Putting Together a Global Development Network

One of the first things other developers and entrepreneurs ask me when I talk about products I’ve created over the years and the specific methods I use to get from an idea to an actual tangible product is how a kid from Nashville managed to put together a global network of designers and developers.  I always feel the answer is never as simple as they would believe.

How I Connected with Europe

I have developed products as three companies over the years.  I started with JennisMedia.  It was a modest start up that I was fortunate enough to create a product concept that had a market.  It was 1996 and I found IRC chat rooms the easiest forum to connect with others who were doing the same development work I was doing.  It was within IRC that I met two very important contacts that held the key to tapping into very inexpensive developers in Europe.  The first contact I met was Jergen Groesbeck, a developer from the Netherlands.  Jergen immediately started introducing me to other fellow programmers in the Netherlands.  Through this network, I was able to build a strong contact list of designers and developers in Netherlands, Belgium, Germany and beyond.   The other contact was Slava Vorotaev.   Where Jergen was strongly connected in Western Europe, Slava was the man amongst developers in the old Soviet Bloc.

Outsourcing

Quickly, I found myself presented with the option of outsourcing significant amounts of development to small development groups located in countries like Poland, Ukraine and Estonia.  Several of my early development partners went on to work for a little start up called Skype  (I’m not one bit jealous about it either.  Ok, maybe a little).  It was a very successful process for me.  I opened myself up to the idea of not having 100% control and in return I got products that were well built and matched specs.  Now, many will knock this method of getting the work done, but when you’re a entrepreneur on a budget you have to look for every competitive advantage available.  Working through cheap overseas was the price I was willing to pay to get ahead.  And get ahead I did.

The Fall and Rise

For several years, it felt like shipping work over the Eastern Europe was a dying trend.  I was convinced it was dead the day I learned of European shops outsourcing their work to Bangalore.  But, with the rise of the Euro and Eastern European countries still on their old currencies, their money suddenly didn’t go as far as it once did.  Combine this with the fact that Twitter’s success has brought developers from around the world into conversations that they would never had participated with otherwise and outsourcing to Eastern Europe is on the rise again.  Its easier now to procure talent from overseas than it was when I first started doing it over a decade ago.

Getting Connected

If you really want to connect with cheap global development options, here is how I might go about doing it in 2009:  The first step has to be getting involved in Twitter.  Finding developers who seem to share a common development philosophy is a huge first step.  Once you’ve connected on Twitter, Skype is an absolute requirement.  You may user Google Talk/Grand Central, AIM or another IM product, but the overwhelming majority of European programmers are on Skype first and foremost.  Skype also provides a cheap communications tool to those countries where you might otherwise rack up huge phone charges really quick.  The third tool you must have is PayPal.  You have to pay them somehow and even though they lose 3% with PayPal, they know its about the only way to securely get money into Eastern Europe, especially Russia and Ukraine.

Now that you’ve connected with some developers, if you want to have a long term relationship where everyone is on the same page, then pack your bags.  The face to face meeting is essential to the success of any long distance development partnership.  It always help if you’re a seasoned traveler who doesn’t appear out of place when you meet your new contact in Moscow’s Red Square or by Charles Bridge in Prague.  You’re new contact will be impressed that you’ve traveled the distance to formally secure the relationship, but doing so like a tourist will be a sure sign of how green you truly are as a global developer.

Finally, don’t be afraid to reach out if you are an entrepreneur looking to get ahead.  Nobody’s going to fault you for doing what you have to do to succeed.  Once you have succeeded in your venture, that is the time to start bringing more work to people in your backyard.  You may decide that you would rather have everything local.  You have a better chance of maintaining full control over your projects.  It will come at some cost though.

If your interested in making European connections, check out my first European partner @groesbeck on Twitter.

Review: Spymaster

As a developer who works with various APIs, I am always compelled to try new products that utilize the Twitter API.  I am not a person you would consider to be a gamer.  I never play games, online or otherwise, which makes my involvement in Spymaster a rare exception to the rule.

I received an invite from a colleague and proceeded to sign up and invite other Twitter followers with little hesitation.  I understood this type of invite could turn some followers off and they would unfollow me.  I sent it to people I thought would be interested and if some unfollowed me, too bad.  I probably wasn’t contributing enough to their daily feed to be worthy of a follow anyways if all it took was a silly invite to get an unfollow.

