What happens in our startup, week after week...
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Hello everybody, my name is Domagoj and I work in the financial department of Bumblehood as an analyst. Sometimes my friends joke around I was born with a calculator because I'm always trying to calculate odds of some events happening (for an example: what are the chances you'll get 2 aces in Texas Hold'em?) and different scenarios in which those events are possible. Plain and simple - I love numbers and odds.
Financial analysis is a pretty complex economic „feature“. There are sometimes several ways for calculating virtually the same thing and so many variables you have to have in mind while you are making your calculations.
As you probably know, most small entrepreneurs start their business without proper planing. They just have an idea and go with the flow hoping that everything's going to be great, without questioning themselves what the challenges in front of them are. A very important thing every business owner must ask himself before deciding for an investment is cash flow. Cash flow is determined by cash movement in and out of your business or a project. There is one important fact you have to become familiar with – profitability isn't a synonym for liquidity. One company can fail if it's not liquid even with the fact that it's profitable. Shortage of cash in a crucial moment can easily ruin a company and make the owner’s life pretty tough. Cash flow forecast presents monthly cash receipts and cash payments during a certain period of time, most often one year. To determine your cash flow projection, the first thing you have to work on is identifying all the factors that make cash inflows and outflows. Try to be objective and realistic because an overestimated cashflow forecast can be worse than not having a cashflow forecast at all.
That's where making your business model scheme comes into place. You have to estimate movement of all variables that affect your receipts and expenses in a way to formulate a scheme with all those variables interconnected and related to each other. Sounds like fun yet? Well, I suppose many people wouldn't consider this as the most interesting thing you can do, but I'm really enjoying it. So, you've made your „Business model scheme“, what now? Calculating your cash flow of course. You've identified all sources of cash income and expenses, so now's the time to assign them to certain numbers. The perfect way to do that is to create 3 scenarios – financiers most often name them optimistic, realistic and pessimistic – and yes, you should be ready for any of those as you're still making a prediction, not a statement. Try to be realistic and have one simple rule – if you're in doubt between 2 numbers, always use the less favorable to avoid overestimating your calculation. After making your cashflow forecast, the information that document provides are invaluable for efficient planning. After that you can easily start calculating other indicators that can provide you with useful information and make certain decisions easier – to invest or not to invest, that is the question!
Thanks for reading, hope to write again soon....If you're still wondering, probability of getting 2 aces in Texas Hold'em is 1/221 or 0,0046%(4/52*3/51=1/13*1/17=1/221). I once got it 3 times in one evening, lucky me...
Posted by Domagoj Klaric on August 9th 2010 --- Permalink --- Tagged in categories: What's up --- Comments on Forum
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The number one problem which comes with every expansion is, without a doubt, logistics. Wikipedia says: „Logistics involves the integration of information, transportation, inventory, warehousing, material-handling, and packaging, and occasionally security.” Headaches caused by attempting to solve each one of these points in a limited time frame and with limited resources are not mentioned anywhere in the article.
To put the problems (and possible solutions) into perspective, I will use a recent examplefrom my experience - implementation of a customer loyalty platform in a (foreign) city. On the right-hand side is a high-level chart which represents all the actors and how they interact with each other; you might want to take a closer look.
The problem: create a model for logistics & support management which includes multiple in-house actors (contributing from different physical locations), education system for new in-house actors, external partners , material-handling, packaging, security, inventory, information storage and clearly defined workflows for each part of the process.
The fact that not all in-house actors are in the same physical location presented additional difficulties in communication and synchronization between them. Although BumbleMap, the software platform we’re using for knowledge management, wasn’t built with for these purposes, we’ve managed to effectively use it to solve this problem. An instance of BumbleMap was modified and organized in such a way to provide an intuitive interface; each actor has his own semantically structured section. Whenever any actor needs something (i. e. wants to place an order to be processed) from another actor, he opens the section of the adequate actor and creates a new task for him. When a new task for any actor is created, it goes into a queue and the actor to whom the task is assigned gets a notification.
With this model, each actor needs to know only which other actor is responsible for handling which task. Since one task is almost always handled by multiple actors, whenever one of the actors is finished with his part, he forwards the task (which is a simple drag&drop procedure) to the next actor in the “chain”. When a task is completely done, it is forwarded into archive for future reference.
Here’s one real example: an agent receives a request for creation of promotional materials (i.e. flyers) from a business representative (via E-mail, phone or any other medium). The agent creates a new task in BumbleMap within the Designer’s section under “New Order” (since the flyer needs to be designed first) and describes how the flyers need to look like, uploads some examples etc. When the designer is finished, he attaches his designs to that task, and drags&drops everything back to the Agent’s section under “Pending Approval”. The agent then checks whether the design is satisfactory.
If changes are needed, the Agent drags the task back to the designer’s section under “Design Needing Changes”. The designer then makes the required adjustments, attaches new proposals and moves the whole task back to “Pending Approval”.
When the Agent is happy with the design, he then forwards that same task to the coordinator, who then makes sure the flyers are sent to the print studio and printed. And so on… :)
Since the vast majority of tasks that go through the system are very time-dependant, it is crucial to have a system that is running smoothly and with minumum possible errors. As you can deduct from the diagram, the only critical point of failure is the coordinator – the actor who is also responsible for checking the system and correcting any mistakes and unprocessed taksk which „got lost“ somehow.
Of course, we will continue improving the system until it's the best it can be. But, it's encouraging that it works in the current state.
Posted by Vedran Banjeglav on July 5th 2010 --- Permalink --- Tagged in categories: What's up --- Comments on Forum
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Let me ask you something: do you pay for browsing the Wikipedia content? I don't. Do you pay for navigating the Google maps? I don't.
Do you pay for your nice and colorful travel guides? Many people still do. Let's change that!
I will state here something bold and hard to do, so please remember where you have heard it for the first time: Bumblehood will be the first company to create and put in the public domain, free of charge for the end user, tourist guides for every single country and city in the world. And I do not talk here about "a couple of pages promotional pulp fiction trash". We will create extensive, nice looking, professional, colorful geo-guides with photos, recommendations and interesting stories for every single important place on this globe. If Google starts populating Mars (in a 'we don't do evil' attempt to mine the planet's natural resources), that's where we will go and create the geo-guide for Martian cities as well.
It will not be easy, it will take a long time, but we have already started; and as Lao-tzu once said: "A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step".
We will never charge a single $ for any of those geo-guides published on our web site, and we will always keep them in the public domain for the end user. And the best thing is - many of you will help us build this project! Things start small, but they grow and after a while we will reach the point of no return. Anybody willing to bet?
Can you envision a world where people carry e-Book readers (or iPads or iPhones or ... whatever can read PDF files) while they travel? How about geo-guides on the fly? Search, find, load and hop you go. Museums, bars, hotels, interesting inside stories, good food. Everything freshly written by the Bumblehood community and published on the day of travel. Or better yet, published at the moment you need it, right on the spot in the local Starbucks' WiFi.
You can always keep the compact and easy-to-navigate tourist guide, with well known topics, photos, recommendations. Just like the good old paper book, but ecologically acceptable, never outdated and, of course, free of charge.
Can you envision that kind of the world? I can.
But for that idea to become reality, we will need a lot of people contributing and helping us create professional content for every country in the world. And we will need a viable business model which will keep us running. The good news is: community seems to start forming and web site traffic started to grow significantly in the last few months. And for the business model, well - I promise you that part too.
I want to see this thing happening, so I will do my best to make it happen. How about you?
Posted by Boro Milivojevic on May 25th, 2010 --- Permalink --- Tagged in categories: What's up --- Comments on Forum
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So let me introduce myself as everybody before me did. My name is Ivan and I’ve been working as a software tester on the Bumblehood project for almost a year and a half. In my first post I will tell you something about challenges of software testing. But befor that, let me briefly describe my work here in Bumblehood.
The initial phase of the software testing process is not - as everyone outside IT automatically assumes - to open the application and start clicking everywhere until the application stops responding. The first step is getting to know and understand the project documentation which mostly includes feature requirements, GUI specifications and use cases. The next step is to write a good test case according to the specs. Only after writing a good test case - and putting it to a corresponding test suite, the “clicking job” can really begin.
Functional testing is my favorite part of the whole software testing process. Every new functionality is a new challenge and questions like “Can a user do this?” or “Does this new feature work as described?” are brought up on a regular basis here in Bumblehood. Of course, a lot of regression testing – the most boring type of testing – also has to be done, to ensure that no additional errors were introduced in the process of fixing other issues.
So what are the top challenges for a tester? There are quite a few challenges which every tester has to face and cope. Here are some of the most important ones in my opinion.
Deciding which tests to execute first is a very important challenge – what has the higher priority? Bug fix confirmation or a new feature? The answer is sometimes self-explanatory, but not all the questions are as easy as the previous one. So ability to work under pressure is essential for this challenge.
Regression testing is also a big challenge - as the project is expanding the pressure rises and it is difficult to handle constant functionality changes and in the mean time check previously working functionalites and bug tracking.
Proper understanding of exact requirements can also be a significant issue. Did a person who wrote the requirement miss something? What if I completely misunderstand the requirement? Therefore, a logical mind and a lot of team work are necessary to overcome this obstacle.
Relationship with developers is another delicate challenge for both testers and other developers, particularly because both parties can make a thousand excuses when they do not agree with some points. Good communication skills, troubleshooting and analyzing skills are essential for a good tester.
For the end of this post, here’s a picturesque joke about developer – tester relationship.
Posted by Ivan Lajtman on May 10th 2010 --- Permalink --- Tagged in categories: Software team --- Comments on Forum
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As you might have already noticed from the changes on our main page, we started a new community project a few months ago. The goal of project Bumblehood Books is to provide free PDF travel guides for all members of the community, and motivate people to share their knowledge. If we succeed in our goal, there will be no need to buy expensive guides anymore – anyone will have access to free travel guides and all related information.
The first of many E-guides on our virtual shelf is the Bumblehood Travel Guide to Italy. As it was a pilot project, there were many things that were not quite fast enough (there were a whole bunch of things edited manually at first) or which had to be repeated. It took a lot of effort, but we persisted, learned a lot of know-how and optimized the whole process for future publications. Most importantly, we upgraded the BumbleMap platform (the “engine” behind Bumblehood) to better support PDF printing and make the process of publishing new PDFs much easier. Just a reminder here - any individual topic on Bumblehood can be exported into a PDF (via the PDF icon in the upper right corner), but printing of more than one topic (or “print manager”) is still being polished by the dev team.
