37signals post about how Urgency is Poisonous.

Not only is it poisonous but it seems to be everywhere. It's almost like people think something is up if it is not urgent. People can be organised and get things done well without incessant pressure(stress) which just leads to more disorganisation and then off we go to more pressure and so on. I personally find that urgency stems from disorganisation or procrastination in the first place.

Cabel Sasser from Panic Software the guys who make Transmit (great FTP software for the Mac and the excellent Coda web dev software ) talks about how they started and about their process etc.

Steven Frank, co-founder of Panic software who make great Mac software including Transmit and Coda blogs about how a product succeeds in the marketplace.

From the post: "My current hypothesis is that there are at least three positions of prominence in each segment—three ways to be number one, if you will: The First One, The Free One, and The Good One." Full blog post here: The First, The Free and The Good...

We would tend to agree with that one.

Dave Shea posts about what options are available to designers to produce something by themselves that they can sell. A product! I love this quote from the article: "Hey, I’ve got these visual design skills, what can I do with them that will result in a product I can sell to people?"

Here at Marino we have taken the collaborative approach, working within a team to create products. It can be hard but rewarding work if you are passionate enough about what you are producing. I have tried the on my own approach before but found it frustrating trying to spread my skill-sets across so many technical areas.

Of course the lure of creating a financially successful product with little maintenance overhead is compelling.

We have now employed our first oursourced resource and so far things are great. We have code coming in to our SVN server each day and we can see the project developing.

We got an extremely good developer from Russia who speaks great english. We found him through ODesk.

Odesk is very impressive, its a great platform. On signing up someone to do a project you get access to SVN and Bugzilla through their system. It also provides monitor of work done and hours put in by your resource.

We will continue to update how we get on and will give more details on what we are getting built soon enough.

Coworking is essentially someone organising a space for people to work together who could be from different firms, freelancers etc. to work together in a shared space.

I really like this idea. I know when I was freelancing in the past I would have loved to be around other people working in related areas, sharing ideas etc. There would be great networking opportunities along with sharing the cost of rent, communications equipment and so on. And you can start going a bit crazy from lack of social contact if just working from home. :)

The New York Times has a great article on it here...

This is taking off now in Ireland too. More info at www.coworking.ie

In the last few weeks we have hit a couple of instances of Irish Banana republic public services.

We moved in to our offices and naturally wondered about how to get our bins collected. We have no room for a wheelie bin. We are on the first floor, we have no access to the back of our building and the front goes straight out on to the street. So we figured its no problem, we will get those stickers for the bags.

So we called Dublin Waste only to be told under the current rules we cannot use bags. Now bear in mind, we can see other people using bags. This was about six weeks ago.

After numerous calls by Naoise we were told we should use a private company, Greenstar. We called them. They didn't come out. Well ok they did but only after calling the guys supervisor on the fourth or fifth call. Then out he comes.

We generate about one bag of waste a week. The guy comes out and explains that we have to buy the bags 200 at a time and in total it will come to about €1500. Now ok, we are a business and I accept the fact that we have to pay for things but paying for four years of bin service in advance seemed a bit much to me.

To top it off at the same time we got a letter "demanding" the first "moiety" of our rates. I highlighted the two words on purpose. Firstly, they demand the rates. This is the first communication we have received about this "moiety". Given we can't even get our bins collected you can imagine how we feel about this. The second problem was I didn't have a clue what a moiety was, unless we are talking quiet man stuff here and someone is a "moiety fella". A quick search turns up the fact that moiety is the old french word for half. So these people who can't even collect our bins and demand our money can speak old French.

In the end Naoise got on the phone to Dublin Waste and threatened them with calls to politicians. The guy then says, while he was on the phone, that the inspector has just approved our request. Hmmm.

This has all happened in the same week that our telco left us without a phone for a week and now I have just been told I am getting no post at home all week as the postman is holidays and there is no cover.

I'm supposed to pay some VAT and PRSI now but I'm just not feeling it.

Now lets get this straight. I am a bit of an Apple fan boy. Not the rush out the door every time they release a product type, nor the type who gets overly excited when the store goes down but I really like their machines and software. I have personally converted several people to be apple users as well.

