Jan Sedivy: Just some comments

eClub strikes again

2012-02-25T12:45:00.000+01:00

See the opening eClub 2012 presentation. It shows the eClub goals, program of presentations, explains the competition and awards.

I have opened next round of the eClub on Wednesday. The presentation explains the eClub basic: the main goals and how can students benefit from joining us. I have introduces all our great speakers. I also have looked a the rules for entering the competition. They are still very simple, therefore it is easy to enter the competition. You can not loose anything, you can only win. Presentation lists the scholarships as a form of seed money. Every winner will also benefit from a mentor. The number of mentors who cooperate with us constantly grows.

I was very happy to find that almost all students joining the first presentation were new to the eClub. They had many good questions at the end. Check the eClub program page, I will soon publish the video recording. Vojta Meta TV is still working on it. We have also welcomed Petr Koci from lupa.cz. Read his interesting article describing our first meeting.

The best at the end. Next Wednesday presents Karel Janecek, who is going to tell us about the importance of high education and research for creating a successful startup.
This presentation is opening a new page in the eClub history. We will be streaming to many sites at universities across our country. I am very happy the community of students interested in startups grows.

See you next Wednesday, Feb 29 at 18:00 we will meet in HUB. Prepare good questions. The presentation will be followed by networking. Do not forget, the refreshment will be served …

eClub starts this Wednesday

2012-02-19T19:10:00.001+01:00

eClub schedule

eClub starts with the opening presentation on Wednesday 22.2.2012. Let’s hope this magic date will be sign of a successful series. In the first presentation I would like to inform all our fans about what we are offering in the coming series.
For eClub newbies: the main mission is to bring together students enthusiastic about new technologies, innovation and entrepreneurship. We want to help students who want to change their dreams to reality, to a product, help others, be successful and earn money.

Presentations at two different places.

Join us! We have great speakers in the coming series. You will learn about the success and the misstates too. Each session is followed by networking, come and meet people with the same interest! See the schedule we will meet at two places: HUB and the traditional CVUT FEL location. We are inviting students and friends from other Czech universities for three presentations from HUB Prague. These presentations will be streamed. We have to do lot of preparations. We had to work with local champions and locate suitable rooms, prepare advertising, publish on blogs and in media etc. We have tested the streaming on Tuesday to make sure all is in place. Our friends from streamhosting.cz are helping us with setting up the video. We have tried to stream the video in HD quality and all the data lines sustained the bandwidth. Keep the finger crossed to not get surprised during the transmission. We want to deliver a top experience.

As in the last series we also will record all sessions. The HUB recordings will show on the web with a one week delay. We will try to put the CVUT presentations on web as soon as we can. The HUB presentations will be delayed by one week, because we want to get all students at universities together to discuss with the speaker and network after the show. We want to make very lively idea exchange.

Join the competition!

Similarly as in the previous series we will have a competition for the best startup idea. The rules for joining the competition are quite simple. The first rule is: at least one student of a Czech university in a team. Certainly the PhD. students are mostly welcomed too. If you were successful in other startup competition do not enter, let the chance opened for starting teams. The winning teams will get a scholarship for three months during summer to work on their projects. We will fund maximum two students in a team and the award will be between 15-5K/month. We will also try to get you a mentor and this is even bigger value. We constantly work with our industrial partners to get more donations to CVUT Medialab Foundation. May be you will be surprised as in the last series. We got very lucky, in the last minute Czech ICT Alliance helped us funding seven teams. They are currently working on their projects. To join the competition we ask you to register your project. Do not hesitate, even if your project is not ready and polished. eClub is here to help you to bring up your project. We are also looking forward to see teams from other than Prague universities in our competition. If you are interested let me know. I will answer all questions and will help with the organization.

Learn in eClub.

Learn from our sessions, we will show case studies of different startups to give you motivation for your own projects. Hear from successful entrepreneurs what to do in the initial phases of the startup. See the links on our eClub pages with some helpful links. We would like to help you to deliver best performance in front of our international jury. All teams will have a chance for a dry run of their presentation to test how it feels and how to put together a catchy presentation. Register, come and deliver the presentation, you will get a very helpful feedback, viewers will ask you questions and this will help you clarify your idea. The teams will also be able to get feedback from their peers to improve the pitch.

Work with us!

I am looking forward to see you next Wednesday. I will try to explain the details, present the speakers and comment how the program was put together and what is the focus. Prepare your questions, because I am also looking forward for questions and suggestions. Come to join us and take your friends with you.

eClubs starts in two weeks

2012-02-09T10:14:00.001+01:00

eClub starts with a new series of presentations and the Best Startup Project competition. We have a great news. Students at universities in Brno, Ostrava, Olomouc, Hradec Kralove and Zlin are joining us.

I have managed to get together a list of very attractive speakers for this eClub round, see below. As usual we will be meeting on Wednesdays. The big news is: three presentations (blue boxes) will take place in the homely HUB, Prague environment, the rest as usual at CVUT. I believe, we will attract larger crowd of students and their friends. On top of that I am very happy to announce we will stream the three selected presentations to universities in Brno, Ostrava, Olomouc, Hradec Kralove and Zlin. We will list the Universities and the locations on the eClub pages very soon. I am sure, all the new locations and students will make the competition for the best startup plan even more challenging and I am looking forward to share the presentations and new ideas with more enthusiastic people. Spread the news and join us. please.

22.2. Jan Sedivy Introduction, What is eClub, what will you learn, what can you get, how are we going to be organized in this semester.

29.2. Karel Janecek RSJ algoritmic trading owner. The presentation will show the importance of high education and research for creating a successful startup. This will be demonstrated on a phenomenal success of the RSJ algorithmic trading.

7.3. Jan Sova Workswell.cz CVUT Media Lab helped starting this company. Jan is going to tell us how is his company organized and you will also learn what are the basic legal requirements.

14.3. Jakub Nesetril apiary.io After he has been working in the web industry for 15 years as a developer, team leader, director and product manager, he lives his dream of 90-hour work-weeks as a founder of a web startup, now. Come to learn how to do it too.

21.3. Jan Zdarsa google.com. will visit us and show all the magics of AdWords. How to promote your application, attract more users, boost your sales ...

28.3. Jan Rezab Social Bakers owner. This presentation will describe the initial startup steps. Good idea, creating a team, developing the first application and getting funding. The Social Baker received 2.5 mil USD and is rapidly growing.

4.4. First Demo Day this is the dry run of all new teams, with new projects

11.4. Daniel Franz unisona.com. Some soft skills for you. Dan will tell us how to create well working team, how to successfully communicate in the team and customers too.

18.4. Olda Neuberger libimseti.cz How to build a 30 people company, miss the selling sweet point and than shrink it back to 10. Case study.

25.4. Patrick Zandl the editor in chief of Lupa.cz is following the the Czech Internet startup and the whole community from the early beginnings and will show the up and downs of the most important players. He will also present his future visions.

2.5. Marek Johanes How to create a new startup and how to grow it, what are the employees benefits, what are the employees options, how to distribute them, how much is your company worth.

9.5. Demo day presentations of the teams competing for the awards

16.5. Announcing winners

Create a new mobile app – first steps

2012-02-05T15:03:00.001+01:00

This blog is listing and explaining the first steps for inventing and verifying a new mobile application. It shows the systematic steps you need to take before the coding should start.

There are hundreds of thousands of applications on iTunes or Android markets these days and it becomes more and more difficult to come up with a new idea. On the other hand there are many situations where simple and focused applications can help. Smaller communities of users may need very specialized or customized applications because of their job, hobby, disability etc. These are niche applications but world-wide they may address an interesting number of customers.

The motivation to write new apps may have different inspirations. Many developers are writing the applications for themselves. This is a fortunate situation since the developer understands very well the needs. Sometimes a developer is asked to write an app for his friends. This is also good, friends will be able to explain their needs and they will help with testing. Writing an application for a customer is a little bit more adventures. Customers sometimes do not know how to formulate the problem. Communication may be demanding. Agile software development is the answer, but requires cooperative customers. You may also spark an innovative idea. Everyday you face many situations and problems, which are difficult to solve or overcome. Make a note, may be a mobile app can solve them.

First, check the existing applications. It is very likely someone has already written an app you need. Finding and reviewing the apps is a tedious process. It is difficult to understand the functionality. They don’t come with a description, because they mostly rely on intuitive interfaces. To understand you would need to test them and this has its shortcomings. In many cases the apps are social or use data sharing. You must register and you need to find some friends who will cooperate, share the data. All this takes lot of time but it will help you to differentiate or enhance your new idea. Don't skip this step but do not spend too much time on it either. Remember your idea doesn’t need to be completely new, but it must bring at least some new features to be competitive.

If you don't find any existing app you may have hit a new idea. Start with describing it in the simplest terms. Select the application name and try to describe it using this template:

(project name) is developing (this offering) to help (an audience) solving (a problem).

Keep all very simple don’t start inventing new features. Work on a brief application description. Once the simple sentence is ready, explain your idea to your friends. Use web, twitter, blogs etc to get feedback. Explaining and getting feedback is the best way to understand the customer’s needs. Don't forget asking your friends for how much they would buy your product. You also may decide to provide the application for free for non-profit or humanitarian purposes. In any case you have to be sure someone will use it. Don’t be secretive. Many people have the same idea in the same time. Your task at this point is to make the problem formulation as simple as possible, understanding the essentials. You may need to modify the idea and repeat the process. What is the result? Either you will discover no one needs your app or you have a clear case.

Now, you know who are your customers, what they need and how much they would pay. The full featured application may have a lot of branches, it can be quite complex. We need to focus on basic features. Identify the essential action and its outcome. Sketch an app flow diagram describing a sequence of actions the user needs to go through to get the outcome. To each action draw by hand a graphical elements. i.e. screens, buttons, pictures, icons, menus etc. Don't forget the errors pop ups, dialog boxes etc. The diagram will show the first scenario of your application.

Once the logistics is clear, it is the best time to try it on real users. Create the necessary buttons, text fields, etc. from the app flow diagram. Use some wire-frame tools, that let you create a clickable static screens. For example Keynotopia provides templates in Powerpoint for different apps. Export the screens in a clickable pdf and with a proper pdf reader you can simulate the whole app on a mobile device. HTML is also easy for creating static pages. Get back to your friends let them face your clickable mock up and observe how they accomplish the first simplest task. Get prepared, the interaction with the testers has two basic steps:

Quickly explain the task.
Observe and note the problems.

Do the same with three to four people. It should be enough to discover the biggest design problems. Fix the UI problems and do the same one more time. Most of the developers are skipping this stage. Don’t do it. This exercise will save you lot of time while coding. You may repeat this stage several times but you will converge to a sensible solution. If you are patient and you successfully finish all the steps you are ready to start coding. As a reward you will produce much cleaner code.

I have reviewed very simple, known steps for inventing and testing usefulness of a new app. They may not apply for all apps, but they are showing how to systematically think about apps development. One more comment: this steps don't need programming, but soft and organizational skills, therefore people with expertise in the targeted field will typically produce much better results then programmers.

The main reason why I have put this blog together is the course I’ll be teaching in the next semester. Students will learn the basic programming skills in Java. I believe, students need motivation, they need to understand what is the purpose of the course. Main programming language for Android is Java and I hope, combining development of simple apps and learning Java will be attractive enough for most of them. I am really looking forward how this would work. Stay tuned I will be reporting how we are doing ...

Galaxy projects, applications - report

2012-01-22T23:22:00.001+01:00

Thanks to the Samsung Galaxy 10.1 tablets donation I was able to start several projects with our students at CTU FEE. I would like to review our applications, give the status report and explain further plans in this blog.

I used the tablets to support the students in two different directions: degree thesis projects and education.

Theses
The 3C is a home for 20 PhD, master and bachelor students. They all work on various aspects of cloud computing and SaaS application design with the emphasis on the mobile applications. The work is organized as described in the "How to organize web project". Here are the major mobile applications:

Weather forecast widget project implements Android widget displaying the weather forecast using the ALADIN model for the Czech Republic. It installs on Galaxy tablets and Android phones too. The presentation layer development still continues. The application is fully functional available through the Android market and gaining popularity.

Browser Guru is an application helping the user to select the best browser for current type of connectivity. For example for the 2G, 3G/4G connectivity the Opera browser is faster than the default browser. On the other hand when on Wi-Fi the default browser provides higher comfort. Browser Guru is also compatible with the voice search (Most browsers are not). It can be used for tablets as well as for phones. Application is fully functional and available through the Android market. It has almost 24 000 downloads up today.

Menzy CVUT application has been designed for students of Czech universities. Currently it lists the CTU students canteens everyday menus. It enables students to quickly find the menu of choice and rate the foods. The application has more than 700 downloads and more than 500 active users. Application itself is built as a platform allowing to import other canteens menus. Get in touch with us, if interested. Application is fully functional available through the Android Market.

Cloudcardz is an application aiming at business cards exchange. While networking, at conferences or events we exchange business cards. They are then piling on our desks and we do not remember what was the occasion, whom we met and and how to quickly convert them to a computer. This application allows quick exchange of business card data using NFC or QR code. The app contains only pointers to personal data. Change of a phone number or other data is automatically updated. Some more development is required. The pilot will be available soon.

