by vinova | Jun 2, 2011 | business, Projects, Ruby on Rails
Preserve your most treasured moments forever, whilst bringing them to life and sharing them with family, friends or even for your own personal keepsake. Whether your photos are old or new, they can be enhanced and preserved for years to come by putting them onto DVD. Photo stories are a great way to celebrate a milestone, pay tribute, relive a holiday or just a fun way to organize your photos. Your Photo Story can be created using still pictures, home movies, or a combination of the two. Your Photo Story will be personalized with music, motion and transitions to create your desired mood and is sure to impress! Our lives are a collection of experiences and memories. Share your life with a photo story!! Contact us today to discuss your...
by vinova | May 28, 2011 | Technologies
Steve Blank Gigaom Interview via steveblank.com Key points: Entrepreneurs are artists. New bubble is good. Today, total available market is exponential. VC $$$ should be used for scaling and visibility. Entrepreneurs should study psychology. Find out more by watching the whole video. It’s...
by vinova | May 27, 2011 | Technologies
We high five each other and claim “Rails Win!” when someone finds a gem that solves a really big problem in a few lines of code. In this post I’ll list a few interesting addons to the RoR Mongoid ORM that are slowly adding up to a feature-rich ecosystem of plug-and-play modules that work with Mongoid. This list should convince you that you should at least try MongoDB. You can get a ton of functionality “for free”. via code.dblock.org Vinova is proud to be author of voteable_mongo gem and contributor of mongoid-slug...
by vinova | May 22, 2011 | Technologies
At 37signals, however, we have a different position on ambition. We’re not big fans of what I consider “vertical” ambition—that is, the usual career-path trajectory, in which a newbie moves up the ladder from associate to manager to vice president over a number of years of service. On the other hand, we revere “horizontal” ambition—in which employees who love what they do are encouraged to dig deeper, expand their knowledge, and become better at it. We always try to hire people who yearn to be master craftspeople, that is, designers who want to be great designers, not managers of designers; developers who want to master the art of programming, not management. via inc.com At Vinova, we are doing the same by building a skillful, passionate and inter-dependent team. Team members wear many hats and work in harmony toward a common goal. Each member should be the boss of his...
by vinova | May 21, 2011 | Technologies
The challenge that many startups face today is: Are you really providing enough value? Will you get the TechCrunch bump, the tier-1 VC anointment, followed by great PR firm support and then the NY Times or WSJ story that follows? Will that be enough or will high churn rates creep in, new toys be introduced into the market, new time sucks pulling user attention away? This year’s Tamagotchi? If you’re building a startup today I would encourage you to think harder about how you’re going to win the battle for share of mind. That’s much tougher than getting people to play with your hot product for 6 months. To do so you must truly provide value that changes the way that end-consumers do something in their lives that will persist. via...
by vinova | May 21, 2011 | Technologies
The LinkedIn IPO “absolutely” marks the beginning of a bubble — and he thinks it’s going to be great. He likens it to the Netscape IPO in August 1995 that kicked off four years of boom times, but notes that this time VCs actually know how to build real companies with real revenue and profit. Crazy investors — not geeks — are what makes Silicon Valley unique. Without the “crazy” financiers willing to take big risks in hopes of chasing “obscene” returns, the valley would just be “a bunch of smart scientists and entrepreneurs sitting in their labs and their garages.” Microsoft will start to fail within six quarters. Blank put a timeline on Microsoft suffering the kind of huge loss that drove IBM to restructure itself back in 1993: six quarters from now. He thinks Steve Ballmer is a “miserable failure” and that the board should be blamed for not replacing him. He also suggests that buying Nokia and installing Stephen Elop as CEO might be a solution. But Larry Page is doing the right thing at Google. By letting the geeks run the show, Page is following in the footsteps of one of the earliest Silicon Valley pioneers: Fairchild Semiconductor in the 1950s. via...
by vinova | May 20, 2011 | Technologies
The most common mistake is to put profits first. That opens the door for bad things to happen. Numbers become all-important, and almost any behavior is justified in the name of profit. Cheating sets in. Instead, a company’s priority should be to protect and enhance its reputation through ethical behavior. Within the confines of that behavior, its next most important goal should be to attract and keep customers. Third is figuring out how to make money. via blogs.hbr.org It reminds me of...
by vinova | May 17, 2011 | iPhone, Projects, Ruby on Rails, Technologies
Yay, new site launched! myAppalogues – App-based electronic catalogues. You can also find the iPhone/iPad app available on Apple Store too In their words: Every day we see merchants willing to spend thousands of dollars on tradeshows, magazine / print, and website campaigns. And then they end up selling at a discount anyway as it’s such a crowded market. We’re not telling merchants what to do, and there are some benefits to tradeshows obviously, but if the world is going to mobile (which it is) and you can easily afford to give it a try (which now you can) then we’re finding that people will do that.” myApp4KIDS is free to download and use and costs a small monthly fee per advertisement. There are no commissions on sales. Merchants can register at www.myappalogues.com and use the Ad Wizard to easily create instant mobile promotions for their products. A few screenshots of the...
by vinova | May 17, 2011 | Technologies
Discovering context is the end game of curation The need to filter social networks to create value is a natural reaction to the raw value and size of the networks themselves. via...
by vinova | May 17, 2011 | Technologies
I do think the rise of alternative notification channels; sms, mobile push notifications, direct messages on twitter, facebook messaging, etc are going to move some of this kind of thing off of email over time. But today, if you want to drive retention and repeat usage, there isn’t a better way to do it than email. via...
