UnSnapp.com - TechCrunch for App Developers

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Following up to my earlier post about TechCrunch for App Developers blog post, we finally went ahead and registered the domain name unsnapp.com. Atleast it is the first step. Just finished installing wordpress for site. Wordpress is probably is the easiest way to skip all the complex programming needed to get a professional blog review website up.

Next step is to start working on logo and branding message.

Faqden Labs company presentation video - Sample

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Here is the first attempt at creating Faqden Labs video.

IntelliVocab website and ESD.34 System Architecture class

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As previously discussed faqden is working hard to build a website for its popular IntelliVocab product. With over 150K users on iPhone, 10K on Android and 10K on old website (intellivocab.faqden.com; previously at powergre.com), we thought it makes sense to consolidate user base and provide a seamless transition between multiple channels. This is an ambitious attempt at creating a consolidated product line, which can be accessed and managed through multiple channels.

The feature backlog is so huge, that it is almost scary. I guess everything I learnt in the ESD.34 (System Architecture) class is helping me manage the complexity of the project without making it complicated. It took me sometime to realize and appreciate the essence of principles I was learning in Crawley's class. If I will advice one class, which is very useful apart from the Competitive Strategy by professor Yin, it is the ESD.34.

Anyways coming back to the subject of the blog, we almost finalized the home page of the new intellivocab site as well as the Login Page. The second image below is the login page and it completely blew me away. The designer (Jaydeep) did an amazing job at design. He are lucky to have amazing design team in Jaydeep and Ajay.

The practice session screen is making progress. The first draft (3rd image below) was simply bad. The second draft (4th image below) is work in progress. I have about 14+ feedback for this screen. We still have many more screens to design. So overall, it is still a long way to go.

WakeUpBuddy Latest progress

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Few more updates on the settings screen and news section. It is moving slowly now, but we hope to pick up the pace soon. Faqden has started on few more ambitious projects and we are pretty busy now a days

IntelliVocab website is coming along pretty well

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IntelliVocab website design is coming along pretty well. We are still miles away from the final design and eventual attempt at creating html out of it and developing the back-end server code.

Latest mockup:
Our VP of products filed 14 bugs today, so I guess we are still few days away from finalizing the home page.

TrailHead video created by Vivek

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One of our most successful product TrailHead received an update this week. We have now added calender functionality as well.

Vivek, our technology evangelist created a product video for TrailHead. Animoto is amazing, I am going to give it a run to. In case you are wondering this video was created using Animoto.


Create your own video slideshow at animoto.com.

Finalized the Logo for IntelliVocab Website

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These are the finalist for IntelliVocab website. We are going to design the website around these logos and see how it looks in the final placement.

IntelliVocab Logo Design for the website

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Now that the PowerGRE website has found a new address intellivocab.faqden.com , we are in the process of re-designing the whole website. I am including the sample logo which was created by our designer. Not that I liked any of them, but it is a start. Logo design is a complex process, as it is very difficult for the designer to build what is in your mind and it is difficult for you to communicate as well.

WakeUpBuddy Settings, News screens

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The application is coming along pretty well. The ipa file continues to give trouble on my iPad, but the visual mockups are almost done. We are doing final touchups and working on social networking screen

Latest Screenshot

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First binary of WakeUpBuddy

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I received the first binary for WakeUpBuddy (name to be changed) today and it was a good feeling. I had been dreaming about this app for almost a year now. It was good to see a working version, but few requirements were way off.

Looks like my request to integrate with Facebook using APIs was mis-interpreted as displaying Facebook page in safari browser. But after a couple of discussions, it is now sorted out. I guess challenges of working with remote developers. But these are the best developers, one can find and we are lucky to have an amazing team.

The news section didn't come out well, so I have asked it to be redesigned, the settings screen is yet to be designed. The Facebook integration was misunderstood. So overall, the framework is there, but different peaces need to be built and then integrated.

Unlike other projects, where we do detailed wireframes before starting the visual design and development, we decided to take a different approach. We took the continuous design approach, where we design minimalism wires and jumped right into visual design and development. We are building the requirements and design as we progress. This approach is being pushed to a large extend by ThoughtWorks and so far, I am impressed. It just requires a completely different thought process.

It is little harder than the regular SCRUM or waterfall, but it has so much room for innovation, as your whole project team can jump into the product discovery process. The discovery and development  happens simultaneously. I am not sure how scalable this model is, but for an innovation based project involving small team, it can work pretty well.

Anyways, will continue writing. Will post more pictures tomorrow.