We started developing a simple helpdesk application more or less as an educational demo. It allows sending a request ticket to an operator from a mobile device including photo and the location information. After sending the request to the helpdesk, the application creates a ticket, which is handled by an operator. The conversation continues between the operator and the user till the ticket is resolved. We continue working on it and it will be finished in May 2012. It is more interesting, that we have derived other two apps from the original code.

The helpdesk functionality will serve to businesses getting orders through a job search portal. The business to customer interaction is very similar to helpdesk. Typically, craftsman communicate with customers after working hours when they get to the office. This application will enable them to give offers to customers by smartphone. This app is also scheduled to be piloted with customers in the May framework.

The next app derived from helpdesk code was competing in this year eClub. It is focusing on supporting sales. The scenario: shoppers in the store download an app by scanning QR code. After garment selection the shopper takes a photo and saves it on a store portal. Information about the picture will be send to customer's friends to comment. This application is in the development and the first working pilot version is planned for end of May.

czSMS is an application enabling sending free SMS messages using the free Internet SMS gateways. The app is developed for multiple mobile platforms using the Phonegap platform. It is in the early development stage. All the technological and supporting issues has been solved and the design is beginning with the UI and wireframe design. The pilot application will be available end of May 2012.

Education
Total of 60 students took the Internet Application Development course. The goal of the course was to teach students to develop web Android applications. Students learned how to use the standard Eclipse IDE and the Google plugins for Android and App Engine. They were organized in teams of four persons. Each team came with their own app proposal. All together the class was working on fourteen applications. Teams had to maintain a web page for the project and track the development. I have organized two demo classes where students were presenting their progress to get class comments and suggestions. The semester was concluded with working pilot applications.

Three months are too short to create full featured app, nevertheless I expect, that some of the students will further working to finish their projects.

Summary
What are the benefits of the development? Three applications already on the Android market and several other applications are scheduled for May. The current activity and the mobile applications development created awareness and high visibility at our university and in media too. I am hoping that the development experience will attract more students to pursue their projects. Most of the university staff is aware of the development too and became interested. Some of the department want to join us. Currently we are designing new course for students in the first year of study.

There are also things we need to improve. The biggest weakness is the graphical quality. Great graphics and usability are very important for the customer perception. We are actively looking for a partner who will help us. We are ready to support these groups with tablets to enable their creative powers and motivate them to cooperate.

It is quite difficult to develop a new application. Many different skills are required and it will still take us some time to develop really successful with hundred thousands of downloads and clear benefit for users. The weather widget is probably the most advanced, also the Menzy and Browser Guru apps are finding users. There are many other applications in the development with the targeted date end of May. Stay in touch and help us improve.

Galaxy projects, applications part II

2012-01-14T13:27:00.000+01:00

Thanks to Samsung we have started with our students working on the latest Samsung Galaxy tablets. Currently we are evaluating the first batch of VIA projects. The experiment number II starts now. The first year university students of Open Informatics program will receive the tablets and the task is the same. Be inventive, hardworking and have fun. Develop an interesting Galaxy tablet application.

How are we going to be organized? This time the projects will be part of the Java course. The students learned the basic Java programming in the winter semester and they continue in the advanced Java course. One of the course requirements is to deliver a Java project and we will create it on Samsung Galaxy tablets.

Why tablets, why Android? Many consider the tablets the new very fast growing segment. Currently there are 4.3 billion mobile devices in the world and this is more than TV, fixed lines or PCs. Tablets are introducing new user interface unleashing new application design and capabilities. The UI is easy for everybody much more natural. This all is opening new possibilities. The new tablets are a great chance to work with the latest technology. On the other hand, keep in mind, that the tablets are not laptop replacements they focus on everyday users, not programmers. We still have to discover how to take full advantage of them, how to address the largest number of users.

Is the Android good platform to learn Java programing? First, Java is the primary programming language for Android apps. There are lot of application examples in the open source. The programming environment IDE plug-ins are greatly simplifying the development. Google is providing better and better support to developers. All these are reasons to motivate students to learn new skills. It is also a great opportunity to get creative and invent new applications and introduce new ideas.

I believe, that programming is a combination of an art and discipline. It requires quite some time to learn a language. Mostly it is a self-learning process. The learning curve is steep once you have a good motivation and this is where I am stepping in. Let's enjoy creating something new on the latest technology and have fun too.

What is the timeline? I am happy I can start working with students early in their university education. There are many interesting disciplines where they would need programming. My mission is to show students the opportunities for inventing and turning their ideas to real products. I hope, some of the students will join us during summer working with us or completing their own projects. Every summer we offer the best students an university internship. Others with strong idea and motivation can join the eClub, learn the art of creating startup and compete for winning seed money. For a freshman in the first year it seems to be terribly long to start working on a baccalaureate thesis, but it is round the corner. Working on problem oriented projects early will help them learning all the necessary skills to write great thesis.

I’d like to organize our work similarly as the VIA course. We will run all as projects see the previous blog. We will keep all in English. Why? We need to cooperate with our colleagues. The world is huge, but Internet connects us. Many students around the world are like you and we need to communicate with them. We keep all on the open Internet, to let other comment. This is a good source of advice. Openness introduces good attitude and cooperation. I will encourage all students helping each other and use all possible resources. I will leave space for all students to come with their own ideas not only for the projects. Think what it is you want to create. How are you going to change the world? Think big! Internet is democratic.

I am looking forward to see the students creating new exciting stuff! Any questions? Send me an email and ask. Join us!

How to organize a web project

2012-01-07T14:53:00.000+01:00

This blog shows how to organize an Internet project. What needs to be in place before you start coding. The essence is simple. Come up with a good idea, set the team with strong commitment, formulate the minimal functionality, create an Internet site, communicate, use simple work flow management and start coding.

How big team do you need? You can start alone, but the best is to have one or two friends with a complementary expertise. The diversity of views is great and it yields innovation. Besides, it is also great to have someone for discussing the problems and making decisions. The team must be excited about the project and committed to make the things happened. Team allows you sharing the joy of the development. Discussing and arguing with the team is always very rewarding. Of course, there are also very successful “lonely rangers” on the Internet. They need to master the art of outsourcing to complete all project tasks.

It is very important to communicate and discuss your idea. Even if you have not written a single line of the code inform your future customers and friends. They will tell you what they like and what they want. Don't be afraid someone will steal your idea. There are many other people on Earth with the same idea, but the team with the best execution and strongest commitment will win. You also do not need to be the first. Sometimes the second mouse gets the cheese.

To inform your friends you need to be seen on the Internet. How to do it? Start with finding a descriptive name for a project. Check if the domain name is not taken yet, many sites provide this information. Select the domain carefully, once the page views start to grow it is too late for a change. Set your home page. Don't program the web from scratch. There are many different sites where you can create the homepage for free and in a matter of minutes. Go for the bigger players, they stay around longer. Use some of the stock templates to achieve an eye appealing look. To personalize your site create a project logo.

The key for success is a good idea. Your web must clearly communicate the idea, it must state what you are offering. The idea needs to be well formulated. Keep it simple! The resulting application or service will be offered to people like you and no one wants to study complicated stuff. Define your audience! What are you solving and who will use it? Your project description, explanation must be short and crystal clear. Check it by putting together a sentence like this:

(project name) is developing (this offering) to help (an audience) solving (a problem).

This sentence is the core message on your site. You can put on your page more detailed explanation or further thoughts, but an essay, mission statement or a vision shouldn't be too long, two, three paragraphs at maximum.

List the team members with photo. Each person should describe previous experience, successes, awards, interests etc. Inform about the project progress. To get customer feedback provide contact information. Do not show personal phone numbers or mail addresses. You don't want to be woken up at 3:00 AM by some Argentinean geek wrestling with an obvious problem.

Before you start coding you should have a plan for implementation of the project. Start with the description of the minimum functionality. Product, the result of the project, needs to be very, very simple. To development of even the simplest product will take quite some time and requires a lot of effort, you will be surprised. No matter if it is an one-man show project or several people will cooperate, you need to get organized. The purpose of organizing is to not loose focus, stay productive and see the progress. There are several project management tools available such as Pivotal tracker, Campfire etc. To maintain the project with such packages may be too much overhead for a starting team and a simple blog might serve at the beginning.

You have to learn regularly recording the progress and set the next development tasks. Report at least once a week. The progress records will help you learn how to more accurately estimate duration of the next tasks. You will learn better planning. From leading many projects I know, that planning small tasks is much better than larger milestones. Create tasks in duration of few hours. Sometimes the task turns out to be too big and needs to be broken to several smaller ones. No problem, record them to your work flow system and continue. If you work in a team set regular meetings to check the progress. The meetings don't need to last too long. 15-20 minutes are OK. Each team member should report the progress, inform about the problems and suggest further steps. Meetings and communication create good spirit in the team and push the project ahead.

Once you have all the above in place you are set to go ahead. Here starts the regular SW development process. Select technology, select revision control system, set the build system… Remember, only good discipline in running the project will bring good results.

I am working with university students teams and in all my activities I try to follow the described process. I am leaving on students to chose the portal and development technologies, but I am insisting on setting the reporting tools and generating the communication. The described rules are very simple but when followed they stimulate the team to develop organizational habits. Our students usually have great or good programming skills but very low awareness of how to run and organize projects and of course, no hands-on experience. From my industry experience the organizational stuff is equally important as the programmers quality. I also know, that the business processes mustn't suppress activity and enthusiasm. The managers need to discover a balance.

This simple system based on free Internet tools support sharing, creating traction, exciting other groups, and finding other followers. It is also allowing me to follow the teams progress and help them when required. Also reporting the activities of all teams on my pages is very simplified. I can provide links to all projects and all is for free, except we have to do it. Best of all, I hope, this operational habits are setting a good example for the future project development of my students. I try to keep all on the free Internet to let anybody to comment, help us or join our efforts. Of course, this is with the students consent. See the links at the main menu of this blog.

Let me know if you have comments or suggestions for improvement.

eClub winners

2011-12-19T23:27:00.001+01:00

The jury sent the votes, we put the results together and we have announced thewinners in the winter 2011 series of eClub. Join me in congratulating to all the winning teams.

The first price summer semesterscholarship of 15k CZK goes to the Avocado team. The second price goes toInstantStorm with the summer semester scholarship of 10k CZK. And the thirdprice is 5K CZK and goes to CloudCards team. All teams will receive a mentor tohelp them in starting the entrepreneurial career. The CVUT MediaLab will provide all scholarships.

Big thank you goes also to all the jury members. Theyhave done great work in evaluating all the teams. And I am concluding with inviting you for the next eClub, which will start in the second half o February.Watch this blog and eClub pages and join us.

Final presentations - eClub

2011-12-14T09:19:00.001+01:00

eClub is finishing. We met for the final round of presentations on Monday 12.12. Twelve teams were presenting their projets for startups and competing for prices. We will announce the winners next Monday 19.12.

The crowd was huge. At least sixty people gathered for the finals. The atmosphere was great. We started with introducing jury. Next we drew the order of presentations. We also had to add two last minute teams to the competition. This time 12 teams were competing and it is four more than last time. Also, based on the first reaction of jury, the quality of presentations was higher. We watched several short YT movies. The graphical appearance of presentations was great, we have seen several very interesting and eye catching shows. Also the content was according to the recommended format: team members’ introduction, the problem statement and suggested solution. All of them paid close attention to monetization, marketing, addressable market etc. It is clear that all participants have learned how to present. All presentations with short annotations are on eClub pages. Thanks to the Meta TV, who worked with us the whole semester, we will soon have on our pages the presentation videos. They will hlep to the jury members who did not make it to the final presentation. It is also for our overseas members.

The number of new emerging competitions is growing world wide as well as in our country. Some of the teams had already tried their luck elsewhere. We probably should allow competing only teams with no award from other competitions. Next time we also need to watch closely the clock some of the presentations were too long and the whole meeting took almost three hours. At 9:30 the university concierge kicked us out reminding us on the closing hour (9:00).

The best news: CityAdventures team competing in the last eClub is close to launch their product. The EasyWall team has pivoted and it is now running Meta TV company. Some other students, who were competing last time are part of new startups. Great, and I hope we will see more and more startups growing from the university environment. Watch us next year, currently we are preparing the program.

Overall, the final presentations were big success: lot of people, good quality of presentations, more projects, better focus. Come next Monday we will announce the winners. Misko Hevery from Google Mountain View will follow with a presentation about the Trends in IT. I am looking forward to see you on Monday!

Barcamp Prague

2011-12-11T23:42:00.001+01:00

Yesterday I joined the Barcamp Prague. Over hundred developers from the whole country got together to discuss development of mobile applications. People were giving short presentations along with discussions in the nearby rooms.

The series started with NFC and the Google wallet discussion, very interesting and very important for the contact-less payments. The typical problems in mobile UI development were discussed and demonstrated in several presentations. One of the focus groups discussed the difference between native and web based mobile applications. Developers presented different views with a lot of details about the progress of browsers capabilities on iOS and Android. Phonegap framework seems to be the best choice for developing a multiplatform applications. Many discussions focused on HTML 5 details. We have also seen some sort of promotional presentations such as Toast masters presentation. I also liked an overview of how to use mobile phones for advertising with examples of SMS and augmented reality usage. There were many more interesting applications, this is just a sample of what caught my attention.

