAP wasnt not an ideal thing to do on a mobile phone to be doing. If youve ever used any sort of public webservice from Yahoo or Google youll notice that almost everything is in REST too. So, I wrote a whole datalayer wrapped in a service and created a small proof of concept for an idea I’ve had for some time now. I had my idea written down on a couple of Google Docs to get all my thoughts and questions down somewhere so I wouldnt forget anything. I ended up sharing this with some friends and ended up with their support.

So now we’re going for it. We’re going to try and create the next big thing. One friend mentioned to me that the new mobile frontier is our chance at making it big. We were too young to be able to do anything when the internet first came out, but the mobile net is just waiting to boom. Hopefully we’ll get our project done on time and if we’re lucky we could make off with a great prize and HUGE opportunity to be part of something big.

I’ll share details about the actual idea soon :)

What will it take to have you hand over your money? Maybe that sounds like horrible question to ask, but I really want to know. People have money, people want things and people are willing to pay money for those things… right? Well, what is it that people want? I guess people want a lot of different things and there are many companies providing to those needs. I want to be one of them!

I have had many discussions with friends about which companies are making the big bucks these days. Obviously, for a company to make money they need to provide something people want and implement a successful business model. There are many business models that a company could adopt. Quite a few websites make all of their revenue from ads while others actually charge money for access to a service they provide. Everyone wants to find the perfect business model and I am right there with them. It is farily difficult to think outside the box and come up with something new. And even if you do think of something new the timing is really hard to get right. So what’s the solution? I don’t know. The next big thing doesn’t have to be something brand new I suppose. Myspace wasnt the first site to offer a place for people to put up pictures of themselves. Google wasn’t the first search engine. Digg wasnt the first user contributed content site. I just need to find that one thing that people need (or dont even know they need) and get it out at the right time.

I am also discovering that another problem is that most of the time you don’t know about the problems that exist. Why is this a problem? People pay for solutions and other things that they want. But, it’s really hard to solve a problem you don’t know about or provide something to people you don’t know they want. So I suppose one solution to the problem would be to find a Domain Expert of some sort and learn from them what the problems are. Any domain experts out there?

Yesterday, The founder of Xmission Pete Ashdown paid a visit to Neumont and I had the opportunity to listen to him speak. Pete shared various experiences on how he developed the idea for his ISP company and also how much work it took. I wish I took notes! He used some interesting terms that I heard for the first time. The one that stuck out was Sweat Equity. He used this term when he was talking about all the traveling and work he had to do just to run his first server. I suppose when you think about sweat equity it makes sense. There are businesses interested in paying you for something they didn’t want to do themselves for various reasons. Some reasons might be because the initial risk or startup costs are very high. Services that require the kind of work Pete put into his company are what makes his service different than something such as a new website idea. Anyone can copy someone’s great site idea (MySpace, Facebook, etc), but it takes a lot more work to start a company with tangible assets and services. This of course got me thinking more about what I really want to accomplish in the future. I think if I had a choice between developing some great site and actually starting a company with employees I would go with the later. It would be great to start something with employees and provide a valuable service and have something that I could invest some sweat equity into. It’s going to take a lot of work no matter what I choose to do.