windows 8 elite
It’s official I am now part of the Windows 8 Elite programme, as I managed to submit my application (FinnGo) to the Win8 Store before the official Win8 launch.
Business Cards
New business = new identity = new cards
In all the startups & companies I’ve been part of, I’ve never had to do these myself. They are actually pretty expensive.
Anyway I eventually chose to use http://www.printsafari.com mainly because their bulk prices are good (especially for US people) and their interactive chat was so useful, even if they did keep calling me Dave and I had to use googletranslate on their German state and mark Finland as a county of Germany (some American web site designers need to study Europe a bit more). Took me about 1 week to sort out – but most of that is down to me being new. Runner up was http://www.print100.com.
To design the cards, I first started off with powerpoint (I am an ex-consultant after all :-)). However I eventually ended up using a trial copy of Adobe Illustrator. Actually once you get your head around the user interface, it has most of the same features as powerpoint (send to back, align, etc) as well as visio (with layers). Biggest challenge for me was handling alphas and I never did find the colour picking tool.
On the way I found an amazing artist: ruddall30.
Categories: Startup Tags:
Windows phone app fest wowzapp is open for registration
Grab your laptop and get ready to code apps for windows phone 8! For Finland, register here: http://www.microsoft.com/finland/wowzapp. This will be a global event with 24-hour support. Lucky we are in the land of the coffee addicts 🙂
Categories: Startup, Tech, Windows Phone Tags:
Collaboration Software
Back in 2006 my old company invested in touch-sensitive whiteboards which we could use in meetings. However I never saw those being used across distributed, global locations. I think one of the reasons that face to face meetings don’t die (apart from being able to shake hands, look people in the eye, etc) is that it is so hard to share a virtual whiteboard such that everyone can draw on it. Here’s some solutions (not yet listed in priority order):
Note: some of these are from: 5 Free Collaborative Whiteboard Apps For the iPad… you can go there for the links.
Startup tools
Sources of info: http://www.readwriteweb.com/start/2012/04/rww-recommends-the-startup-too.php
1. Productivity Suites. Winners: Google Apps AND Microsoft Office
2. Project Management/Tracking. Winner: BaseCamp, possibly MS Project for more complex stuff. Comments: Trello (www.trello.com), Minigroups, DeskAway (www.deskaway.com)
3. Accounting. Winner: QuickBooks. Comments: Freshbooks
4. File Sharing. Winner: Dropbox. Comments: GoogleDrive
5. Payments. Winner: PayPal, possibly Recurly for recurring subscriptions
6. Web Content Management. Winner: WordPress
7. Support. Winner: Zendesk
(from comments):
8. Hiring, Submittable’s Resume Manager
9. CRM. Zoho CRM – it’s very important for a start up to have a centralized place for managing clients, prospects, etc.
10. Email. Rapportive. The info that it gives you in your inbox is so valuable. It brings emails to life 🙂
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Inspirational people on the road to tech nirvana
Quite often I wonder whether what I am doing is what I want to do. That’s usually an easy question to answer. What is harder is to work out what I really want to do: CTO vs CIO, enterprise architect vs program manager, application vs infrastructure, enterprise vs ecommerce, mobile vs mainframe, Switzerland vs Silicon Valley vs Chicago vs uk vs Australia… To help me and maybe you, I thought I would start to list a set of inspirational people. Idea being to see what path they took and create my own…
Categories: General Blog, Startup, Tech Tags: