When it comes to the selection of outsourcing provider for the creation of innovative web project (anything from social network to widget creations) the company shall make sure that the provider has the actual expertise of developing similar innovative projects. In the majority of cases the customer might end in selecting reliable web development company with a long track of experience creating web projects, employing experienced developers but without the experience of creating the relevant innovative web properties. Chances are high that this project will be a failure because the provider is simply not there yet from a relevant experience prospective. They haven’t work with this types of web properties and do not invest much in R&D and stepping into powering startups (usually those are the first adopters of innovative technologies).

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.

Tags: management, web 2.0, web development
Posted in management, outsourcing, web 2.0, web development | 1 Comment »

Whoever you are and whatever you do; it is not about how good you are and how good your songs, smiles, poems, door handles, decors, paintings, services and buns are.However, speaking about buns, you won’t gain much from the fact that they are known beyond your street and community. There is a chance that your buns will become a local attraction, so that every tourist will by all means drop in to taste them on the way to the art gallery. Still that tourist won’t be able to enjoy your buns for breakfast while at home.

If your activity is not very much dependant on time and location and you are not the sole service provider in the area, you certainly need advertising. If not advertising in its pure sense, then at least some efforts to make your business known beyond the circle of your actual clients, their friends and relatives.

There was a time when ads in the local newspaper would spread the word about you to everyone. Then came a time when you needed to bother about radio-coverage, publish a couple of leaflets, and, who knows, may be your city was big enough to have a TV channel.

Today, however, the issue of spreading information is not that simple. The thing is that the pool of information is bottomless. If you want to get your message through to me, for instance, it’s no use trying to do it with conventional advertising techniques. It was 1.5 years ago that I last saw a newspaper; I only occasionally come across a radio broadcast once in a couple of weeks; as for the television, I don’t watch it at all. And it’s not that I’m a snob who doesn’t care about the world around. The thing is that I don’t have time to follow all the information sources. And even if I did watch TV, how could one guess which of the dozens of channels I would pick that day. When there used to be only 3 TV channels, the term “information space” made some sense. But since their number saw an incredible increase, there have appeared numerous, practically isolated information spaces.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: adwords, facebook, general thoughts, google, MySpace, orkut, search engine optimization, SEM, SEO, SMO, web 2.0
Posted in SEO, general thoughts, web 2.0 | 1 Comment »

This morning started with exciting news by Google introducing Google App Engine that allows web developers around the world to build applications and use the same infrastructure that Google uses. Google provides authorization which is using gmail addresses and hassle-free deployment and scalability.
Below are the links that will quickly update you on the story:

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.

Tags: amazon web services, facebook application development, google apps engine, web 2.0, web development
Posted in web 2.0, web development | 4 Comments »

If you are an owner or a marketing peer of small or medium business you definitely should spend 15 mins of your time for making first step in Facebook marketing.

For those of you who are still not familiar with Facebook the following facts are listed:

• The total count of active Facebook users is 55M+;
• 250.000 users join the network daily;
• 35% (and growing) users of Facebook are professionals, in 2006 Facebook shifted the focus away from being a students social network;
• Because of the focus shift the fastest growing age category is 25+ years.
• 1000+ developers start using Facebook API daily to develop applications covering every aspect of life.

The above mentioned means that Facebook is the perfect marketing opportunity for B2C businesses and the first steps toward marketing of Facebook will be creation of a corporate page there.

The following guide explains the corp page setup process step by step:

1. On the profile setup page select the industry relevant to your business;

2. Enter all the necessary descriptions about your business (overview, mission, product - the more the better) and upload corporate logo so the visitors can recognize the business.

3. Click on your business name hyper link and then click ‘Publish this page’

4. Become ‘fan’ of your business. And here is where the magic begins. As soon as you became ‘fan’ of your business your Facebook ‘friends’ will get the notification similar to the following one: Peter Melnikov became fan of MoveYourWeb. Assuming that the big part of your ‘friends’ would be your customers part of them most likely become ‘fan’ of your business to and ‘friends’ of ‘friends’ will see it too…

5. Optional. Might be number 1 if you played with Facebook arleady - before creating a corporate page add a lot of new ‘friends’ to your account by converting the database of your customers to facebook friends (many are likely have a Facebook account already). That will increase the results of this small marketing campaign proportionally.

Want to see a sample corporate page? Check out MoveYourWeb on Facebook and feel free to try becoming ‘fan’ of our business. Questions? leave those in comments and our Facebook developers or marketers will reply asap!

Tags: internet marketing, web 2.0
Posted in internet marketing, web 2.0 | 4 Comments »

At recent IT English classes that are organized in our company (personally I attend upper-intermediary level as a lot of other management do, we also have intermediary level classes) we discussed the evolution of advertisement on the internet. Everybody could remember the crappy ad banners that were flooding the web sites 4-6 years ago. Those were simply untargeted and spent a big deal of advertising budgets of .com companies. Nowadays the advertisement is getting more context and relevant with ad programs starting from AddWords and Overture and finishing with Amazon  having ‘customers  who  bought that  book also  bought‘ feature, which provides the results based on the sales history. The advertising and marketing are getting less offensive and are getting more and more focused on target audience.

The world of marketing is definitely getting smarter with the marketing masseges hitting very small targets. The successful marketers of the future and successful business ventures are those who will be able prepare X versions of the same basic ad delivered to X different users based on both data that is mined behind the scenes, and data that they directly input.

Web 2.0 is in power now and the most valuable companies are those focused of competitive differentiation based on data. Those services succeded because they effectivelly gather and use the data - there is no much sense listing all of YouTubes, MySpace, Facebook and others here. They are known not for the security, reliability or security. In fact many have experience outage that would have killed any other traditional web company. Data is the most important component of internet success nowadays. Think about the way you utilize and use the data while starting your next business venture or rethinking the functionality of the current solution.

 p.s. I’m a big fan of our English classes not just because we polish our English speaking skills here but because this is a great opportunity to discuss ideas, trends and innovations happening in the IT industry.

Tags: advertising, general thoughts, internet marketing, marketing, web 2.0
Posted in general thoughts, internet marketing | No Comments »