by vinova | May 8, 2011 | Technologies
In last few months, we has been developing and iPhone / iPad apps that pull JSON data from an web API frequently. We used Ruby on Rails to do the first version for both website and API service. After trying the first version, customers complained about loading speed. They said that data loading on the mobile app was SLOW. There are two reasons that make Rails based API calls slow: Rails is heavy and blocking (after an API call we do some logging and system shouldn't have wait for logging to return data to clients) Need to join four SQL tables to query data, combine data then convert to JSON Let optimize them! Solutions for (1) are: Rack Apps + Job Queues (Delayed Jobs, Resque …) Non blocking server (Node.js, Goliath …) to fire an action to log info to database, forget it and return JSON to clients Non blocking was chosen because it's fast, it handles more requests and help to avoid managing additional job queues. For (2), de-normalize and pre-calculate JSON is the first step. But there is a table that cannot be de-normalized using SQL. It's listings table that state which item will be showed on which month and in which category. Let say item I will be showed in category C in month M1 and M2 then two rows (I, C, M1) and (I, C, M2) must exist in listings table. After de-normalization and JSON pre-calculation, only it need to join only two tables to get items give a category and a month then combine pre-calculated item JSON and return it to clients. Second step for...
by vinova | May 5, 2011 | Technologies
via nosql.mypopescu.com If NoSQL is fast enough, is cache layer necessary? – or- Can we use NoSQL as a cache layer for...
by vinova | Apr 4, 2011 | Technologies
Because vendors of RDBMS technology have little incentive to disrupt a technology generating billions of dollars for them annually, application developers were forced to take matters into their own hands. Google (Big Table) and Amazon (Dynamo) are two leading web application developers who invented, developed and depend on their own database technologies. These “NoSQL” databases, each eschewing the relational data model, are a far better match for the needs modern interactive software systems. via couchbase.com A nice introduction to...
by vinova | Apr 1, 2011 | Technologies
Focus on the road not the wall—When they train racecar drivers, one of the first lessons is when you are going around a curve at 200 MPH, do not focus on the wall; focus on the road. If you focus on the wall, you will drive right into it. If you focus on the road, you will follow the road. Running a company is like that. There are always a thousand things that can go wrong and sink the ship. If you focus too much on them, you will drive yourself nuts and likely capsize your company. Focus on where you are going rather than on what you hope to avoid. via techcrunch.com I found “focus on the road” technique worked for me for both business and life. Overall it’s a great post. Read and enjoy...
by vinova | Mar 31, 2011 | Ruby on Rails, Technologies
Guys, let’s join us at RedDotRubyConf – South East Asia’s First Ruby & Rails Conference 2011. There will be renowned international speakers, local practitioners, workshops about Ruby and Rails. List of speakers include: Matz – Founder of the Ruby Language Dave Thomas – Author of “the pickaxe book” and an original Pragmatic Tom Preston-Werner – Cofounder of Github. Gregg Pollack – a Hollywood director trapped in the body of a software developer Ian McFarland – VP Technology & Principal at Pivotal Labs Mikel Lindsaar – Founder of rubyx and a Rails commit team member Alex, co-founder of Vivova, will proudly be one of the presenters at this big and long-awaited event of South East Asia. He will have an in-depth presentation about MongoDB (NoSQL in general) and Scaling Web Apps. If you are interested in these topics, please come to the conference on 23/04/2011 – 15:30pm to join his presentation: “Benefits of using MongoDB: Reduce Complexity & Adapt to Changes” See you soon...
by vinova | Mar 10, 2011 | Technologies
I proudly share with you guys a list of gems released to Ruby on Rails community by Vinova team recently: voteable_mongoid vinova_sunspot_mongoid vinova_sunspot_autocomplete refinerycms-newsletters Have a nice...
by vinova | Feb 17, 2011 | Projects
Well, just keep you informed that we’ve just delivered a new site to our client: Puritas Pte Ltd About Puritas: Puritas Pte Ltd is a solutions provider for clean and controlled environments and provides the design, supply and installation of complete cleanroom solutions. Puritas Pte Ltd is headquartered in Singapore with a project delivery system capable of being applied throughout South East Asia, India and China. At Puritas we always put our customers at the forefront of everything we do and deliver projects that not only meet their expectations’ but exceed them. Through our vast International experience, our teams of Project Managers and engineers are always able to come up with and develop innovative solutions tailored to our customers needs which can be delivered safely, quickly and to the highest...
by vinova | Jan 10, 2011 | Projects, Ruby on Rails
Product.io is a free product reviews and Q&A site. Ask support questions about a product you own, or research a product you might want to buy. Read other people’s experiences, or sign in through facebook or twitter to filter product reviews by your social network. Why do you care? When you’re about to buy a new LCD TV, where do you turn for help? Maybe you call a friend, email somebody that you know who’s good with electronics. Then, you probably search on google. But who do you turn to for advice? That’s where we come in. We rank reviews on the internet and encourage you to ask your friends what they think about products before you buy them. We make researching and purchasing products easier and more efficient. Product.io is a startup project of Anideo Singapore (in the collaboration with Vinova team) – Anideo develops innovative web technologies as both stand-alone web applications and integrated services on popular social networking platforms. Their main focus is the monetization of social networks, through employing the social networking framework and its corresponding social graph to improve and enhance e-commerce. Their key products will seek to apply innovative web principles to the following industries: online & offline retail commerce, news & media, entertainment, information technology & systems, marketing, and...