However, the one thing that constantly annoys me is the price difference between Ireland (or generally europe for that matter) and the US.

The new Apple TV is $229 in the US. By google magic this is €157.46. On the Apple Ireland site, €299!! Almost twice the price.

Now I can understand that Apple can't keep up with currency variations on a day by day basis but this is ridiculous. Come on Apple get your act together.

We now have 4 bids in for Rails Manager application. The prices vary quite a bit and also it difficult to determine what the price will end out at as some are offering fixed price and some hourly rate. Its also hard to determine how good the people are but I am fairly impressed by the calibre of what I have read anyway.

And we have uploaded our second project up on to the sites today. Its a more web based one so I expect more quotes as web projects seem to draw more quotes anyway.

Today I travelled through 2 airports, Heathrow and Dublin.

Now Heathrow at least had a large selection of wireless networks I could join, although all at a price.

Dublin Airport was a joke. The new gates, the ones starting with D don't have any wireless at all. None whatsoever. I actually couldn't believe I didn't have the option of paying.

But how operations the size of major airports cannot afford an internet connection and a few wireless access points is beyond me. Business travelers have to go through these completely under serviced and overpriced building on a regular basis, can't we at least expect to be able to get some work done while there.

Funnily enough, just after I mentioned that the merger between AOL and Time Warner never really worked there are rumors about that they are going to split.

Its hit Slashdot today - Time-Warner Planning AOL Split

I've wanted to experiment with some of the outsourcing sites like ODesk for a while now. It always sounds like a good idea but when I head stories about outsourcing it often falls flat.

I've just posted a test job though. You can see it here: Rails Manager

The idea is I'll get someone to build a simple rails manager for Leopard and see what happens. If its good I'll put it up for download. Its a small enough app that its not a big risk and its no risk to our core business.

I'll continue to post updates on how we get on, but I'm getting worried now. The job is posted an hour and we have no bids :(

Looking at the proposed merger of Yahoo and Microsoft I am reminded of the merger of Time Warner and AOL.

I worked for Netscape up until 1999 and saw Netscape get swallowed up in AOL and then the merger of two huge companies. It didn't work at all. In fact very quickly the Time Warner people wanted their old shares back. It still hasn't worked and the share price will never get back to its old levels.

Another example was the HP Compaq merger, while it has worked out ok long term it slowed them down for the first couple of years.

If the deal goes through it is inevitable that someone will pay the price, whether its Yahoo or Microsoft it will most probably be in some way the shareholders. Pulling the two companies together will take time, time that Google will enjoy. If you take two large companies that can't beat Google, I don't think putting the two of them together makes a company that can beat Google.

Also, the ethos at the two companies is miles apart right now. Yahoo runs on Open Source and champions open source projects, I don't have to mention how MS sees this hippy stuff.

If you look at this deal in light of the level of cash that Microsoft has left, it looks like a huge gamble to get in on the internet game by Microsoft. One that I can only see backfiring.

There is a great new yoga studio called Yoga Flow opening up in Terenure in Dublin 6W shortly. You can sign-up to be alerted to the opening and their newsletter on their site.

We have partnered up with Yoga Flow and Yoga Dublin on an interesting new project more of which will be revealed later. Now, I'm off to do some sun salutations.

Personal note: If someone would open up a Yoga Studio on the Dublin North-side I would be eternally grateful. Somewhere along the coast between Clontarf and Howth would be ideal. :D

We have put our new mProperty website live. You can see it at www.mproperty.ie

We will be adding new articles to the learning centre and videos to the features sections in the coming weeks and months.

Michael Arrington of Techcrunch has an interesting perspective on the current hype and madness in Silicon Valley surrounding web 2.0 etc ...

"Now, a year after the madness started, it’s even worse. Companies have to actively dodge venture capitalists to avoid raising a big round of financing."

"Times are good, money is flowing, and Silicon Valley sucks."

Full article over at Techcrunch...

Dan Cederholm (Designer) and Dan Benjamin (Developer) have sold their excellent web collaboration project Cork'd, which was made out of a passion and interest in wine. Cork’d is a free service for reviewing, sharing and discovering wine. It was made using Ruby on Rails and Dan Cederholm has pointed out a few times his positive experience using Rails as a web designer, comparing it to sculpting, which has been also my own experience working Ruby on Rails here.

