Archive for December, 2009

Russian Wide Web. Introducing cyrillic domain names

Wednesday, December 23rd, 2009

From the very start, Internet was entirely English — American English, to be precise. Originating from Arpanet, which prime purpose was to aid the information sharing over the government defense agency, the network standards didn’t seem to care of those who don’t speak English. But things change, and now, according to ICANN, more than half of multimillion Internet audience use non-Latin alphabets in their mother tongues. Despite being negative at first, ICANN has finally responded to a global call for nationalised domain names, and recently announced the program for ‟…delegating a number of internationalized top-level domains”. In layman’s terms, it means that the unipolar Internet world of ICANN holding all the strings in one hand would develop to distributed system, with each country having a body that manages nationalized top-level domains.

Russian officials were among the first who’ve applied. President Dmitry Medvedev is excited about the opportunities to deploy a range of government services over .рф zone, which stands for Russian Federation — but, according to The New York Times, there are other opinions. Technologists express their concerns on new and potentially unstable systems to be introduced; business people don’t see a reasonable ROI in having Russian site names as registrars made sure to make a fortune out of this. Interesting also is the fact that English version of the same page doesn’t list ridiculous prices like ~$350.000 for any domain at the opening day. Alex Gostev of Kaspersky lab notes that it would be a whole new field for fraudsters — and businesses agree: lots of them will be acquiring Cyrillic domains for the only reason of protecting themselves from scam and cybersquatting.

Despite of potential issues, there is a positive side to this novelty. People who are not familiar with English would find native language domain names easier to read and memorize, which will potentially increase the Internet use and penetration. The global network is commonly associated with freedom of speech and thought, ease of access to the most recent information and news etc — so making it easily reachable for the whole new audience is a positive thing indeed. There are concerns expressed in the same NYT article that ‟local internets” would be somewhat hermetic — but they might as well serve as a bridge to global space for those who haven’t had such a possibility in other cases.

Bottom line is, the whole process of introducing non-Latin zones is quite rough around the edges, bringing both problems and opportunities — as any innovation is in its early days. Lots of tech issues to be solved, and lot of political questions as well, which we don’t touch, being a technology company. Let us hear from you instead: what do you think about the future of nationalized domains?

Written by: Yuriy Pryadko

Posted in Uncategorized | 3 Comments »

Some lessons from a failed startup

Monday, December 21st, 2009

Creating successful startup enterprise is a great experience, but going through a failure may be a huge experience as well – at least this is what Eric Ries states in his talk at Stanford University earlier this year.

Amongst the main lessons Eric claims he has learned during five years of building out product with $40 million investment is “Don’t be crippled by “shadow believes” rule. “Shadow believes” are believes which are universally shared inside the company but never spoked out loud, never documented or discussed, never tested against the real world.

As Erick states, major of these “shadow believes” are:

1. We know what customers want – think whether the vision that you’re following really and truly reflects the reality – the actual needs of your customers

2. We can accurately predict the future – a sheet with numbers frozen in business plan months (or years) before you’ve got first investment round and never changed after that can NOT be relied upon as true prediction of future market and company conditions. Any predictions should be questioned, criticized and reanalyzed all the time as the company develops

3. Advancing the plan is progress – advancing the plan looks like absolutely right thing to do, BUT – is this plan any good? Is it worth while to advance it? Same as knowledge of customer needs and future prediction values, development plans should also be questioned all the time and adjusted to reflect the current reality

Written by: Sergii Gorpynich

Tags: startups
Posted in Uncategorized, Web 2.0 business | 7 Comments »

Building iPhone and Android apps with HTML/CSS/JS

Wednesday, December 2nd, 2009

Just a few days ago we had a chance to look at Appcelerator platform and its  Titanium family of products.
We looked primarily at Titanium Mobile, as both Android and iPhone  are of a significant interest for us – we do lots of development for these platforms.

So we’ve played quite a bit with Titanium Mobile and here’s quick summary of our opinions:

Pros:
• Same code that works on iPhone and Android platforms. As Android market gets traction, the option to “kill two birds” with one code-base looks like really cool.
• Enough to know html/CSS/js to develop. This is important. Especially for iPhone. While we regard Android Java SDK as a very good development platform and our J2EE engineers just love coding for Android (although they quite shun from J2ME)  iPhone Objective C is pretty different story. It is difficult to learn, it is bug-prone. It has quite weird callback logic. In fact, it is literally impossible to train Java or Ruby or Python engineer into iPhone engineer. Titanium Mobile opens iPhone apps world to even more light-weight technologies, and this is just great.
• Easy to install and to use.
• Free and open source.

Cons:
• Optimality of generated native code and native SDK coverage is questionable. Our experience shows that all such translator solutions (and another example is Adobe’s Action Script – 2 Objective C builder) do not cover complete set of native SDK functions. Honestly speaking we did not run into such situation with Titanium Mobile, but our gut feel is that there should be some limitations.
• Ability to quikly support new SDK releases. Apple’n'Google naturally are enhancing their SDKs all the time. Ability of appcelerator to quickly follow these changes is questionable.

That said, here’s our current view on how Cogniance may use Titanium Mobile: it is definitely useful when quick’n'dirty prototyping should be done or when app functionality is pretty straightforward and simple. But, if the task is to create state-of-the-art app which utilizes many advanced SDK features we will probably not risk to go with Titanium Mobile and go straight to native layer.  Yet, we appreciate that Cogniance is not exactly target consumer for Titanium Mobile, as we’ve already got both iPhone and Android engineers and Mobile targets web developers w/o native layers knowledge.

Written by:  Sergii Gorpynich

Posted in Mobile technologies, Uncategorized, Web 2.0 technologies | 6 Comments »