During the day I have met lot of interesting people including some of my students. I gave a short overview of the VIA classes and the eClub. It definitely was worth of the time and I will try to join next time again.

Misko Hevery, Google, Trends in IT

2011-12-09T18:49:00.001+01:00

Misko Hevery, top Google developer is coming to talk about future trends in IT industry. We will meet at the CVUT, Karlovo namesti 13, KN:E-301 on Monday, December 19, at 18:00.

Misko is leading the AngularJS project. It started as a one person 20% project and it turned to a Google official project today. The project is growing also thanks to other two fellow citizens Vojta and Igor from Slovakia. All of them are very passionate about their project, just look at what is the AngularJS mantra: "What HTML would have been had it been designed for web apps". See the tutorial and examples. Misko already gave two AngularJS presentations while he was visiting us in March. In this Christmas time he will share with us his visions of the future trends in IT.

Before the presentation we will award the winners of this year eClub competition. If you are interested in seing the competing teams join us on Monday December 12, at the same address.

Samsung Galaxy Projects Review - class 10

2011-12-07T23:18:00.001+01:00

VIA is an Internet applications development course introducing to mobile web applications. VIA class number ten. We are slowly but surly approaching the end of this semester.

This time we had a class about security. This is one of the most important topics for any web apps developers. Unfortunately there is no special course on security in the curriculum and we could not afford to spend more then one class on it, too bad. Tomas Charvat prepared very condensed class reviewing the security. He has approached the first part from the point of view of a company CIO. Their main concern is the disaster recovery strategy and security. What is the security role in a company? What are the principal security guidelines and processes? The company CIO needs to answer these questions precisely and we have learned the basic approaches. Then Tomas listed the main security standards and explained briefly the history. Next we have looked at how to conduct security audit, penetration test and vulnerability scan and what are the differences.

The last part of the presentation introduced the most common types of attacks. Examples of DOS, SQL injection and cross scripting vulnerabilities were explained along with graphs of security incidents. Overall this was a great class covering the most important security aspects.

In the next class we are going to look at how to select the right hosting site based on the type of application, which will be pitched by Tomas Vondra. After that we will follow with the project presentation.

It is sad, but I have to report two of the fourteen teams broke. The teams stopped working on the projects. On the other hand there are signs that some of the teams will create nice working demos.

Final presentations in the eClub

2011-12-03T18:40:00.001+01:00

The winter 2011 series of eClub talks is slowly ending. On Monday 12.12. we will meet for the final presentations of students projects competing for the best business proposal. The jury headed again by Ondrej Bartos (Credo Ventures). will select the best projects. The jury members are the entrepreneurs, investors and technologists. The main sponsor is the CTU Media Lab Foundation and it will grant the students scholarships.

The eClub and Media Lab Foundation goal is to provide students with seed money to start working on a projects and commercialize them. The general rules are quite simple. eClub is planning to award the first three teams with a scholarship for the academic summer semester 2011/12. To start the business they will receive a monthly scholarship of between 5-15 thousands Kc. The eClub competition is designed for university teams and only students will be supported. We can afford to support maximum two students in each winning team. In addition to the scholarship eClub will try to get a mentor for winning teams. Mentors will help the teams to work on the proposed project, will help keeping focus and concentrate on the key aspects of the business. The second role of the mentor will be to monitor the progress of developing the idea. eClub will work with mentors and evaluate the progress. If the awarded team will stop or suspend the work on the project the schoolarship will be suspended.

For competing teams it is very important to understand the jury rules. They will evaluate the proposed projects based on the 5 P of an investment rules. For investors is very important the quality of a problem. They are looking for big scalable problems. They want to understand the size of potential market and the impact of the proposed idea. Very important is the team, the people and their passion for business, their experience and the commitment to turn the idea a prosperous business. Last but not least is the payment. The teams need to explain soundly how are they going to make money. After all this is the main idea of any business. The presentation needs to prove the basic idea and introduce the basic steps to make things happened.

I am looking forward to see all the teams and their presentations. eClub and Media Lab Foundation we are ready to do our best to help turning students ideas to success.

Samsung Galaxy Projects Review - class 9

2011-11-29T17:29:00.001+01:00

VIA is an Internet applications development course introducing to mobile web applications. This is the VIA class number nine report.

This time we had one to one discussions. We have reviewed all fourteen projects. The overall findings are very positive. The teams are working and making progress. But we have found also some problems, which can be improved.

Some of the team members are contributing more and some of them less in all teams. There is always one person contributing a major part of the code. These are the leaders, they need to take the initiative and delegate certain tasks to the less active team members. This way everybody will contribute and more work will be delivered. Everybody in the team needs to contribute.

Many students were complaining about getting stacked on some weird problem. This is typical situation in programming and I have tried to persuade the teams to immediately report the problem. There are many PhD students and other teams who may have faced a similar problem and can help immediately. The problematic code as well as good and polished parts of the code need to be shared. This is the main reason why we have started our forum. We still have to learn how to work in a larger team and share the experience. The excuse for not asking a question is most frequently: "I do not want to be considered a fool asking a stupid question".

I need some help or advice how to unleash the activity and create an atmosphere of collective knowledge sharing. We need to stop spending time finding a solution for non-documented or ill behaving code. Any advice?

Next we have realized that some of the teams are really working hard producing a lot of code, but without dropping a line of progress or documentation. This is also a typical geek behavior, which is sometimes great. Some people really work hard and produce enormous piece of code, but very frequently the code needs to be later rewritten. I have requested to start the blogs as a space for recording the work items, as a space for planning the next steps, to not lose the focus. Only some of the teams are doing a good job. Reporting and planning is a key activity in many companies. They use many different special programs for tracking the development. We need to learn the art of planning and reporting.

Only few of the teams are using github or other RCS system for archiving code. Some of the teams use zip files – no, no, no. This leads to mess, it is difficult to find the latest code, this leads to lot of mistakes and misunderstanding in the group of programmers. We have to learn to use the proven practices and organize the work properly.

Some of the teams have tendency to add more and more features to their applications. This is also one of the bad habits of the novice developers. The opposite, constant search for the simplest solution is the right direction. It takes sometimes very long time to distill the simplest UI or the simplest code, but in many cases customers appreciate simplicity.

Overall, I think, we are doing great job and I am looking forward to see the first apps running. Keep up the good work. See the projects in detail.

New position in our department

2011-11-28T10:24:00.001+01:00

Czech Technical University, Faculty of Electrical Engineering, department of Cybernetics is looking for an advanced web applications developer.

We are planning to develop new Internet presence for several departments and many research and industrial projects. This involves a design of a large CMS with high level of interactivity and presence at social networks. We are aiming also at mobile and tablets. We are offering a full time or part time job for an experienced, creative and hardworking web java and CMS programmer. Any experience in creating visual content including text layout and formatting and the graphical interface development will be appreciated. This is a great opportunity to work in an innovative academic environment with high level of independence and encouraging experiments. The job is good match for recent graduates and can be combined with some of our MSc or PhD courses. If interested send an email to libuska@ci.felk.cvut.cz.

Media Lab supports education, research and startups.

2011-11-23T17:27:00.001+01:00

The Czech Technical University Media Lab Foundation supports students from Czech technical universities in three directions: scholarship to support study at foreign universities, advanced research projects and recently also seed money for startup. Media Lab is actively raising money from Czech industrial partners.

Once a year Media Lab organizes workshop to present the results of the supported projects to public. We have again met all the supported students last Thursday. We saw fprojects from various fields. Two teams were working in the local Automaker Skoda on a new methods for 3D presentation. The project researched new methods for virtual presentation of the cockpit equipment and real time 3D virtual presentation. Both team worked in Mlada Boleslav in Skoda research headquarters. Foundation also supported Tomáš Siege student of the Faculty of Electrical Engineering to take part in Berkeley summer course in mining and modeling of neuroscience data. He has presented his follow up research of equipment helping the Parkinson’s disease patients. This year for the first time the Foundation also supported a startup oriented stay in PlugAndPlay Tech Center in California. Peter Somlo was the first one enjoying the entrepreneurial atmosphere in Silicon Valley. In his presentation he has explained what he learned from the courses and how he has joined one of the startups during his stay. The easyWall team was the second who were incubated to PlugAndPlay during this summer. They are the winners of the last series of the eClub. They won with the easyWall project but after discussion with VCs in Valley they have dropped it and currently they are starting a new project in the field of TV for education Meta. During the workshop we have also voted for the best project. The winners were Marek Votroubek and Monika Svedirohova. They have presented a mobile robot for rough terrain. They brought the robot with them for the presentation and explained the very interesting and innovative design. Great!

Samsung Galaxy Apps Development - class 8

2011-11-16T16:30:00.001+01:00

VIA is an Internet applications development course introducing to mobile web applications. VIA class number eight is here.

This was the fourth presentation about the Internet apps design. Filip has concluded a series of four preceding presentations of the web application design by putting it all together. The presentation started with repeating the server client paradigm, then he has listed various HTTP based server APIs. Filip is a strong believer of REST therefore he has spend quite some time explaining its advantages and simplicity. REST API is also the selected API style for our app skeleton, which is published on github. The validation, serialization and de-serialization and other processing are common in all web designs. Many different frameworks are helping designers implementing and unifying these routine pieces of code. We have chosen SPRING one of the most popular frameworks for Java. The SPRING configuration for an Eclipse web project is very simple and it saves a lot of coding. Filip has used the content negotiation, URI templates, message convertors HTTP method conversion and validators. The presentation ended with the discussion and demo code of the networking from the Android SDK. We have not managed to get to the C2DM communication during the class, read it in the presentation. Many code examples. including a simple Android app sending and reading text to and from GAE are available for cloning from github. Our sample code is not using the original Google RPC API, we are betting on a modern Java REST based code. Thanks to SPRING it is also very simple and high quality code. We believe that our code is combining high efficiency and simplicity. Enjoy it and let us know if you find any problems or suggest what needs to be improved.

See the presentations How to write the Android native apps skeleton (FK) Google app engine, how to write the server part (FK) Mobile Apps Development Bootstrap #3 (TB) Mobile Apps Development Bootstrap #4 (FK)

Next Thursday I am getting ready with Filip to talk to all teams in one to one meetings. We would like review the stage of the applications development. I want to understand how the teams selected the minimal feature set. I'd like to see how far they are with the implementation. We will check the blogs and the weekly reporting. We also will be ready to help solving possible problems. I hope, we will see some early stage applications already.

New projects - eClub

2011-11-06T16:36:00.000+01:00

Entrepreneurs Club is bringing together students enthusiastic about new technologies, innovation, cooperation and startups. eClub introduces the best entrepreneurs, marketers, technologists and vcs motivating and inspiring students to start their own projects and businesses.

We had the first round of presentations in the eClub, check the videos. We have 8 teams presenting their projects, similarly as last time. The proposed projects are all Internet applications, some of them are addressing the mobile market. Here is short introduction of the projects:

Helpdesk team is proposing a mobile/web application. The client allows users to take a picture, save the GPS location and add a comment or question. The collected information is send to an operator. User gets the reply to mobile - simple easy to understand.
CloudCardz team wants to make the business cards exchange easier by scanning the QR code with mobile phone. Simplification and exchange speedup of a personal information using cell phone is a great idea.
WebDop has the ambition to help users to follow their friends easily on all social sites they may use – not simple but very useful.
An early version of SetYourSchedule is already used by some business and the author wants to make it more general and offer it globally.
Favorite connections is a public transport app. It has already strong competition but the team is betting on new features and additional know-how in their design.
I like the idea of the Boring-o-meter. It is a simple moving hand standing in front of the audience. The hand shows the crowd happiness collected through cell phones. If we use it in the next eClub session we definitely will call it happiness meter, there is nothing boring in the eClub…
ConTutor team wants to help all students of foreign languages. The app helps finding a tutor, give him a rating. It also handles payments. Get a friend for foreign language conversations – nice idea, very helpful.
The last project is focusing on 3D business people trying to find easier and cheaper ways using 3D-SaaS apps. Very demanding but it also may be very rewarding.

All teams tried their best to introduce new ideas. They have another few weeks to improve ideas before the final presentation. The jury will vote for the best teams and the Media Lab Foundation will award the best teams with a scholarship to help them to turn their applications to real offerings.

We already had several interesting speakers in the eClub this year. We met successful entrepreneurs from Silicon Valley Hubert Palan. Vitek Valka has explained how he has developed one of the best stores with photos PixMax. Jan Matejka gave us introduction to soft skills. Tereza, Vojta and Pier gave us some insight to Silicon Valley incubators. We continue next Monday with Ondrej Bartos presentation. Join us!

Samsung Galaxy Apps Development - class 7

2011-11-04T19:50:00.002+01:00

VIA is an Internet applications development course focusing on design of mobile web applications for students. VIA class number seven took place last Thursday. Half of the semester is behind!

Presentation number seven was about databases. Tomas Barina prepared an introduction of the database technology for web servers. He has reviewed the SQL basics and explained some of the specifics of the NoSQL database technology. Mainly he has focused on the Google App Engine data services: datastore, memcache and blobstore. New datastore with five 9s is the recommended choice. Then he continued with some APIs recommendations, there are two java choices JDO and JPA for GAE. Large part of the session was devoted to a sample code. Tomas has shown how to set the database, write the basic CRUD operations and how to test the code using a REST client and datastore/viewer. Samples of the memcache usage were also explained with some comments about efficiency. The whole presentation is giving complete advice on how to configure and use persistence in GAE.