Hiring in India..Part 2

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In my previous post about Hiring in India, I wrote about hiring challenges in India. In this post I wanted to continue the discussion to focus on post hiring challenges. Once you give an offer in India, the job does not really end, but it just starts. Every developer in India has on an average 3 good offers before he makes the final decision. The decision generally depends on the brand of the company, type of work and lastly the salary.

So it is not really the money/CTC which is the biggest issue. It is the brand. Developers in India want to be associated with something which they can feel proud about saying to their friends as well as family. This is a bigger problem than many realize. It does not matter who you are in US, if your company is not well known in India, it is tough to attract talent. Start-ups like ours is a totally a different story. Today we had one PHP developer who we were anxiously waiting for, called us and said he is not joining. I was glad that he atleast called. Most developers in India, just do not show up on the last day.

I will continue writing my experience with developers in India, but for now, off to working on WakeUpBuddy project.

WakeUpBuddy clock and coffee cup images are finalized

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I guess I am spamming the internet with the progress of my app, but this is also a kind of experiment for open product development. I wanted to document and blog about every step of the product development process including how we went through various iterations for visual designs and interaction designs.

The developer did finish the first prototype of the app for iPad, but I am not able to still install it on iPad and test it. Hopefully he can fix the issue soon.

More soon :).

IntelliVocab for SAT deluxe is now ranked 69th best education app on Apple store

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IntelliVocab has been steadily rising in rankings since last couple of days. It is now the 69th best app in the education category. It is ironical, that right now we have to use our competitors product to check our own ranking. We are working hard towards building our own analytic for mobile soon.

http://www.appannie.com/intellivocab-for-sat-deluxe/ranking/history/

TechCrunch for app developers - Updates

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Following up to my earlier article about TechCrunch for app developers, we debated internally a lot (we just love debating and I think we debate more than we work :) ) and finally agreed on taking it forward in small steps. For initial version of the website, we will only create an app metrics website on the similar lines of  http://www.appannie.com/.

This should be roughly a 3 - 5 months project. Our board has given initial approval for a prototype. We are also exploring partnerships for building this site.

WakeUpBuddy new images

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Not that everyone in the company is happy with the name, so this is just a code name. Other code name popular internally is Isabella :).

These is the latest mockup of home screen. It is still not there yet, but slowly making progress. The coffee cup and the digital clock are ugly looking.

More to come.

WakeUpBuddy's competitive analysis

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Today while analyzing competitors in this space, I came across Alarm Clock Rebel app which is amazing. More than anything, it validates that there is a market for these kind of apps. It was number 1 productivity app and top 133 app overall few times.

It is also a good source of ideas :).

Hiring in India

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We @ Faqden Labs have been on a hiring spree since last month. Now that we are scaling well and experienced resource heavy, we decided to focus on freshers. It has been an interesting experience so far. To give an idea of the progress India has made: A fresher when contacted by our HR department for an interviews says something like this..."How much do you pay per month after taxes? If it is above 25K INR, I will come for the interview, else not". Do keep in mind, this person does not have a job and zero experience. He just graduated from a engineering colleague and looking for a position.

This example gives you an idea of opportunities and growth in India. Compare that with US, where even engineers graduating from premier engineering schools are without a job and looking for a decent start. I am little worried that this saturated growth in US and hyper growth in India is going to create either backlash in US or increase in wages in India and decrease in wages in US until an equilibrium is reached or people heading to India to take up positions. The third scenario will be an interesting turn of events. I recently read an article about Americans lining up for Canada immigration. 

America has always found a way to stay ahead and out innovate the rest of the world, so it remains to be seen how events will unfold in the future.

Irrespective of the growth in India, I still think that the professionalism of some of these engineers graduating from tier 2 schools is questionable. Taking into account that most of the engineers trained by engineering schools are not employable in corporate without atleast 3 months of training by software companies, it is even more shocking. Add to that the job-hoppers who switch companies every one year to get a meager salary hikes, the resource management in India has become a major problem.

Faqden Labs - Alexa Ranking

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Faqden Labs has been steadily rising in Alexa ranking since we started our SEO activity. The website was ranked roughly around 2 million and is currently ranked 800K. Our preferred keywords are doing good and steadily rising in their placement on Google search query. It has been a learning experience on what works for SEO and what does not. Hubspot webinars and blog posts helped us a lot in optimizing the site.

Next stop, under 500K. Will write a post back in few days, once we reach that ranking :).

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SCRUM in a mobile apps startup

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All the thoughts here are just personal opinions and not of Faqden Labs. SCRUM is a high-tech project management methodology, but I am yet to see its advantage in a small company setting. In a company of size less 10, where you work with everyone in the company one on one, changing requirements by the hour, all I see so far, is it putting unnecessary stress on innovation, and adding overhead.

