You can setup a dev account in salesforce.com and make some customization to contact, account objects with custom fields, etc. This will give you some ideas on how to architect your system for easy customization.
I keep getting emails about expiring domains and auto-renewals. I maintain a separate spread-sheet to keep track of these.
For some reason it not only annoys me but it always make my blood pressure shoot up. To turn these alerts off you have to disable auto-renew for the domain. This check box is not easy to find. They hide the auto-renew check box column very cleverly.
Now I get emails about expiring other services... I still haven't figured how to turn these off.
Not sure of the market you are targeting. It has been my past experience developing and selling stock/sales system in India that it's very hard to break in with a browser based remote model (vs. FoxPro, curses) based interaction model. The main reason being adoption. Some of these adoption issues are.
- Hot keys
- Popups (like FoxPro) and selections.
- Local vs remote (availability) vs sync later. Syncing has to be automatic with extremely good fail over mechanism.
- Install once and forget about it. What I mean here is that retailers (at POS) are not thirsty for new features/functions.
You maybe right about category (iii). I have need for stats/ML person to solve problems for features that can truly act as a competitive advantage. But haven't found anyone in my peer circles for various reasons (primarily lack of vocabulary (on my part) when talking to stats people.)
Maybe item(iii) is approachable by using some of the principles used by the SEO or web design companies in approaching clients.
I was a long time free subscriber of nytimes.com but now after the pay wall I switched to wsj.com because it clearly states the articles that are locked (removes guessing).
Thanks for your response. I've been developing a side project which has outgrown it's role as pass time. The idea is well formulated and the prototype is working hence I thought to share with some people to figure if it can be a viable business.
It's a software that provides usability insights into your Ruby/Rails applications (I'm aware of newrelic, mixpanel, etc.)
I'm a senior software architect by profession.
You can get in touch with me here yeshsriram @ yahoo.com
- UI is nice.
Excellent idea. Was able to quickly use the site and chat with two people.
- The space to say something is small.
- Can improve on giving more visual feedback
- First panel should be anonymous chat
- Easy way to enter your anonymous profile
- There was a javascript alert window that pop up (maybe debug message or something)
- .. Unable to connect..
- .. Down for maintenance ...
- The icon to add more panel should be more clear. It sort of surprise me.
- Ability to maximize a panel (I suppose I can delete the other panels)