I did get a few unfollows.  I also got some follows from the game from people I was attacking.  It turns out that I actually gained some really cool followers from this who are in the tech industry and share similar backgrounds.  You can never have too many birds of the same feather.

Game Review

It has been about 48 hours since I started playing the game.  The first thing I did when setting up my profile was to disable updates and most direct messages.  The game gives you extra currency for actions taken if you allow it to tweet notifications for you regarding your activity.  By no means does disabling these features hinder you in playing the game.  It does take a little longer to achieve goals without the notifications.

It is a shame that the service wants to be so heavily integrated with Twitter updates.  The turnoff for most revolves around the fact that having a few friends who have notifications turned on can hijack your feed with a ton of #spymaster posts, which for all purposes are useless for those not playing the game.  For a follower who is not playing the game, an update that states “I just acquired a safehouse in Berlin #spymaster” is the equivalent of tweeting “I just scratched my ass”.

For the players, here is the catch about Spymaster initiated user updates on Twitter.  Watching others posting activity about their actions is the best intelligence to know when the time is right to launch an attack.  When another player has successfully launched an attack is the prime time to attack that player.  If you want to get into the game and play it properly, this is how you do it.  Twitter now gives you intelligence.  But, for the player who is savvy with both Twitter and Spymaster, turning notifications off is the best way to stay covert and avoid alienating your followers on Twitter.

UX-UI Review

I have yet to encounter a bug from the site, which shows that the site was tested well before it was launched.  The experience is pain-free, with all actions well defined, making it easy to make correlations between actions, consequences and prizes obtained.

The site runs an AJAX status bar at the top that shows time until next update, assets, health and energy levels.  Sure, it isn’t perfect, but it does the job pretty well.   The user experience is clean and feels like you’re involved in spy game, complete with dark facade, shadows and the lingo commonly associated with international espionage.

Room for Improvement

I have just two suggestions.  Games on Twitter will only work if you can play them behind the scenes without turning the service into an action log for the game.  Taking Twitter and using it for game communication instead of compelling person to person communication is not good for your game or for Twitter.  Finding a way to gather intelligence without getting hijacking Twitter feeds to do it is critical.

I would also suggest the ability to review revenue generated from safe houses.  Right now, this is a mystery to me.

Th virality of this game will probably serve as a good model for others who want to create a buzz through services like Twitter.  I would encourage anyone who aspires to use Twitter to create an immediate impact for a product or service to check out Spymaster and think of it as one of potentially many ways to create buzz.  Overall, I am glad I chose to play the game and also glad I started it on a weekend because its a productivity leech.  With Monday quickly approaching, I’ll have to cease my covert operations on Spymaster in favor of those that actually pay the bills.

Mother’s Day Thoughts

When I was little I spent more time around my father than my mother.  My father was the one who was always at sporting events and taking me along.  My mother, I guess you could say, was the quintessential housewife.  She made the dinners, washed the clothes and mad sure everything on the homefront was in order.

Later in life I began to learn that my mother was the calming force in my life, the one person who put me and my interest in front of her own.  When I was struggling to find myself in my early 20’s, my mother was there.  Even when I was less than respectful or appreciative of her love, she never stopped looking out for me. 

There is no doubt in my mind that I am who I am as a result of my mother.  My drive to succeed is a trait I can trace back to her, with my understanding that there are consequences for everything you do and to make sure you are alway aware of the decisions you make.

For this I am thankful for my mother on this day and I hope that each of you are half as lucky as I am.

this might be the reason for newpapers’ issues

every Wednesday, the Tennessean delivers a free lightweight edition for Nashville-Davidson County called ‘Davidson A.M.’. While I didn’t request it, they deliver it anyways, except in my case they deliver it twice.

So, it get two of a newspaper that I consider not worth my time to read. You may ask yourself, why do they deliver it twice? Well, I have an oval driveway with two entryways to my street. So, I guess its the paperboy’s ingenious idea to drop a paper at the foot of each end of my driveway. Its a complete waste. I toss each issue, every week, in the trash without taking a second to take the paper out of its plastic sleeve.

Inefficient, impractical, and unnecessary… That pretty much sums up the greater issue.