Apart from PDF guides, all of which will be available for free download to our registered users, we’ve also released two Kindle Books from Bumblehood content: the Bumblehood Travel Guide to Italy and the Bumblehood Travel Guide to London (PDF is coming soon). These inexpensive guides were re-edited specifically for the Amazon Kindle e-reader (they are not just automatically converted PDF) which took considerable effort. If you like our guides you can support further publications by purchasing these Kindle books. A big thank-you for everyone who does!
Those of you who haven’t done so already, please download The Bumblehood Travel Guide to Italy and check it out! We appreciate any feedback you might have on these digital books, as it will help us improve them for everyone’s benefit.
Posted by Vedran Banjeglav on April 30th 2010 --- Permalink --- Tagged in categories: What's up --- Comments on Forum
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I write about what happens in our startup week by week...
In my last blog (almost 3 months ago - sorry folks, did some fund raising in the meantime), I asked myself how to predict the perfect formula for earning money. Which are the elements and variables of your start-up business which will have significance, and which will not? Which part will be of great importance for your income and which will have only a small influence?
Let's widen up our problem a bit, and later I will give my point of view where the solution to our "predictions problem" might lay.
One of my favorite books, written by John W. Mullins, states it is wise to start thinking about your business model even before you start writing your business plan. There are many things you should clarify before you conclude that you have a perfect idea which will work. Basically, you should aim to give yourself (a would-be entrepreneur) a reality check. As stated in the book: You may have capital and a talented management team, but if you are in a fundamentally lousy business, you won't get the results you would in a good business.
Let's assume you did pick up the right thing, your idea has potential and finally you came to the point of predictions. Writing the business plan always has that part which deals with earning money. Every investor will ask the same thing: "How do you plan to earn money?" It is not everything in the business, but it is surely the most important thing every would-be entrepreneur has to consider very carefully.
And every formula how to earn money has variables you have to guess or predict.
So my point of view how to solve that problem lies in a magical number: 5,000 (that is, 10,000 divided by 2). When you take the time to become an expert in something (usually called "10,000 hours expert process"), you need half of that time to become good enough to figure out the big picture and to capture the business model.
You need around 1,5 years of your life just to figure out is this idea of yours good to go. Many hours of research, Internet reading, data mining, thinking, long hours of work and iterations. And if you really spend that time and afterwards still think that your idea can earn money - give it a try. Invest your time, money and energy to pursue that business model - but only after your initial research period.
Never, ever before that!
It is so easy to say, so hard to do. Right?
Posted by Boro Milivojevic on April 13th, 2010 --- Permalink --- Tagged in categories: What's up --- Comments on Forum
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I write about what happens in our startup week by week...
I was tempted today to write about our Bumblehood portal news - start of our new community project, professional, inexpensive (or even free of charge for our community members) travel guides for everybody, but I couldn't take it from Vedran (the "father" of this project) who will write about that topic soon, probably right about the time our Kindle eBook sales start (if "the Kindle team" holds the deadline, that should be sometime mid February).
So, for this blog I am going to cover one thing which bothers me most of my entrepreneurial life. Still does at the moment. Predictions!
Let's assume you are a young "entrepreneur-to-be" and you have "one great idea" (who does not?) which you want to push to the market (and get sooo rich that you can buy Google!). You start thinking about it (the idea, not Google), put first brainstorming ideas to paper, sleep less, think more, figure out you are not-so-good in Excel as you thought you were (yeah, right, you DO need to learn what the "goal seek" function does!) and finally you finish up with, (*insert dramatic music here*) - the first business model, usually called "the beast" or "when-you-read-me-again-you-will-not-understand-me".
No panic, that's normal. People tend to overcomplicate everything when they think about the model of the idea for the first time. Now, what is important for the young entrepreneur-to-be is to be consistent and patient with iterations of the model. Iterate, make it simpler, iterate, make it more simple, iterate, make it even more simple and at the end, when you have the final model which is so simple that you can understand it "no problemo". Then (not before!) you ask several people to read it and give his/her first opinion. And then, guess what? "Sorry, I didn't get this", "Can you explain how do you plan to do this".
So - back to the "make me more simple" table. Already bored? Well, if you are, entrepreneurship is not for you. If you still stand, welcome to the club.
And then, somewhere on your way of progress with your new ideas and the business plan, you will come to the point when you start asking yourself: "How will I make money with this thing?" Again no panic, every entrepreneur-to-be (also called '"the founder” among the VCs or "the fool" among friends) comes to that point, because, guess what - your business model must earn something, right? If it doesn't you have two options, either drop it or continue sleeping and eating at your favorite hostel "Chez Mama".
And when you come to the point of asking yourself how your business will earn money, then you come to the point of predictions!
And here, my friend, nobody can help you. This is the Mordor of every single entrepreneur-to-be, this is "the final divine truth" you have to seek and be sure not to mistake (at least not to mistake too much). Trust me, if you want to do something new, something worth spending your time and efforts, something you will put all your energy into, there is this one topic of predictions NOBODY can help you with.
Every single business model idea will have variables which form the magic formula "How to earn money?" Let's write a simple example for a small family restaurant which sells exotic soups to vegetarians in Soho (New York):
Money earned = "number of vegetarians who will come to my restaurant that live or work in Soho" *
"number of times they will come per month" *
("number of those who stay loyal during more months" + "newcomers") *
"average number of soups they will eat per meal" *
"how many meals per day" (maybe both lunch and dinner, maybe not?) *
"do I offer new soups every day/ week/month so they don't get bored" *
"how much does one average meal cost" *
"what are my costs to run the business" *
...
You get the picture, right? And this is just about a small family restaurant, not about hardware machines paired with hi-tech software which will navigate a laser beam in eye surgery. (BTW, it is rather good that small family restaurant owners usually do not ask themselves these questions, or we would have nobody opening restaurants. Many owners close their businesses during the first year simply because they do not ask themselves those questions.)
All the variables have to be predicted and put in place for your business model to work. This is it, this is why starting a business is so fun to do. You get one good idea and all of a sudden you find yourself in deep ... well, you know where.
Maybe this whole mess with variables and predictions would not be so bad if you just have to deal with those parts of the problem. But there is something you have to know in advance - and it ain't pretty. Most of you already know this, many of you will find out soon if you are following the path of entrepreneurship - EVERY single investor (if it is not from the class of 3F - family, fools, friends) will ask you to EXACTLY specify to him the revenue formula and exact numbers for each and every variable you can think of. And it is not even the worst thing - they will pretend to be very clever and they will ask you trick questions about each variable. Of course, usually they know less than you do, so they just pretend and use their common sense and a bit of experience.
So how to work out this problem? Think about it and come back in 10 days, I will write my point of view about this topic.
And don't forget, new projects and companies fail because founders usually stop working on them. Don't be one of them. Work out your "profit formula" well.
Posted by Boro Milivojevic on January 28th, 2010 --- Permalink --- Tagged in categories: What's up --- Comments on Forum
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Hi there! Since this is my first contribution to this blog, I'll shortly introduce myself.My name is Miroslav, better known to all as Kela. I've been a Bumblebee for almost two years and I’m currently working on this project as a senior software architect. My previous work experience is based on many different technologies and work methodologies.
A couple months ago we have started a parallel project, the BonusCard Program, in which I currently participate. So I'll tell you a little bit about it.
There are many customer loyalty programs on the market, and many of them are quite successful. Most of them are using very simple business models, which ensures customer satisfaction and ultimately gaining a higher profit to the company. The business model is not designed only to satisfy the current customer but to get new ones as well. In general that includes business models which have changed in time and are dependent on the current market situation. Loyalty programs are mostly driven by market analysis and marketing plans (loyalty marketing).
There are many concepts and models; some of them are using cycle of success and cycle of failure concepts. However, general investment in employees, their correct selection and training will create a corporate culture in which they are empowered, and that can lead to increased employee satisfaction and motivation. Such concepts will, in turn, likely result in better service delivery and more likely in better customer satisfaction. Customer loyalty will be increased as a result, improving sales levels and gaining higher profit margins. One of key elements to evaluate customer satisfaction and loyalty is through customer's feedback to a particular business.
Loyalty programs are marketing efforts that encourage and reward customers’ buying behavior. Customers are provided with loyalty cards, rewards cards, club cards or point cards which can be made out of paper or plastic. Those cards are usually identical in size to credit or debit cards, or even smaller, and they identify the cardholder as a member of a particular loyalty program.
Loyalty cards are mostly used by customers to gain discounts or to collect points that can be used for future services. In most cases, the card issuer requires the potential cardholder to provide a (most often) minimal amount of identifying data, such as name and address. Application forms usually entail agreements concerning customer privacy. Aggregate data is most often used internally (sometimes even externally) as a part of market research.
Those were some general facts about loyalty programs in general. Stay tuned for subsequent posts!
Posted by Miroslav Kelekovic on January 7th, 2010 --- Permalink --- Tagged in categories: Software Team --- Comments on Forum
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So I guess it's my turn to write something about what we do here at Bumblehood. But first, let me introduce myself. My name is Aleksandra, and I've been a content writer for Bumblehood for some time now. I started as a member of "a skilled network of writers" as my colleague Petra smartly put it, and today, some 18 months later, I still write articles that are at your disposal to read or edit. Alright, I did some formatting and editing as well, and more recently, I translated some shorter texts from German into English. Oh, and I also had to rewrite the Help section. This was an extremely tiresome work demanding of me to deal with some very technical terms I didn't understand. Thankfully, my IT colleagues were there to help. :)
So, what's it like to be a content writer for Bumblehood? Well, if you're into creative stuff like writing or searching the right photo for the article you've just written, then being a content writer is a satisfactory venture. Mind you, if the longest you've ever written is a text message to your partner explaining why you couldn't make it to your date, stick to reading.
A great deal of content writing is research work. This means digging through various sources for pieces of information that would back up your article or simply confirm your knowledge on the subject. Sounds time consuming? It is! But it's a must and it's worth the final product, i.e. the finished article. Of course, personal experience is always welcome, if not required.
Although the articles are proof-read and edited if necessary, it's advisable to refer to various dictionaries and grammar books. I always keep my collection of Oxford dictionaries close at hand. However, being a graduate student of the Faculty of Philosophy, this does not come as a surprise.
Being a Bumblehood writer has its ups and downs. As almost every work on the planet... WSISWYG Bumblehood editor is really easy to use, and certainly is one of the ups of content writing. It enables you to change your article in whatever manner you want; to play with paragraphs, titles, tables, pictures... It almost allows you to act like a child. The downs include some minor bugs, although these are now in the past.
