Entrepreneurship

There are 36 posts filed in Entrepreneurship (this is page 4 of 4).

El Impacto de la Tecnologia de Corona SDK

Last Friday, February 11th, 2011, I was interviewed by the spanish newspaper, Diario Las Americas. They did a good job in capturing the essence of our Corona SDK, and Ansca, my company, via my mutilated spanglish. Having been born in Nicaragua, and Spanish being my first language, I should be eloquent in my native tongue. So far away from the truth. I grew up in the States. My computer and business vernacular is all English. Trying my best to translate the ‘computer lingo’ into Spanish was quite a challenge and I had to resort to a very bad form of Tarzan-esque spanglish.

Cordial thanks to the reporter, Sergio Boffelli, who went out of his way to ‘translate’ my spanglish.

The article is in Spanish, to read it, follow the link here to Diario Las Americas.

Carlos

Who’s on First, What’s on Second, I Don’t Know is on third…

With apologies to Bud Abbot and Lou Costello.

One of the nicer perks of being on the razor edge of technology is being able to see and play with a variety of devices. Some will make it to the market, some of them will never get out of an R&D lab, and some will flounder and be buried in the pantheon of devices that once ruled the mighty mobile lanscape. (how is this for an opening paragraph?)

I get exposed to a lot of devices — from multiple manufacturers, from all sizes, from all colors, and ranging from specific market segments to the ones positioning themselves as an “all-in-one” device. Yes, there are some devices striving to be a swiss army knife of sorts  while others strive to be more incisive in a “just do one thing good above all other devices” sort of way.

And in this far-reaching techno Tower of Babel, there is a significant question we all ponder and one that I get asked often: Which device do you think is the clear winner? Ergo, the title of this blog — Who’s on first, What’s on second, I Don’t Know is on third…

Who is on first? Which device is number one? Is it the Apple iPad? The Galaxy Tablet? The iPhone 4? The Motorola Droid X? The (now defunct) Google Nexus? The Samsung Galaxy S? Which one, Carlos? Which one is it???

What’s on second? Which device would be number two? Well, I’m pretty sure that it has to be an Android device. Sure, iOS is the mobile OS, but Android — purely by default — has to be number two.

I Don’t Know is on third — Microsoft’s WP7. Nokia, Samsung’s Bada, Asus Tablets, ViewSonic Tablets. I’m sure that the new Motorola tablet that is rumored to be announced at CES will be the one to beat.  Then again, maybe not! Maybe this new Motorola Xoom (?) will climb up the charts to be number one and dethrone the iPad, and make for a formidable competitor to the Galaxy Tablet. Then again, maybe some unknown tablet that is yet to be announced will take the coveted first place position.

So, which one is it?

NONE! No tablet — whether it is an iPad, Samsung Galaxy Tablet, NOOK Color, or any other tablet device — is number one.

Sounds like blasphemy, right?

Well, my answer to you is this: There is no clear winner!

Surely the iPad is elegant, well-made, outstanding, and has all the things that one may ever need in a tablet device. The Galaxy Tablet is also outstanding, it is an Android device and although the UI is not as elegant, it is just as outstanding as an iPad in terms of functionality. Features missing on the iPad are available on the Galaxy and the opposite is true. And the NOOK Color, it is by far, one of the best devices out there for eBook reading. It is not an iPad, nor a Galaxy Tablet, and Barnes & Noble is not positioning the device as a tablet — it is being positioned as an eBook reader with tablet capabilities. Combined with an excellent eBook experience, the NOOKColor is a device capable of standing on its own merit against the big boys.

So why no number one?

Because the clear winner here is not a tablet from a specific manufacturer, the real winner here is the software.  Yes, you read that right — It is the software, the app running on the device. And is the app I can run on my iPad, Samsung Galaxy, NOOK, or any other device. What good is it for me to have any of the aforementioned devices, or up-and-coming devices, if i can’t get my personal email, my calendar, my documents, my eBooks, and games? If I can’t log into my corporate VPN and access my intranet to access my corporate documents and edit them, or my user list, forums and make the appropriate changes, the device is just as useless as a red-brick. It is dead weight.