See the presentations How to write the Android native apps skeleton (FK) Google app engine, how to write the server part (FK) Mobile Apps Development Bootstrap #3 (TB)

The next session will put all three presentations together. The result will be a simple code for a web application running on a Galaxy tablet. The native client will display an entry field for name, surname and date of birth. The user will fill-in data and save them on GAE. The next “activity” screen will read the data from the cloud and display it. This final application will complete the web apps how-to. The whole code will be published on github.

We had two interesting contributions in discussion forum. Adam send a post showing how to use WiFi instead of the USB cable for the Galaxy tablet during the development. Very nice and useful, no wires cluttering the table. The second contribution describes an API for the university information system called KOS. Tonda put together sample code for authentication and data access. This is the starting point for all teams working on applications requiring the schedule and other data from KOS. Michal has published description of a small game on his blog.

I have reviewed the teams development sites to check the activity. I have found good and interesting progress. Happy meal team produced nice wireframes for their application.
Car share has developed lively video showing authentication, great job!

Conclusions: Some teams have made great progress. It looks like some do not like documenting. Some of the teams need to wake up and begin working. But overall, I thing, we are doing great job!

Samsung Galaxy Apps Development - class 6

2011-10-29T18:42:00.000+02:00

VIA is an Internet applications development course focusing on design of mobile web applications for students. VIA class number six (time flies) took place last Thursday.

Thanks to the generous Samsung donation all of us in VIA course work on the same software as well as hardware. The new Galaxy tablets are great and we are all excited. Most of the students are already getting familiar with the new capabilities. Tablets will become their primary target platform. It is great advantage getting the latest technology as soon as released. Especially in this case, tablets are changing the way we will use Internet. Playing with new gesture oriented applications on new screen format, with different capabilities opens new opportunities and ideas. Tablets have an easy and natural UI, but it still takes some time to get acquitted with it. For programmers it is not simple to switch from the traditional UI web design thinking to full screen gestures controlled environment. Of course the hands-on experience is essential. Samsung thank you, the new tablets will open new opportunities.

This time the class was about the Google App Engine. GAE will be our primary server platform. Fillip has done great job, check his presentation explaining high level the architecture, registration process, how to install the GAE plug-ins to Eclipse. One by one the screen shots with key sequences show how to install plug-ins. The presentation is completed by a simplest java servlet “Hello world”. Next pages are explaining how to use the GAE and how to develop an application along with the GAE administration console main screens showing statistics, logs etc.

See the presentations How to write the Android native apps skeleton (FK) Google app engine, how to write the server part (FK)

All teams should be able to create Android native client and write a simple GAE servlet now. Next class will be about databases. What data services and what modeling and persistence APIs are available at GAE, how to configure the database. The hands on part of the presentation will show how to code a simplest servlet width doGet() and doPost() methods reading a storing text string to database.

The discussion forum is also starting to take off. Some good questions and post with coding and development hints are showing up. My ambition is to demonstrate students the power of the group work, the advantage of sharing and helping to each other. Crowd sourcing paradigm and social networks grew for the same assumption and are today the base of the most successful apps. Cooperation and communication are essencial.

I am looking forward to see the progress, therefore my next task is to check how the teams are reporting the development progress. I can not wait to see first apps "activities" on the tablet screen. Join us, look at presentations and ask questions if something is not clear. Help us improve!

New Samsung tablets at CTU

2011-10-25T23:20:00.000+02:00

Samsung has donated 50 Galaxy 10.1 tablets to support mobile apps development at CTU. Samsung President and CTU Medialab representative have signed the contract in presence of the CTU president.

Fantastic, first of all, this is the best news for my students of the Internet Applications Development course (VIA). The tablets will be the main development and testing tool in this course.

Why tablets? It is clear that tablets will gaining bigger and bigger share. I believe, a tablet application saving the data in the cloud will dominate the future Internet. They will be used in many segments of the industry including universities. In general the mobile devices will generate large, probably the largest part of the Internet traffic. Students need to learn the art of these applications development.

What are the steps in our project? I’d like to walk students through the whole development cycle of Android apps storing the data on Google App Engine. We started with product specification and currently the we work on product valuation. At the end of the course each team has to demonstrate working app. In my view the key difference to other theoretical courses is the problem oriented approach and hands-on experience.

I am looking forward to see the first team showing the tablet with working application. Track the teams development steps on their web pages or you can read my regular reports, click the VIA tag.

Mobile web applications development - VIA class 5

2011-10-22T20:33:00.000+02:00

VIA is an Internet applications development course focusing on design of mobile web applications for students. VIA class number five took place last Thursday.

This time the class was about the native Android applications development. My PhD student Filip delivered the presentation. With his long experience in developing web client applications he is the best to introduce students to the art of designing web apps. He has started with creating the building environment. Our preferred IDE is Eclipse with some plug-ins. Filip has shown how to do installation and configuration of the guild system. The first sample Android application can almost entirely generated by the Google Android plug-ins. We expect the students to install all the tools and plug-ins and show the first application running in the emulator next week. Tough job, the emulator is pretty slow, but alas, we have a surprise for all the students. Wait till Tuesday for the oficial announcement … Next, the teams will have to select github or code.google.com source control system (SCS). All the projects will be open source and we will use the SCS for a sample code to quickly jumpstart the development.

Next Thursday we will continue with introduction to server side - Google App Engine. The goal is to have a simple sample code showing a web native application on Android with CRUD operations on GAE. In two weeks from today I expect students to demonstrate running sample apps saving and reading data from the web. These apps will be the basis for further development. We will do our best delivering the easy to understand presentations and consulting to help to all students overcome difficulties and make all working.

Using the computer science terminology: the teams concurrently work on validating proposed projects. One of the teams already pivoted, or more correctly, they have completely changed the application. Instead of building another social network they are planning to create a tool for remembering points required for getting credits and participation on seminars, very valuable for all students. It is the Foko team, the site is still not updated, wait ... They need to ask colleagues what exactly it is students need to record at school. In my view this is the right right attitude: something doesn't work let's switch to something different

Keep the fingers crossed! The schedules are aggressive! The teams need to deliver working apps. Stay in touch, suggest …

Mini Seedcamp Prague

2011-10-21T18:43:00.000+02:00

I have met lot of interesting people yesterday at the Mini Seedcamp in Prague. Seedcamp is an early-stage micro seed investment fund and mentoring program. I was happy to be a mentor. In the morning we saw all twenty participating teams giving very short presentation. In the afternoon mentors created groups of three and had one to one discussion with selected teams. Discussions were limited to 45 min. I had a chance to talk to five teams. During the sessions mentors tried to analyze teams proposals, find weak points and suggest further steps. We have finished the day in the nearby Friends Coffee House.
Working with teams was lively experience for me, I always enjoy to think how to move the company ahead how to define the next steps in their journey to market. As usually many of the companies were very technologically and less business oriented.
I liked very systematic approach of the Indoors startup. They provide the indoor location capabilities. Subjects are localized using the wifi and installed application. My second favorite is the Qminder from Estonia. Beside of wearing a lovely stocking cap they introduced a great app to line people to a queue with smart phones. Nice, simple, easy to understand. The only drawback, it is easy to copy.
It was a fantastic event. I had the opportunity to meet many important people from the local as well as international startup community. During the breaks we had time enough for discussions and networking. I am also hoping there will be more than two startups from the Czech Republic next time. Great event we need more of them in Prague!

Google developers day Prague

2011-10-18T13:14:00.001+02:00

Great, my students are presenting on stage of the Google Developers Day in Prague. Vrata is showing the first version of a helpdesk application for Android phones. The application is designed for mobile users to ask company operator to help them in their job. They can attach a photo to a question as well as the location. The operator is answering using a web application. The complete list of questios is stored in Google App Engine. The operator can see the pictures and the location is displayed in the map. Great work. It still requires some tuning, but I am sure it will be very useful for many mobile users.

Brainstorming in eClub

2011-10-17T16:04:00.000+02:00

We had a discussion about what to do in this run of the eClub about two weeks ago. One of three requests was to organize a brainstorming session. Let’s do it today. Brainstorming theme is: web applications. Jan Matejka will have short presentation about emotional and social intelligence and just after he will help us with brainstorming. We are relatively large group, which may generate a lot of ideas. To enable easy and quick idea entry I have prepared a simple entry form on our web. Each idea will be labeled with a name to allow add comments or further suggestion. The author can edit the original idea. All ideas, comments or suggestions will be collected in a read-only spreadsheet. I leave the idea entry form and the spreadsheet open even after today meeting to let you think about them. I hope, the preferable way of generating an interesting idea is to stand up and shout ... Remember we are not going to do any evaluation during the session. The main purpose of brainstorming is to generate weird ideas and then extract the best essence.

Last time I have also asked who is going to enter the competition for the best projects. I saw a decent number of hands. This is a signal to go ahead. What are we going to compete for? It will be a scholarship 5-15k CZK per month for 3-5 month in the summer semester. We will award the first three teams. The winning teams will be selected by an international jury after presentation just before Christmas. You will also win an experienced mentor, who will help you turning your idea to a viable product. We will organize monthly meetings between you, your mentor and the representative of CTU Media Lab Foundation to evaluate the progress. The meeting may decide to stop the funding in case of a poor performance. The presentation tryout is next week. Get on stage, you’ll get a valuable feedback before presenting in front of the jury. All of you intending to enter the competition register in, please. The registration link is on our home page.

What are the rules? The entering team must have at least two members and one of them must be a university student (PhD students are OK too) in the Czech Republic in the academic year 2011/12. Members who are not students are not eligible for scholarship. We also have prepared a simple summary how to present on our web pages or you can have a look at a presentation by Lucie from last year to understand what is the trick.

I have created also the “Interesting links” page with some good startup know-how sites. At the button of the page is a comment window. Use it to suggest your favorite links, please. You can also send me a suggestion by email. Let’s try to select the best links.

Prepare for nest week presentations, join us for today brainstorming!

Mobile web applications development - VIA class 4

2011-10-15T12:56:00.001+02:00

VIA is an Internet applications development course focusing on design of mobile web applications for students. VIA class number four took place on Thursday.

We have finished the presentation of all the fourteen projects. All teams have created home pages and short description. The links are at our VIA projects pages. We can roughly break the applications to three categories.

Scheduling applications enhancing and simplifying access to our very complex university information system.

The Manager Calendar group is betting on the idea of publicly informing about participating or skipping a class.
The Via-Gra team offers a calendar/task application alerting users about school important deadlines.
Eager programmers are offering combination of courses schedule with entering notes and links to study materials.
The Day Team suggests almost the same idea.
The Vychodniary project is designing aggregation of the study materials from slightly different point.
Fellow Me team wants to improve searching for students and university stuff using all information on net.
SocDev team is trying to design a students oriented project management application.

The second largest group of applications leverages the power of social applications.

Party Pool and Foko Team have very similar idea helping to find events based on location and time.
ShareTimeProject is trying to help friends sharing activities through their calendars.
Car share is more or less a general application automating hitch hiking.

These applications are much more ambitious than what can be achieved in a school project. To create the critical mass of users nmaking the application useful is very difficult and takes lot of time and money. My suggestion is to design these ideas as Facebook application with the mobile UI.

The last group contains all the other applications.

Happy meal wants to provide a list and scoring system for the university canteens.
A great idea is an online presentation evaluation proposed by Via Team.
Jamata team is offering games to kill free time.

Great, we have fourteen teams with a plan for an application. Next Thursday we will show how to install Eclipse plus plug-ins and explain a sample code. It will be an Android native application with single widget and a Google App Engine backend to store the entered data on server. Basically, we will use the Google suggested code. All will be placed on github to let all students easily download the initial source and start to experiment.

The next deadline for all teams is the October 27th. I expect the teams to present validation of their applications, explaining their experiments proving their apps ideas. This also will be the time to limit the feature set of all apps and set realistic targets for the MVP.

It is a lot of work in front of all of us, but I hope it also will be a lot of fun.

We are meeting teachers.

2011-10-10T10:43:00.000+02:00

My university is constantly looking for new, talented students. Thanks to Google for sponsorship the Open Informatics program is organizing a meeting with secondary school teachers today. We want to show what we do and also get a feedback. My part is to explain how we use Google tools in education. I must admit, I am little bit biased. I have worked for Google for more than two years and I was using all Google tools on everyday basis.

My presentation will show how I work with students in the Internet Application Development (VIA) course. Students will learn how to invent, validate and develop a simple Android tablet application in one semester. Hands-on experience is the only way to learn how to work and act while developing an application. I am encouraging students to use the Agile software techniques in projects. Team members, except at school, are not in one place they need to communicate, use the Internet. Consequently collaboration is the most important skill students need to learn.

To achieve our goals it is very important to choose the right software tools. They need to be simple and support daily project activities. Clearly, all the tools need to support cooperation. We have chosen the Google Apps education edition. In my opinion it offers superb tools for cooperation and group work.

