The Viamentis Blog

After a rather long absence from writing anything here, I’m back. There is only so long I can hold back from yammering about one cool thing or the other that I see, inspite of the hectic schedule.The last one year has been a great adventure. Some of you have followed it here, and I’m thankful to you. See the number of subscribers to this blog and I wonder who it could be. I hope you’re getting some value out of it. I can only say things will be getting better.

As some of you know, Viamentis started a life of it’s own last year around this time. Previously, it was just me hacking away nurturing dreams of building this company, and hiring more developers who are as much in love with the web as I am. And I did that. I got to work with two really talented ones, and it has been a great ride. Unfortunately, the ride did not last long. Of course, I have myself to blame. I underestimated what it takes to actually run a web development services company.

Though I loved every minute of creating something of my own, but it meant that I was moving away and away from the things that I really loved – writing code, exploring new technologies. Still, I did not really regret it, because Unni and Divya were really enthusiastic about checking out new stuff and blogging about them here. I knew that there would be some administrative overhead that I would have to handle.

In the end, it was down to every startup’s curse – burning cash too fast – that did us in. I had to let both of them go, because, let’s face it, Viamentis is fully boot-strapped, out of my pocket. I really hated letting them go. But I guess we all have to start somewhere, and it was a great lesson to me. Though it has been very difficult, I would not miss the experience for anything. It’s absolutely true that you don’t actually know something until you start doing it. I learned a lot more about running a business by doing it for six months than I did in years of reading business books.

So, here we are, back to Viamentis being a single-person company again. Of course, that means my schedule is a lot more hectic – luckily, most of the clients that I picked up stuck with me, and I’m grateful to them. But I think there is an upside after all – now I realize why I have to find a good partner – there is no way I can handle everything in a business like this. Also, being on my own again means that there will be a little bit of free time -  so I can go back to tech stuff that never had time for checking out.

There are a couple of new languages that I’m dying to check out. Also, the mobile arena is really getting interesting – with iPhone SDK and Android. Though I always loved the iPhone, for now I’m more leaned towards Android, mostly because it uses a language I know (Java) and uses a toolset that is very familiar to me (Eclipse). Also, the emulator was pretty neat – I got a taste of what G-1 would look like, right on my desktop. I would still like to check out a bit of iPhone SDK too, but that would mean I have to change a lot of my development environment – the biggest one being getting a Mac. Now, that would take a bit more time. With Android, I can just start right away on my beloved Ubuntu box. More on this later.

If you made it this long, thanks! Hang on, there is a lot of interesting stuff coming up!

I normally don’t post comics on this blog (that’s game for my personal blog, though – if you have to know where it is, ask me). But this one happens to be very relevant for my last post. So why not?

Hi all. I know I haven’t written much in the last few weeks and not because I didn’t have enough to write already. I have been delaying a blog post because there are some things I should announce. Number one, Viamentis is slowly but surely converting into a product company. I guess you must have seen this coming, but I will have more interesting announcements pretty soon.

And probably disappointing news for the Lispers out there is I had to port the Lisp webapp I am working on into Ruby on Rails. It breaks my heart to announce this, because I really wanted this app to go production written in Lisp – it almost did. But there were some bugs, and in the process of fixing them, I was running into more, and not because of lack of tests. Lisp simply needs a kick-ass web framework to really shine in that space. It’s a great language, but I was re-inventing too many wheels in the process of making it web-friendly. As a single-person, self-funded company, that is something I cannot afford.

So, as we speak, the app is already ported to RoR, tests written, bugs fixed, and is happily running on production – it is not time to announce it yet, but I think it will be ready in a few weeks for a larger set of audience. Currently I am working on the feedback given by a few of my friends.

In the meantime, we have seen iPhone come and take up the world by storm. Ok, at least the geek world, maybe. No, I don’t want to write one more fanboy post about it, no doubt, it is a great phone, and more than just a great phone, as Apple fans want everybody to believe (ok, that includes me ). I never miss a chance to write about Apple – it is an inspiring company, in many, many ways.

So, this post by GigaOm kinda surprised me. I respect him tremendously. I think he has a very fun job – probably more fun than Mike Arrington – TechCrunch is nice too, but I like GigaOm better – it’s flavor and style is more to my sensibilities. But I digress. In the above said article, he posits that high-end iPod sales maybe falling due to the iPhone mania.

Let’s see. Head over to apple.com, and you will see iPhone adorning the frontpage. Go to iPod+iTunes menu. It says iTunes is “activating” millions of iPhones. Not iPods. In the section that belongs to iPods. Head over to Apple Store, and you find that the 80GB iPod costs $349. And the iPhone starts at $499. Hmm. For $150 more, you get what is probably the most hyped technology gadget ever, which includes a video iPod, a phone, with a kick-ass browser thrown in. It is almost a mini-mac. So that would lead you to conclude “duh! of course it cannibalizes the high-end iPods”. And of course, Apple knows about it too. It’s obvious. Apple has stated it before. iPhone is the best iPod your money could buy. Period.