Tag Archives: summer 09 project

The state of my market

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After doing a few hours of market research (not exactly in depth, but a quick glance over my market) it turns out there is a definite gap. I’ve found a few websites (two) that offer exactly what I’m offering, and a few more that offer close to my service.

After playing with the former two (they give out two week free trails) it looks like they both designed fairly badly. They’re definitely not easy to navigate and both use confusing terminology. I’m not sure if they’re trying to avoid Microsoft’s names that have been used in their offline solution, but if they are they’re doing so needlessly. They’re not trademarked terms – they’re everyday words in the field – and changing them causes confusion for everyone. Especially when they use one term that’s already used within the field, but they’re using it for a completely different thing!

They’re missing out blatantly obvious features that seem simple to program in my head. I’m not going to mention them here, but I’ve done so in a OneNotebook. (Which is an awesome and under rated piece of software, by the way.) The feature I’m most excited about, and the one that I think business most need, is completely missed out.

One of the competitors I looked into even completely misses out on a vital feature for their service. And they’re the business that’s charging $250 a month for their lowest package, which could explain why my possible customer projections was so low for them.

They’re also imposing limits on their service which are totally wrong. I like to think that a forte of mine is knowing how to monetise services (in fact, it’s a consultancy job I’d love to do, and I plan to do more blog posts on my views for large, net properties), and I definitely disagree with how both these businesses are charging.

I couldn’t really find any other companies that do exactly what I want to offer.  Other companies I did find though are hoping to completely remove the need for my service for their customers. I can see why that’s a massively attractive prospect for the customer. This is a service where a business would just outsource this aspect of their activities. However, there’s absolutely no reason why (so long as I make my product awesome enough) these companies that I see as competition at the moment shouldn’t become my customers.

Sorry about this all being vague. I just don’t want my idea to be stolen so early in the game.

I mentioned Microsoft having a software based application that does what my service does, and I should probably talk about why they aren’t currently competing with me. Microsoft’s version is software based, where as mine would be cloud based. In the future I truly believe software will be completely removed from out computers, in place of a browser (not even a browser, probably) where we do everyone of our activities online. We can already do almost everything (*winkwink*) from Office in Google Docs, and that trend is only going to intensify.

Businesses like the portability of being able to do their processes without being locked into their offices at their desktops, or having to buy separate software licenses for their laptops, desktops, home desktops, etc, etc. The fact that they can access all their data wherever in the world is awesome too, in fact why not even have employees that live on the opposite side of the world? Presentation and meeting applications have been revolutionised by the Internet and web apps and can happen any where. They also don’t have to worry about the hardware, that’d be my job. They don’t have to worry about scalability either! My servers should be able to handle ten times more data than they want me to store and still run perfectly. Tonnes of reasons why web apps trump applications, and I’ve barely started talking about it.

It’s true that Microsoft are moving into that area though. So area Google. So are other companies. That doesn’t worry me. They’re not working on what I’m doing at the moment. Which is integral; why would they start working on their own products if they can just buy business? I’m not saying I want to run this business for a year and then drop it for a quick sum of cash – I’d request to stay on in the company in some influential point (not just “founder”) – I’m just saying that’s an opportunity that I’m not ignoring.

More and more software giants are starting to give a shit about web apps because they can’t be pirated. You can’t crack serial codes for an online account to something like you can for Spore. That means a sustainable score of revenue for them, rather than a short jolt of revenue on release, and then that stopping as you watch the seeder count increase on The Pirate Bay.

Foiled by Microsoft

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It’s taken me about five hours to work out that it doesn’t look like it’s possible for PHP to convert Excel files (xlsx or xls) to XML, or any other plain text and then to XML. I can see why some projects take much longer than they should, and why programming only takes up a little more than half of that time. The hours I’ve spent around Google today are probably going to be reflected in most days.

Anyway, I found a C library that does that, so I’m going to have to use it. That shouldn’t confuse the PHP code too much, but it makes me feel uncomfortable. Do different languages often overlap like that? Scrap that. Looks like that library creates XLS files, the exact opposite of what I want… (I got excited when someone linked to it in IRC, so I assumed.) Back to square one, eh?

The annoying thing is that if I was using ASP, I could totally do it from within the language. That doesn’t make me want to start using ASP though, to be honest.

This update has little point: A secret project I’m working on

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I was looking through a Mashable post on some start-up companies which always gets me motivated. I want to be motivated because I wanna start working on that web app I want to release by the time I get back to uni in October. Seven months should be more than enough to program almost anything, but typically my heart isn’t in it. Hopefully it will be this time though.

I was reading that post and suddenly realised what I could make. I’m not going to release it here (because that’s how cool it is), but I am going to say that it’s focused on business, rather than social which I just assumed it would. Might not even happen, I’m gonna do some research and some screen designs and stuff.

Does it being business orientated mean that it needs to be less sans-serif and more serif? Less curved edges? WordPress looks professional, but more matured because of that. I dunno, I’m not a designer. I suppose that I’ll just make it bland until it looks like a finished product and then get a designer to come fix it up. (I’m more likely to make money from a finished project than an unfinished one, so why started shelling out money when it’s unfinished?)

Kevin Rose apparently draws out screens or something? Hopefully they’ll follow up the video he and Tim did. They’re basically talking about how investing works these days. Hugely interesting and enlightening.