What we use? The VIA home page is hosted on Google sites. The calendar for the class, map and other widgets are included. For project tracking we use Docs and Blogger. I also use quite a lot Forms to run surveys. Some students created their home pages on code.google.com, some have also chosen Sites. For discussion we use Google groups. Some of the teams use Google Presentation Docs. In the initial part of the project students need to validate the app hypothesis and beside Forms, they used also Google Insight and Analytics. For the development we use all the Android and Google App Engine with lot of introductory staff on Google Code.

Almost all the students entering the course have their private gmail address. This is complicating some of the sharing, administration and access to apps, since they do not use the VIA account as primary. Moving email address is probably one of the most difficult problems.

The VIA course is completely open, all documents and projects are public. I am reporting about what is happening in each class periodically in this blog. We have thirteen projects. I’d like to attract other students and join us. I can imagine, we can use these tools for working with students before they get to the university, we definitely can introduce and motivate them to new technologies. Talk to us. We can also work with other universities and developers worldwide. These are the benefits of great software democratization process on the net. Join or follow!

Mobile web applications development - VIA class 3

2011-10-06T18:33:00.000+02:00

This is the report from the third VIA class. Internet applications development course focusing on development of mobile web applications for students.

It was an interesting class today. Student teams were presenting projects proposals. CoreOfPoodle presented an app to quickly find the neareast cultural events. Eager Programmers team and Dynamic Core team are suggesting social web based application to organize free time. AdusMaraGoust Team introduced Car Share project desiged to search for cheap student travel. DEV-TEAM came with an interesting idea to share class supporting material generated by students accessible through a classes schedule. Sometimes it becomes very difficult to find friends and teachers at the university and the Fellow Me team is trying to make this simpler.

All teams set their home pages and those who have presented provided links to their presentation. Some of the presentations are in Czech but I hope, we fix this soon. All teams delivered good work presenting clearly what is their idea. We will finish the presentations in the next class.

Ok, we have some idea what to develop. But we only have hypotheses for an application. We must validate the proposed apps, make sure someone really needs it. How to do it? Teams have to test the hypotheses on their colleagues.

One way of doing it, is to create a paper mock up of an applications and test the interest, for example, in the university cafeteria. Asking students what they like, would they download the application, is something missing or what they do not need. All answers should be recorded, presented and then decisions need to be made. Other method is to create a web page, which is just showing a wireframe with some links. Route friends to the web and collect clicks with google analytics. Most frequently clicked feature is important, but be careful, it also depends on the web page layout, this experiment needs to be repeated with different layouts. Other methodology is to create a questionary and ask colleagues about their opinion. Some of you may develop a pdf mockup, with clickable links and run it on Android device to collect users response. The closer we can get to the final experience the better we can estimate the customers needs. In all cases we want to estimate what is the minimum features set.

Almost all of the applications are very ambitious. Some of the applications are only vaguely related to students needs. We will probably need to fix this. Keep in mind that most of the Android market apps are very simply accomplishing one thing with a minimum UI complexity. This does not mean the implementation is also simple. To destile the most important features and create a simple UI is the trick. This is the teams job now! Teams need to focus on reduction of functionality, implementing only what is necessary. This is probably the most difficult task.

The minimum viable products should be available just before Christmas and this is an extremely agressive target. We have to work hard ...

New eClub season kick off

2011-10-01T12:52:00.000+02:00

Last Monday we have kicked off the next eClub season. HubertPalan a Czech entrepreneur from Silicon Valley was visiting Prague and this wasthe opportunity to invite him for a talk. It was an exiting evening. Hubert didnot prepare any detailed presentation but he was sort of throwing around many interestingideas, advices, observations about his involvement in startups. Quickly the crowd started asking questions and, as usual, the discussioncontinued in the nearby pub. Great kick off. We will soon put the video on our pages, stay in touch I'll let you know.

Come and join us this Monday. Help us to form this eClubseason. We want to hear you...

Mobile web applications development - VIA class 2

2011-09-30T17:17:00.001+02:00

I had the second VIA class yesterday. Internet application development course focusing on mobile web applications for students at the Czech Technical University, Faculty of Electrical Engineering, dep. of Cybernetics, Prague.

The presentation title was "Steps to develop a web application". Our fist step was to create and organize the teams. It is almost finished. We have 11 teams with eleven projects. Most of the teams already created their home pages and blogs for tracking progress. I asked students to put an essay, high level description of the project, on their home page. The blog is set to track all development steps. I recommend to have two types of records on the blog. Milestones are two weeks jobs. Small tasks should take not more then few hours. I’d like students to write the tasks and mark who is solving what and when it has been finished. Breaking tasks to small steps is essencial. Marking progress is motivating and saves you from losing focus, (well sometimes)
Then we have started a small discussion trying to explain how to pick the right application. We brainstormed and discussed several suggestions. I have tried to explain what are the experiments to test the app idea. I have suggested what questions to ask other students to understand the usefulness of the app. How ask to discover how they will use the app. This is not simple but essencial before starting any development. I have tried to show some simple examples of the idea validation. I hope the sThis is precisely the set of problems I want students to focus on during the presentation. Their task is to present using experiments results what value the app will deliver to them, what problem is the app solving, and what needs it is satisfying. I have also briefly mentioned the Business model canvas and provided the wiki link for further study. The presentation was closed by discussing what is the Minimum Viable Product and, what is the set of minimal features. I have covered each of the topic very shortly, in depth discussion will require much more time and effort. Our class is more focused on technology but I thought this little excursion to business thinking is very important. Students need to understand and be motivated for the development of apps.
Next week we will continue with presenting the project ideas. Students are due to deliver an essay. Each team will get around 10 minutes and then we will discuss the idea.
Follow us on VIA pages.

Learn how to build a startup - VIA class 1

2011-09-24T10:24:00.000+02:00

today I'll tell you about my plan for the winter Internet Application Development course. I want to teach students what are the steps for developing a useful Internet application. I got a little inspired by Steve Blank LaunchPad. Today, many of our students work on their own projects and typically they focus on programming. Real hackers frequently fall in love with new idea or technology. They spend a lot of time developing, but only few of them convert the idea to a working product. In my course I’d like to help them to change it and in the same time learn what are the product development steps.

How do we operate? First I am splitting students in to teams of four. Each team must set up a web home page and write short essay describing what they want to develop. Next, they should use the home page to attract the users and check the idea. During the whole course I want students to track the development. We will use blogs or other journal like application. Documenting progress is always good practice. List of finished tasks is creating a good feeling of progress, it also helps to stay in focus.

Who are the customers and what do we want to deliver? Customers are all students of the CTU and we want to deliver applications making their university live easier. Since developers and customers are the same it should be easier to validate the product idea. Teams, students will test the product on students.

I am also narrowing the choice of application to Internet apps for mobile. There are many reasons, besides the sales numbers and popularity. Most important is that mobile apps are typically much simpler. They focus on one simple task. Small screen supports only easy UI. Simple, small and intuitive apps are our target.

I’d like to finish the semester with real working minimum set of features applications. To make the apps development as simple as possible we will offer ready to use sandboxes for Android and Google App Engine. This should quickly jump start the development.

What will the students learn? How to lead a project, how to organize the development, and how to create something useful and attractive for users. The most important take away is the hands on experience.

I do not know how the whole course will work out, are there enough ideas for applications, are our students inventive enough to pick the right set, do we have enough time to do something useful? There are lot of questions, but I am sure we need to search for new ways how to inspire students and help them achieving good results. This is my try. I’ll keep reporting about the progress. See the deliverables specifications at VIA web pages. Keep your fingers crossed, comment, suggest!

eClub opening presentation

2011-09-22T16:17:00.001+02:00

On Monday 26.9. we will welcome Hubert Palan at Czech Technical University in Prague. He is coming to Prague for a short visit from Silicon Valley. He will tell us why being an entrepreneur is the best career ever and how startups are built in Silicon Valley. Hubert will explain how the Silicon Valley entrepreneurial ecosystem works, how universities, students, companies, entrepreneurs and investors collaborate and innovate. Luckily, innovation doesn't happen just in Silicon Valley and you will find out how to apply startup best practices anywhere in the world. Come and jump start your journey of building a great product with a stellar team and changing the world. Check it out at the eClub home page and recently on Facebook too.

September 26 - eClub

2011-09-13T23:13:00.000+02:00

Wikipedia says: September 26 is the 269th day of the year (270th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. There are 96 days remaining until the end of the year. I say: on September 26 we start the first 2011 winter eClub meetinging. Join us.
The winners of the last eClub, the easyWall team returned from California with a lot of interesting suggestions. They advised me to make at least the first page in Czech. The English version is apparently discouraging some of the students. OK, I am listening, the first page is in Czech, but I kept the rest in English. As soon as we catch those shy students we convert to English anyway. We need to cooperate internationally. We need to be understandable.
I also was told to make sure everybody understands that eClub is not part of the curriculum, no exam, credits for participation. Good point. Another important comment was do not emphasize it is at Czech Technical University. So don’t be scared all meetings will be easy going and entertaining. We will welcome students and their friends from all technical or other universities interested in starting business. eClub is open to everybody.
In our club you will have a chance meeting your peers, interesting entrepreneurs, technologists and visionary. We will welcome great speakers Karel Obluk, Karel Janecek and others. We are also planning to have first presentation streamed directly from Silicon Valley. Keep the fingers crossed. One more note: after each presentation there will be an after-party in the nearby restaurants to chat with your friends.
We have dry run project presentations planned for October 24. I hope, most of the participants will try to present their own project. We will tell you how to formulate the project plan and how to present. We will help you to get advice from mentors. You can use our forum to discuss. An international jury will select the best projects and they will get the awards just under the Christmas tree.
Those of you who cannot join us in person make a note: all presentations will be recorded and displayed on our pages. Let me know if you have any suggestions, comments, improvements, etc. and don't forget September 26.

What startup is best for you?

2011-09-04T23:01:00.000+02:00

How to motivate students to create a startups? What are the types of startups? I am putting together the program for the Entrepreneurs Club these days and these are some of the questions I want to discuss.

The university students are in the best period of their life to experiment, turn their dreams to something useful. The entrepreneurial path is offering lot of different opportunities. The most ambitious is the high-tech path: pursuing PhD program, inventing new, disruptive technology and turning it to a startup. Contrary to scientific research, some students may start a small business in their hometown. Some may chose to work alone or in a small group and make enough money to have a comfortable life. The top aspiration is to go for the big thing, creating a scalable business addressing millions of customers worldwide. Let’s look at different types of startups in more detail.

One person makes the smallest startup. Typical example is Tonda Hildebrand who calls himself a micropreneur. He wrote and sells an enhanced Finder version for Mac. He has thousands and thousands customers around the world. As a micropreneur, thou you are the only person in the company who needs to do all what the business requires. You need to be a very strong personality to not lose motivation and focus, and to overcame all difficulties. You can focus on what makes you happy, where you are best and outsource the rest. You will be very independent in time, location etc. On the other hand you’ll be vulnerable, if you find and develop an application addressing large customers cloud, the competition will kill you rather quickly.

Typical startup has two or three people at the very beginning. Many of the startups die, some survive but do not grow, and they become small companies with few staff members. They may choose working on a single product. If they manage to find a niche market and customers, they may create a successful business. As long as the number of customers is of no commercial interest to large companies they may create a sustainable income. In eClub we had a presentation of the Fakturoid team falling in to this category. The danger is very similar to micropreneurs, the variety of products is narrow and the single core product can become part of larger companies portfolio or the whole business model may die. The right niche market may generate a good stream of revenue to have a comfortable life, therefore: lifestyle companies. Some small companies managed to address considerable number of customers with their very successful products, for example 37signals.

What is the majority of IT companies in the Czech Republic? According to the Czech ICT Alliance 98% of companies have less than 20 people. My estimation is that these numbers will be similar in many other countries. These companies are focusing on web pages authoring, administration, IT integration etc. Mostly they provide custom development or services in a small, local scale. They are very important for the national economy, but they do not have the ambition to work worldwide or grow. They can be classified as small business startups.

The real startup is mostly associated with a high grows, technology oriented company. We all know the top startups: Google. Yahoo, SalesForce etc. They are very successful in introducing new disruptive technology. They have found great business model, grew to a large company and developed additional lines of innovative products. An idea for a great scalable business can emerge anywhere in the world, but it is not easy to find the right people and the right ecosystem to scale. This is the reason why most of the large technological startups are coming from Silicon Valley. It is the reservoir of the best programmers, engineers but also top IT managers, visionary, lawyer, venture capitalists, marketers, sales people… Even the most successful Czech IT startup entrepreneur Roman Stanek moved his Gooddata operations to Silicon Valley.

Researcher or scientists like a high-tech startup developing a disruptive technology based on technological break through and new algorithms. Turning the results of their several years long research to a business may lead to significant competitive advantage. The formation of such startup is a very intricate process since people of science typically do not have commercial but scientific targets. The success metric is the number of scientific articles not revenue or number of customers. Startup is the best setup to commercialize new IT scientific ideas. The typical goal of scientific startup is to prove the technology, show the growing revenue and sell the company.

Beside of missing non-profit or open source startups and a very special kind of startups winning government tenders, the list is complete. Most of the students will start their entrepreneurial activities without knowing in what category they will end up, but from the point of view of what we do in eClub it is not important. The goal is to make students active, teach them the practical steps how to create a product and how to find customers. I will be delighted, if as a result of eClub, we will see a new company in any of the above categories.

