This is a serious problem for aspiring software engineers and designers in the US and the future innovation potential of this great country.

Today, outsourced projects are typically reserved for maintenance and lower skilled software work (as explained in the article below). For large scale software projects where labor costs are high, finding this cheap source is a no brainier for large companies. Outsource is a great solution in this case. The cost of living in China and the south east asia is just so much lower than the US and thus salaries reflect this. Even as India’s market matures and the cost of doing development there matches that of local software development, new markets will open up to fill the demand. India is now having to outsource it’s self to keep costs low enough to meet expectations (article below). They continue to change to meet market demands, but the pace is typically slower.

Software developers are by nature a tough, smart group. We counteract becoming obsolete by learning new technology and adapting to the changes in the industry. For the most part, innovation continues to happen here first (i.e. apple, adobe, microsoft eh… maybe not so much microsoft). Hardware and software engineers and thought leaders drive this. For new development where companies are looking for new software strategies, the best bet is with senior level software devs in the US. For this reason, onshore, higher level software development will continue to be in demand here for the foreseeable future.

I for one have plans to begin business school this fall. My long term goal is to continue to be a software developer for the next 3-4 years, but continue to diminish in that role as I grow CodeTrex. Part of the reason is the fact that software development requires constant learning, and I want to grow in other areas. I will always want to tinker and create prototypes for new ideas, but long term, I’m looking to drive the company rather than be the engine. I believe this is the path for many developers, but for those that choose to stay a developer and individual contributor, staying ahead of the curve is the only option. Your job security depends on this.

The following is an article discussing whether this is all just “hype” or the real deal.
http://itmanagement.earthweb.com/career/article.php/3787566/Is-IT-Offshoring-an-Overhyped-Myth.htm

It’s a very controversial issue, and the problems have no easy solution. What politicians and industry leaders plan to do about it is anyone’s guess, but in the end I think it’s going to be up to the individual to be successful in this industry.

I met Blake Byrnes at the ATDC Web Entrepreneurs August Meetup. His company CrowdMind.com is doing some really cool stuff in the social space. If you have a question that is hard to answer, let your friends, family, or random people figure it out for you. Get the pros and cons and what the majority thinks.

CrowdMind.com

]]> http://www.codetrex.com/index.php/2009/08/26/crowdmindcom/feed/ 0 http://www.codetrex.com/index.php/2009/08/18/snapfinger-mobile/ http://www.codetrex.com/index.php/2009/08/18/snapfinger-mobile/#comments Tue, 18 Aug 2009 16:19:49 +0000 Ryan http://www.codetrex.com/?p=253 We are in the process of getting approval for our iphone application for Snapfinger.

The web version is available now at www.snapfinger.com. The site works with iphone, palm pre, and android. Here are some screenshots!

Here is a clever company called Tap, Tap, Tap using twitter as a marketing tool for iphone application release. It’s a good old fashion contest to win a really nice mac book pro.

http://tweetblast.taptaptap.com/

Here is how you can market with twitter. When I wrote this, there were 3500 people who had signed up.

It’s easy to talk about clever ways to reach new customers. Making it happen is hard to do. Doing it cheaply is even harder.

One way is to create a simple marketing application and a small website to advertise it.

By using off the shelf technology, coupled with skilled, custom development, organizations can create a mobile application to reach customers without a lot of risk or expense. We’ll discuss how great off the shelf software and a talented team can combine to build quick interactive applications and websites to market them.

Step 1: Pick a Software Partner

Putting together a great team of developers is tough to do. Its easier to outsource this if you are not a technology company, but picking the right provider is important. Software development projects need capable, savvy software people to work closely with an organizations internal team. I believe it is critical that the marketing folks can interact directly with the developers.

Using the Joel Test

There is a great test by Joel Spolsky which organizations that are evaluating technology should ask a vendor or development contractor before signing on the dotted line:

The Joel Test
(The higher the Joel score the better the company)

The simple test is a set of 12 questions which describe “best development practices”. If the vendor scores below 10, you should have serious concerns.
Ask the company if they have processes in place to promote quality software development. We prefer a development process known as Agile Software Development.

Scrum and Agile Software Development

Everything you ever wanted to know about Agile Software Development is available at Wikipedia. I’m not going to go into it here, but if you haven’t heard of it you need to go there and read it. From a 10,000 foot level, it is a proven way to increase your return on investment for the development of your software.

A process which is often used with Agile Development is called SCRUM. Scrum development uses an iterative approach to implementing great ideas. Start with small goals, set a time limit, and then sprint towards the finish line. At the end of the allotted time period, take note of how successful the team was. By breaking down your huge task into small bite sized increments, your team can more easily focus creative energy into actual products.

Step 2: Decide on a Quick Project

Come up with an application which can be accomplished in three days of work. Brainstorm with your marketing team and include a technology member to help guide them towards a “doable” project. Keep your expectations reasonable, but push your team.

The application should meet your business needs.

Ask questions. Think of answers and what the implications are.

• Who Are you Trying To Reach – Are you trying to reach new customers or inform existing customers about new services?
• Revenue – Are you planning to sell the application or give it away for free and hope to gain through other indirect means?

Make a decision and then put a trusted developer on it. This can be an outsourced developer’s time or an internal resource if available. Give the person a deadline and say “just do the best you can do”. You would be surprised at what a talented teammate can accomplish with some inspiration and attention in a relatively short amount of time.

Iterative Development

Next you want to play with the application. Give it to your internal team and let them play with it. Get them to give feedback, but be kind as the prototype was created in a short amount of time. Use some of that feedback to either build on the application or change it. Repeat this process with short development cycles.

