Intridea - Leaders in Agile Software Development

It’s been a busy week at Intridea. Michael, Pradeep, and Chris presented a couple of talks in Berlin. Then, Chris and Pradeep met up with Adam in Austin, Texas for a full-day training session. Back in our DC headquarters, I was one of the panelists for the Future of Software event organized by Potomac Tech Wire. Japan and China next year? We are definitely getting our name around.

The Future of Software event was attended by over 200 tech executives in the area. The discussion revolved around technology trends, business model implications, and funding software companies. There was a lot of discussion on open-source and software as service (SaaS) models destroying the lucrative, traditional perpetual license models. I was really surprised by how much discussion we had on Ruby On Rails (and I didn’t even have to start it!), both among the panelists and the audience. It’s nice to know that ROR is hot in this area flooded with defense contractors.

Here are some of my thoughts I prepared for the meeting:

Three Software Trends

Cheap, easy-to-use consumer software will continue to make in-roads into the business world. Google Apps in the enterprise will fundamentally change the way we collaborate inside the companies as well as personal life (e.g. Gmail, Calendar, GChat, Apps, Sites, etc)

Building applications on top of open platforms with existing user bases will continue (e.g. iPhone Apps, OpenSocial, Facebook apps, Linkedin). Innovation and the killer apps come from the development community rather than the platform companies. It’s still hard to make money on these platforms.

Software as Service is finally taking off (Salesforce, Google Apps, Basecamp, ...). Even small companies can buy enterprise software.

Commoditization & Business Models

Commoditization is inevitable. Companies will need to aggressively focus on customer value and innovate more rapidly.

Software as Service is finally taking off (Salesforce, Google Apps, Basecamp, ...). Even small companies like us can buy enterprise software like SalesForce.

The freemium model is also popular on the web. You attract the users with the free version and then upsell them through value-added features.

Servicing open-source apps is great way for new companies to compete with the large companies. Even using this approach you need lot of energy to promote the technology, build a multi-vendor eco-system, and convert the leads into sales.

Fate of big software companies (Microsoft, Oracle and SAP, etc) in 10 years:

Ten years is a long time in software business. Probably a couple of players will be still very strong. Probably 25% will fail. The remaining players will not be so dominant. They will continue to survive through acquisition of innovative companies. New leaders will emerge. Second comings like Apple are going to be rare.

Advice to new startups:

Don't under-estimate the need for marketing and sales. After your initial beta launch, the interest will wane. You have to promote the product pretty heavily to get the traction you wanted. It will take time to succeed. Ideas are cheap and execution is hard.

Find a business partner. Start-ups can be a roller coaster ride, it helps to have someone to brainstorm ideas and to share the ups and downs.

I think entrepreneurship is the best way to compete in the global marketplace.

It's always a nice surprise when one of our client spontaneously praises Intridea. Recently, our friend and client T.J. of Freewebs.com wrote something nice on RailsConf Job Boards: "Intridea has been a joy to work with, working for them has got to be awesome!" Oh, by the way, we are looking for more Ruby Rock Stars!

Congratulations to T.J. and the crew for raising 15 Million in Series A Funding for their new venture Social Gaming Network. I am jealous, he gets paid to write games!

With all the buzz about crowdsound, we got picked up by KillerStartups. Kudos to the CrowdSound product team for great product launch and exciting new features under development.

Subscribe to our RSS feed if you want to hear about new releases.

In collaboration with our good friends at Koanetic and Karlin Sloan, Intridea launches Committed Conversations (CC), a social networking site based on our SocialSpring platform. Committed Conversations is focused on actualizing individual and group commitments to personal, organizational and social transformation.

The community was launched today in support of the largest event in the history of the state of Washington: Seeds of Compassion. Seeds is an unprecedented gathering to engage the hearts and minds of the community by highlighting the vision, science, and programs of early social, emotional, and cognitive learning.