Maybe, I am yet to figure out a way on how to make it work in a highly charged hyper changing environment. Having worked with Scrum for over 3 years and involved in multiple change management phases in large organizations, I definitely understand its value, but just not sure if it applies to all size organizations.

I am open to giving it a run for couple of more weeks. I am open to ideas.

IntelliVocab is in the top 100 education apps ranking again

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After a long hiatus, IntelliVocab is back in top 100 ranking in the education category (among 45K+ apps). IntelliVocab has been going through wild swings in the recent past and we are yet to figure out a reason for it. This is our featured app and we hope that we can soon stabilize both the rankings and sale. We have planned an extensive roadmap for this product.


Will keep posting updates as we make progress.

re-branding PowerGRE to IntelliVocab

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PowerGRE website was created in 2008 during a South America trip, as an experiment. It had decent success and since then, I was thinking to migrate it to smartphones. The decision obviously paid off as IntelliVocab went on to become the top education app with huge media coverage. The success for a simple vocabulary tool was unimaginable, but I guess that is the power of iTunes (thanks to Steve Jobs), that the discovery and curation process is easier. It is easy for quality apps to get noticed.

We have decided to change the location of www.powergre.com to intellivocab.faqden.com and brand it as IntelliVocab. We just started the project yesterday and will take some time for the migration. The goal of this initiative is to provide a seamless access and  transition between multiple channels for studying vocabulary.

We have also planned a huge roadmap for this product and make it a true platform. But that is few months away. Our development team is excited and motivated to see our vision through. I am happy to hear that they have confidence in the roadmap we have created, not only for the intellivocab product, but the company in general. We have a team which can make any product we dream up, into a reality. Just read my other post about iGoogle clone app. Within 2 days of starting the project, we are already seeing good progress.

Entrepreneurship and decision making process

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There is a saying "Decisions made in real-time are never perfect. Never second guess them sitting in an arm chair" and it is very apt in the world of entrepreneurship. Since the day I founded faqden labs, I have been making decisions every second, many a times with almost no information and just based on gut feeling. I do get asked sometimes to justify why I am making a particular choice over the other, and I struggle to put it in words and the fact is there is no real justification.

Startup is like a battle field, you do not have all the information, but at the same time you do not have the luxury to wait for situation to get clearer. The opportunity will pass you by. The best thing you could do is take shot and go with your instinct when u are small. The opportunity cost of not doing anything is higher than taking a decision and not really succeeding at it.

Obviously this strategy should change as you start to grow. The decisions should be based on data and not only instincts. In leadership roles, instinct will always play a role, but as the company grows the balance tilts towards the data more.

iGoogle app for iPad is making good progress

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The team at faqden labs is charged up and working hard to bring this app to life. I wrote briefly about it in the last post and I plan to continuously post the progress daily here. If you have any feedback or suggestions, you can send it to feedback@faqden.com

We had a long brain storming session for this app yesterday among co-founders. It was intense, as every one in the company is passionate about this app and has some feature they definitely want to see in it. This product went from a MVP (small prototype) to a full blown application. Now we have a Facebook integration as well. No more meetings...

iGoogle kind of app for iPad - WakeUpBuddy

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I have been dreaming about building an iGoogle kind of application for multiple years now. I initially planned to do it on desktops, but could never get myself to do it. Jarvis in Iron Man did inspire me a lot, and after that I decided to change focus on iPhone app. I finally settled on iPad.

I have decided to try and build it this time around. But I am going to take a slow approach. Building a complex AI system which can learn users behavior and be a true semantic app is couple of years away. What I want to do with WakeUpBuddy app is take a first step towards that. There is currently no app which truly owns the first 30 mins after you wake up and last 30 mins before you sleep. If the workflow in those 30 mins, can be enveloped in an app, it will not only create immense value for the user, but the developer gains to capture the maximum value.

Think about an app which truly knows, when you sleep, what you read and truly provides you all the utility you will need when you wake to get your day started right? It has amazing potential. Ofcourse what I am building at faqden labs is a very simple MVP (minimum viable product), or a minimum viable experiment towards it. Wish me luck :). Below are the few screen shots of the backgrounds, our designer has started creating.

TrailHead - Basecamp client for iPad

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Basecamp is one of the best project management tool I have used so far. I met both kinds, the ones who love the tool and the others who do not care as much. I also met few who hate it, but I am still not sure, if I understand why. I guess, it is matter of preference.