The Sasquatch of Twitter Error Messages

Is this like the Sasquatch of Twitter error messages?  Its like an error message you get with the fail whale fails.  This is a combination 502 and 403 error.  In case you aren’t up on your HTML Server Status codes, 502 is the error message for a bad gateway.  This means the server responsible for taking your request and sending it to the proper servers for processing has failed.  The 403 error is a Forbidden Request.  These requests are denied when the server processing the request is instructed not to process the request.

I am curious, have you seen this error before?

My funeral: Now with cash

I was joking with some friends at last night’s geek social about how I wanted my funeral and burial to happen.  Some wanted their remains spread around the globe others want a standard burial.  I initially wanted to be buried with a choir singing Queen’s “The Show Must Go On”. Dramatic I know, but with laser lights and smoke machines, it would be like a rock opera spectacular.  Now, I’ve changed my tune.

After our little discussion last night, I have decided I will start setting aside some of my estate to my funeral.  Not to build on some big theatrical specticle, but to have a cash giveaway extravaganza.  Here’s how we’ll do it:  I will purchase a cash machine.  Then I will instruct the funeral staff to place me in the cash machine.

With 100 dollar bills flying around my corpse, funeral attendees can have 30 seconds to get as much of the cash as possible.  I think this is a wonderfully fun way to go out.  Thanks to @anneinreallife, @aduthie, and @fishwreck among others who helped me build this idea out.

American Television has Gone to Hell

In the past day I have seen commericals for three different new television shows that feature a nanny coming into homes with undisciplined children and saving the day.

These nannies are all caricatures of Mary Poppins or something. They all have British accents and as you can tell from the getup on the lady above, they have taken this stereotype to ridiculous levels. Anyone living in the UK today will tell you its been years since a nanny has doned such a ridiculous costume.

My wife and I had hoped that Greatest American Dog would be a fun show to watch, but that one is pretty much ruined already. Hardly any of the dogs on the show have a single impressive trick in their arsenal. What they have managed to do is take what could be a great show and completely trivialize it by casting based on the personalities of the owners and not the dogs. Its the Dog Whisperer meets Big Brother and The Biggest Loser.

We have Wipeout and I Survived a Japanese Gameshow which are essentially the same show. There is such a lack of originality in these shows. I would watch a 24 hour marathon of Cops before I would watch 10 minutes of either of these shows. I blame Survivor, which is the most tired and worn out concept on TV today. (American Idol is a close second)

Finally, its been a decade since MTV, Music Television, stopped being Music Television. MTV2, then MTV3 come along to take the place of MTV. Now, MTV2 and MTV3 rarely air music videos anymore. I understand and respect the fact that YouTube and other video sharing websites are now the defacto home for music videos, but does that mean we have to completely lose “Music Television”?

Social networking deviants

As many of you know, I am a co-founder of the social networking website SoberCircle.com. SoberCircle is a community that caters to recovering alcoholics and addicts, a population that general websites do a poor job in delivering a service that allows them to communicate comfortably about their recovery. This is where we come in.

Recently, an incident occurred on SoberCircle where another member masqueraded around the site as me, telling members that they had a problem and that they all were getting on my nerves. Here is a timeline of how the events unfolded in the chat room:

Monday, 2:24 PM CT
A bitter argument between two members takes place (this is not an infrequent occurance in chat). The person pretending to be me says :”oh, just simmer down, i am sure we will all get along as soon as you start thinking like me” These are fighting words for some in recovery…

Monday, 2:40 PM CT
I start receiving messages asking why I would bash monitors. Word travels fast apparently and not very accurately either. Its like that experiment we all have tried when we were younger, where you give a single person a secret, that secret gets passed from one person to another and at the end of the communication chain, the result is hardly like the original message. This is what happened here.

Monday, 3:45 PM CT
By this time there are a half dozen blog posts by various members that voice their frustration with me and they’re starting to comment on my profile. Here is an excerpt of one of the comments:

I would suggest you apologize to your monitors via blog asap.
Things got out of hand and none of it should have been in the chat room.
Please do this soon before things are broken and not repairable.

At this point, I am completely confused.

Monday, 6:30 PM CT

Find out that half of our chat monitors have resigned themselves from their positions. Damage control is in full effect at this point. A meeting is called where we pull our chat monitors into a conference call to discuss the situation and how to resolve it. After an hour and a half of discussion about the matter, we come to some pretty hard conclusions. Here is what we determined:

A moderation force for any website that sees millions of hits has to have a quick, fluid and continuous communication stream that exists outside of the walls of the website itself.

