wejustblog

I start by apologising to everyone for not writing since the day we were preparing for the Broadcast Asia 2008 exhibition. I told myself that if we were going to have a blog, we should blog. It shouldn’t be a press release site. It shouldn’t be an announcement page. It should be about engagement. Well, I’ll try to make amends from now on. If I’m screwing up, feel free to drop me an email to let me know.

So here goes.

I’m glad to say that since BroadcastAsia, we’ve completed building the Widgeous core - that means to say it can stand on it’s now although we will keep improving it and I’m sure we will learn of it’s limitations as we proceed to scale. From there, we’ve moved towards wanting to attract developers to start building applications on our platform.

In that respect, we recently went over to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia to be part of their inaugural Barcamp(which I have to say, was friggin awesome!) If there’s anything I took away from that session it must be the fact that the culture of sharing knowledge coupled with a sense of dissatisfaction is critical to innovation. We left KL with a sense of excitement that we would be going back to continue work on Widgeous and yet with a certain sadness that it would be some time before we see the next Barcamp Malaysia happen.

And since we’ve come back, we’ve had to think about solving our next set of problems - how to gain traction? You see, we’ve always had a chicken and egg problem, We need the users and the developers - but we’ve always needed them both at the same time. That is so not going to happen. And so we shifted our focus on trying to get the developers on board first but still, that’s not working. We sat and we figured:

1. People don’t entirely understand what we do.
2. People don’t have a real example of what the Widgeous Platform can do(this is made worse by [1] ).
3. People don’t have time to explore…and we haven’t really made that process much easier.

So we made a few decisions. Amongst those:-

1. We’re going to spend more time creating real in-house applications. Some of which will released in the coming weeks. This will aimed at providing both a case study and an experience for users.
2. We’re going to provide a more dedicated area for developers to find out about how they can be part of our system and guide them into learning how to use our APIs.
3. We’re going to provide a more friendly channel for communication with you - mainly a forum.
4. We’re going to provide a place on Widgeous for non-developers to actually do useful stuff and slowly get introduced to our work.

If all goes well, we’ll make our first release tomorrow afternoon…Just need to check some things with the rest of the team when I get into the office tomorrow morning.

I’m also thinking of meeting up(either online or offline) in small groups just to get feedback on some of our internal product development plans/products that are in development now. Coffee joints probably work offline but do you know what online tool( or collection of tools) are good for having online demos & discussion? Anyone interested?