Do not stay aside, communicate, be active, and join us.

Software development democratization and eClub

2011-08-23T11:30:00.001+02:00

I am preparing for the next season of eClub thinking what is the best way to introduce our students to the art of starting their first own business. To experience the joy of having customers who use your applications. In this blog I will focus on business on the Internet, which thanks to the technology development got very democratic and therefore it is very easy to enter for all of us.
Yes, we are living in a great time. The cost of a notebook is constantly decreasing and every student owns one. Beside great ideas and commitment the computer is probably the only required prerequisite to start an Internet business. Most of the other required components are available very affordably or for free. What more, to buy the computer you need your savings, but to run the business in the cloud you can pay as you go and only for what you use, no upfront investment is required. It scales as you need. The cloud is spreading (this is meant positively) and the web services as AWS, Google App Engine, Heroku are easy to access and use for hosting your apps. You can find several services (Bitnami, Turnkey, Fluxflex, on the web enabling you to install well know open source packages as LAMP stack, Wordpress, Joomla, MySQL, Moodle, RedMine, etc with a single click. Check also the Rightscale one of the most popular tools for running cloud apps. To organize your office (email, calendar, documents, ...) you have a choice of Office 365, Google Apps, Tungle, Zoho,... To complete the company administration you can find many different accounting systems and project managing packages.
A successful business needs bright developers and tools to create the best product, but the most important is the sale. With the advent of cloud many business and marketing channels have emerged in the cloud helping you in reaching your customers and selling the product. Well known are the iPhone and Android markets offering hundreds of thousands of small apps. Google and Apple introduced Web Stores. SaleForce is also very active. These channels are helping developers to offer their applications to customers, sell them and collect money for a reasonable share on the sale. If you do not like the big shots, you can proceed by your own, there are on the web organizations taking care of the whole sales lifecycle handling the credit card, issuing SW license keys, handling tax world wide, for example Fastspring. Monitoring customers and marketing is the next step in growing the business. Very popular is the Google Analytics. It will give you very good insight to you apps and web traffic and help you with effective marketing. Many other services exist for advertising your product.
All this is available to everybody and it means it is very easy to start today than ever before. Most of the students are very good programmers and have great ideas for new applications. eClub is here to motivate and empower students to make their dreams true. eClub is subsidized by the CTU MediaLab foundation supporting the best students teams with scholarship. You will meet experienced people to discuss and advise you with the business development. At the end let me share with you my secret wish: I would like to have by the end of the academic year 11/12 at least one alumni team who will attract thousands of users to their new application.
Join us in the next season of the eClub. Start to work with us. We are opening in September. Watch our blog and web pages. Get first batch of customers, …

eClub Winter 2011

2011-08-18T10:29:00.001+02:00

soon the school will start again and this is the right time to begin planning for the next round of the eClub. They eClub sessions will start from September and they will be again supported by the department of Cybernetics and the CTU MediaLab foundation. Last year most of the students were from the Faculty of Electrical Engineering. For the winter 2011 we want to attract students from the whole CVUT.
What is the current plan? I am preparing a series of 13 sessions. As usual I will open with an introductory presentation announcing this year competition for the best startup project. I want to put together again an international jury selecting three to five best projects. The winners will be awarded with a scholarship to start their projects.
I am in the middle of putting it all together and there still will be some changes, but let me introduce first speakers and sessions. In the last week of September we will take advantage of Hubert Palan visiting Prague. He will share with us his experience of studying at UC Berkeley and then creating his own startup. He works for GoodData now. His presentation will be an introduction to Silicon Valley, the center of startups. In the next session I am planning to give the opportunity to the winners of the last competition, the EasyWall team. They spent three months in the Silicon Valley Plug And Play accelerator and there is a lot to report. They have taken many videos and made lot of interviews. The next winners went to the Technical university of Copenhagen and took Innovation and Creativity “In search of the Blue Ocean” summer school and I am sure they have a lot to discuss too. I want to have one presentation focusing on the “soft skills”, particularly on organizing your work as well as your life. Jan Matejka will be teaching you how. I also hope we will attract Jakub Nesetril, the founder of apiry.io. He will share with us his experience from the SpringBoard accelator in Cambridge (UK) and will also tell us how to get the initial funding. Jan Sova owner of the WorksWell company will present his experience in starting a company in the CTU incubator and will come up with a list of initial problems you should avoid when starting a company in the Czech Republic. I am personally looking forward to meet Karel Janecek CEO of RSJ Algorithmic Trading who promised to join us for one session. The most important for those who will compete for the scholarships are the presentations of your business plans and then the final demo presentations.
I am sure there will be still some more surprises but this is the first draft of the winter eClub sessions. Stay tuned. I’ll be back soon with more messages, ….

No vacation

2011-08-09T20:56:00.000+02:00

Most of the students are enjoying vacations, but not the winners of the eClub the EasyWall team - Tereza, Vojta and Pier. They are in California in the Plug and Play Tech Center meeting with a lot of interesting people, networking with other startups, participating in discussion and watching interesting presentations. Their calendar is full of interesting meetings in Silicon Valley. They have their video camera with them shooting great video clips. Watch some of their vlogs on facebook and read the blog.
Four students from other eClub top teams are in the Copenhagen University College of Engineering, Summer School taking part in Innovation and Creativity “In search of the Blue Ocean”. They are reporting: it is no vacation, we will have to work here. Maybe bad news for them but we are looking forward to see what they learn. See the picture of the group in front of the Copenhagen University building.
I hope they all will prepare for us interesting presentations in the next eClub meetings.

Research proposal

2011-08-02T13:52:00.003+02:00

With Filip we have submitted a proposal for a research grant. We want to look at new ways of designing the web apps server side. Here is the abstract.
Businesses need making the web applications development faster and cheaper. There are many RAD tools focusing on fast UI development, but much less attention is paid to the back end. Our target is to develop new RAD tools for easy API authoring. The usage of the web object oriented architectures, e.g. CORBA, DCOM, SOAP (SOA) is decreasing because of quite large code complexity. Instead, internet developers are preferring the principles of REST, described by R.T.Fielding. His RESTFul approach is based on information representations, resources, composite resources etc. We use REST APIs for our applications for quite some time and we noticed things are repenting. Filip than came with this idea: a simple declarative Domain Specific Language (DSL) is enough to define information representation and resources. This sounds great because it simplifies a lot the whole design. In addition, choosing declarative approach has much deeper theoretical implications. The web server design is for us no longer object oriented. We are dropping the current procedural programming paradigm. In our further research we are taking the Resource Oriented Programming (ROP).
At the moment we are building test applications to prove our assumptions and see what are the problems. What functionality is the most frequently required for building web business applications? What is the best information representation? How to generate and describe effective APIs? How to reuse existing web services? How to derive composite resources? How much more easier is a graphical interface? Many things can be tested and we are eager to play with these ideas and see how far we can push it.
I will report about the progress.

Eucalyptus is running

2011-07-21T23:16:00.000+02:00

Finally we have managed to make our Eucalyptus private cloud running. The first matlab scripts processed thousands of pictures. It took us quite some time to make this happend. We had many problems with network and routers configuration, with NFS, disk overflows etc. All typical network computing problems, most of them solved by now. But we are happy we are producing useful results on computer which were so fare idling.
The current cloud setup is used for number crunching only, for image processing. Each experiment is described by a matlab script. There is currently available only one machine image, which includes installed matlab. To start and control execution we have developed a SaaS application uploading and managing the experiments. It also works with AWS. We are running the application on the same box as the cloud server. It is written in R&R. The UI is designed for inexperienced users. The application messaging is build on top of the RabbitMQ. The input and output files are read and written to and from users subdirectories over NFS.
Further development is still needed to make the cloud much more efficient. We need to include some monitoring to control the usage of the cloud. We need to optimize memory, networking and speed of execution. We need to control user access etc.
We have successfully proved, that we have chosen the right solution. Our first test user managed to use the system almost immediately and produced useful results. The next step is to add another two user with no experience and collect all complaints, wishes, bugs etc. to continue in the development of the controlling application and make the whole system stable and robust.

CCC + Google

2011-07-15T16:46:00.001+02:00

Vojta Jina is a Google employee, who is finishing his MSc in our Cloud Computing Center (CCC) at CTU. Vojta is big fan / promoter of JavaScript and Test Driven Development (TDD). At Google he works on an open source project AngularJS. AngularJS is a great platform for building web apps, written in JavaScript. In our center he works on a HelpDesk client application. We plan to publish the HelpDesk application as an open source example showing how to use AngularJS. Actually, we have larger plans with HelpDesk and I am planning to announce them soon.
I am supervising his thesis and I am really looking forward to start the real work. So far we have several times discussed the topic and Vojta is already doing the preparatory studies. The JavaScript development and especially AngularJS is heavily relying on TDD. Test function is a must for every new functionality. The code is repeatedly tested during the whole development cycle. TDD is the only way how to keep larger JavaScript applications under control. The problem is even larger, different browsers use different JavaScript interpreters, with different behavior. Therefore we need an engine testing all interpreters during the development. There are some testing engines with this capability to support the development, but they are not covering the whole problem flawlessly. Our vision is to design and implement new testing engine satisfying all developer's requirements. This is the grand idea of Vojta’s thesis. We are going to put the code to public domain and I'm looking forward to inform you about the progress.

Tonda + Tomas = 8

2011-07-11T18:29:00.000+02:00

We are eight people in the Cloud Computing Center. Tomas and Tonda our students have joined us today and they are already enjoying the world of web applications. It is their first university year, but they are already experienced programmers. Their first design was a very successful robot, which they have build at a middle school.
Together we have started a development of a web-based application with a native client for Android.. The server site will run on Google App Engine. The client server communication will use REST API. Filipe has done the first preoperational or organizational step, he has designed a git server where the code is saved. The second step is to develop a very basic code for the server and client application and display some small piece of text on Android. We hope this will work on Friday. I will announce the application very soon
I am looking for students interested in iOS for Apple mobile devices.

Cloud Computing Center grows

2011-06-28T15:26:00.000+02:00

I was a member of the PhD students committee last week and I managed to push trough two Tomas students: Tomas Barina and Tomas Vondra. Both of them, of course will focus on cloud computing.

Tomas B. works for IBM, but he has 40% time reserved for self-education in his contract. He wants to devote this time working on his PhD. His diploma work was in the field of NoSQL databases and he wants to pursue this work in his PhD project. We plan to look at some advanced methods for organizing the data structure, optimizing the replications etc. Patrik Lenart was the other student writing his theses in NoSQL databases. We are putting together a comprehensive paper summarizing their findings.

Tomas Vondra has just recently graduated too. His diploma work was focusing on testing GSM gateways. But the cloud computing problems are pulling him to our group. He is a very talented computer geek with a passion for collecting ancient computer parts. He has a lot of experience in administering, fixing and tuning computers. He has installed for us the Eucalyptus cloud OS and he is still supervising the development. We would like to contribute with him to optimum distribution of tasks in hybrid clouds. There is lot of problems associated with task execution planning.

Ivan Kutil is joining our group to work on his diploma thesis. He is a MSc student at the Faculty of economics in Prague. He is interested in business aspects of Google Apps. Mainly, what GA offer to MSBs, what are the typical problems to switch to GA etc. He is also running his company www.appsatori.eu. The company helps customers with GA conversion and installation problems.

I am also very happy about Vojta Jina joining our group. He has an experience working for UK based software companies. He has learned a lot, but his adventure had almost damaging impact on his university carrier. It was five after twelve when we saved him. His job is to make two semesters in 6 month. He is doing well, but he is in a hurry since he already works for Google. He moves to Mountain View in September. He will do his diploma work also in our group. Vojta is big fan of Javascript. He contributes to the Angular project in Google. His idea is to write a new much better Javascript testing engine and I am looking forward to join him in this work.

I am looking for new students. There are new projects descriptions at our university pages. If you know some enthusiastic, self-motivating and hardworking individuals let me know the CCC is greatest home for you.

We believe in Cloud!

Virtualize your servers

2011-06-22T00:19:00.001+02:00

I wrote about my presentation at BIF in Prague two weeks ago. I focused at the difficulties we are facing on the way to virtualization and cloud computing at small and medium companies. This blog is the first part summarizing some of the messages.
I have started with a question: what is the CIO's task? And I have also provided the answer: save money, make the IT highly available, secure and have a plan for disaster recovery. First what comes to our mind is to save money is virtualization. Next is the cloud. The reason is simple, companies have investments in the existing SW and HW and they have to amortize it.
How difficult is it to virtualize the company internal infrastructure? Hard to say but it strongly depends on the quality of standards of administrating, managing SW, and the internal infrastructure. The better is the company IT organized the faster can be virtualized.
However, the reality is sometimes very problematic, because the dynamics of a small company are not always under control. The boss needs some performance graph and he needs it immediately. This makes the developer to use the fastest way to launch the app producing requested graph. After a while the company’s servers are full of many different single purpose apps designed in many different styles and using a set of disconnected databases. They are used randomly, some of them got forgotten or obsolete, but everybody is afraid to delete anything. The data and the mess grow. It is not simple to virtualize in such environment. On the other hand the savings can be bigger.
The first step to effectively introduce virtualization is to profile applications and servers. This is also the best time for consolidation of the SW. The company needs to understand how many applications they need, what is their usage, how many clients they need to support, what is the seasonality, how much CPU and memory the apps require, what is the necessary availability, how critical is the application for company etc. Some of the apps are good candidates for virtualization, but not all. For example, there is no reason to virtualize apps requiring lot of resources and utilizing the whole server well.
The biggest virtualization gain comes from combining apps with non-overlapping profiles. Typical web app has the peak 8-10 times higher then the average load. If we can group applications with different seasonality, with non-overlapping peaks, we can run several of them on one box and achieving higher server utilization. To achieve this goal we need to configure the VMs resources for the peak performance, but expecting that most of the time they will require only the average load. Aggregation and multiplexing of apps with dynamic resources requirement on one box may lead to achieving utilization of up to 70%, may be even higher. This will help us to save some of the servers.

