Web 2.0 Entrepreneur

Web2.0 is about technology, not money

• Posted by Tengku Zahasman on May 23rd, 2007 filed in Thoughts, Entrepreneurship


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Reading Mike Arrigton’s recent post at TechCrunch really caught my attention and sparked some thoughts:

“When I look back at the pictures from those early events, I remember good times, and no one was talking about twenty million dollar venture rounds or selling out for a cool $1.65 billion. Companies like Meebo and Sphere literally launched in my living room in front of a couple of hundred genuinely interested people…

..snip..

It’s no longer about beautiful products and genius developers. It’s about the money and the status, and hot PR chicks and marketing departments.” - Mike Arrington

It’s true what he said. I’ve been hearing so much about new Internet startups seeking million bucks of venture rounds every month that I’m starting to get sick of it. Web 2.0 startups initially sparked off from tech enthusiasts and bright developers who believes in creating unique applications of their own that they love and hoped other people will love too. Money is not the first thing that comes into the picture. It’s the idea of making a difference that comes first - using Web technology as the backbone. Startups today seems to focus more on chasing the money, getting millions of capitals, and enhance their application with the intention of selling them off to some other giant companies like Yahoo, Google or eBay. This is what I don’t get. We don’t build applications to get capitals. We don’t build applications to sell them off. We build applications because we love it. If at a later time someone chips in offering a deal, then that’s something to be dealt later.

To me, real startup entrepreneurs are those who wishes to “marry” with their idea, developing the application till late at night with their small teams who also believes in what they are doing. Forget about capitals, they don’t mind starting off using their own money and credit cards, bootstrap all the way so that they could see their dream comes true. And they are the people who will cry if they had to sell their application to someone else. Isn’t it interesting to hear people create successful apps out of their garage or apartments? Meebo is an example. These are genuine entrepreneurs. “Profit” to them is the money that comes from the invention itself, not from those venturing rounds or hoping to be bought.

I suggest that you guys read that post in TechCrunch. Some of the comments are pretty interesting read as well.

If only Malaysia could have our own Silicon Valley….

First impression matters!

• Posted by Tengku Zahasman on May 21st, 2007 filed in Web Design


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I’m not saying that you need to develop creatively stunning design for your web app. I mean hey, look at MySpace… it was once regarded as the ugliest web app ever. But the amount of users they have scrolling over their ugly, full of ads website every single day is overwhelming. What I actually mean when I say “first impression” has nothing to do with beauty, but more towards the strategy that you use for your site’s look-and-feel. It’s the type of layout that you want to use, the fonts, where you place your login form, the logo, the theme colour, where to use Ajax or Flash, ads placement, user-friendliness, etc. Different types of web apps will have different style of interface and user-experience, because how your app should look and behave is largely dependent on what it is used for and the target users. ImageShack, an image hosting application have a minimalist design to impose the “easy & no hassle” look, while Netvibes has a more defined design to give the impression of “we have many features for your favorite feeds!”. Invest your time more on defining what’s the most effective design for your web app. For what is worth, simplicity and cleanliness always work in most apps so you can start off with that mindset. Even after you have launched your application, you can continually tweak your placements here and there to analyze the differences that it makes.

Talking about look-and-feel, I have just finished sketching the mock up design of one of my current web app project using Fireworks - my favorite graphics tool. I am not going to show you guys yet how it looks like but I will when I think its time to have them uploaded. Anyway, you can also adopt this practice when designing your app. Sketch your whole website in a graphics tool first because it is faster and it gives you an idea of how you your site will look like in the end. Only after you have satisfied with the mock up will you start coding the layout and placement on Dreamweaver (or any other softwares that you use).

Develop like an architect, not like a cowboy

• Posted by Tengku Zahasman on May 16th, 2007 filed in Web Programming, Web App Development


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Few years back when I was still in University, one of my lecturer who taught us Software Engineering said, “Don’t be a programmer, be a developer.” I was a bit confused back then. In my head I asked, “What’s the difference? Don’t developers also write codes?”. I’m pretty sure the other students in the lecture hall were as confused as I was at that time. But now I know for sure that programmers and developers are from different planets.

In software development, there is a term called “Cowboy coding” which implies the method of writing softwares where the programmer start coding the application without doing any sort of proper “planning”. They just picture in their head how the application will look like in the end and start coding straight away…. do whatever they think is right. They hate planning. They think planning is boring and a waste of time. The idea of writing codes straight out from the head may sound cool, but in reality, applications that are written by cowboy coders are typically sluggish, full of bugs and very troublesome to maintain. I know this because I used to be one of them (in certain cases I still am, but well that’s a different story ).

An experienced developer will plan his project out before he even writes a single line of code. Knowing the basics of UML (Unified Modelling Language) is an advantage. Now you don’t have to plan out too detail until you had to prove the cowboy-coder’s point - wasting time. No. The best thing is to balance your planning phase so that you have a firm base to start writing the code. For me, I like to use UMLPad to plan for my project. It is a very lightweight program, free, easy to use, very straight forward, and eliminates the complexities of other more sophisticated UML tools like Rational Rose or maybe, ArgoUML. Since PHP is not really a pure Object-Oriented programming language, all you need before you start writing an application are:

1. a simple Class diagram - to define your classes/objects and the relationships between them,
2. an activity diagram - to define your application’s flow, and
3. a state diagram - to define your application’s behavior.

UMLPad provides exactly that. Alternatively, planning the traditional way (ie: sketching on papers or white boards) is also very recommended because many finds it to be more comfortable and allows us to think out of the box. What about the rest of the diagrams in UML? No need to worry about them for now. Is UML hard? Trust me, UML is just common sense. Do you need to plan in detail about everything? If you can do that very quickly, go ahead, but you probably don’t need to. Remember, we don’t want to waste too much time on planning, but we also understand that no planning is planning to fail. So if you respect yourself as a person, be a developer who plans, not just a programmer who cares about nothing but codes.