At Aroxo we have a wholly owned off-shore development centre based in India and therefore virtual working is an important part of how we run and manage the continued evolution of Aroxo.

On the panel we had Jasmine Whitbread, the Chief Executive of Save the Children, Ghislaine Caulat from Ashridge Business School and myself. It was chaired by Denis McCauley, the Director of the Economist Intelligence Unit.

You can view the full panel discussion below:

The main reason for this post is to tell you about some really exciting new features we launched today! Here’s what we’ve done:

1. News about products we sell
2. Top Tens
3. Introductions to the top makes on Aroxo
4. Lot’s a performance improvements

News, news, news

At Aroxo we know that it’s really important you get the best information available when you’re trying to decide which product to buy. To help you choose we’re now tracking news from all the different makes and brands on Aroxo.

You can see our full news feed here and it’s kept up-to-date in real-time! In addition to this you can see the news for just your favourite make and follow it, all on Aroxo. Here an example news feed on Samsung. Be careful with the RSS feeds though – they’re not quite working right yet…

Top Ten madness!

On Aroxo we currently have 76 DVD and blu-ray players. Not only is that quite a lot, but it’s about to be expanded out with hundreds more, so how do you decide which one to buy with so much choice?

It’s a big problem, to help make this decision easier, we’ve added in Top Tens for all of our products! You can see the Top Ten DVD and Blu-ray players here.

But not only that, we’ve got an incredibly flexible system for Top Tens, and we can do cool stuff like the Top Ten Sony Bluray players, the Top Ten Sony products, or even the Top Ten Silver Bluray Players!

Guides to all the main makes

Next we’ve been really busy creating lots of new content for you with introductions to all our Top Makes on Aroxo, including introductions to Apple, Samsung, Sony, etc, etc. We’ve got lots more coming too, with more and more product guides and information about individual manufacturers product families too.

Performance improvements!

Finally we’ve done a lot of work to make Aroxo faster to use and enjoy! Because of all the changes we’ve been making the site was getting slow in fact at one point it was taking 10 seconds for a page to load, which is just not good enough! I’m pleased to say that, thanks to a lot of work an effort from our development team, our pages should now be loading in less than a second! Much better!

We’ve still got loads more to come, and we’re trialling out a few new features on the site even as we speak! You might bump into a few of these as you surf around!

It’s a technical post which I’m leaving partly because I found the information very hard to find online, and partly because I’ll probably reference myself it in the future.

I should also point out we have a great sysadmin who looks after the Aroxo production system, but I’ve got a “knock about” server which I like to play with to help me understand what I’m doing, what I’ve done here refers to that server.

So here’s the scenario: you’re hosted using Amazon Web-Services EC2 platform. You’ve created a volume to store your data on, and you’ve run out of space. How do you increase the space on /vol using AWS?

Here are the steps which after a lot of messing around and a lot of help about I eventually found to work, some of this is based on this post. This might not be the most efficient way and some steps might be unnecessary and it’s based on a Debian install, maybe that makes a difference, maybe it doesn’t:

1. Log onto your machine using SSH
2. Type

   umount /vol

   to unmount your drive (note it’s umount, not unmount)

   1. If your machine tells you that the drive is use, and it probably will, do this:

   2. fuser -m /vol

   3. You’ll get a list of the process IDs which are currently using the drive
   4. I then just killed them using

      kill xxxx

      but there’s probably a smoother way to shutting them down, you might want to think about that, like a clean shutdown of Apache and mysql at least

   5. Type

      umount /vol

3. Go to your AWS console
4. Detach this drive from your instance
5. Create a snapshot based on the volume and wait for it to complete
6. Create a new, larger, drive based on the snapshot
7. Attach the new drive (remember the mount point, maybe something like /dev/sdf)
8. Back to SSH type

   mount /dev/sdf /vol

9. Type

   xfs_growfs /vol

10. Restart the box or the services you unceremoniously killed
11. Check everything
12. Breath a sigh of relief
13. Make a cup of tea and find some to tell who’s likely to be impressed (if you find anyone, let me know).

That’s what I did, it worked but it wasn’t pretty.

A perennial entry in Google’s top applications in Market has been WP-To-go, a Wordpress client for your Android phone.

I’ve just installed it, set it up, and I’ve got to say, it’s brilliant! You can manage comments, write posts, edit posts and write and save drafts.

Fantastic stuff, thanks guys!

Google Wave invites available

I know that many people are desperate to get their hands on one. So, if you want one, simply blog about this post which I wrote about Google Wave, happy if you disagree or leave you thoughts, just credit me back with a link and I’ll send you an invite!

Matt.

Overall I was a combination of slightly bermused, impressed by the technology bowled over by the real-time goodness and the slick UI, but fundamentally unsure of what I was supposed to use Google Wave for.