For most of the companies the biggest problem is to organize properly and cleanly all business applications. In addition, the company may have problems to run the VMs on old HW, the networking may need to be upgraded, the SAN may need some update or changes, the staff needs to learn new methods for monitoring and managing servers. The existing SW licenses policy needs to be reviewed. Each VM requires new OS, which is no problem in case of open source, but it is not for free with Windows.

Recently, Filip provided a link to an interesting survey about the cloud adoption. Let me mention only three of the findings: 69% of cloud users are planning to use open source SW, 70% of data center managers plan to start with private cloud and 77% IT professionals prefer to deploy their infrastructure using virtualization. This is completely in synch with my blief.

Conference Business Information Forum 2011

2011-06-08T15:34:00.000+02:00

I had a presentation at the Business Information Forum 2011 conference yesterday. This was a gathering for of the Czech IT leading experts. The major theme was cloud computing. I had a 20 min slot for my presentation. The name was Virtualization & Cloud. Petr Koubsky the organizer and a friend of mine has chosen this topic for me. I was supposed to explain what are the major difficulties to virtualize or convert to cloud the IT infrastructure. An impossible job, but check what I put together on my prezi.

eClub summary presentation

2011-06-04T10:38:00.002+02:00

I was involved in many activities in May. The most successful and also rewarding was eClub. To summarize what has been done I have prepared a presentation. It shows what were the motivations and what were the achievements. This is also my presentation for a Systemova Integrace conference next week in Prague. I want to continue in the eClub effort again from autumn. I am thinking about new format. If you have any suggestions, let me know.

2011-05-19T10:41:00.000+02:00

Yesterday we have announced the winners in eClub. It was hard work but it was worth it. See the videos of the final presentations, all in English. The winners are:

easyWall - Vojtěch Ciml,Pier Kurth, Tereza Horáková

They receive the grand prize a scholarship for a Summer program in Plug and Play Startup Camp, two air tickets and USD 10,000.- for expanses awarded by Credo Ventures and CVUT Medial Lab. Students from the top three and the most innovative project:

MonItems - Vojtěch Křížek, Martin Župka
CityAdventures - Tomáš Gogár, Martin Klekner
Interactive carpet - Antonín Novák, Tomáš Báča, Tomáš Vítek

receive a scholarship for a four weeks Innovation and Creativity – Blue Ocean Strategy Summer school hosted by The Copenhagen University College of Engineering.
Join me in congratulating the winners and check their presentations.

Thanks to all contributors helping to make eClub great success and I am looking forward for the next eClub as well as for your further cooperation.

Presentation of startup projects in the eClub.

2011-05-01T12:26:00.000+02:00

Join us at the final startup project presentations in the eClub. We are meeting on May 11^th at 6:00pm, meeting room KN:E-301 at CVUT FEL, Karlovo náměstí 13, Praha. Teams of students will compete for the best startup idea.

Eucalyptus: we are almost there

2011-04-26T23:06:00.000+02:00

It is quite some time I have reported our progress on using Eucalyptus for our image processing group. We are trying to design a frontend application with my MSc students. It controls Matlab experiments on a cluster of workstations in one of our classrooms. During the day the comps are used for education running WIN. We are switching to Eucalyptus at night. The RoR frontend application handles ACL management, collects Matlab scripts and pushes them to a queue (RabitMQ). It starts the EMIs, mounts NFS, launches the scripts. The images files are read and saved over NFS. The logs, errors and status info are pushed to an output queue. The RoR app displays processes status and saves logs. The frontend app is running as a stand alone app on Mac today. We are still having little problems creating the right EMI with properly installed RoR. Most likely, we identified the problem and I hope, we will be able running scripts on multiple machines under Eucalyptus really soon. Stay tuned I’ll let you know as soon as all runs.

Research proposal

2011-04-25T18:43:00.000+02:00

I was busy preparing a proposal for the Czech Grant Agency research grant last weeks. With my team we have been brainstorming for quite some time about new directions in the Cloud computing research with no clear conclusion. (see previous blogs).

The benefit of a deadline is that you have to finish the job on time. This made us to put together finally a reasonable plan. The proposal has nine pages, therefore I am copying just the executive summary:

Problem
Every growing company needs to quickly design new applications supporting business processes. Lot of effort has been spent on the RAD tools for UI, but the back end RAD tools do not exist, slowing down the development.

Approach
Design a declarative resource management, configuring and provisioning the web SaaS applications 100% from the client side. Design REST APIs to match the business processes CRUD applications requirements and resources usage paradigms. In other words design tools with no programming required on the server.

Benefits
Back end RAD tools with declarative resource management will result in easier, faster development cycle and standardization of database REST APIs. The complete application code will be on the client side. These APIs combined with modern NoSQL decentralized, distributed databases will deliver large volume and high availability resource management for scalable multi-tenant applications.

Video from Misko's presentations

2011-04-25T16:46:00.000+02:00

for those who missed Misko at the CTU, here are the videos (in Czech).

Research proposal

2011-04-03T13:21:00.000+02:00

I am writing my first research proposal and I need help. See the introduction below. If you have time, read it and comment, please. It is just an introduction and I will need to work on details, any suggestion or idea are also appreciated. If funded, I expect three PhD students and several MSc students will take part in the first year, later the group needs to grow ... Thanks for any comments and suggestions.

Here it is the first version:

Allow me to say few words introducing the situation and strategy. I have returned after 18 years in the industry to the department of Cybernetics at CTU, Prague to share my experience with students in education, in research and also help with successful commercialization of the research results. Last years I have worked in Google, Switzerland on the development of web applications. Before I have worked at T.J.Watson Research Center IBM in Yorktown, New York for 8 years, then I was manager of the IBM research and development group in Prague. I am submitting this proposal to seek research support. I am building a group of people, who have experience working in the industry and research. I want to focus on research in the Cloud Computing. The main idea is to research new innovative architectures, technologies and tools for the next generation of business applications and tools.

The new emerging cloud computing programing paradigm is opening new challenges and opportunities for application design, development and deployment. The big promise is the availability of almost endless computational power and memory. The challenges are new business models shifting the expenses to operation expenses. The big promise is reduction of the overall cost of deployment and maintenance.

There are still many unsolved technical problems in the cloud computing. Our research target is to study approaches and tools to simplify the whole process of design and deployment of next generation business applications. We envision our research in three different directions: user interfaces, business logic and databases.

The motivation is to enable experts from other fields then IT to design and deploy applications they need in everyday business. Other fields experts much better understand their needs and technologies then IT specialists programmers and therefore are in a better position to develop more useful application. On the other hand they do not have experience with computer science. They need help to develop stable and robust solutions. Our aim is to study the typical paradigms in the business applications, discover them and provide higher level tools to design and develop the required functionality.

To make the things clear we are not going to research new technology for rendering UI, implementing business logic or designing new databases. We rather will research new ways how to simplify the usage of the established technologies introducing new programming patterns and tools. It is well known that for example the development of a complex UI for CRUD type of application can be quite complex and difficult to debug. It is also known that development of server logic with session status and large data processing can be very difficult to debug and maintain. The management and maintenance of current RDBM systems is very complicated. See just the size of the users manuals for Oracle or DB2 databases going easily to thousands of pages. Other direction of research is focused on resources, computers and memory for the next generation of business applications. Thousand and thousand of computers in the cloud enable businesses to think differently. For example the production planning, which typically requires say 5 computers doing the calculation for 20 hours, we can do the same in one hour with 100 computers or in six minutes with 1000 computers on the cloud and the cost will be the same or lower.

From my experience in the industry I know that research is initiating changes and discovering new approaches and we would like to play this role in the Czech Republic. I would consider our research successful once the Czech IT companies will accept the results and build on top of them new innovative applications. I am planning to make the results of our research publicly available. The group will publish the results of the research in conferences, on the Internet and in scientific journals. I am ready to make the relevant code available in a form of open source.

Last but not least, I have lot of friends in global IT companies around the world that will definitely serve as a source of information about the latest development and trends in current research and in the industry. I am sure they will contribute to our success, too.

Last week in eClub

2011-04-01T16:50:00.002+02:00

We celebrate the first round of projects presentations in the eClub. Seven teams shared their ideas during our meeting last week. All presentations were in English with slideshow or accompanying web pages, check it out here. Each presentation started quite a big discussion and many comments. Some of the discussions expanded to our forum. It is very rewarding to realize that we have students who think about commercializing their ideas. We will continue with further presentations and we are all looking forward for the final, competition. The best team will be selected and awarded with a three month stay in Silicon Valley incubator.

Misko in Prague

2011-03-20T10:24:00.000+01:00

Misko Hevery, top Google programmer is coming to Prague tomorrow. He is going to give two presentations on Monday and Tuesday. He will focus on the Test Driven Design (TDD) methodology and philosophy. The technology will be presented on real examples. TDD is a standard Google technology used to develop all their products. Misko is an evangelist and propagator of this technology for several years. He has the hands-on experience as well as the experience sharing his views with developers. The TDD is one of the key elements of Google success. There are not too many opportunities to see presentations about proven top notch technologies delivered by top experts, do not miss this unique chance and join us for the presentations.

We will meet at the CVUT, Karlovo namesti 13. Here is the plan:

21.03.2011 Monday 18:00 19:30 KN:E-301

TDD in action: Built a web app calculator example in TDD style. This way people will get the flow of the how TDD works.
In case people would like to try this on their computer here are the links:

INSTALL "git": http://help.github.com/set-up-git-redirect
INSTALL "node.js": installation instructions or Windows download from here. (You will also need 7 Zip to unzip the node archive) (and don't forget to add node.exe to your executable path)
INSTALL "java runtime"
CHECKOUT the project: https://github.com/angular/calculator-sample
EDITOR: have some kind

22.03.2011, Tuesday, 18:00 19:30 KN:E-107

Psychology of TDD: We explain the reasoning behind TDD and common pitfalls and why it is hard to introduce it into organization. (Slides here: http://goo.gl/V0aWx)
This is the theory behind the TDD demo

Cloud Computing Center

2011-03-18T10:36:00.000+01:00

the Cloud Computing Center (3C) is starting. It is going to be a platform for MSc, doctoral students, university staff and industry experts. Platform for all who are interested and enthusiastic about cloud computing. The core of the 3C are PhD students and the target is education, research and commercialization.
The Czech universities are typically focused on basic research with very weak links to the industry. This is not only a problem of the universities. The Czech SMBs do not have enough funding and internal resources to work with universities. The global IT players do not conduct research in the Czech Republic. They view us only as a pool of good programmers. In many cases companies also do not believe the university can effectively help them solving practical problems in their business.
On the other hand the university staff is interested in pure research and academia people do not want to get their hands dirty with the everyday programming etc. The academia people are not looking for research funding in the industry they concentrate on governmental funding. On top of this academia people and industry speak different languages, they have problems understand each other.
3C has the ambition to bridge this gap at least in one segment of IT. If we manage to get university working with industry it will be beneficial for all society, industry and academia too. The best benefit for the university research, I believe, is the motivation and feedback coming from users, from industry and society. The benefit for the industry is also clear, they get the best innovation and technology.
You may ask, what is the difference between 3C and software company? The software companies have business motivations, they need to earn money. They have the urge of executing projects in the most efficient way to stay competitive. This is limiting a space for programmers to test new approaches or develop innovative solutions. The main 3C vision is the research as a driver for innovation, practical implementation and evangelization of latest technologies, paradigms, frameworks etc. 3C researchers need to prove their quality by writing top scientific contributions as well as deploying and commercializing their ideas in the industry. Similarly, I want to evaluate the students not only based on the quality and number of publications, but also on their impact to industry. After all this should be easy to measure in terms of funding coming from the industry. In some sense 3C should act as a technological start-up.
Next time I would like to point out the main technical directions for 3C.

Eucalyptus-next step

2011-03-15T09:48:00.000+01:00

We are starting the first jobs on successfully installed Eucalyptus cloud. The primary intent is to use the cloud for image processing, testing new algorithms. The CMP group is using some Terra Bytes of images for testing or compare new algorithms. Typically the algorithm is implemented in Matlab. To ease the provisioning of the tasks we are building standard Eucalyptus Machine Image (EMI) with Debian Linux and installed Matlab. This will allow researchers simply start the image, log-in through ssh and start the script with the experiment. The pictures are stored on our servers. The volumes must be mounted to the EMI instance before the experiment starts. We are in the middle of the initial tests. For the basic management we use the Eucalyptus euca2tools and the Hybridfox plug-in for Firefox browser. We are looking for testers to prove that our environment is stable and accumulate some experience. While doing these first steps we have started to look at ways how to make the process of testing and developing new algorithms easier. Especially the UI for starting the Matlab algorithm, monitoring and collecting the results will help. We are reviewing several tools and libraries, such as the RightScale tools and Gem for Ruby. I will report as soon as we have first batch experiments successfully running.