I don’t give a hoot if the device has 27,000×27,000 HDMI output in Super-not-yet-standard-XXLHD format and with THX 20.1 surround sound coming out of the unit — if I can’t get to my movies or to my documents on the device, it is a waste of my time and yours to be carrying around a brick.

The clear winner is the software and, even more so, the software that is available on the different platforms. (read “iOS and Android” since I Don’t Know is still on third. 😉 )

I know — you’ve figured it out, you are smart, you are now saying “This guy is good!” This was all a bait-and-switch to peddle his Corona SDK. Boo hoo, I just wasted a good 15 minutes reading this, and for a second there he had me going.

Well, yes, my company creates a cross-platform app creation solution called Corona SDK. But if you think I am going to bait-and-switch you, here, I will give you my number one app for devices.

DropBox. Between my two laptops and my three desktop units, my iPad, and my Galaxy Tablet, and other tablets that I can’t talk about, DropBox has become my choice of app for synching documents across my disparate OS units.

And with everyone from analysts to pundits who are calling this year “The year of the Tablet,” the software that enables the device to access your documents anywhere, anytime, is the real winner.

Abbott: … Who’s on first, What’s on second, I Don’t Know is on third…

Costello: That’s what I want to find out.

Abbott: I say Who’s on first, What’s on second, I Don’t Know’s on third.

Costello: Are you the manager?

Abbott: Yes.

Costello: You gonna be the coach too?

Abbott: Yes.

Costello: And you don’t know the fellows’ names?

Abbott: Well I should.

Costello: Well then who’s on first?

Abbott: Yes.

Indeed.

The Meeting in South Beach (Miami)

An insightful read into how we got our first ever Corona developer and his musings on “The Birth of Corona – Part I”.

Pretty much, Joseph DeSetto relates how he got to be the first ever Corona developer, how we met at the lobby in a hotel in South Beach in Miami, Florida and how he somehow knew he had to trust us to deliver.

Joseph’s guest blog post over at my company’s blog The Birth of Corona – Part I

Talk about entrepreneurship spirit from both sides.

Carlos.

Podcast Interview by FogView.

Back in October, Tom Newman from FogView did a podcast interview and we discussed all things Ansca, entrepreneurship and what it took to get to where we are today.

Part I
http://media.blubrry.com/fogview/media.libsyn.com/media/fogview/fv-056.mp3
 length: 32:00

Part II
http://media.blubrry.com/fogview/media.libsyn.com/media/fogview/fv-057.mp3
 length: 25:42

Link to FogView http://fogview.com/

Enjoy and feedback always welcomed….

Carlos

Carlos’ Ten Commandments for Entrepreneurs

For a number of years I have been invited to give a series of talks at Florida International University’s School of Computing and Information Sciences and at the University of Miami’s College of Engineering. Both schools asked me to elaborate on my experiences as a software engineer at a Fortune 500 company and about what it’s like to start a company in Silicon Valley.

This past Tuesday, (November 2nd) I was invited to FIU to chat about what I thought was going to be about the challenges of going mobile and how Ansca — with its Corona SDK — solved the problem of platform fragmentation with iOS and Android devices. With FIU being far removed from Silicon Valley, I figured the students would benefit not only from listening to my “pitch” about Corona, (salesman hat on!) but also about the mobile landscape, in general.

To my surprise, FIU, announced the event under “Entrepreneurship” and the title of the session was Entrepreneurship in Silicon Valley. Usually, the sessions last about an hour: a 30-minute talk and 30-minute Q&A. Curiously enough, the session on Tuesday went on for almost three hours! We started at 6:30pm, and I answered the last Q&A question around 9:40, as the maintanence workers were about to lock up.

Unfortunately, nobody had an SD card big enough to record the entire 3-hour session. But luckily, I had done a presentation on entrepreneurship before where I shared my experiences as an entrepreneur — from having an idea to closing $1.5 million in Series A funding from Merus Capital.