But what actually went wrong here? I’ve got a theory and it’s not what you might expect – valid though those criticisms are. Google Wave went wrong, not because of what it is, but because it didn’t harness any viral power:

1. Invites are not sent fast enough
2. Wave is closed
3. Wave has no pointers

Google Wave is first first and foremost a communications technology, which means for people to really see the benefits they need to be communicating with people they know.

When you join Google Wave you receive 8 invites, when you’re through those you get another 12. But when you send the invite they don’t arrive for several days. Meaning you’ve got practically no-one of significance to communicate with when you’re first into it*.

So your first experience of Wave is with strangers.

The second problem with Wave is that you don’t know when you’ve got an unread Wave. You signed in first time around, played around a bit with a few people you vaguely know online, and sign out. If someone now communicates with you whilst you’re signed out you’re not informed.

No email, no RSS feed, no Tweet, nada.

So you don’t sign in and respond and you don’t slowly fall away from being a Wave user.

The final thing which they got wrong is that there are no easy to follow pointers to get your started, clues for intentional uses, a quick “first action”.

When people first use a technology they are in a state of mild stress, in short they don’t want to publicly demonstrate that they don’t know what they’re doing and therefore look stupid. So they want something easy to do, figuring out the complex stuff afterwards. This is as true of techie geeks as it is of our non-techie friends.

Google Wave doesn’t supply these pointers.

What’s important about what I’ve said here is that all of this is entirely fixable, and there are plenty more people who desperately want to try out Google Wave. With any luck the feedback from the 2nd and 3rd round of adopters will be a lot more positive!

* I totally acknowledge that there maybe good technical scalability reasons for this, but it doesn’t change the affect.

I’ll start with a quick Aroxo update, we’ve been through a lot over the last few months and we’ve got a lot to tell you about.

So, first things first. What have we done with Aroxo in the last few months? Here’s an overview of some of the new stuff we’ve launched recently:

• Twitter integration
• Questions and answers
• Thousands of new products

For a while we’ve enabled you to tell your friends on Twitter when you’ve signed up to Aroxo, or created a Want-it Note. But we’ve now added a live stream of everything that’s going on, on Aroxo. You’ll find the Aroxo buzz here.

What’s best, if you’re only interested in individual product groups we’ve created separate accounts for those too. I’ll post a page with those on it shortly.

We’ve also got a great new Q&A system where you can ask questions about our products and either us, or one of our seller’s will endeavour to answer  you. Here’s an example product. Unfortunately it’s attracting quite a bit of spam, a loophole shortly to be closed!

Finally we’ve added in thousands of new products for you to choose from. We’re working even as we speak to bring you price comparison links, as well as videos and reviews of all those products.

There’s lot’s more to come from us too! Watch this space!

As well as being a blogger, Trevor is an eCommerce consultant at Vendlab.com as well as running his own online baby retailing business, Hello Baby. With any luck you should start seeing some baby stuff on Aroxo soon!

Off-shoring your web-development is a great way to save money and, if you are bootstrapping a small start-up, it could be the perfect strategy to hang on to more equity and delay financing. However off-shoring your development is also fraught with risks, it is far harder to manage your development and communicate ideas, so it is vital to take proper steps to protect yourself. In this post I continue describing the system I’ve used several times in order to ensure that I get developers who are motivated, technically capable and trust-worthy.

You’ll find stages 1 and 2 discussed here.

Step 3 – Send the developers you’ve found a “Request for Information”

A Request for Information (or RFI) is a questionnaire to help you short-list developers. The objective of the RFI is to enable you to decide which developers can deliver your project in the right sort of price range. Your RFI should at least gather the following information:

• Hourly rates for different staff types
• Which currencies the developer can raise invoices in
• Whether they are prepared to set a fixed cost for the project (you want a fixed cost, right?)
• Between 3 and 5 customer references
• Information about the company (how long has it been running, how many people it employs)
• Information on their typical project (how big it is, how long it lasts)
• The development methodology employed and development technologies supported
• Whether they have a design house
• Their preferred development technology
• Any technology certifications which they may have
• a “difficult technical problem” which is related to your project, ask the developers to sketch out how they would solve it

I’ve included an example RFI in the documentation bank to help get you started.

When asking for references, try and get projects which are similar to yours. Also get a reference for a company which is physically near you and then arrange to meet up with them for a coffee and a chat.

Your RFI should also tell the developers all the key deadlines for the selection process. It ensures that the developer knows where they stand at all times, and it gives you targets and deadlines to meet yourself. When you issue it give the vendors at least 2 weeks to respond and an opportunity to ask you questions.

If you are worried about controlling your IP, then there’s no need to discuss what your actual business is in the RFI. However, you might want to describe in broad terms the type of business you are launching, or refer to some similar companies.

When you send the RFI out, update the vendor dashboard which you set up at the start of the process.