So, to return to the main topic of this blog, and that's my current work for Bumblehood. I've been fortunate enough to have been able to write about places I've visited and was permitted (urged, even) to put some of my own impressions into those articles. I consider myself an experienced traveller having visited most of European countries, slept in various hotels and having tasted many national dishes. So for the last couple of months I've been writing about two top destinations - the city of Munich and Italy, or more exactly, the regions of Italy. Last year's trip to Venice was my fourth visit to Italy. Before Venice, I had visited Tuscany, Rome, Lombardy... Come to think of it, I've actually travelled through the entire upper half of the country. Writing about these Italian destinations was a trip down the memory lane for me, reimiscing the sights and sounds, tastes and smells. The latter two largely referring to the delicious Italian cuisine. Enough about that (I'm becoming hungry). Munich is one of the largest cities in Germany and Europe, and I've been lucky enough to visit it last October. Yes, you've guessed it, I went there just because of Oktoberfest. But I had a great time! Munich is a truly fascinating city! It has so much to offer (besides the vast amount of beergardens). There are galleries and castles (be sure to visit the Nymphenburg castle), the biggest park in Europe (the English Garden) and highly entertaining festivals (the most famous being Oktoberfest of course).
For me, being a Bumblebee is fulfilling. I get to combine two things I'm really good at, travelling and writing. Oh, and my fellow Bumblebees are also great to work with... :)
Posted by Aleksandra Mladenovic on December 11th, 2009 --- Permalink --- Tagged in categories: Content team --- Comments on Forum
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We write about what happens in our startup week by week...
I read an interesting article recently about one famous company and its history. The story goes like this:
In 1833, Marcus Samuel founded an import business to sell seashells to London collectors. When collecting seashell specimens in the Caspian Sea area in 1892, the son of the founder realized there was potential in exporting oil from the region and commissioned the world's first purpose-built oil tanker, the Murex. By 1907 the company had a fleet.
The name of the company is Shell, and the brand is one of the most famous symbols in the world. The yellow and red colours used in the brand logo are thought to relate to the colours of the flag of Spain, as Shell built early service stations in the state of California which had strong connections with Spain.
Wow, that's a lot of information! First the guy starts a business to collect shells. Then his son, some 60 years later, finds out that the shells are not enough and switches to oil, propelling the business into unseen heights. The company is from London, UK, their logo is red and white because of the Spanish flag and everything is connected through the State of California in the USA. Sounds like 21st century, although it happened 150 years ago.
Starting up any business is hard, making money out of it is even harder. One of the first lessons every manager learns while trying to push the company through the break-even point is that business models change. In the times you're starting up, you thought you will earn money with the "best business idea" ever. Yes, of course it is the best business idea in the world - nobody thought about it, nobody knows it, you are in the position to change the world. The dream lasts until the time you have to earn the first dollar from your "great business idea".
Then you start tweaking, turning, changing, refactoring! You do everything and anything for your company with only one goal in your mind - survival!
This is exactly what we did in Bumblehood. I saw that the investment "situation" is far from being perfect and that it is going to be hard to raise new capital for the project in the near future. So we started to tweak, turn and change; 6 months later we have BumbleMap, the product which feeds us in these stormy days.
The times are hard, especially for startups. Last week I got an E-mail from the founding member of The Funded, a web site dedicated to research, rating, and reviewing funding sources worldwide. In that E-mail, the first couple of sentences were not so inspiring to the young entrepreneur which is searching for a new round of investment. The E-mail said: "The venture capital bubble has burst, and change is coming. Investments into venture funds are at a fifteen year low. There is increasing risk that innovative businesses will be unable to raise capital within 18 months."
Wow again! 18 months - that's a long, cold winter. Maybe even two long, cold winters. Young entrepreneurs, prepare for the ride.
I have been talking to some of the venture capitalists in the last 10 months. Most of them silenced at some moment and I thought I did something wrong. The project is crap, ideas we created are useless, my team is not known enough, I suck, something is wrong! You know all those thoughts person has when not everything goes as planned.
Then I asked a couple of my friends, who happen to be in the same process of raising capital, how were they doing. And this is where I figured out that we all suck, all our ideas are crap and none of the teams is known enough. But it was not us being wrong. It was just the lack of new investments happening in the world. And they still don't.
New entrepreneurs, prepare yourself for the ride. And two cold winters!
Posted by Boro Milivojevic on November 2nd, 2009 --- Permalink --- Tagged in categories: What's up --- Comments on Forum
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As some of you may have noticed, we're officially no longer in beta status. The software team has been working around the clock to make BumbleMap as stable as possible and removing bugs encountered so far, in order to make using the software a pleasureable experience. We're determined to keep all features easy to use and only a click or two away, and the list of features & feature requests grows daily :).
Besides the software platform, we're also preparing to launch an innovative customer loyalty platform - a complete package for both customers and business owners. The idea is to provide local business throughout the world with an integrated solution for attracting new customers & rewarding existing ones, as well as a method to effectively promote the business and available special offers. It's a win-win situation for all involved parties, since the cardholders will be able to discover great new places at the Bumblehood portal, collect points for every transaction made at an establishment which is a part of the program and earn special coupons offered by different local businesses.
The city of Munich will be the first to try out the Bumblehood BonusCard, as the program starts there in December. We've prepared a local portal just for Munich (we will be following this model for all future cities which will be a part of the BonusCard program), available in both German and English languages, including interesting local information and a list of local businesses in the city.You can also get all information about the BonusCard there.
We'd love to hear what you think about this program, especially if you're a resident of Munich! Send us your opinions & ideas how to improve at bumblehood (at) bumblehood.com.
Oh and while you're at it, give as u tip or two about how you like our weekly comic!
Posted by Vedran Banjeglav on October 19th 2009 --- Permalink --- Tagged in categories: What's up --- Comments on Forum
Since all my colleagues before me started their first blog post with an introduction I will do the same. My name is Goran Hacek and I am one of the developers here at Bumblehood.
Today I would like to share the results of one of my side projects with you. As the size of the Bumblehood content database has grown significantly, a need for tools that provide insight into the state of that content arose. One of the tools that I have been working on is for visualizing link states in local guides - today we are making this tool publicly available. You can access it by following this link.
The tool collects data about internal topic linking and visualizes that data in an informative and at the same time visually appealing way. Local guides are displayed as radial trees of topics. In the center of an image is the root of a tree, and all nodes in particular depth are placed on a circle with the same radius; as the node depth grows so does the circle radius.
Topics are displayed as circles. Their interior radius represents the number of outgoing links from that topic while its border width represents the number of incoming links (number of Bumblehood internal links that are pointing to that topic). Labels are displayed only for leafs of a topic guide and their size is calculated by taking both the number of outgoing and incoming links into account.
We have a couple more ideas about what to visualize and in which way (I will write more about this in the following posts), but if you have any ideas of your own about what could be interesting for you to see please don’t hesitate to write on our forums. Also, tell us your opinions about these visualizations.
Posted by Goran Hacek on August 31st, 2009 --- Permalink --- Tagged in categories: Software team --- Comments on Forum
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There are several blog entries made by members of Software Team at Bumblehood, but none of them is mine. So to make things right, the first part of this post will be a short introduction with a little bit of history. My name is Marko, and I'm currently finishing studies at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (FER) at the University of Zagreb, with 3 exams left at the time of writing. Along with my studies, I have been working here at Bumblehood for about a year and a half as a college intern. A lot of things happened in that period. Bumblehood and Bumblemap projects developed from early system drafts made on blackboard in the office in Munich, to fully developed scalable application. This required a lot of work and effort, sometimes staying up all night making deployments and testing before the deadlines, but also we had some fun times while working.
For this first post I will write about experience gathered by working in the Software Team in Bumblehood and what are the highest priorities in making new features and releases. Bumblehood project encompasses many successful and proven tools for Java and Javascript development. Its backbone is the modular Spring Framework which is a top tool for building modern, scalable and extensive enterprise applications (replacement for bloated J2EE application servers). Most of the tools are open-source and they made our life a little bit easier. But relying only on good tools is not all. Far from it.
If you ask an average developer how long does it take to develop a wiki community portal software, he will probably say something like this: "I can make it in one weekend, and a high school student would do it in 2 weeks. It's trivial." In his eyes Bumblehood would be nothing more than an "Edit" button and "Submit" button. When you press "Submit", text is stored in database in some table and it's retrieved when you press a button on your mouse on the topic link. There is a tremendous amount of polish added to rough core system here at Bumblehood project. I know because I see the code every day :). A vast majority of users which are using Bumblehood agree that the overall user experience from start to finish is enjoyable. Ultimately, user experience is the only thing that counts. It's also a very complicated and abstract term. It goes far beyond a of list of features and sources of information, and consists of simple, clean and responsive user interface, page loading speed, page flow and much more. If users find what they need quickly without much fuss, that is also helpful. And the most important thing is that improving user experience is an iterative process. So every day one busy Bumblebee in the Software Team (and in other teams too :)) has only one goal in mind, and that is not making the best Bumblehood code ever, but making the best Bumblehood experience ever.
This was a short insight in Bumblehood software policy, I hope you liked the post! You can send me a message on my public wall whenever you need my help on Bumblehood, or if you just want to say hi!
PS. I didn’t make up this talk between 2 developers about triviality of developing software. I accidentally overheard this talk between two guys during lunch time in our team’s unofficial diner - Modena. :)
Posted by Marko Mrkus on July 30th, 2009 --- Permalink --- Tagged in categories: Software team --- Comments on Forum
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As this is my first blog post, I believe a short introduction is in order: My name is Petra and I've been working on this project as content editor for a year and a half now. As the project grew, so did my tasks and responsibilities – writing Help section, formatting texts (which was the most boring part!), content selling, and, most recently, translating an entire website into German (BumbleMap).
In the initial phase of the project I worked as content writer as well. The plan was to cover 30 countries in a year, which seemed to me as quite an ambitious plan, but we managed to do it. At one point, as many as 55 people worked on content writing. However, while some countries are covered into detail, there are some which need to be further elaborated, thus giving the community a possibility to join in and contribute.
Anyhow, my role of content writer lasted only less than a month, as the amount of content grew rapidly. Since Gabrijela, being the chief editor and content team leader, also had to take care of things such as administration, and acted as a mediator between developers and content writers (which consumed a lot of her time!), at some point I was practically left alone to edit the content. I think you would all agree if I say that it's simply impossible for two content editors alone to go through the whole content (some 40,000 topics!), created by more than 50 people. So if you come across content parts that need editing, feel free to jump in. We'll be grateful :).