Anchored by the deep wisdom of His Holiness the Dalai Lama, this community-focused event will celebrate and explore the relationships, programs, and tools that nurture and empower children, families, and communities to be compassionate members of society.

Each of the five days will provide the over 100,000 parents, educators, and business and community leaders in attendance an opportunity to better understand the real benefits of compassion, and concrete steps on how to bring compassion into their lives. In addition to His Holiness, participants include: Dave Matthews, Daniel Goleman, Daniel Seigel, Richard Davidson, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, John Gottman, Rajendra Sisoda, and many, many other leaders in the fields of science, business and government.

Over 3 million individuals in 92 countries will be viewing the event live (or on-demand) on the webcast.

Committed Conversations™ is committed to helping create a world in which every individual has Voice with which to declare their Commitments and Communities through which to explore and manifest those Commitments. We encourage you to join the network and make your commitments.

We launched our Bebo plug-in (Beboist), the day the Bebo API became public. Beboist was the first Ruby interface for the Bebo platform, and was selected by Bebo to be their official Ruby API. Always pleasant to see something like this gain traction and attention, even several months after release!

Intridea helped Geico launch Iheartcavemen.com – the web’s premier caveman dating site. This tongue-in-cheek take on the online dating scene allows gentlecavemen to post online profiles complete with customized caveman photos. The morphed photos can be virally distributed on dozens of social networks using the ClearSpring widget platform.

Iheartcavemen.com is based on Intridea’s SocialSpring platform. SocialSpring is an enterprise-level white-label social networking product. With SocialSpring, a company can quickly have a fully-featured custom social network in a fraction of the cost and development time of building a solution from scratch.

South by Southwest (SXSW) 2008 Launch

The site was developed in collaboration with our friends at iStrategyLabs. The site garnered A LOT of attention at the SXSW launch: Mashable, Valleywag - So easy, a caveman can do it, Valleywag - Even the cavemen are getting action

Team Intridea has gained a national reputation for its team members' expertise and knowledge, especially when it comes to Ruby on Rails. Adam and Chris were recently interviewed for an eWeek.com article about Ruby on Rails 2.0 - check it out to see what they had to say:

Ruby on Rails 2.0 Users Give Thumbs Up

Dave Naffis demonstrated Intridea's Photo Greeting Card Application in-front of a technology audience at the Facebook Developer Garage event in Washington DC. This event was sponsored by Facebook and the local tech companies. The demo followed a lively discussion of new features and enhancements. Kudos to Pradeep for developing the app in one weekend.

Intridea is developing several facebook apps for large corporations to extend the corporate brand into facebook's social graph.

Chris and Barg will be participating in the Startup Weekend DC on October 26-28. We are sponsoring the event. We are looking forward to sharing ideas and building relationships with our DC tech community. Please stop by and say hello to us.

This year the Agile 2007 Conference was held in Washington DC, our home town. We presented two workshops on Rails and Agile. Since we talked about movie making , we thought we shoot a quick marketing video for Intridea. We created "Agile vs Waterfall" video, a spoof on Apple's famous "Mac vs PC" commercial. We submitted the video to Google's YouTube video contest. The video won third place. It was shown to an audience of 1200 attendees at the Google Party and the Conference Banquet.

Facts behind the video

1. The child actors are BoySonic, 9 and ViqVegas, 5. ViqVegas can't read so he had to memorize all the lines and technical jargon.
   
   
2. The total budget was two M&M chocolate packs.
   
   
3. The script, the shoot, and the edit took about 6 hours in total.
   
   
4. The videos received about 2500 views.
   
   

Ok, I am not quite ready to quit my day job to go into the movie business.

The script:

Hi I am agile...

