1. Set up impossible deadlines.
2. Let them work overtime.
3. Don’t allow breaks.
4. Place a ban on laughing.
5. Break the coffee machine.
6. Don’t shield them from the dirty daily business.
7. Don’t challenge them.
8. Underpay them.
9. Bribe them.
10. Infiltrate a team member who is demotivated anyway.

Seen on Manuel Klimex

Has Google acquired Digg for 200 millions dollars? Michael Arrington has written a post on TechCrunch saying that both companies have reached an agreement for around 200 millions dollars. The popular social bookmarking site would become part of Google News property.

Since I started to build YouAre.com I knew that the scalability was an important matter to solve. Sometimes the scalability is more important for your pocket and for the success of your startup than originally thought. According to Google, a slow performance could cost you 20% of your revenue. If you are starting a new company, you ought to know that any savings in servers can accelerate the growth of your company. These costs include hardware, software, human resources and time (for many people the most appreciated resource). Apart from the monetary costs, it’s proved that half a second delay in page load time can kill a user’s satisfaction.

The scalability is a relative problem which depends on many things: the technology used, the fault tolerance and the availability of programming staff. Many people think that scalability=performance, and they are wrong as there are more aspects to be considered. For me, the scalability is to maintain the balance between the resources and the number of users, when the size of the problem increases. The size of the problem is the growth of the number of users and the resources. A graphic which represents a good scalability could be the following:

We can appreciate how well the growth of users (n) have been solved. The amount of required resources grows logarithmically.

Some good points for scalability that should be considered:

• Good database design: Normalize the database, select a suitable DBMS, consider the users’ necessities, …
• Search engines: Use a search engine for your application. Lucene is a very high-performance text search engine library. You can also consider Nutch or Solr, both based in Lucene but oriented to web applications. If you are finding some engine more basic take a look at Sphinx.
• The Keepalive problem: Enabling Keepalive for images and external files (such as CSS) is very good for clients, but bad for servers. Keeping Keepalive off we reduce a lot of the memory of the server. A good solution is to have separate images in a different server, getting the added benefit of higher browser concurrency with multiple hostnames (it will let you to load images in parallel). In YouAre, we are using Amazon Simple Storage Service to store our images.
• Cache: Cache as much of your dynamic content as possible Memcache could be a great option.
• Take care of your code: Take care of your code and it will take care of you
• Use GNU/Linux: GNU/Linux uses spare memory to cache files on disk. This means much faster I/O.

More information | Rico Mariani
More information | Shiflett
More information | No VC required

I have been hard at work during the past few months, creating something very special. When José Luis Antúnez came to me with such a great idea I could not turn it down. YouAre is a global social network that lets you publish multimedia microcontents. It’s global because it takes on relations between people in different fields (personal, professional, interests, …). YouAre lets you publish from texts to multimedia files such as images and videos.

SOCIAL NETWORK

YouAre is a social network that represents a semantic graph. Nowadays we have implemented XFN (metaweb nivel), but the goal is to create a true semantic graph. We are developing a reasoner which will check the consistency of the relations between the differents nodes (or vertex) of the semantic graph. For example, in an ontology representing a basic familiar hierarchy, if a user A sets that he’s the user B’s father, and later the user B sets that he’s the user A’s father, an inconsistency will be produced, as the user cannot be father and son at the same time. In this case the system would indicate an error. In YouAre we want to go beyond simply giving an indication and be able to predict possible inconsistencies. For example, if the user A is male and he sets he’s homosexual, later if he sets that the user B (female) is his partner, the system would detect a possible inconsistency (a warning). We can create a true semantic graph with a well defined ontology. Now we can extract information from the established relations between the users.

MICROCONTENTS

We can publish microcontents in YouAre. There are three different typologies available: texts, images and videos. The texts will have a lenght of 140 characters. We will be able to publish images and videos from external services such as Flickr, YouTube, Vimeo, … Also we will be able to upload ours pictures directly onto the system.

Now you can ask for an invitation in order to test YouAre. We will send out invitations in a few weeks. Whilst you are waiting, you can view a set of screenshots on Flickr. Stay tuned to YouAre.

It’s true, this is the age of the second Internet bubble. By means of Oriol’s blog, I have been noticed that the popular site Digg is for sale. People was speaking about a possible $300 million rumor last month. Many people think Digg doesn’t worth that amount. Who can buy Digg? I’ve read in some blogs that there are two possibilities: The New York Times Co. and the Washington Post Co. This a little fragment of the report by Venture Beat: A reliable source just confirmed the company’s plans, noting the company has hired Allen & Company, a tiny but influential private investment firm, to help broker a deal. The asking price is still $300 million, the source said. We asked Digg founder Kevin Rose about a potential sale, and Allen & Company’s involvement. He told us, unsurprisingly, that “we never comment on things related to acquisitions.. This operation would be the biggest purchase of a social bookmarking site.