As majority of content was written by a skilled network of writers, its quality is unquestionable, though I remember coming across an amusing image caption describing a fjord in Norway, which said: Preikestolen – a lovely nature spot or suicide paradise – no fence, no one to hear your screams as you jump headlong into the abyss. Morbid - as if we were a suicide travel guide :). I still don't know whether this was intended as a joke or not...
Having graduated from the Faculty of Philosophy (my majors were English and German language and literature), most of my working experience was somehow connected with translating and I consider myself everything BUT a tech-savvy person :). So naturally, an encounter with this kind of platform was a completely new experience for me, but not an unpleasant one. Bumblehood's WYSIWYG editor is very easy to use, one just can't make a mistake... Though, I remember, in the very beginning, work was sometimes annoying due to repetitive bugs that drove us all crazy (content writers and developers equally) – sometimes content just disappeared, country templates didn't display flags, we had problems with positioning images in articles, etc. Content writers were simultaneously testing the application and reporting bugs to developers through Gabrijela. It took a lot of time and effort to remove bugs, but we're now proud of the results.
In addition to all that, I've broadened my vocabulary – I've come to understand terms such as Topic Maps paradigm, syndication, RDF and similar. Working on this project has been dynamic, creative and interesting. I think we all contributed to developing a product of high quality. And luckily, my job is not as stressful as that of developers. I do stay longer when necessary but I still haven't spent the whole night(s) in the office. And hopefully I won’t have to :).
Posted by Petra Kekus on July 23rd, 2009 --- Permalink --- Tagged in categories: Content team --- Comments on Forum
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News flash: we’ve recently set up a website for the BumbleMap platform, the “engine” behind Bumblehood. A German version is also available. As certain deadlines had to be met, only the most important parts of the site were implemented – it will be fine tuned, properly branded and optimized in the following weeks.
BumbleMap software will also have a strong SEO-friendly aspect, doing most of the work in that regard for the customer. Of course, this is not especially important for use on company intranets, but is invaluable when used for powering web sites of any kind. It is our goal to provide a complete solution which will meet all user requirements and keep up with the latest trends.
As far as Bumblehood is concerned, we have a major SEO update coming up, which should drastically improve organic traffic over time. One big issue we’re currently researching is duplicate content. Since we’re relying on the Topic Maps paradigm, it is logical to have the same entry in multiple instances within our tree structure. Let’s take Café de Paris in London for example, which you can access through the following paths:
United Kingdom – Local Businesses – Nightlife – Clubs
United Kingdom – Cities – London – Local Businesses – Nightlife – Clubs
United Kingdom – Cities – London – Areas – City of Westminster – Local Businesses – Nightlife – Clubs
All of these paths make semantic sense, but technically this is duplicate content in the eyes of search engines. One possible solution we’re considering is the introduction of canonical links, which will hopefully resolve any duplicate content worries.
Another thing we’re considering is introducing more “reader-friendly” links. Currently, links to all articles on Bumblehood have the /article/ID_hash format. Such flat structure has its advantages, but it’s really not convenient for showing in search engine result pages. Naturally, changes of this scope require tight cooperation with the development team, careful research and testing.
With the implementation of user registration and PDF printing option, Bumblehood’s beta days are numbered. There is still a long way to go, many improvements to be made and numerous features to be added, but we’ve made good progress thus far. Teamwork is everything, and my personal opinion is that’s one of our strongest points.
Posted by Vedran Banjeglav on July 15th 2009 --- Permalink --- Tagged in categories: What's up --- Comments on Forum
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I am writing about what happens in our startup week by week...
Some time ago I read one article from Joel Spolsky about the nature of new businesses. He says: "A new business is like a shortwave radio. You have to fiddle patiently with all the dials until you get the reception you want."
There is a lot of truth in those two sentences and everybody who runs any kind of business can confirm and agree to that. The business you start probably won't look like that in several years. Changing and tweaking every step is a constant task for a young company, and if you are not ready to do that, you shouldn't even enter the turbulent waters of entrepreneurship.
So, is it easy to constantly self-motivate yourself and change your business model every second, all the way until success? If you look at the fail rate of new businesses, the answer is "no". When asked about all the different ways a start-up can fail, Jessica Livingston from a small angel investment group called Y Combinator said that they all fail for the same reason: people just stop working on their businesses.
Paul Graham, also from Y Combinator, says: "The biggest reason founders stop working on their start-ups is that they get demoralized. Some people seem to have unlimited self-generated morale. These almost always succeed. At the other extreme, there are people who seem to have no ability to do this; they need a boss to motivate them. In the middle there is a large band of people who have some, but not unlimited, ability to motivate themselves. These can succeed through careful morale management (and some luck)."
It seems that every founder and young entrepreneur has the same problems, and it is up to them to self-motivate. I personally manage to self-generate my morale. How about you?
Back to reality, what happened in Bumblehood during the last several months? Did we stop working? Is our morale low? Check out our portal, we are finally fully functional and the air of web 2.0 is all around us. We change constantly and tweak our progress every day - we are far from slacking. Our BumbleMap platform is in the spotlight at the moment, but that is a topic for another blog post. Stay tuned.
Posted by Boro Milivojevic on July 7th, 2009 --- Permalink --- Tagged in categories: What's up --- Comments on Forum
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When IE6 was launched some time in 2001, I was just a college freshman with a big interest in the Internet, a small interest in how websites work and no interest whatsoever in browsers, standards and all the other stuff that defined how things work the way they did (or at least should). As almost every boy over the course of his childhood tries to disassemble a toy to see what makes the wheels on a toy car spin, I was certainly no exception. But in my case this exploring spirt hasn't faded out yet. That's how HTML and I first met :)
After I constructed several „Hello world“ dummies, I think it was in 2003 that I launched my first real web site. The site looked fairly cool, at least from my perspective and for my level of expertise at that time. There was a whole lot of DHTML which was a big buzz back then... However, the most important thing was – it worked. At least I thought so, since I had no reason to believe otherwise. Back then I had no idea that anything other than IE5.5+ existed (anything important, that is). And even if it existed, I thought in my blessed ignorance, how different can a web page look in another browser? You've seen one, you've seen them all... The only difference is in the company that makes it and maybe GUI skin. Yeah, right... Until one day I saw my site in Netscape Navigator. The horror I saw that day is still haunting me from time to time... Javascript errors, hidden menus jumping all over the place... Horrible.
My experience back then is probably how many client-side developers feel today after testing their web apps in IE6, the very same ones they've just completed to be W3C compliant and work flawlessly in standards-compliant browsers. However, NN was at that time a tired old browser at the sunset of it's existence, and today IE6 is a big boring yet vigorous old hag that just keeps annoying you day and day again.
Due to its lack of support for advanced CSS and XHTML, IE6 can be considered to be really holding back the web. With so many alternatives available, and after the release of Internet Explorer 8 which put IE in the standards-compliancy era, it's time to take the web to the next step.
Four months after our launch, although IE6 usage on Bumblehood is still not low enough to be considered irrelevant, what's encouraging is the fact that both IE general share and IE6 share are dropping constantly at a pace greater than 0.5% on amonthly basis. This pace is a good signal, given the fact that IE6 already dropped significantly in 2007/2008 and that the last few pounds are the hardest to lose. What's discouraging enough is the fact that at this pace, it would take almost two more years for IE6 to drop to levels where it could no longer be considered worth supporting. That means two more years of excessive development needed to enable your web-apps for the uninformed minority. Two more years... Probably even Microsoft itself will abandon any kind of support for IE6.
A decision to stop supporting almost a fifth of the audience (IE6 market share accounts up to 16.94% in May 2009 according to NetApplications) is something designers and developers are not quite comfortable with. Yet this decision has to be made, whether several weeks of lower traffic (and consequentially a lower income) are a small sacrifice for a greater goal of getting the Internet out of the stone age. Having in mind that Pareto's principle can also be recognized in tweaks and hacks required for sites to work in IE6, it's not that hard to calculate what limited support for IE6 can contribute to extra development time.
When decomposed to a logical level, it is really easy – people are using IE6 and aren't considering replacing it with more up-to-date browsers simply due to the fact that „everything works“ in IE6. If „everything works“, it can't be that bad after all, so why bother changing it. As long as the websites are tweaked and hacked to work in IE6, people will use it to visit websites. Once the people are unable to use the majority of web services with IE6, its usage will be abandoned. What one in client-side development can do is inform the visitor that his experience of the website could improve significantly with a modern browser (or even going maybe a bit down the extreme road and letting people know that the web cannot be viewed in IE6), people will consider alternatives. Just imagine if Google, Gmail and FaceBook decided that IE6 is no longer supported by their apps - would that be a large enough impulse for the significant part of IE6 users to switch to alternative browsers?
What about us? As much as I'd like to completely abandon support for IE6, I'm quite sure the management will disagree with this idea, as it means 15% lower traffic. 15% for a start-up is worth pure gold, I know. Since Bumblehood already supports IE6 in read-mode beta, there's no point in changing this approach overnight. But with launch-day approaching for edit-mode beta and IE6 being unsupported in the first iteration, I sincerely hope that our stand towards IE6 will not change significantly more than providing limited support for content editing in IE6. That's the least we can do for the web.
Posted by Dino Ursic on June 30th, 2009 --- Permalink --- Tagged in categories: Software team --- Comments on Forum
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I am writing about what happens in our startup week by week...
In the last couple of weeks my colleague Matko wrote about technical side of our project. At first I thought we can do it in parallel, one blog about technical side, one about business aspects, but after his first blog post we got so much attention from the community that we decided to keep the buzz in the air for three weeks in a row. So here I am, after one month of technical idiosyncrasies I will write, as I promised a while ago, about Yelp and differences between our project and what those guys at the West Coast are doing.
I love Yelp. All people that I know like Yelp. It helped me find a good restaurant last time when I was in the States, not to mention the bad bars I managed to avoid. OK, I admit, I do check CitySearch and TripAdvisor, but Yelp's GUI is clean, without tons of ads, and I feel cozy enough to spend a lot of time on their pages. I guess I made my point, and I reckon that Yelp is going to stay on the Internet scene for some time.
So, if Bumblehood has local businesses, if we have slick and almost ads-free GUI, if we are a community oriented web portal for global and local travelers, what makes us think we are so much different than the Yelp guys?
Yelp has acquired data for millions of local businesses; huge base of followers and community members updates its content on daily basis. They got 40 times bigger investment than Bumblehood and they have been “live” for years. Does all that make them different? I wouldn't say so.