[waterfall: wearing a yellow rain jacket...]
[agile: wearing brown intridea tee shirt and blue jeans]

agile: hi i am agile
waterfall: i am waterfall

agile: what are you doing there waterfall?
waterfall: we just got a new project, I am going through the contract [flips through a stack of papers], you can never be too careful…

agile: really, i just started new project with my customer, we made some sketches on the white board... and we came up with a quick prototype

pulls out a hand drill, brrr, brrr
agile: What's that…
waterfall: Oh, its our requirements tool, its pretty neat, you can drill down 12 levels deep. It automatically generates three binders so we can be CMM Level One Certified.

agile: that sounds like fun…
agile: what's are you doing now?

waterfall: just a little planning. we have three development teams. We should have the initial design in four months, three days, and 14 minutes. It used to take us six months...

agile: that's pretty good planning, we build software in short cycles, so we can learn and adapt...
Waterfall: ok i have to go now, i need a meeting to plan our meetings...

I just read Neil Davidson blog on learning lessons from Rodriguez's movie making. It's nice to see another fan with similar views.

I thought Neil's point about having a clear vision and script was dead-on! "He still had a script though. Most importantly, he had a clear idea of what the film was going to be..." We find that out team is the most productive when we have the visual design (wireframes, storyboards, and CSS) mostly done ahead of the implementation. Of course, we fine tune the design with the back-end software.

We will be helping out our friend Bob Payne at CodeGreenLabs at the Agile 2007 Conference. We will offer our rails and agile expertise to work on projects that make a difference in the world, benefiting organizations that are working to improve the environment, human rights, social justice, health and economic development. Come join us.

Dave, Matt, and I will be presenting a Rails/Agile workshop at the Agile 2007 Conference. The conference will be held in Washington DC, our home town. We are pretty excited.

Having fun with Rails and Agile Development

Agile software development brought fun back into building software by introducing light-weight approaches to team communications and customer collaboration. Delivering working software and learning new technologies made us happy. In spring of 2005, an open-source web application framework called Ruby on Rails (RoR) was introduced to minimize tedious aspects of web application development. This framework allows a developer to focus on application’s business logic, interact with customers frequently, and reduced the cost of changes. The Agile community quickly embraced the new framework as evidenced by one of the best selling technical books titled Agile Web Development with Rails (by Dave Thomas, David Hansson, Leon Breedt, and Mike Clark). The RoR framework abandons traditional heavy-weight assumptions and encourages simple, creative interfaces. Good looking, easy-to-use applications make the users happy, which makes developers happy. In this workshop, we go beyond the buzz by interactively demonstrating key elements of Rails framework. Then, we will have a group discussion/debate on if (or how) this framework enables project teams to be more agile. We will end the workshop by improvisational development of features requested by the workshop participants.

My good friend David Kane and I will be presenting a workshop at the Agile 2007 Conference. This is a reprise of our 2006 workshop, which received rave reviews from the audience and the session chair. The workshop was both educational and entertaining (don't tell your boss). We will plan to have a mix of new and repeated film clips.

Checkout the wiki notes from last year.

Bob Payne, our mutual friend, interviewed us and posted the podcast here.

Making movies and software at the speed of thought!

Director Robert Rodriguez (Spy Kids^TM, El Mariachi^TM, Sin City^TMis an Agile Director. He enjoys making highly creative movies quickly and cheaply. His ambition is to make movies at the speed of thought. To achieve this goal, he works in small teams to develop the ideas, visualize them quickly, shoot the movie fast, and build the movie in layers. This workshop will introduce Rodriguez's approach to filmmaking by screening several of his 10 minute flick school^TM featurettes and we will explore if and how these techniques translate to software development in a lively group discussion.

Highly recommended for DVD-extras junkies.

Eric, a good friend of ours recently went to work for Google. The lore had it that he was personally approved by The Larry Page. I have been working with him for over five years. Great guy! He is a Linux expert, very quite, efficient, and very organized. The perfect go-to guy. About 26 people RSVPed for the lunch at the Cheese Cake Factory (three times the typical attendance). In the end, over 30 people showed up for the lunch. Even people who ordinarily don't go to these kind of social events showed up.

In all my seventeen years of working career, i never seen such a warm send-off. Is this really Eric's charisma or did Google have something to do with it?

Maybe it's the cheesecake...

Congrats, Eric!