So many of the monitors walk around on egg shells, in fear that any move they make could be scrutinized. Scrutinization is good, but you have to empower these people for them to be effective monitors.

Every action that is taken to clean up chat must be documented so that the other monitors know everything that is taking place within the rooms.

These are essentials to a good social networking monitoring force. All of which are points I was aware of before but this incident just drilled it home even more about important these really are to a successful community.

Its a constant struggle for balance, where every little thing that is seen as negative could be that seed that starts a user revolt.

Where I was on 9/11

I’ve never really talked about this, but I was pondering it so I figured I would save it in a blog.

I was working at Dell in Nashville at the time. I was on my way into work at 8 am when the radio morning show I was listening to announced that a plane had hit a building in New York and they thought it was the WTC, but there weren’t any details. I arrived at my office probably around the time the second plane hit and it was obvious that this was not an accident.

As I sat down at my desk, i peered around and everyone was watching the televisions posted around the area where I worked. This was a call center environment and it was normal to have people talking constantly to customers. There were no calls that morning. That alone made it surreal. For those of you who aren’t familiar with where Dell is in the Nashville area, it sits directly south of the International Airport. Every plane approaching from the south flies directly over the Dell complex and the Dell building has a million windows which allows us to see most of the planes that land from the south. So, to set the scene for you, here we all are just waiting for the phone to ring, watching planes land every few seconds and the national guard setting up checkpoints around the airport. Plus, dont forget we have full tv coverage on every screen possible.

Ask yourself, if you were watching the coverage of this unfolding, did you really think either of those towers would collapse. Looking back on it, I guess it is perfectly reasonable to think that a large jet packed with fuel burning at a few thousand degrees could cause a collapse, but at the time I didnt see it coming. I wasn’t really paying attention to the television coverage when the first collapse took place but I heard a collective “Oh my God” from about 3 or 4 people and I looked up to see the collapsing tower. It was at that moment I realized the magnetude of the situation. Then the second one tumbled and there was the eerie smoky void in the skyline. You see footage and photos of the towers on fire, but the image that is seered into my mind is that view of where the towers were just a few short moments after the collapse.

Around 2 pm the phones began to ring again. It was the strangest of phenomenons. From 2 - 5, I took about 15 calls. Of those 15, 9 were from NYC or the immediate area. I guess people there started looking for diversions to get their minds off of what was there right in front of them. One of these was an actual firefighter who had been at the WTC earlier in the day. The guy was in no shape to talk to anyone, and here he was talking to me about purchasing a new computer. At one point in the call, he was trying to recount some details I had shared with him and he stopped and asked “you’ll have to forgive me, I just watched a lot of good friends lose their lives and my mind isnt really keeping up with you, could you tell me what was the processor speed again?” I remember that word for word even to this day. Ultimately, we agreed that I would call this gentlemen back in a few days to discuss further. I did call this fellow back and we completed his transaction, but I had a good sense that he was so deeply affected by this. I recall that about every call I took from that area began with about 2 minutes of discussing if they were affected by the events. That was just the natural course of the conversations that day. One lady actually cried while I was on the phone with her. It was a tough, tough day.

Ok, did you all go out and buy gas that night too? Everyone thought gas would rise $3 a gallon overnight. Ah, to be paying $1.39 for gas again. And yes, I went out of my way to get a full tank of gas and there we had those few people in our society who always overreact. And in this situation, they overreated by rounding up every gas container available and filling them all. (The same thing happened immediately after Katrina as well)

In retrospect, what have we learned since that day? We recently learned that the financier of that attack is still alive and well. Are you 100% sold on the fact that passengers rebelled on flight 93 causing it to crash? I wouldn’t be surprised if the order wasnt given to clip the wings, causing it to crash. Its just so ironic that it went down in such a rural area. We also learned that there are people out there in the world that despise us. The world got a whole lot bigger and a whole lot smaller at the same time on September 11, 2001. Figure that one out for yourself.

I need your car!

File this one under bizarre.

When leaving my office for lunch on tuesday, I noticed a brown slip of paper pinned against my windshield by a wiper blade. I was driving my wife’s 2002 red Honda Accord. So, I grab the note and opened it up. The note said…

“I need your car. Please call me ASAP”

And it went on to list his name and phone number. Who leaves a note like that on a complete stranger’s car???