Small companies grow, outsiders gain popularity on the Internet quickly. In months and years to come our community will also pick up and we are determined to stay on the same track of what we have been doing so far. And what we have been doing is not what Yelp has been doing, and I will now tell you why.
First, and maybe the most important of all, Bumblehood is not trying to be the yellow pages of the United States of America (with Canada and UK as a side-kick) only. Yes, the USA is the biggest economy in the world, but Europe, Japan, China and Russia, just to mention a few, are the new markets where local businesses emerge faster than in the USA.
Yelp is focused on the USA and on yellow pages only, and no matter how good they are doing their job, our opinion is that it is just not enough. Focusing on local businesses and not providing additional information about geo-location itself (being it a town, region or country) seems a bit boring.
Bumblehood aims to be "Yelp for the whole world", but also wants to provide the "full experience" for locals or the global travelers. Our wiki approach, semantic structure and carefully designed domain should help us in this non-trivial task we want to accomplish in the years to come.
Some will say the most important difference is that Yelp and Bumblehood have completely different business models. Yelp has sponsored ads, all sorts of them actually. Many say that Yelp's marketing blurs with user generated content and that companies are stacking the reviews. Recently I have also read that some businesses have gamed (or tried to game) the system by reviewing on each other's business pages.
Bumblehood still hasn’t revealed publicly its business model and I am sorry but I cannot talk about it at the moment, although I feel the need :). Please stay tuned, we are launching at the end of the year.
But one thing I can promise already, we will not charge or sell anything to the local businesses and there will be no promotional ads on our local business pages. We think that community information should stay unbiased and that businesses should do their job the best they can without conflict of interests. This is and it will stay the holy grail of our business strategy.
Yelp is also doing elite squads and "the Elite thing", encouraging some people to pour thousands of reviews and fight their way up the ladder of the Elite group. I wonder if someone writes a lot of reviews just to become a bit "more elite" than the others, does this system goes into the direction of the community and the freedom which has been lately emerging on Web 2.0 Internet led by Wikipedia, YouTube, Flickr and the others?
I also wonder how unbiased and relevant those reviews are.
Bumblehood will not encourage this type of activities and no matter how popular or "elite" somebody is, his or her opinion should not influence the view on the local business more than somebody else’s. If we want to keep unbiased results we should think about this factor too.
Stay tuned for our big portal update this month.
Posted by Boro Milivojevic on June 12th, 2009 --- Permalink --- Tagged in categories: What's up --- Comments on Forum
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The World Wide Web in its today’s form brings significant benefits to web users by allowing them to perform a simple keyword-based search against hyper-textual information stored in tens of billions of web pages in a matter of second. The keyword-based search as the only search mechanism, however, severely limits the possibility of finding wanted information. Firstly, the search mechanism based purely on matching text strings does not take into account the underlying meaning of information, and secondly, the absence of implied semantic relationship makes organizing the relevant search results and presenting them systematically hard if not impossible.
Semantic web, pioneered as a layer on top of the classic web that adds semantic metadata to information enable computers to process and understand data in an intelligible way. This makes them (at least theoretically) able to perform more complex tasks regarding information finding and to obtain better end search results. To underpin semantic meaning, such approach also advocates use of ontologies, formal representations of a set of concepts within a knowledge domain and the relationships between those concepts.
Both ontology modeling and metadata creation can be seen as major obstacles to a wider adoption of semantic web. Ontology modeling, unfortunately, cannot be avoided; however, it is ideally to be performed by a small number of domain experts proficient in the underlying technological solution. On the other hand, manual annotation of documents with metadata is unlikely to be appreciated by knowledge contributors, unless the system provides support for reducing such workload (e.g. in the form of relieving a user of explicitly entering automatically deducible annotations).
Several enabling technologies have emerged as a part of the global semantic web effort. Arguably the most widely used one is the Resource Description Framework (RDF), a language for representing information about web resources. RDF, together with RDF Schema (RDFS) and the Web Ontology Language (OWL) constitutes the W3C cornerstone for formal description of concepts, terms, and relationships within a particular knowledge domain. The format of RDF expressions follows the subject-predicate-object form (known as RDF triple), e.g., the sentence “James T. Kirk commanded USS Enterprise” could be represented as (JamesTKirk, commanded, UssEnterprise). There is a number of RDF serialization formats (such as RDF XML serialization or RDFa) that can be used to semantically annotate hypertext data with and embed such annotations in web pages.
Topic Maps also emerged as a form of semantic web technology. While Topic Maps and RDF are very much aligned, they seem to be intended for different purposes (which stems from the original context they were developed in). As explained in detail in this article, while RDF was developed to support the semantic web vision by providing structured metadata about information and a foundation for logically inferring new information based on the explicitly provided data, Topic Maps were created to support high-level indexing of sets of information resources to make the information in them findable.
The key trait of Topic Maps that makes them particularly suitable for a web application like Bumblehood is that they can be envisioned as a hidden assistance provider to community-driven process of contributing information. Namely, Topic Maps take a topic-centric view of the information space, while RDF takes a resource-centric view. In my opinion, people are more likely to grasp on semantic annotations pertaining to topics than to particular resources. Furthermore, RDF as a language is more of a “lower-level” one with few semantics of its own, whereas Topic Maps are a "higher-level" language with relatively rich semantics. To be more precise, Topic Maps actually do not operate at the syntax level per se, but they are a paradigm. One does not need to stick to a particular data model for Topic Maps (as long as it conforms to the Topic Maps reference model), and can make the implementation by using any technology.
Alongside technological implications lies yet another, and probably the most important one – the approach, no matter whether RDF or Topic Maps, must be made to work for the benefit of its users. Both RDF and Topic Maps are a powerful way of organizing information, however, for working with complex structures, effective user interface is of uttermost importance. Successful implementation of a semantic web based system should require from a user to enter as few semantic annotations as possible, while enhancing user's perception of relevant information and providing facilities for easy navigation. In Bumblehood, we saw Topic Maps as particularly adequate for driving the latter, which we materialized through our tree-based visualization.
In conclusion, although one could argue that RDF and Topic Maps are equivalent on a theoretical level, and that one could be used in place of another, I hope that with arguments in this blog post I provided a sound explanation as to why we believe Topic Maps were the natural choice for Bumblehood.
Posted by Matko Botincan on May 22nd, 2009 --- Permalink --- Tagged in categories: Software team --- Comments on Forum
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Topic Maps are an ISO standard for organizing knowledge structures and associating them with information resources. Originally initiated outside the semantic web context and evolved from efforts to develop electronic indexes, they emphasize the ability for locating information within a large pool of information resources. As such, they are particularly suited for tasks involving discovery and navigation of knowledge bases, and thus constitute a promising enabling technology not only for semantic web, but for knowledge management in general.
A topic map consists of a set of topics capturing subjects from some knowledge domain and maps them to resources referring to information about the subjects. A topic in a topic map can stand for literally any entity (e.g. a person, an event, a business entity, an abstract concept, etc.) regardless of the entity’s specific characteristics. The subject a topic speaks about is given by topic’s name, and a topic can also be assigned a type. Relationships between topics are expressed by topic associations which put into a relationship any number of topics. Like topics, associations can also be categorized according to their types, and each topic participating in an association has a clearly identified role. Information resources a topic is linked to are called occurrences of the topic. These three concepts – topics, associations and occurrences – constitute the Topic Maps key ingredients – the TAO of Topic Maps.
In order to exemplify these concepts, let us have a short look at the topic map in Bumblehood. For example, London is a topic that speaks about the subject London, the capital of the United Kingdom (N.B. to be precise about the subject, we need to disambiguate from other meanings of London). Its topic type is “city” and it appears in the article about London shown in the right pane. It is in a parent-child association with the topic Cities of the United Kingdom where it plays the role of a child, and in associations of the same type with topics Local guide to London, Areas in London and Local businesses of London where it plays the role of a parent.
However, there is much more in Topic Maps than just separating relationships between topics from their occurrences in resources. We see on the London example how important it is to have knowledge of the identity of the topic’s subject, so that when referring to “London” we know that we are not referring to London in Queensland, London in Kentucky or London the writer. Furthermore, the topic map ontology developed for a particular application has to be supported with a mechanism for defining constraints on the topic map that will enforce the assumed semantic rules. For instance, in Bumblehood’s geographical ontology, only topics of certain types are allowed to be put into an association – only a city can be placed in a city container, while either a city or a country region can be put in a country’s regions container. On the other hand, it does not make sense to have a country container underneath a city. You can also see that Local guide appears as a child topic only for topics of certain types, and the semantic rules for local businesses are even more complex.
A large body of work has been done in regard to Topic Maps, however, techniques that support dealing with complex constraints still seem to be in their early beginnings. Arguably the most prominent approach is the Topic Map Constraint Language, a formal language for defining schemas and constraints on topic map models defined by the Data Model for Topic Maps. We did not follow this route in BumbleMap, but we implemented an approach of our own that allows us to specify the semantic rules we need in Bumblehood more easily. It is the subject of future work to see whether this approach could be exposed as a fully fledged language like TMCL, however, we believe that even in its current form it offers a beneficial solution.
Posted by Matko Botincan on May 15th, 2009 --- Permalink --- Tagged in categories: Software team --- Comments on Forum
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As some bumblebees already know, Bumblehood portal is powered by BumbleMap, a software platform for collaborative knowledge management. The introductory article about BumbleMap platform portrays its key features and pinpoints utilization of the topic maps paradigm as one of its bedrocks. Topic maps are a form of semantic web technology for knowledge representation, and in this blog post, I would like to explain a bit why we chose to employ them in BumbleMap. Also, I will try to give my perspective on how Bumblehood fits the semantic web area in general.
The key idea behind semantic web is adding a well-defined meaning to information on the web (typically in the form of semantic annotations) in order to provide more powerful searching capabilities and allow better processing and understanding of data. These characteristics, at least in theory, bring benefits to both kinds of web users – people and machines – making development in the area of semantic web even more appealing. Although 8 years have already passed since the term semantic web first appeared in public (in a Scientific American article), its repercussions among web users, however, are disputable at best. The fact that the web world has not been turned inside out as some might have expected is hardly unanticipated, but it comes as a bit of a surprise that even 8 years later no “mainstream” semantic web application seems to be successfully solving a problem of general public’s interest.