I was planning to build a basecamp client for iPad for a long time and finally we partnered with Winjit Technologies to build it. It came out pretty nice and is already in the top 100 charts in the productivity category. It was also featured in the best apps of the week list on AppleGazette.com. We have uploaded a latest version with more features. Lets see how it performs.

http://www.applegazette.com/iphone/this-weeks-best-apps-5/

IntelliVocab referred in the article commemorating Steve Jobs

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I like every other technology enthusiast, whether an Apple fan or not, is sad that the world lost its greatest tech innovator. He truly was the Leonardo da Vinci of our time and no one denies he changed the way the world interacts with technology for ever with the introduction of iPhone and iPad. Oct 5th, will remain a memorable day in history for a long time to come.

When I was reading an article about him on sematicweb.com, I noticed IntelliVocab being referred there. It is a privilege and honor to be mentioned in the same article.

http://semanticweb.com/we-come-not-to-bury-steve-but-to-celebrate-him_b23764

TechCrunch for app developers

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I have been contemplating creating a blog portal for app developers. Of the many topics TechCrunch covers, I do not see enough coverage for small app developers who are trying to survive. It has become a place for either successful startups with deep pockets or enterpreners with connections with writers.

This problem is very evident and was acknowledged by TechCrunch themselves sometime back. I guess it is just simple supply and demand problem. There is also another angle to this. There are just too many different types of startup currently popping up (read bubble), that the need for a dedicated site which writes and promotes mobile app developers is paramount.

I have been talking to a couple of industry leaders in the mobile area, and there seems to be an agreement that a dedicated blog to promote mobile app developers which is curated and promotes self financed app developers is desperately needed.

I am still discussing the concept with many fellow enterpreneurs and lets see where it goes. I will keep you posted.

Microsoft - yahoo

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This is an amazing stat. This will create a stif competition between Facebook, Google, and Micro-Yahoo.


        

Rav 4 it is...

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After weeks of market research and exploring cars ranging from 20K to 60K in price I have decided to buy Rav 4. I am not a big fan of Toyota brand, but Rav4 seems to be the best economical SUV. I sure hope it is not a bad decision. Going out today to meet few dealers to complete the purchase before Sunday.

I am planning to drive from NY to CA in the SUV..so I guess I am gonna hate it by the time I reach west coast :). Will write more about my trip in future blogs.


                

Why we choose kids education domain to focus on at Appluza LLC

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Why we think we're targeting the right markets:

Quotes from Apples conference on Oct 4th 

1:18PM iPads are "showing up everywhere" according to Tim. In schools they're "changing the way teachers teach and kids learn, and many educators agree with us."

1:18PM iPads are "showing up everywhere" according to Tim. In schools they're "changing the way teachers teach and kids learn, and many educators agree with us."

1:19PM That's a lot of iPads -- and a lot of peanut butter smeared on screens.

1:19PM But it's not just grade schools. Colleges too...

My 3 months in Chicago

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I spent a little over 3 months in Chicago since June 26th, 2011. Chicago is an amazing city with friendly residents. Moving from Boston, it was a pleasant experience and I was happy to be back in normal world. The cost of living is amazing low. You can buy an apartment in downtown Chicago for 400K roughly. Not that I bought one, but did hear from my colleagues. The food, expenses, everything is super low compared to NY and SFO, 2 of my other favorite cities. 

               

A one bed room apartment in the heart of downtown is around 1600 - 1800, which is unbelievable compared to the 3000 USD apartments, I am being quoted in SFO. My current apartment (1 bedroom) on the Hudson in NJ is 2400 USD, so you can imagine my surprise. 

People are very friendly and helpful. Good restaurants everywhere and very affordable, too many Panda Express though :). Apart from parking locations which have rude attendants and a run-in with a rude Boston visitor, I can rate this as one of the best experiences of all the cities I visited in the world. The only better experience I had was in Singapore.

If it was not for the cold weather and lack of technology companies in Chicago, I would have most likely settled here. Now that I am down to the last 10 days of my stay in Chicago, I feel sad leaving it. 

SEO optimization and website ranking

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After a couple of days of SEO work on our website we finally reached a worldwide ranking of below 1 million and 63K in India on Alexa. I am not very sure how sustainable is the traffic to the site based on SEO work alone, unless the appeal of the website based on content and services is good.

This is the best ranking we have achieved since we launched our company in June and started our office on Sept 9th. As expected with any startup, things are crazy and fun. It is quite evident based on my inability to find time to blog.

After running for last couple of months, I suddenly stopped myself yesterday after I heard about steve jobs. His way of product building has been the guiding principle behind our product development philosophy and I just felt sad that I was reading the news on the very device he will always be remembered for creating, the iPhone.

We do hope to continue building good products on iOS platform.


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