Cork'd was made in the spare time of the designer and developer and has a community of over 20,000 users today. I don't have any idea how it scores on revenue but it is impressive all the same. Shows what can be done when a project is your own, has a very clearly defined audience, you have the tools and ability to make it, and you are passionate about it.

Dan Cederholms post on the sale...
Dan Benjamins post on the sale...

Fintan Palmers blog has some coverage of Barcamp Dublin which was on over the weekend. We would loved to have gone but we had other commitments. Will really have to try and make the next one. Great to see some events like this happening in Ireland now.

More about Barcamp Ireland here: http://barcamp.org/BarCampIreland3

While browsing through some items on the iTUnes site it really became apparent how much the changing exchange rate play havok with pricing on electronic products. There really is a need for more dynamic pricing.

Right now Apple have a number of albums on sale in iTunes at $7.99. Which works out at only €5.88. However, on the Irish iTunes store the same album is €9.99, a huge markup even taking VAT into account. Thats some joke for an electronic product which doesn't even have to ship anywhere. A 41% markup. Soon the DRM version will cost even more!!

Strangely it doesn't seem as bad for some physical products. The Apple TV is $299 dollars which is €220 euros. The €299 charged by Apple in europe is a 26% markup, not much over VAT.

If electronic items such as music, tv and video are ever going to catch on in Europe its time they priced them based on what they actually are, a non-manufactured, non-shipped, drm crippled item. It completely unfair to overprice items like this for Europe. It seems the sensible thing to do is wait until the CD you want it in the 3 for €20 sale in HMV.

PS. I am not 100% blaming Apple here, I know its probably the record industry behind it.

We have spoken internally about how important it is for us to keep customers.

With a recurring business model even if your acquisition of customers is slow, so long as you keep every customer you win, you can at least mark a date on the calendar when you will be in good shape. As soon as we have mProperty live we will be building in the customer service features.

Scott Carson, mentioned this on the Carsonified blog a while back and I agree with his sentiments. Build in your customer service features into your app and also empower your support people to use them. For example, we need to have a button for refunds in our back office and anyone who is dealing with a customer has to have the power to click on it.

Anyway, the main point of this post was Dyson. Seven years ago I bought a Dyson DC01, their first mass market model. Over last weekend it's main belt broke due to me not cleaning out some crud that got caught up in it. I considered buying a new one but I decided to chance giving them a call. Their phone system was quick and to the point, no shouting "One", "Two" down the phone. I spoke to someone quickly who took my address who agreed to send out the belts for the price of postage only. Considering this was a seven year old vacuum cleaner which only had a five year guarantee I thought this was great. I have since told several people how good they were about it. And I would definitely buy another.

So they prove the point up above. My seven year old cleaner will probably die sooner rather than later anyway, and for the price of one piece of rubber they have ensured I will spend about three or four hundred euro with them in the near future.

One of the benefits of starting a new company is the fact that you start with a clean slate.

Given we have no previous investment in hardware etc we can select the best items for the job instead of sticking to something we have already spent money on.

We went with MacBook Pro's for all our machines and at this stage we will probably never bother with a desktop machine.

The laptops have a number of benefits for a start up company. For a start, they take up less space. But another one hit me while reading a Slashdot article, they use less energy.

If you want a computer to use less power you only have a couple of options, use an older less demanding processor in a machine with integrated graphics or use a laptop. Laptops are already designed for low power consumption so essentially they are the green option. So we should keep our carbon footprint down by our all laptop 'policy'.

Now of course someone will tell me that for every laptop made a whale drinks a litre of battery acid and trackpads are made from the left eye of an african child.

I have to say I applaud the Irish Government for making the effort on E-Government.

We had to do our first annual return recently and it was great to be able to use the web based system to file the return. The system also has a lot of helpful prompts when you make a mistake which of course a paper form can just never do.

There was one silly problem though. I got to the end of the form and everything validated fine and then it explains I needed an account with CRO.ie, right at the very end. Now to get this account you have to fill out and post a paper based form. Had they have explained this at the start I would have filled it out in advance but now I have to wait on the Irish postal system.