When the Bumblehood project started, the possible benefits it could have from semantic web technologies, and, in particular, the topic maps paradigm, were not evident at first. Only when problems pertaining to consistent organization and presentation of Bumblehood content about geographical locations and businesses arose, the topic maps paradigm came out as a natural path to follow. I find this worth mentioning because I believe that one of the reasons for the public perception that not much progress has been made in the semantic web area is a lack of well-motivated applications dealing with problems that people care about and for which the semantic web technology can provide a good solution. I am even under impression that many applications that emerged around the semantic web hype suffer from clear identification of the goals they are supposed to achieve. And even those that are clear about the goals have hard times bringing the underlying solution to their users without sacrificing usability of the application and the overall user experience (e.g., see the story of Twine).
Back to Bumblehood, the topic maps paradigm helped us not only to overcome the difficulties with information organization, but it also opened us a way for presenting Bumblehood content in a structured form that is easy to navigate. The approach you now see in Bumblehood is the one we found the most appropriate for the kind of semantic relationships among information entities that are present in the Bumblehood content. One might argue that the tree-based visualization of Bumblehood topics is utterly simple and does not appear as the most general approach one could come up with in order to lay out arbitrary semantic structures (e.g. check this project providing an API for visualizing graph and tree structures in a hyperbolic geometry). We are not trying to dispute such efforts, however, we firmly believe that it is wisest to keep things simple (of course, not simpler than that:) and use only what is necessary in order to defeat the problem. Only time will tell whether a tree-based visualization could be the right approach for “mainstream” semantic web applications in general, but even if it does not turn out to be so, we are convinced that we made the right choice for Bumblehood by using it.
Keeping in mind that “best things come in small packages”, I conclude this blog post, and announce its next part in which I will delve more into the role of topic maps in Bumblehood and dissect how this paradigm is applied in the domain of Bumblehood content.
Posted by Matko Botincan on May 6th, 2009 --- Permalink --- Tagged in categories: Software team --- Comments on Forum
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I am writing about what happens in our startup week by week...
Starting the startup is all about fun, working hard and being really excited about everything what is going on, right? Wrong!
It's much more than that. It's about having 14-hour working day, sleeping in the office, walking home like a zombie at 11 PM when all teenagers go to the clubs, being with the team at 04 AM when a major release is scheduled, not seeing your girlfriend for days, telling your mom you cannot be on that Sunday lunch (No, Mom, I really can't, I have to be in the office. Yes, Mom, I will be there next time, I promise)...
Actually it's also about being happy about your life, about what you do, and what you plan to change, being proud about it and hate it at the same time. It's all about figuring out how to survive in this cruel world.
Posted by Boro Milivojevic on April 24, 2009 --- Permalink --- Tagged in categories: What's up --- Comments on Forum
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I am writing about what happens in our startup week by week...
This week it is all about communication with the world outside. When a new product is pushed on the market, all you want is the publicity, a lot of publicity. Well, it sounds easy and everybody around you knows "one good way how to do it", so you hear things like: do Twitter, do blog, do Facebook, do Youtube, do Flickr, etc. Everybody is a kind of PR specialist, those entire information dance in your head and you feel you are the only one not being aware of the "perfect plan for spreading the buzz". Stupid me, stupid me!
After you do some broadcasting and make a couple of mistakes, somehow the buzz starts. Most probably your project needs to have a "wow, this is cool" factor, and if it does, the buzz starts. Anonymous people start to talk about you: bloggers blog, Facebookers network, Twitters tweet, media guys call and schedule interviews - in one word, your CEO time is booked and communication becomes your only daily task, at least for some time. Of course, the night is long, so the other tasks are scheduled for 5 p.m. tea time and after. I love tea time!
Every day you get something new to communicate to the world outside and that makes your life interesting and fun. I love my tea time, but I also love to talk about our startup and I enjoy every moment of it.
On Monday I read one post about our project on TechPluto, blog about startup reviews. Mr. Sharma who wrote the article took his time to visit our portal, played a bit with it and wrote a really constructive article about us. I am using this opportunity to say thanks and TechPluto will be on my RSS radar from now on.
At one point the article quotes: "if Bumblehood wants to be yet another competitor to these monstrous services (Wikipedia and Yelp) then the chances of being the Next Big Thing are bleak". Wow, just comparing Bumblehood to Wikipedia is something which makes me dizzy. OK, the author does have a negative opinion when comparing David and Goliath, but that is usual and I would probably do the same thing at the moment (the Google guys were also outsiders in the field which was "already invented", right?). But comparing us to Wikipedia shows where we are heading with our goals and what we want to achieve. And I am proud of it.
So, why Bumblehood is NOT Wikipedia?
I have to bow to the Wikipedia project all the way to the ground, and I have been doing that for years already. My friends know how big a fan of Wikipedia I am and how much I have learned from that project. It is probably the best thing that happened to the Internet lately (with all respect to the others). But no, Bumblehood does not want to compete with Wikipedia, we don't even dream about it. Bumblehood is simply different from Wikipedia.
And I will tell you why:
1) Encyclopedia style (Wikipedia) vs. Local guide for places and businesses (Bumblehood)
Targeting particular groups of users on Internet has always been the holy grail of web visibility, buzz, and search engine optimization. Wikipedia made it successfully and nowadays it became de facto the place where to look for the facts and the details about any topic human can think of. But it is NOT a guide!
Webster world dictionary defines a guide as "a book giving instructions in the elements of some subject", while encyclopedia is defined as "a book giving information on all branches of knowledge".
When people travel somewhere, they will not take an encyclopedia with them, but rather take the guide to instruct them about the topic and the neighborhood of the topic they are interested in. The same applies for a person who needs information about particular business or product - he/she will not take an encyclopedia to find a fitness studio in the neighborhood. He/she will rather take a systematically organized guide (yellow pages or something similar).
There are many differences between encyclopedic style of writing and writing for a guide. Anyone who already had an opportunity to travel somewhere knows the difference between the factual texts and guide texts written in personal, interesting and sometimes "spicy" tone. The thing is pretty much the same with any topic described in encyclopedia or guide.
Bumblehood is a travel guide portal and we do not plan to become an encyclopedia.
2) Flat structure (Wikipedia) vs. hierarchically organized structure (Bumblehood)
Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, a flat structure of documents without real hierarchy and neighborhood-connectivity. Bumblehood is a hierarchically organized knowledge base targeting one area of the human activity at the time. While Wikipedia targets all topics in the world, ranging from science to religion and philosophy in a flat, one article topics, Bumblehood tends to structurally organize geo-location knowledge base about any point of interest in the world. So, the flat system without the "neighborhood” component of Wikipedia cannot be the compared to the hierarchical world of Bumblehood.
While some people will say that Wikipedia has categories, organization and hierarchy, I claim (and open discussion about that topic on this blog) that Wikipedia's structural organization is inefficiently set up in later phases of the project and it does not have structural and semantic rules which can guarantee good systematic organization.
Let's take an example: City of Barcelona, the capital of Catalonia (an autonomous community in northeastern Spain) and the second largest city in Spain can be found in English Wikipedia. If we take a look at the categories in which this city is placed we will NOT find category "Cities in Catalonia" nor "Capitals of Spanish Autonomous Communities". Although, if we take Munich, the capital of Bavaria (a state in southern Germany) we WILL find categories "Cities in Bavaria" and "German state capitals".
This example shows ambiguity and incompleteness of the Wikipedia’s categorization system and justifies semantic topic approach used in BumbleMap knowledge base platform. It is just much more powerful and provides better systematical data organization.
3) No local businesses (Encyclopedia) vs. Local business directories (Bumblehood)
Wikipedia does not allow business promotion and most of the businesses are not present on Wikipedia. It is just not something what Wikipedia does. Full stop.
Bumblehood on the other hand takes into account any geo-location in the world, including local businesses. But those businesses are not scattered around, they are systematically and hierarchically organized together with the local guides, providing the full picture about one geo-location (neighborhood, town, region, country).
4) Plain text editor (Wikipedia) vs. full WYSIWYG editor (Bumblehood)
Jimbo Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, decided to run a simple study and found out that "the most active 2% of Wikipedia editors, which is 1400 people, have done 73.4% of all the edits". Let's face it - to edit Wikipedia you have to have the extensive knowledge of a complicated and user-unfriendly markup language which is used to contribute the content. It is not a secret, and although Wikipedia's markup is a very powerful tool, it is just too complicated for a non-experienced user who is used to WYSIWYG environments of modern text editors. Wikipedia's editor seems to be coming from the age of "terminal WordPerfect".
On the other hand, Bumblehood WYSIWYG editor is easy to use - open the document, edit it, see what you are doing and close it when you are done.
Not only that guide content is editable using WYSIWYG editor, but also information about the local businesses, which makes Bumblehood a unique place on Internet. Hopefully our contributing community will appreciate this part. You can check it yourself on Bumblebee testing environment.
5) Non-profit (Wikipedia) vs. for-profit (Bumblehood)
While Wikipedia is a non-profit foundation not allowing any promotional activities and business placements, Bumblehood is a joint stock company. Wikipedia's way has many advantages and I personally love what those guys are doing - who wouldn't support free knowledge distribution. But many obstacles and growth problems which Wikipedia is facing right now (and most probably there will be even more in the future) start to worry many of us.
On the other hand, for-profit companies like Bumblehood, have more possible sources of income which can provide a long term stability and development. I wonder what would have happened to Google, Facebook or YouTube being non-profitable organizations? Their costs are just too high for that model. Let's hope Wikipedia stays for a long, long time.
Although Bumblehood is a for-profit company, we have already put all our content under the Creative Commons license and as long as I am leading this company, the knowledge base we gather will always be free for everyone. This is the dream I strongly believe in.
Do you have anything to say about this topic? Our Forum is open for the discussion from 0 to 24, and you can reach me privately on boro-AT-bumblehood-DOT-com
And why Bumblehood is not Yelp? Stay tuned for my next post.
Posted by Boro Milivojevic on April 16, 2009 --- Permalink --- Tagged in categories: What's up --- Comments on Forum
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I joined the project in March 2006, after having previously worked for small to medium scale companies doing web applications for banks and other clients in Munich. When Boro presented to me the idea of a community-driven feedback system, I was thrilled, so we started working for our own company. Nothing could have stopped us and it was a very enthusiastic period of time. We had a lot of work, but we were the ones who were defining the goals, planning the tasks and doing them one by one. A completely different atmosphere from having someone else tell you what to do. Such shift was actually not easy for me :)
Having set up the office, bought and installed computers, and created infrastructure for Munich-Zagreb collaboration with two more developers, we started our work on software. We used what we knew best, namely web design and java. For me, this was also an opportunity to apply domain-driven design, which connected our ideas to the software we were creating. This approach helps you focus on the domain, on finding problem-solving models, rather than just on technologies. Having a chance to set up everything from scratch was a valuable experience to us.
