Over the weekend I participated in the 2008 Rails Rumble. The rules are simple: Build a webapp in 48 hours. 200 teams of up to 4 developers compete on building the best, most innovative, most cool and most kick-ass application.
Team
cphftw where founded by members of the
Copenhagen Ruby Brigade. We were supposed to be 3 guys on the team, but one got hit by the flu the day before the whole thing started, leaving it all up to
Jakob Skjerning and myself.
During the last week we did a lot of brainstorming, planning, feature lists, usecases, todolists and we even tried to decide on how the database should be structured, but with a bit more rumble experience there were several other things we could have prepared beforehand.
Jakob has documented the progress made over the weekend on his
blog.
After 48 hours I can now proudly present to you: Quotagious - The ultimate way of storing, sharing, and finding interesting quotes.
Voting should be possible within the next few days. If you like what we did, feel free to give us your
vote.
Well, competition is tough and there are several good bids. There is no official list of applications available yet, but here is a
partial collection.
[rails-rumble, quotagious, quote, ruby-on-rails, competition, webapp, cph.rb]
[15 comments]
If you're the CEO of a company and you want a successful business in the future you shouldn't make it solid as a rock.
You should create the organisation so it could change, if necessary every day.
Why is that insanely important ?
Well. If you want to find out where your assets and faults lie, and what direction you need to steer your ship, you need to be able to fail.
More importantly: you need to be able to fail faster than your competitors , ( no matter how wide or narrow you are competing with them).
The only way to achieve this, is to create an organisation that can make u-turns as fast as a limousine in a hollywood movie from the 70s.
Some companies are as fast as trucks carrying heavy loads of oil - and finds the easiest way is to back up the truck instead of turning around.
Freelancers are like bikes or speedway motorcycles.
why ?
Because they can follow their gutfeeling. They can turn the whole thing around just by changing their mind and start heading in another direction.
Would Microsoft be able to do this ? - or Google or Yahoo ?........... not... yet
[competition, u-turn, changes, failing, tools, gutfeeling]
[0 comments]
Honestly and truely ?
I want to elaborate on
my last blogpost. The business of business shouldn't "just" be more than business.
it is going to be the single, most important -top -notch competitive advantage in the future - oh wait let's say it is coming up now, and it's coming up real fast.
What else will you compete on towards king-like customers? product ? salesforce ? marketing activities?
You are one lucky bastard if you are swimming in so much sale that your personnel cant keep up with it. You are one of few if your company is known by the right people who are pushing it forward.
Let's look at me as a consumer - I make pledges to myself these days based on what company criterias I have - for me to have the slightest interest in buying a product. There's enough companies out there so I can be extremely picky and demanding.
The winning crowd is gonna be the companies that understands that the purchased product is a sidefactor to the identification with ideals and goals between consumer and company.
So the customer isn't king anymore - she's emperor of the world, running your board and your company =) or she will be in the near future.
Start making values and ethics for the whole company, and live by them. Don't compromise. because your users wont.
[marketing, goals, king, customer, thebusinessofbusiness, competition, advantage, product, consumer, users, pledges, purchase, winners, identification, ideals, values, ethics, compromise]
[1 comment]