- Make another kick-ass application that will hit TOP10 AppStore. With stories like that popping up the internet every day there is a bunch of folks out there that think they have another great idea for the app. And I’m sure some of those will hit the jackpot!

- Port existing application or web service to the Iphone Platform. This is very wise move typically! Literally there is a wholly new audience waiting for the service which you provide on the web and not yet on Iphone. Be the first and gain competitive advantage over competitors. Now I heard the stories from CEO’s telling that they not only managed to increase the audience for the main service they provide but to earn some extra buck from the Iphone App sales.

- Update the web sites so they are displayed correctly on the Iphones. That is the simplest but smart move as well. With adoption of Iphones people started using Internet more heavily on mobile devices. So yes, it’s time to update your web site if you still didn’t do so.

Now the funniest thing about all Iphone-development buzz is that experienced app developers charge up to $150-250 per hour and some are booked up for the coming months. There are lots of talks about Interactive Agencies rejecting <$30k Iphone development projects because of the gap between the demand and available experienced developers on the market. MoveYourWeb is here to help as always! We have enough talent pool onsite and keep charging at a fraction of the rates mentioned above. Even after one of our apps was featured by Apple team.

The shortest example of an unsolicited junk that I have to clean out from my inbox daily:

We are a company in China, and we could provide you with any web related services for only $12 per hour, either PHP, ASP, Net programming or any flash development, web site designing, etc. You can have a whole group of experts, AND you don’t need to pay until the project is completed (only available for those projects are below $2000).

Not only the those ‘marketers’ are not able to understand that they are emailing to the VP of outsourcing company (why would we need to outsource the work when it’s outsourced to us), their spam emails are not wanted (I never subscribed to their mailings) and no one is interested in their cheap and unreliable services.

Anyway this post is not a rant about confusing marketing techniques but about the fact that people cannot think deeper than just following their desire to replicate the success of established big vendors. This so called ‘companies’ fail to recognize that offshore outsourcing market is over-saturated already. There will not be another Wipro, Infosys or Satyam or as a more local example there won’t be another MoveYourWeb, Itransition or Aitoc. Big fish which is swimming in this pond is able to keep with market saturation and keep well. They are able to employ administrative personnel needed for effective functioning of the company (executives, marketing, sales, hr, attorneys, office managers, system and networks admins, representatives). They are able to compete on price easily because there is no need to earn high profits on every employee to maintain the functioning of the company. They are able to provide solid offices and work space to the employees and motivate those. They have millions of other advantages that the similar small company doesn’t have.

Don’t take me wrong – there are and will be successful outsourcing companies starting (few -providing services, many – developing proprietary product) but founding another outsourcing service provider trying to emulate the model of an established successful company located next block is just a FAILURE. A lot of times this new ‘CEOs’ of such ‘companies’ think: ‘We know everything about technology and outsourcing. We’ve been working in outsourcing company for years. Why not to start our own company. We will compete for the customer by lowering prices, offering a additional compensation advantage to employees and claiming that we have a more personalized clients approach and earn some decent buck for it, right?’ WRONG. Optimizing competitive advantages by 10% will not do the trick of competing with big names established long ago! That is simply not enough to brake though. You will end up in spending years of your life, face debt, bad image and other bad karmas. The business model should be different to compete and succeed.

Types of offshore outsourcing companies that can get successful:

1. Companies providing UNIQUE set of services. Take a look at this company providing online tutoring services. Finding the unique niche which is not saturated is the key for companies giving a stake on this business model.
2. Companies leveraging relatively cheap offshore resources to develop unique web properties. Those are generally called Product companies. This is a concept of the future, the only downsize aspect of this is that you will need funding to support the operations. But that’s the different story.
3. Companies which act as an office of established software companies or big outsourcing houses employing AT LEAST 100 full-time people in other countries. Partners that have small ventures don’t qualify (you don’t want to become the company with the 1 customer). In 99.95% of cases this is the dead road since the ‘partner’ will not be able to grow the company big due to the same reasons mentioned plus additional like multi-focus on different businesses that are being run (in 90% the ‘partner’ will be just trying out this outsourcing venture). Only big established companies. Full stop.
4. Companies located in rising outsourcing destinations. Vietnam, Egypt, Argentina and others – outsourcing is just starting there that’s why you can compete on price on the global market and grow because there is not much fight on the local labor markets yet. The disadvantage is lack of strong experience and sometimes communication of the employees so that’s valid to specific types of outsourcing only.

So you are located in a third world country and willing to start your own company or already running it (small one). Does the business model qualify as one of described in 4 types? NO? Then keep building the career at the company you work for, gaining additional experience and skills, leveraging the expertise you have for your success, the success of the company you work for and the ultimate success of the customer. You future is stable and planned and stable in this case. In case the answer is YES – you are at a spot where it might be worth trying. Go for it if you are really confident about it! Just remember that in case everything goes wrong sending out the cry for help if the form of SPAM emails begging for a project will not be the way out.

We’ve seen customers that engaged established software houses into the creation of a media streaming web sites ending in a failure to deliver the project after half a year!!! of work. The vendor experienced in this type of projects can roll out the similar solution developed from scratch during 2 months (assuming that the customer doesn’t want another clone of YouTube but has a more-or-less unique concept).

Now not only starts ups but big media companies need to innovate. Consider this example: an average American citizen spends 28 hours a week watching TV (sounds unbelievable, right) however for the young people that’s much less because they take this time and move it to their computer. So media companies, like MTW, suddenly say: Ooops, how do I get into computer? How do I reach this audience? What technologies do I use to engage the audience? In the majority of cases the answer can not be found internally. In the old days such companies were innovating internally but now when the web is evolving so fast the internal senior executives might not even how to use an RSS reader. Same issue with the internal IT folks – it’s most likely that they do their job instead of doing the research on new technologies and happenings on the web. So where is this innovation going to come from?

We see that more and more companies are relying on the outsourcing providers to come up with this innovation or support it. It’s important to understand for the customer and the vendor that to success in outsourcing innovating not only the technology aspects should be in place but the provider should understand the business of the customer and take themselves more of a consultant just as a provider of development services. This is the aim of the MoveYourWeb development departments and that’s where we are at partly and where we are going to. Not only we are proud to develop innovative web properties for our customers but support big names dealing with innovation, such as MixerCast – one of the best widget distribution companies out there.

Here at MoveYourWeb we understand this principle and develop a lot of innovating web projects and try to share the critical knowledge as much as possible among the employees engaged into production. Innovative web technologies and latest happenings on the web are under our radar and we are really pacionate about it because clearly this is the model that will be very popular in the future.

1. Official news on Google Blog;

2. Home page where you can sign up for Google App Engine Account and download SDK plus other misc small things;

3. Getting started guide;

4. Gallery of applications which are already created (wow – more then 20 apps during the first day)

Now – it’s only a beta and registration is closed for the first 10.000 developers that were lucky to join the program. Our CTO is the happy person. There are many limitations which are currently in place but much of those should be lifted after the official release. The only supported language now is Pyhton. Luckily (or should I say proudly) here at MoveYourWeb we have such people and working on the first applications already.

There is HUGE buzz in the developers community already with the rumors that it’s competing with Amazon Web Services such as S3. The benefits are obvious – you concentrate on developing while not worrying about the system administration and servers. It would probably can compete with Facebook Applications platform also. During the last year the developers around the world were engaged in developing applications for Facebook trying to leverage it’s user base (and for good). Say every 1/10 customer of ours showed an interest in developing applications for Facebook. What might happen now is that everyone will want to leverage the user-base that Google has and build the application for on their engine also. You have gmail account already, right? With this say – it’s all the guessing game in the day one after the release and we will see how it will evaluates. For now we can just state: we are in this game already and working on our test applications plus we will be happy to help the existing and potential customers with the development of applications using Google App Engine.

If you want your web-site become popular and your business prosper – do not abandon the management of the web-site. You are to follow all the trends in the sphere of hi-tech and implement them on your web-site even if doesn’t relate to technology and web-development. The efficient issue is to draw potential visitors to your web-site and in order to achieve this one should not neglect such marvelous marketing steps like creating a blog, for example, a successful corporative blog that presents its visitors with detailed information about modern furniture trends on the market; making some press-releases about the new products and services provided by a concrete web-site; organizing meetings and broadcasting them online again with definite details about a web-site; leading Google AdWords campaign and come out first in the Sponsored Search results; taking part in affiliate programs and so on and so forth.

One should not forget the that a Sale is an issue of enormous importance. Nevermind how great a sale is (-10%, -30% or more) this produces a psychological effect of the end customers. The table “Currently on sale” affects the customers as a magical artifact. Special events and occasions are the best sources of marketing strategy. Let’s say “Christmas Sale”, “Independence Day Sale”, “Thanksgiving Day Sale” and other. Well, this is a great marketing step in order to attract visitors reminding them of the pleasant things that they want to hear at the same time showing that shop owners as well as shop-assistants are caring about the end customers and show their “equal relation” or “we-group” (psych.) in relation to the buyers. Decoration here places by no means the last role. An ideal instance can be this online-shop: Ductless air conditioners & heat pumps store.

Summarizing this post one should restate the fact that there is always a huge scope of substantial improvement that a webmaster can put into practice if the ultimate objective is to benefit on-line!

Recently I dropped on really nice thought, comparing both models. Seems to be the vivid answer to that long-lasting question.

Which is easier:

1) Architect the backend
2) Build the backend
3) Build the front end
4) Test it
5) Client asks for a change
6) Change the Architecture
7) Rebuild the backend
Rebuild the front end
9) Test it
10) Client asks for another change
11) Change the Architecture
12) Rebuild the backend
13) Rebuild the front end
14) Test it
15-1000) Rinse and Repeat until client says you’re done or runs out of money
1001) You’re done, yeah!

Or:

1) Build the front end
2) Client asks for a change
3) Change the front end
4) Client asks for another change
5) Change the front end
6-250) Rinse and Repeat until client says you’re done or runs out of money
251) Architect the back based on the front end
252) Build it
253) Test it

If a webmaster has a web-site that sells, for instance, modern furniture and mattresses he/she could definitely use the keywords like “funiture” (162 searches a day according to Wordtracker), “matras” (34 searches a day), “matress” (346 searches a day) and so on. Just make the necessary changes in title, meta-tags and in the content body itself and you’ll reach the top! Outstanding results one can make out of people’s illiteracy!

Right now the situation is improving a bit as there are fewer and fewer illiterate searches in the cyberspace. It’s not a piece of cake anymore to reach the top10 even if you use, say, “bithstones” keyword instead of “birthstones”.

One can mention this “misspelling technique” as an old micro-strategy in marketing world, but the idea has transformed into a global direction in the Search Engine Optimization world due to its efficiency and marvelous results.

Web developers might say: “You right – we are going to use Mozilla and IE for testing purpose”. What about Mac users? There are quite a few emulators of Mac OS out there, and it’s real nightmare to install them. Better bookmart the SafariTest – just enter your URL in the box and click View. SafariTest will return a screenshot of your page as viewed with Safari.