At that time we were defining the first specifications of the software, in an informal way and with help of basic questions like:
• "What do we have to do?"
• "Ok, but how exactly will this work?"
• "I haven't seen anything like this before, will it be accepted?"
Sometimes answers were clear to some of us, but most of the time they weren't and it felt like blind walking. We moved slowly, starting with the navigation tree. While Vrc and Dino did the GUI prototype, I focused on the infrastructure and backend. At that time, Boro defined most of project requirements.
I communicated with Dino and Vrc over voip phones and IMs. With voip phones and RealVNC, we were able to establish a kind of tele-presence by sharing a desktop and doing pair programming.
Among the most interesting project activities were week-long brainstorming meetings, when most of team members gathered either in Munich or Zagreb and had day-long talks about solutions to problems. During that time, we went out at least once a week, to a beer hall or to the famous Oktoberfest in Munich, and to some traditional restaurants like Medvedgrad in Zagreb.
18 months ago, after having developed the first prototype and enlarged our team, we discovered Topic Maps paradigm, which fitted in our project perfectly and gave us more insight into what we wanted to do. This was just an addition to the current software, but the infrastructure remained the same, comprised of many software technologies chosen from open source space, such as Tapestry, StringTemplate, Spring, Hibernate, MySQL, Lucene, dojo, TinyMCE, Ant, Maven, TestNG, Tomcat, Apache HTTP Server and others.
All of them are integrated in BumbleMap product and all of them offer a one-stop-shop solution which, with time, was either extended, changed or simply replaced. None of these actions would have been possible if we hadn't learned from the open technologies and their backend communities.
Also, our families and friends contributed to the project with their patience and support... I know my girls, Vilte and Daina, experienced my absence most. I am grateful for your support, girls, thank you.
Posted by Claudiu Dobre on April 6th, 2009 --- Permalink --- Tagged in categories: Software team --- Comments on Forum
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If a tree falls down in a forest, and nobody is around to hear it, would it make a sound? How about if a web portal goes live and nobody knows about it, is it really there? I'm not entirely sure about the first question, but in the second case the answer is clear – yes, but not for long. My name is Vedran, and my team's job is to make sure that Bumblehood takes the place it deserves among the Internet community and steps out of its current anonymity.
It requires a lot of time and effort to draw attention to a website in the vastness we like to call cyberspace, especially one that is quite new – Bumblehood has been around a little over a month, since February 15th (what Sasa likes to call „one night of horror“). Since I used to be a content writer for Bumblehood during the non-public beta days, I had good insight about what the portal was really about, as well as the general “feel” of it. That knowledge proved invaluable in the current mission of my team, because I could focus my outgoing communication on the portal’s innovations and cool aspects.
Needles to say, we were all quite excited during the first week of our mission, which consisted primarily of brainstorming about different means of creating buzz. Numerous ideas arose, some of them good, some excellent and some bad, and a plan was slowly beginning to form. We all knew that months of intensive correspondence and other forms of communication were ahead of us, all the way hoping that people would recognise the potential of our web. It was up to us to spread the news, but we couldn't control the feedback, so we were quite anxious to see Bumblehood through the eyes of others.
Since Bumblehood is a community-driven project, it was only natural to approach fellow bloggers first. The team sent several e-mails with general information about the portal and BumbleMap, the engine behind the whole thing, to several blogs which covered web 2.0 news, start-up companies and technology. And they didn’t disappoint. I would personally like to take this opportunity to thank Killer Startups, Startup Meme and Sociable Blog for providing that crucial first coverage, informing their readers about the rapidly-growing toddler, that is Bumblehood. You certainly made our job a little bit easier.
It is not just outgoing communication that matters, however. In order to make it easier for our users to spread the word about us, my team decided to include quick links for every article to the most popular social bookmarking sites like Digg, StumbleUpon and Reddit (also known as the colorful little buttons in the upper right corner). After a brief meeting and arrangement of all details, the development team included those buttons overnight, all without any sort of bribery. Now that’s teamwork!
Another important aspect of our job is search engine optimization – a little science in itself, and a very inexact one at that. After reading many articles and different opinions on SEO tactics, numerous ideas about improving visibility and better keyword targeting popped into my head. I will not go into details here since it is just technical stuff, and we're still considering the positive and negative aspects of all those ideas. Since the primary goal of the communications team at the moment is to generate more traffic and spread the word about Bumblehood, we don’t really have time to go into much detail regarding this activity for now. It is, however, very important, and we intend to begin tackling this giant very
soon.
That’s it from me for now; I will keep in touch with updates as soon they are available. And don’t forget to spread the buzz about Bumblehood if you like the site; there’s nothing quite as reliable as a recommendation from a friend.
Posted by Vedran Banjeglav on March 25, 2009 --- Permalink --- Tagged in categories: What's Up --- Comments on Forum
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As this is the first post from our sysadmin team, it would be nice to get to know each other. I'm Davor, people call me Horza and I'm in charge of system administration for Bumblehood. This blog will be about the stuff that happens in our project from the system administration point of view. Now since my colleagues, Gabi, Boro and Sasa mostly ranted about our problems in their previous posts, I'll try to stick to nicer, shiny-happy topics and hopefully give some insight into our server architecture and some of the solutions that we employed to power it all up.
Oh, and just to give you a bit of warning - there will be some tech gibberish here from time to time. But not in this one, this one is about people from all departments who work to bring Bumblehood to life.
During a year or so that I'm with the company, we have been thinking hard about the architecture that is required to bring users a pleasant surfing experience and explore Bumblehood using the powerful BumbleMap platform our software team developed. And like in every other project, there was (is?) a constant "battle" between our software guys and server gnomes ending usually in both sides making a compromise. Of course this wasn't a real conflict; more like a project-wide cooperation to determine if some feature should take many resources from our servers, or should it be rewritten to take less. This clash of two worlds happens not only between devel and sysadmin guys, but also between devel and content departments, and between content and sysadmin as well. I won't even start about different views that the nice folks in charge of business development have compared to us techies and writers. But despite difference in our views, one thing that we all had in mind all of this time was to have a product that users will like when the D-day comes. So we all joined together and worked to finish all the work on time.
But, besides our work on the project itself, there were also two interesting side-effects that are perhaps more important than the work we are doing here. Those things are about us as people and coworkers.
The first noticeable side-effect that goes on in Bumblehood is that we are learning from each other. But not the standard way, you know those regular work-related things that you learn at any other company at some regular pace. This experience is a little bit different. Since there is so much diversity between different departments here, we are bombarded with new things on daily basis. I'm not talking about work related facts or knowledge, but about the stuff that we didn't know existed, and from areas we would have probably never learned ourselves.
For example, a couple of days ago, I was chatting with a colleague from our content editing team about what to cook that evening, so she mentioned something about Mexican food. And a couple of hours later, I somehow found myself reading about Main industries in Mexico. :) That was a really weird experience, that came to me like an epiphany, because I would really never have read it if she hadn't mentioned something interesting about the Mexican cuisine. And through that I've learned some new things that I never thought about. Of course, I've learned a lot more from our development team, but that's mostly related to technology, so it's a bit pointless to talk about all that stuff.
The cool thing about working with different people here is that we have a great opportunity to learn not only about work, but also a lot about all sorts of topics from the "common knowledge", and all that while performing our everyday job. And you can imagine how much that influences the level of motivation.
The second interesting side-effect I wanted to talk about is happening in human relations. It's quite normal for people who work together to get to know each other better every day. But here at Bumblehood we have been through some tough times together, and we have been working as one to push this project as well as we can. That caused quite a bit of stress and really put us all to a test, not only as coworkers, but also as people. And I think we can all say that we passed it with flying colors. Even when the things got quite tough, there were no nervous breakdowns, no shouting (ok, almost no shouting :) ), and significantly less tension than one would expect from a team this big that had been working 10 to 16 hours a day for a longer period of time. And we still had enough in us to grab a beer after work. Anyhow, we all stuck together and went through it all as professionals, and during that time we really found out a lot of our human and not just business side.
Right now, couple of months after the big stressful period has begun I think we can say that we have all made some friends here, not just established excellent working relationship. It will be interesting to see how it will develop now when one rough patch is behind us and another one approaching.
I would like to conclude this introductory post by saying thanks to everyone who made this project what it is now and for being a great team.
Posted by Davor Grubisa on March 23, 2009 --- Permalink --- Tagged in categories: Software team --- Comments on Forum
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Being the CEO of a startup company is never easy. Knowing the old rule of thumb that from ten companies only ONE succeeds in becoming profitable makes you sweat most of the time. Maybe worse than anything is waking up in the middle of the night, thinking about some tasks which have to be done tomorrow, or this week... or this month... Since this is my fourth software company in the last eight years, from which two were profitable and one a failure, I am doing better than many, but every startup is different and each one brings both sweet and bitter tastes in different ratios.
How does the developing of the company look like from the perspective of the person in charge?
What problems do you face and how hard is it to run the start-up?
How do you choose right from wrong, good from bad, important from waste of time?
Which personal and team challenges are involved in the process?
How do you deal with the tough times and rough rides?
Do you still have time for your friends, family, yourself?
Are you getting fat?
Many times I have searched web portals and blogs for the answers which would reveal to me "the pearls of wisdom". And I have to tell you something - not many people write about this! They are either busy running their companies and do not have time to describe what is happening around them, or they are just scared of bad luck they might cause by writing about their new startup while it is happening.
So I’ve decided to write my blog precisely about this topic: what happens in our startup, week after week.
Actually, I plan to keep biweekly blogs, and my colleagues will fill in the gaps.
So, what's the title about?
I have a friend, Sunny, who works for a big IT company, and mostly does VoIP integration stuff for governments and big multinational corporations. They just finished a project in Budapest, Hungary, and he is now in charge of an internal task: to set up a better organized knowledge base of 35 projects that his 50-head-department made in the last years.
In February he got my email about Bumblehood being live and kicking, and called me several days after to arrange a meeting. I thought, couple of beers with an old friend is exactly what I need, so I suggested a small local brewery where we usually meet. He said, surprising me: "no, come to my office, I would like to ask you something first, and then we can go for a beer". Ok, visiting his working place in my working hours was not exactly what I was hoping for, especially not now when we have hands full of work preparing a new version of software scheduled for May.
But it's Sunny; always smiling and kind.
