A very nice startup based nearby us in Mainz (half-hour from Darmstadt), was just covered on Techcrunch here:
They do custom books from content taken out of Wikipedia. They started supporting only the German Wikipedia but now they have extended that support to Dutch, French, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish and English.
Very cool I think!
SciSys acquired last year VCS by paying €16.64 million. Today I got to meet Prof. Dr. Klaus-G. Meng, the company’s single founder, that started VCS in 1981.
He told the initial history of VCS, how he started the company, etc. Basically he knew how to receive a signal from satellites and designed a receiver that was capable of monitoring the signal. Back then this was great technology. The European Space Agency was using paper prints that came out every X number of minutes so going to a system where they had live feedback of the signal on a TV was considered something very useful. His first client was precisely the Agency but soon after Lufthansa and other big companies were interested as well.
The first thing I asked was: wasn’t this easy enough to be done by other companies? Did you had strong competition? He said no because it was a niche market. The bigger companies were interested in bigger markets like medicine, etc.
He ended up doing a tour with us through the office, which was brilliant! The building used to be an abandoned school and maybe that’s why it is so functional inside. There are rooms for 1, 2 or 3 persons instead of an open-space, which reminded me more of a university environment than a software company.
- A book by AdaptivePath called “Subject to Change” with the first chapter free to read here.
http://a.viary.com/ – These guys are developing multiple RIA’s in Flex/Flash that are really worth a look. Check the demo videos at their blog.
http://opensource.adobe.com/wiki/display/flexsdk/Flex+4 – With the official release of Flex 3 comes the planning for Flex 4 – “..provide a framework meant for continuous collaboration between designer and developer.”
http://issuu.com – a very nice interface for reading e-books.
Via bittbox, an interesting article about the relations between programmers and designers. I totally agree with the author. When we understand what we can learn from others we get along a lot better, and that applies not just to software.
“When working together across both the design and programming disciplines, the best results and happiest clients are directly related to how well the (sometimes deceptive) design/programming companies work together. The best way to move forward and stay ahead of the game is to find a reliable partner, be it programmer or designer, that is willing to wear your hat and even go to meetings with you when needed. Once you develop a relationship, which most do eventually, it’s easy to get comfortable in your situation. This is one of the major reasons designers and programmers are so baffled by one another. No one interacts and shares knowledge, they just do their part and that’s it. This isn’t constructive enough to satisfy me, sorry.
Designers and programmers should be constantly looking into new ways to help each other out. And if you’re a small and growing company and have the demand, hire someone to compliment your team. Your designers will learn 100 times more information from an on-board programmer than emailing an outsourced “friend.” The same goes for programmers. Having one Graphic Designer on board could save you thousands in outsourcing, and teach your team priceless information about the layout in front of the code, and how the scripts manipulate what the user sees. Website interfaces should be designed for usability and accessibility, and that involves both what you see, and the programming that powers it. Make an effort to understand your complimentary discipline.”