Category Archives: Spider Strategies

Web 2.0, meet Business 2.0

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As a gadget lover, the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) is my annual awards event of choice. Others can have the Oscars, the Grammys, and all of the Pageants combined. For me, it’s all about what new gizmos are coming out that are going to make my life easier, happier, or more productive.

This year was no different. Although life always seems to prevent me from attending, I followed the highlights from the 2007 show in Las Vegas on both CNET and the CES website. As you can see from the list of 2007 Award Winners, these gadgets are all about making life more enjoyable and perhaps even a bit more productive. CES 2007 highlighted everything from a fully voice-activated control system for your car, in the Ford Sync (through a Partnership with Microsoft), to a PDA/Smartphone designed to play TV programs.

Really? TV on a cellphone? Well, this, coupled with Steve Jobs official introduction of the Apple iPhone at Macworld 2007, got me thinking about mobile productivity in the next 2-3 years. Looking back, the last 5 years have brought the onslaught of the Blackberry, Treo, and other PDA/Smartphone generation. These devices have allowed us to get away from our desks (although never away from work), by bringing our email, documents, presentations, and even the web right to our pockets. And now, it seems, TV, videos, music, and more.

So, as the technical world and the business world further collide, will more business be done via hand-held computers? Perhaps the V- Cast and iPhone don’t convince you. But, how about the new OQO Model 2? This is a palm-sized mobile device with the specs of a PC (1.5GHz CPU, 60GB HDD, and 1GB RAM, the model 02 computer supports Microsoft’s next generation operating system, Windows Vista).

Well, since we here at Spider like to be out ahead of the curve, this got us thinking: “How are we going to embrace this new Mobile Generation?” For starters, we modified this very blog page you are reading to make it accessible via mobile-internet. That’s right, your favorite blog is now available anywhere, anytime right from your mobile device.

Treo

But, that’s not all. It’s one thing to make your Blog available via mobile internet; In the next several months, Spider will be looking to integrate mobile accessibility into our products. Meaning you would be able to access our Corporate Management Suite via any web-accessible PDA/phone.

We’re just getting started on this, but we are extremely excited about the use of this technology and what it will mean for our customers. In the mean time, if you have any ideas or suggestions on mobile-web applications, we would love to hear them.

Getting Real and paying development debt

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We’ve recently stumbled onto a book by 37signals (the people behind Ruby on Rails) that has gotten us fired up all over again about the advantages of being a small web-based software company. Sure, we’ve been using many of the concepts they talked about over the past several years, but we were surprised to find several ways of thinking about things that were different than the ways we had approached them in the past.

One concept in particular that I loved was the idea of development debt. They stress that it’s ok to not get everything perfect the first time, and if you try to wait until everything is, you’ll never release a product. It’s important, however, to consider this imperfect software as a debt that you have to repay. On a regular basis you need to go back in and repay your loans. For us, this includes reducing clutter and eliminating areas in the app that aren’t intuitive.

We’ll continue adding new functionality like reporting and meetings over the next few months, but a major push for us will be identifying the areas of the app that aren’t quite working and clean them up. We want someone who has never used the app before to be able to sit down and start using it without a manual.

The book is called Getting Real and has an online version that’s free. If you’re at all interested in software development, I highly recommend taking a look. It’s a very quick read and is packed with all kinds of good stuff.