In large organizations, these kinds of exercises can help give “concreteness” to great ideas. But remember to keep the costs low and set limits on meetings and brain storming sessions.

Step 3: Create a Web Presence

If you think your application is ready to reach a larger audience, you should start by building a small marketing website to launch the application. It is that anyone be able to manage the content of the site. Enter the dreaded acronym “CMS”.

There are tons of content management systems available on the market. Some are very expensive, customized solutions used in large organizations. Some are very small, limited functionality products available at very low cost or no cost to the public. For our purposes here, we will describe one product which serves most needs quite well. It’s very easy to use, easy to setup, and best of all it’s free.

Wordpress

This software package is known best for its powerful blogging capabilities and slick administrator interface. It’s open source software and is available at no cost. They even have a hosted version of the software that is also free. You can go to their site, sign up, and in minutes have your own blog on their servers.

Wordpress.org

Plugins and a Social Network

With hundreds of plugins, you can add social networking components to your marketing site in minutes. Though this tool is mostly used for blogs, it can also be fantastic for creating small web marketing sites used for deploying specialty applications and for reaching a targeted audience.

If you have a creative department, you can try to tap that resource to create the look and feel. You can also get a very reasonably priced website template for your wordpress site from templatemonster.

Step 4: Start Spreading the News

Use the CMS tool to its full extent.

Have team members write about the whole creation process with the blogging tool. Create a twitter account and have a team member give updates on what is going on with the development of the product. You can use a twitter plugin for wordpress which can be found in the plugin section of the administrator to have it show up automatically on the site.

Get the Word Out

Spread the word throughout your organization and have them tell their friends and family about the application. Send out information via your email newsletter list. If you don’t have one of those, create one!

Get Feedback and Improve

You can create a forum on your site to get user’s feedback by using Simple Forum. Have people monitor the forum and read and respond to users requests or questions. By getting potential customers involved, you can learn from them and make your product better.

Here is a great tool for giving and getting feedback. It’s called Rypple. As you let more and more people see the application, have them use a tool like this to get feedback and organize it in a small fashion.

The article basically describes 5 different reasons:
1) It forces companies to be frugal.
2) New products and services will be scrutinized much more before investment can occur.
3) A recession leads to committed teams.
4) Companies that start now have a head start as their competitors tread water.
5) The economic difficulties toughen up companies.

I’d like to add my own entry to this list:
6) With the job cuts that are taking place, there is now some seriously good talent available.

During boom times, finding great talent is difficult to do (its tough all of the time, but especially when everyone is hiring). Small start ups have to fight very hard to attract skilled employees. The market gets flooded with thousands of companies looking for talent. However, during tougher times, layoffs and limited hiring can provide a great window for successful companies to grab high caliber people.

For anyone who has ever tried to invoice and receive payments from clients can testify, AR/AP can be a real pain in the neck. On top of that, figuring out a way to track invoices and allow online payments with a desktop based software is difficult. Quickbooks has an online version of their software and invoice emailing feature with the regular version, but both of these are half baked ideas that were probably outsourced to the lowest bidder. Quickbooks online version is probably the worst software product I’ve ever used in my life. ET the video game by Atari comes to mind. Besides being clunky, slow, and hard to use, the site looks like it was designed in 1995 and then left to it’s own devices.

Freshbooks has the simplicity of Basecamp and the benefit of a healthy breakfast and a good night sleep. Integrating with an online payment system is a real breeze. I highly recommend the product for smaller companies that need a clean solution for managing invoicing and hourly based contracting.

Though we still have to use Quickbooks for the rest of our bookkeeping and accounting, FreshBooks has become an integral part of our operation.

For us, it’s important to have a home base where our developers can gather and work on projects. We’ll also be able to develop our own applications more effectively. Our long term plan is to continue to grow our client base and add staff to our team, and having a central location to work is key. Its a very troubling economic time, and we are being conservative with our growth strategy.

We work with a few companies that have been in business for over a decade and still work virtually (out of their homes). Its a really easy way to keep costs down. We have chosen a different route as software development is a much easier thing to do face to face.

It happens to the best of us. After a lot of hard work on a project and many late nights, even the most energized software developers burn out from coding. Right now, we are working really hard on our latest project vrspots.com, but this has really been a side project over the past 6 months. Whenever we have some down time we pick back up and work on the project, and lately, I’ve been spending weekends and nights trying to complete the project. Needless to say it is beginning to take its toll on all of us. But we are nearing the end and trying to stay positive.

What I’ve learned through this project is to pace yourself and limit your features. Its better to hit a milestone and release quickly rather than add one more “extra” feature. Focus on a set of core features and then let your customers drive enhancements.

When mobile phones started to be come very common in the late 90s, a new protocol called WAP was developed to standardized web interfaces on mobile phones. Due to the bandwidth and screen size constraints, a the WAP protocol uses a limited subset of HTML which minimal styling features. Any phone with an internet connection and wap browser can view simplified web applications with this technology. This worked well enough for first generation cell phones with their tiny screens and puny processing power. However, with today’s mobile phones having support for browsers such as firefox, safari, and ie, WAP is no longer the only game in town.

What does the future hold for WAP applications? It won’t go away completely as there are still millions of phones out there which support the protocol (and can’t browse the regular web). And many people will choose to keep their phones rather than upgrade to the more expensive data plans. However, with the explosive growth of android and iphone applications, wap apps will continue to become less relevant int today’s market, and phone hardware and software will only get cheaper and better.

With the introduction of the next generation platforms like iphone and android, we see a shift towards heavier clients and better user experience. With phone support for full featured browsers, websites and applications can leverage the latest xhtml and css technologies on these mobile technologies and this will probably spell the end of the WAP protocol as a compelling technology in the not too distant future.