Now we can enjoy the new LinkedIn API on a REST based system. Nowdays the API is not public, but if you are interested in developing some application based in LinkedIn, you must to send them an email to developers@linkedin.com telling them what you wanna do. Lucian Beebe (Director of Product Management at LinkedIn) explains us how the LinkedIn API works in the following video.

Estoy buscando a un desarrollador web especializado en PHP para Construmática, un proyecto en rápido crecimiento de Grupo Intercom, grupo empresarial de referencia en la Internet española y fundador, entre otros, de negocios tales como Infojobs, Softonic, e-Magister, Neurona, etc.

Construmática es el portal de referencia para el sector de la arquitectura, ingeniería y construcción en España. Se trata de un agregador de contenidos (mashup), un buscador vertical y una comunidad profesional destinada a los técnicos del sector de la construcción (arquitectos, ingenieros, etc.) en España. Construmática tiene más de 400.000 visitas y 2 millones de páginas vistas mensuales.

Bajo la supervisión del Director General y en colaboración con otro programador, las funciones que realizará serán:
- Planificación y coordinación técnica
- Programación de nuevas funcionalidades y secciones
- Actualización y optimización de funcionalidades y secciones existentes

Se ofrece un entorno de trabajo muy bueno, flexibilidad horaria, ambiente informal, integración en un equipo multidisciplinar, joven y dinámico, y con un nivel muy alto desde el punto de vista técnico y de negocio. También grandes posibilidades de desarrollo profesional (programa de formación, creación y gestión de equipos, stock options, etc.)

Los requisitos son:
- Experiencia mínima de 2 años
- Conocimientos muy avanzados en programación con PHP+MySQL
- Nivel avanzado en programación Javascript
- Profesional dinámico, buen comunicador y espíritu de equipo
- Sentido de la responsabilidad, metódico y capacidad de trabajo

Por otro lado también se valorará:
- Experiencia en proyectos web y/o start-ups
- Conocimientos de SEO, accesibilidad, usabilidad y estandarización
- Conocimientos de JAVA
- Buen nivel de inglés

El tipo de contrato a priori es indefinido y la jornada será fulltime (8 horas al día). Si estáis interesados no dudéis en contactar conmigo: contactar

The first edition of iWeekend has just been celebrated this past weekend in Barcelona. I couldn’t attend because I’m in Andalusia for some days (I’m sorry Luv). iWeekend is like StartupWeekend, an event where the goal is create a startup in one weekend (54 hours). When I’m read the Luv’s notes about the iWeekend, I think he doesn’t feel very happy with the results. Anyways, I’m glad and admittedly very proud of Luv because he’s got to do it (we must consider the difficulties of organizering events like this). I think iWeekend is not a bad idea, but I need to admit that it’s not possible to create something good and complex in only three days.

The result of this last (and first) edition has been Adlemons. I haven’t read very much about it, but reading the name I can deduce it’s something related to advertising. I’ve read an interview in Loogic that they’re going to launch Adlemons the next 11th December. Congratulations Luv.

Docstoc ha publicado un informe donde muestran los reportes de tráfico de los proyectos presentados en TechCrunch40 recogidos de Alexa y Compete. El evento fue celebrado el pasado mes de Septiembre en The Palace Hotel, en San Francisco. Podemos ver como la influencia del evento ha influido notablemente en el tráfico. Mint, el flamante ganador del premio de 50 mil dólares, llegó a superar las 200 mil visitas. Los proyectos que más incremento absoulto experimentaron fueron Wixi, Flock, Docstoc y el propio Mint. La cuestión es: ¿Es notable el incremento de presentaciones de proyectos en eventos hispanos?

Fuente | TechCrunch

Hoy hemos lanzado en Construmática un nuevo buscador interno basado en Google Custom Search Business Edition, la edición para empresas de Google Custom Search. Esto nos permite entre otras cosas obtener los resultados de una determinada consulta de búsqueda en formato XML, teniendo la posibilidad de integrar los resultados cómodamente.

Google Custom Search Business Edition ofrece una inmensa cantidad de parámetros para refinar y concretar la búsqueda por parte del usuario. Puedes probarlo en Construmática realizando una búsqueda dentro del site: Acero.

Más información | Construmática