So I went. And we talked. They need semantically structured wiki software, so that each team member can participate in systematically organizing the mess they have. He asked me how much it would cost if they bought our BumbleMap platform. And I didn't know what to answer. So I said: "It will cost you 20k€ and three months of waiting since we are not finished yet". And he said: "OK, but I want these 4 customizations done for us by the 1st of July". I said OK. And we went for "Dunklesweissbier" (special dark, not filtered, wheat beer made in south Bavaria and around). Only tomorrow did I realize what actually happened.
We still do not have a pricelist for our product, there is still much going on in order to finalize the first full production version and we are working 10 hours shifts every day including the weekends. But we have the startup of something new in our hands, although nobody still knows about it :(.
But Sunny knows. He actually spent 5 hours experimenting with our Bumblebee Testing Environment after I had sent him an email about our existence. He saw the potentials of our software since he already did some research on WYSIWYG wiki software. And he put his trust in me. This is what friends are for. Thanks Sunny.
Of course, he made a deal for his company. Most probably a good deal! Should I have said 40k? I don't think so. Money will come afterwards; the first priority should always be: make the software solve people’s problems, and make it stable. Everything else will come later. Sunny just proves that the exception makes the rule.
Posted by Boro Milivojevic on March 16, 2009 --- Permalink --- Tagged in categories: What's up --- Comments on Forum
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After months of continuous brainstorming, designing, implementing and refactoring, the D day (D stands for deployment, what else could it be :)) finally arrived. The day started at 9am with the last conference team meeting before the deployment. The plan was to add a finishing touch to Bumblehood application and to start with the deployment. Although it was Monday, the beginning of the week, the spirits were high, both in Munich and Zagreb office. You could see the excitement on the faces of team members. Maybe snacks and refreshing drinks contributed to general atmosphere in the office... or maybe everybody just wanted to get this thing over with and take it off the agenda :)
The first part of the plan (adding that final touch) was done as expected - on time and without any problems worth mentioning. Good, first task completed...
I was aware that the second part, deployment (on test servers and on production servers, respectively) might not (and probably would not) go so smoothly. After all, I had several big D days in my professional career and I know from experience that our good "friend" Murphy is always here, waiting behind the corner to surprise you, unannounced and when you least expect him.
And Mr. M. showed up sooner than expected. The deployment on test server failed – the application wouldn't start. How come??? The deployment on test servers had been successfully done several times over the last few days. Uh, we hadn’t even reached the production environment and we already had problems (and I’ve got one more grey hair). A thorough check was immediately done. Luckily, we found both the cause of and the solution to the problem very fast. After some testing conducted by all team members, the conclusion was that the test environment was up and running. One more task completed...
Production servers were prepared and there was just one, though big, step to take. Before we started, I looked at my watch and I was really surprised. It was already evening - I didn't even notice there was no more sunlight outside. The deployment on production servers started without any obvious problems – several minutes of waiting and voila – it failed again :(( Ok, I said to myself, we had the same problem with testing environments and we'll fix it in no time. But, Murphy says, no, no. It was time to drink the refreshing drinks we had and go through the checklist:
According to the checklist, everything should have been working... but it didn’t.
Ok, restart and go over again. I thought, if we restart servers and go through the checklist enough times, the application would start running at some point :))
Each team member checked his parts (code, configuration...). The atmosphere in the office was not so relaxed any more. The phone line with Munich office was open, so we tried to solve the problem by attacking it from north and south. Questions like "What is wrong?", "How much more time do you need?", "When we'll be live?" did not contribute to improving the atmosphere and were mostly ignored and unanswered. The problem was detected after some time and we immediately started to work on the solution. It was already long after midnight. It was still 16th of February in North and South America, so technically, we didn't miss our deadline (since our targeted audience is from all over the world :))). This work on the solution didn't include all team members, but nobody was unreachable - they were either in the office or online (on ICQ). After working on the solution with Claudiu from the Munich office for some time, I had to stand up to stretch my legs a bit. And what did I see?
When everything was fixed and finally deployed on the production environment, I asked the team members to test the application. My request came with a raised voice. Dino woke up, put his hands on the keyboard and started to press keys without any order, as if already testing for some time. At that point, we all burst out laughing.
Having passed the final test - we were live. Tired, but very proud to have developed something what we can present to the internet society.
Tuesday was a working day, but we worked the 2nd shift.
Posted by Sasa Saric on March 06, 2009 --- Permalink --- Tagged in categories: Software team --- Comments on Forum
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It is most likely customary and polite to drop a few words about oneself in an attempt of non-fictional writing such as blogging. Well, my name is Gabrijela and I am managing the content production for the Bumblehood project. I have been working for this nice project for a year and half and most of that time I have been trying to bridge the gap between the technological constraints and wide-ranging ideas of imaginative but not tech-savvy content writers and myself. In this first entry I will try to briefly present the content and the context of this project. Just a small note - it is been a while since this Bumblehood content editor has written anything, but a while ago the forces of the universe have united and triggered off this Bumble blogosphere. While I am rediscovering myself as a writer of anything, sincerely apologizing that any reader has to go along through this process, let’s scratch the surface of the Bumblehood magnificent realm.
If Bumblehood would be a printed book it would have approximately 20,000 pages, not counting the images. The images alone make up a photo album of 20,000 pictures. Good that we saved all those trees and haven’t tried to print it all :) According to our developers, there are 40,000 thousand topics in our tree. The thing we call a “tree” is this left-hand structure that evolves as you click down. The material of the topics prepared here aims to help people to get to know better the place they live in and also to thoroughly guide the travelers to their destinations. This was created by 55 people over the one-year period, creating the ground for the community to jump on and carry out. We have covered 30 countries and approximately 250 cities, writing about some of them into the slightest detail, but truth be told, some have been only scratched, leaving enough place for the community to catch on.
As you browse through the blogs of my colleagues you will probably read about the pains and pressures they experienced while the deadline was approaching. We all somehow managed to get ourselves together for those couple of weeks that preceded that famous 16th of February, and after that we are still in one piece :) This process was an intimate and personal struggle for each of us. It simply had completely different implications to content writers, developers, mangers, founder and investors, so each of us fought in their own way.
It would be fair enough to say that probably the least of the pressure was laid down to content writers who were working in their own pace, giving their best to fulfill the given requests, but not undergoing the same pressure as developers or managers to get things done. Only in those last couple of weeks we discovered that there had been additional 1000 topics to be written and decided to put in 2500 reviews about the business worldwide, all that with no more than 25 people available for the job. We even estimated that one person will be able to write it all down by himself/herself. Those 1000 topics were called splash screens, or as renamed later – the Quick facts page, and at the end four people have still been working on them, even now. This page is basically the first link that opens when you click on a location. It seemed for the best that this page had a small image, a map, and a little bit of text, summarizing the most important information about the location and leading the way to other topics written about it already. Not to forget that there were also couple of people formatting the pages, trying to give the similar look and feel to the layout of all the pages, which was a huge task. I would not bother you with numbers, just imaging yourself clicking on each and every topic, reading it, editing it, and insterting images and links into it. To a certain extent, this is an ongoing process and there will always be some things to polish up. I almost forgot, our bright idea of the Quick facts page required also for the 100 interactive flash maps to be produced in three weeks period. We eventually hired two graphic designers, one to draw maps, the other one to illustrate the topics with our Bumble mascot, another cute thing we came up with while the clock was ticking.
Who could remember all those small details arising every now and then, preventing even the mere attempt of a normal workflow!? Those were the days when all of us finally mastered the multitasking. I rember that sometimes i would have been working simultanously on 10 different task, very often forggeting even about the time. While we were working with the system that was about to go into production every minute, stopping our work sometimes even couple of times a day, all of us became immune to the small and repetative bugs, not even getting excited if we had to go through one and the same thing all over again. It became clear that simply there comes a time when people just push forward. It was nice to see all of us diversely complaining but harmonically getting things done.
Basically, as of 16th of February the internet is richer for one website and we can look behind and say that one big thing has been accomplished. Perhaps we would not get the straight “A” for it; as you can see, most of us have dedicated this first log to sweet struggles we went trough, but this project of ours was made with a unanimous team effort and genuine cooperation.
Posted by Gabrijela Djebro Hodnik on February 27, 2009 --- Permalink --- Tagged in categories: Content team --- Comments on Forum
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It was not easy!
Now when I look back and try to think about the first days of the Bumblehood project, and fast forward the story till the present days, there is this one big thing I can shout out loud while riding on my bike through the woods of Munich neighborhoods on a way to work - It was not easy!
I do have a couple of already successful start-ups behind me. I have a couple of failures too. And I have read many, many books, where the "definite truth" about how to start up something big, was persued (I really liked Founders at work by Jessica Livingston). But couple of years ago, when a friend of mine and I sat down and talked for the first time about "one idea I had", there was nobody to let me know how long and painful this trip was going to be. Think about it, how many times in our lives we wanted to start something big, something we felt is right to do, something we hope will help many people and generations to come, and we didn't do it because of _________ (fill the gap yourself).
Well, this time I didn't have any excuse, at least not one good enough.
So, what's all this Bumblebuzz about?
Internet of 2005 didn't have "big, old, good" Wikipedia. No YouTube every day - all day. Facebook? Nope. Flickr? A-aa.
But what it did have was all that noise around us in the Google results. When we wanted to find some information on one place, systematically organized in a good, old fashion, library style, we need to... well, we needed to browse hundreds of web sites and do OUR OWN document (MS word mostly), just to be able to print it.
And I tell you - we STILL have that noise. Ever tried to find an easy to print tourist guide online? How about your company's intranet mess? Why aren't the things better organized?
At that moment in November 2005 I didn't know that my idea will in the next 3 years put together 8 computer scientists, 2 mathematicians, 55 content writers, a wonderful IT geek, 2 angel investors, one VC investor, 11 week-long brainstormings, many sleepless nights and one goal - go live on 15th of February 2009. We actually set up that goal in December 2007 without even noticing that 15.02.2009 is Sunday. So we went live with one day delay, 16th of February around midnight.
The job is still not done, we have the new deadline set for the end of May this year and I know that the story continues. But already now I know I will be able to tell one thing to my grandchildren: I managed to get in touch with great guys on this project and we all together pushed "that big thing" into the daylight. Don't have to tell you that the investors are pleased too, at least for now :).
And if you ask yourself what's all this Bumblebuzz about, it was all written already here.
Posted by Boro Milivojevic on February 20, 2009 --- Permalink --- Tagged in categories: What's up --- Comments on Forum