Note that not every company will respond to your RFI. Some companies will respond but fail to answer the final question, some companies will send you back documentation packs which probably contain the answers, but they’ve not bothered to put them into your format. All these companies should be immediately dropped from the list.

Step 4 – Short-list the developers

Two weeks after you’ve issued your RFI you should have all the responses you are going to get. I tend not to bother chasing any companies who don’t reply to the RFI and just stick with those that do. Your next step is to short-list the developers, you want to work through the responses until you have 4-7 companies to take through to the next stage.

Before you start short-listing the developers, you need to think about what your ideal company is. You might want to work with a small company, or you might be looking for a larger company with ISO or CMM certification, you may have a particular development methodology in mind, or you might want your system built with a particular technology, etc.  Collate all these thoughts to help piece together what you are looking for.

You are then ready to start “the sift”. First stage is to remove any companies which just aren’t right. Personally when reading through these responses I arrange them into three piles: yes, no, and questions. I then ask the questions and update. I continue to do this until I have only a yes pile and a no pile.

Remember to always check the references, this is one of the best signals of quality company. If they are in your country, arrange to go and see them, otherwise drop them an email. You want to know whether the developer delivered on time and to budget, if they still use them, if they’ve given them any new work and if they’d recommend them.

Keep working the list until you get between 4-7 companies. It is important that you don’t take too many vendors through to the short-list round as you don’t want large numbers of companies knowing what you want building. If you don’t have enough, approach more companies. Finally, ensure that you feedback to all the companies involved (good news and bad) and update the vendor dashboard to so can keep track of where each company is.

In next week’s post we’ll look at how to get a price for the development and how to select which companies is going to build your business.

You’ll find stages 1 and 2 discussed here.

Step 3 – Send the developers you’ve found a “Request for Information”

A Request for Information (or RFI) is a questionnaire to help you short-list developers. The objective of the RFI is to enable you to decide which developers can deliver your project in the right sort of price range. Your RFI should at least gather the following information:

• Hourly rates for different staff types
• Which currencies the developer can raise invoices in
• Whether they are prepared to set a fixed cost for the project (you want a fixed cost, right?)
• Between 3 and 5 customer references
• Information about the company (how long has it been running, how many people it employs)
• Information on their typical project (how big it is, how long it lasts)
• The development methodology employed and development technologies supported
• Whether they have a design house
• Their preferred development technology
• Any technology certifications which they may have
• A “difficult technical problem” which is related to your project, ask the developers to sketch out how they would solve it

I’ve included an example RFI in the documentation bank to help get you started.

When asking for references, try and get projects which are similar to yours. Also get a reference for a company which is physically near you and then arrange to meet up with them for a coffee and a chat.

Your RFI should also tell the developers all the key deadlines for the selection process. It ensures that the developer knows where they stand at all times, and it gives you targets and deadlines to meet yourself. When you issue it give the vendors at least 2 weeks to respond and an opportunity to ask you questions.

If you are worried about controlling your IP, then there’s no need to discuss what your actual business is in the RFI. However, you might want to describe in broad terms the type of business you are launching, or refer to some similar companies.

When you send the RFI out, update the vendor dashboard which you set up at the start of the process.

Note that not every company will respond to your RFI. Some companies will respond but fail to answer the final question, some companies will send you back documentation packs which probably contain the answers, but they’ve not bothered to put them into your format. All these companies should be immediately dropped from the list.

Step 4 – Short-list the developers

Two weeks after you’ve issued your RFI you should have all the responses you are going to get. I tend not to bother chasing any companies who don’t reply to the RFI and just stick with those that do. Your next step is to short-list the developers, you want to work through the responses until you have 4-7 companies to take through to the next stage.

Before you start short-listing the developers, you need to think about what your ideal company is. You might want to work with a small company, or you might be looking for a larger company with ISO or CMM certification, you may have a particular development methodology in mind, or you might want your system built with a particular technology, etc. Collate all these thoughts to help piece together what you are looking for.

You are then ready to start “the sift”. First stage is to remove any companies which just aren’t right. Personally when reading through these responses I arrange them into three piles: yes, no, and questions. I then ask the questions and update. I continue to do this until I have only a yes pile and a no pile.

Remember to always check the references, this is one of the best signals of quality company. If they are in your country, arrange to go and see them, otherwise drop them an email. You want to know whether the developer delivered on time and to budget, if they still use them, if they’ve given them any new work and if they’d recommend them.

Keep working the list until you get between 4-7 companies. It is important that you don’t take too many vendors through to the short-list round as you don’t want large numbers of companies knowing what you want building. If you don’t have enough, approach more companies. Finally, ensure that you feedback to all the companies involved (good news and bad) and update the vendor dashboard to so can keep track of where each company is.

In the next post we’ll look at how to get a price for the development and how to select which companies is going to build your business.