The Viamentis Blog

There seems to be a lot of attention being paid to Google’s answer to the Facebook Platform called OpenSocial. I heard about it on Pmarca’s blog, but there are a lot of details here, here, here and here.

I think this attention is truly deserved, because it really opens up the field for innovative widgets/apps which run on these platforms. The major Facebook Platform app developers are also participating, which portends well for the adoption. Stay tuned for more observations, as I feel this is an exciting new opportunity where there will be a lot of action in the future.

Hi folks, I know I haven’t updated this blog in for quite some weeks, and I apologize. Things have been really hectic, with a lot of behind-the-scenes meetings, interviews, and client work.

First of all, I have an announcement to make: I have a new colleague. I have hired employee #2 for Viamentis (me being the first :D) - ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Divya, who will be working with me to take up my considerable amount of work load.

She is a fresh engineering grad, who is interested in Ruby, Rails and Lisp (now you know why I hired her ;). You will become familiar her anyways here, as she will be blogging about stuff that catches her interest and might have some smaller announcements to make herself.

Second, we have some new office space - I am sharing office with another cool startup, BloggingSaurus. Currently I and Divya are working out of this office, but we are hoping to get some more people soon. That means, you will see lots more activity on the blog and the main site. Stay tuned!

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 :D). 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.

You know, my daily ritual is more or less the same - code a lot, read the blogs, and code some more. Most of the stuff I read on the net is more or less the same - mostly technical stuff, with some business content thrown in here and there. But there are some things that happen once in a while, that make your day. Here are two instances of courage I found on the intar-webs today, and made me smile.

One is the infamous Digg & the HD-DVD key fiasco - somebody posted a link to a forums entry that explains how he broke the DRM on the latest DVD formats, HD-DVD and even Blu-Ray. Somebody sent Digg a cease and desist order, to take the story off. Digg did so, and thousands of people created alternate links and voted them to the top of the story, so that the DVD key story would not die. Finally, Digg relented, and decided to keep the links. Bravo Kevin, whatever happens, you took a stand, and you have my admiration.

One more inspiring story is about a VC, Jeff Nolan, who fired himself out of a startup, because he felt the company can hire a couple more developers by not paying his steep salary, and it’s more of a value add. How many VCs would actually do this? Jeff Nolan, my hat’s off for you.