I am on a Jury

2011-03-08T19:55:00.000+01:00

I am sensing something is going on in the Czechia. After we started meetings in our eClub I am meeting more and more people interested in startups. There are two activities similar to eClub at the Faculty of Economics in Prague Cach Flow and BizIT. There was a two days competition ipo48. And finally today Pavel Curda announced an API MushUp Contest. In addition I am on the jury. Great, I am really pleased to see around people trying to discover new opportunities and enthusiastic enough to help growing them. I am eagerly looking forward to see the results of eClub competition and API Mushup Contest too. I have also learned a lesson the ipo48 ant the Mashup Contest have English pages. This is encouraging me to switch the eClub web to English soon. Many friends of mine, not speaking Czech, want to to read it and contribute too.
If you are interested do not wait join us, cooperate, work on your own ideas, and most of all enjoy the adventures journey.

Cloud Computing Center

2011-02-28T18:41:00.000+01:00

What is going on in my group? Currently, I am helping five MSc students working on their dissertations and the first doctoral student is joining the team. In addition I giving classes in Web Application design and I am running several other projects, such as eClub, Eucalyptus private cloud etc.
Let me introduce my students and their projects. Josef Sin prepares a system for running a workload-planning algorithm on AWS. He is designing a simple web application in RoR, which will make it easy for researches to run large tasks on EC2. The app user interface will allow the administrator to manage access rights, computational quotas, upload the execution code, data and download results.
Tomas Barina and Patrik Lenart work on NoSQL databases. Patrik is looking at Cassandra and Hadoop and Tomas at MongoDB, Couchdb and Riak. Both are using the databases to store emails handling terabytes of data. The databases and email processing (qmail) will run on a cluster of 10 servers with sufficient size of disc space.
With Vojta Novak we try to develop a web application using gData API. We are looking at ways how to cluster users contacts on a Google Apps domain. The simplest clustering may be based on company affiliation. First, we will use tags, next email addresses. But there are many other possibilities to cluster contacts, emails, documents, calendars etc.
Michal Zima works in the field of business processes. The focus is again on SaaS approach. Currently, we are analyzing existing web applications.
Finally, Filip is in. As of tomorrow, he is my first doctoral student. He is starting to work on Rapid Application Tools for web design. See my previous blogs.
We've all heard the phrase "grow or die. We have to grow not only bigger but smarter too. Therefor watch this blog. I'll be looking for students interested in a doctoral position in the field of cloud computing. Especially, I am looking for candidates interested in cloud infrastructure, large DBs, security etc. In the nearest future I will post a doctoral position description.
To conclude, I have started several projects in the Cloud Computing while building traction, getting more people to an „active mode“. To keep the momentum and motivate the students we need to create for us a new home. We are starting the Cloud Computing Center.

eClub first landmark

2011-02-24T07:53:00.000+01:00

Radovan Janecek, VP, Software Engineering at CA Technologies presented the Systinet case study yesterday. Great presentation! We had about 40 folks for the show. We spent the time before 6:00pm discussing projects. First teams are being formed. We have also reached the first landmark. Our eClub home page crossed the 1000 page views threshold.

RAD tools

2011-02-23T11:00:00.000+01:00

In the last blog I have praised the Fakturoid application for creating invoices on cloud. In the mean time I found that one of my students works for a startup company blueberryapps.com. Their web is in English and that's great they have global focus. The web is really minimalistic even in the number of web pages, but they have an active blog (Czech). Probably, their major business is web hosting, see the webpage - very nice name (zoo). What is the relation to Fakturoid? They have a very similar application BillApp. Based on the blog description, it has been created as a byproduct. What is interesting? It is written also in Ruby on Rails. The XML or JSON REST API, thanks to RoR, is ready.
With this blog I'd like to point out an emerging trend in the Czech Rep, popularity of RoR. The 37signals and their philosophy for creating web apps and running startup is gaining great popularity. Many of the small startups are adopting their approach. Many are also using other 37signals products, for example bootcamp to organize development.
There are other rapid web application development tools competitors, such as Spring Roo or Grails. Check it out. For Java edicts Roo provides very quick way for starting a CRUD application. It provides basic scaffolding similarly as RoR. What more it is easy to use GWT as a front end and deploy it on Google (AppEngine).
The conclusion is that all these RAD tools provide an excellent starting point for developing custom CRUD applications for SMB in a systematic way in MVC model with REST API. Consider help-desks, CRM, timesheets, business trip recording, project management etc. In the simplest form there are two parts to these apps: administration and list of items. To develop these to perfection takes a lot of efforts and time, but with RAD tools to get the skeleton is a snap. Give it a try.

Fakturoid

2011-02-18T18:12:00.003+01:00

Last week I have met Jan Korbel and Lukáš Konarovský the authors of the famous Fakturoid application. They are big fans of Ruby on Rails, and they have a sense for clean and simple web design. They took advantage of their skills and designed a nifty application. I like the minimalistic graphical design with green buttons, btw. - my favorite color. I like the layout, very simple and easy to go around. Most of all, I like the Faktoruoid architecture. It is an example of the cloud approach. Cloud has many advantages. No need to download and install any files, there is no upfront investment, you just register. Your data is stored in the cloud you can access it from any place, any time and any device with a browser. You pay for the usage as you go, once you are bored and want to upgrade you just stop paying and start to use something different. Ruby on Rails is easy and quick for development and provides a clean REST API separating the server and client.
Yes, the data is in the cloud, somewhere on the Internet. Yes, you may ask a question how vulnerable is the data, what is the procedure to backup the data on my machine, what is the SLA, meaning what is the guarantied up time, RPO, RTO, what will happened if Fakturoid disappears etc. and these are valid questions. The same set of questions applies to many cloud apps today and I am not going to answer them. I think, we just need to strike a balance between the value of the data and the benefits of the application. Different users with different needs will answer differently. I am a believer of cloud and I suppose, cloud will evolve and provide solutions for many different requirements. As of today, I wish Fakturoid all the best, I like it. Let’s hope we see more of these. I’ll keep you updated ….

eClub first meeting

2011-02-17T19:24:00.003+01:00

we have met for the first time in the eClub last night. I have described what is the motivation, how we will meet and what are the benefits. Our sponsor Ondrej Bartos from Credo Ventures followed with a short contribution and good jokes. The whole meeting was recorded. Check out eClub web site, as soon as the video processing is finished we will publish it. While on the eClub web make a registration, please. We can better inform you about all the benefits. The start was solid and I am looking for the next meeting presented by Radovan Janecek today CA VP. With Roman Stanek they started and sold Systinet, great story. All of you who have not made it to the first meeting you are welcome to meet us next Wednesday. Try to compete for the best prototype proposal and win the trip to Silicon Valley incubator.

eClub lectures

2011-02-15T09:16:00.003+01:00

Here is the plan for the first six lectures in the eclub:

16.2. Jan Sedivy, CVUT FEL - What is eClub, what will you learn, what can you get
23.2. Radovan Janecek, VP, Software Engineering at CA Technologies. Sistinet case study, from one man startup to exit.
2.3. Petr Koubsky, IT Market Analyst, Supply isn't demand, project isn't product - how to turn an innocent passer-by into user and user into customer.
9.3. Ondrej Bartos, Credo Ventures - How to build a successful start up. How to win the competition for the best entrepreneurial idea, who and how are we going to select the winners.
16.3. Lucie Havlickova, Pesronal Development CZ, s.r.o. How to do a presentation
23.3. Projects presentation - first round (Max 10Min), Lucie Havlíčková consulting

REST

2011-02-13T10:34:00.002+01:00

I am preparing a lecture about Cloud Computing and I came across an interesting video about the Google APIs architecture, it is almost one year old - Google IO 10, but worth to see. The video is describing the advantages and also the problems of REST. Google suggests the partial data operations and multiple read write formats. Next section is describing how REST gets awkward; when you need for example to rotate a picture in Picasa server. You need to request the data, process the data and send it back, resulting in two transfers. The traffic can be reduced by augmenting REST with custom verbs. Google will support in parallel the REST and JSON RPC styles in parallel giving the designer the choice. The video is also describing Google approach to make the APIs libraries up to date using dynamic discovery. A sample coding session is presented at the end. Very interesting stuff inspiring to many discussions, check it out.

Eucalyptus private cloud at CVUT

2011-02-12T10:02:00.005+01:00

Summer semester starts on Monday, therefore our cloud experiments will move to nights. Thanks to Tomas and Dan the Eucalyptus private cloud software is installed and running in the class room 132. The grub dual boot software allows luanching Windows after computers power on and waking them up over etherwake and reboot cloud sw at 8:00PM. Eucalyptus runs on a special version of Debian. The Cloud controller and Walrus (storage service) are running on a larger server virtualized under VMware with access to RAID storage. The basic system works, we can launch EMI’s (Eucaliptus Machine Image), this is Eucalyptus equivalent of AWS AMI. We can stop them, we can do the very basic house keeping. The idea is to use the computers to run heavy-duty number crunching for the Computer Machine Perception group. We need to write a small application to push the computational tasks to a queue during the day and let them run at night. The next step is write a small control web app to make this easy. We work on a similar problem in AWS (josin). Who has some know-how with these apps? We need testers ...

First eClub press references

2011-02-12T09:32:00.001+01:00

The eClub is starting announcements appeared on the local (Czech) developers portals. Root, vyvojar, devlogy.

Do you use Chrome?

2011-02-09T21:47:00.000+01:00

Do you work on Mac? Do you know Dropbox? Check out a Textmate like lightweight programmer's text editor right inside of Chrome. It saves files directly to Dropbox, so if you have the Dropbox sync software installed, the changes will appear locally

Status report - eClub

2011-02-08T13:52:00.000+01:00

our sponsor Credo Ventures is throwing the first price to our eClub competition. They will award one of the top three teams with a stay in an incubator in Silicon Valley, great! The CVUT Media Lab experts helped me to successfully set the web domain and mapped the Google apps on it to start our portal. This will be the center point of information for all who will join the club. We will publish the presentations, we plan to take video recordings, we will run there a discussion group, you will get there information about the next presenter etc. Stay tuned, I will inform you as soon as we kick it off.

E-Club

2011-01-25T17:55:00.000+01:00

I have been giving classes in an Internet Apps Development course in the last semester. In fact, it was a little test. I have asked students to develop proposals for a small application with a commercial potential. They have prepared presentations and implemented prototypes. I think, they enjoyed a new approach: walking through the Cloud Computing technology, SaaS and prototype development. I also was surprised with the quality and number of good-looking prototypes. This has motivated me to go bigger. I have decided to start an Entrepreneurs Club and repeat almost the same but focus more on how to start real business. Our students, I believe, have a good technical background but do not have the guts and knowledge to go to the market. We have to fix it. Tomorrow is the day, keep the fingers crossed, I am meeting with an important group of investors asking them to support our effort. If all goes well we’ll get prize money for the best prototype proposal competition, which we will launch end of May. The first price is three months stay Silicon Valley incubator. Stay tuned for the next messages …

Welcome Filip

2011-01-23T11:46:00.000+01:00

A friend of mine Filip Kolarik was admitted for the PhD program in my group. Certainly, he is a cloud-computing fan and I am looking forward to work with him. His major topic will be the RAD tools for cloud based web design. There are many we have played with. Now, we would like to start with deeper and more precise analysis. The current goal of the work is to design set of tools and platforms for fast authoring of web applications.

CTU virtualization

2011-01-19T09:59:00.000+01:00

There are several computer classrooms in our buildings at CTU Karlovo namesti. The computers are used by students throughout the day, but they are idling at night. The CPM group does research in image processing and all their experiments are very computationally and memory intensive. How to take advantage of the at night idling computers for scientific computation? There are several ways how to make the computers available while making sure the current set up for education, data and operating systems are intact. Our approach is virtualization and cloud computing. To start the project we have decided to proceed safely creating new partition and use dual boot. This will preserve the current computers settings and let us use the new partition for the cloud software and virtualization. The partition job has been done this week. The plan is to test two different virtualization approaches VMware and Eucalyptus. WMware tools will let us manage virtualized images on many computers in cluster. Similarly works the open source Eucalyptus. The WMware uses the XEN and Eucalyptus the KVN and others. Both will allow us to manage and run many different tasks. Next, we will start installing the system. Stay tuned for the next report.

Peter is coming

2010-12-03T14:11:00.000+01:00

The super star between programmers Peter Kukol is coming to Prague Czech Technical University. He will give a presentation about Cloud OS and VMware. Peter works for VMware US. All of you are welcomed to join us on Thursday, Dec 9th at CVUT Karlovo namesti 13 at 9:15 am. Peter is an old friend and I am looking forward to hear about the latest technology and the latest jokes too.

Cloudy week

2010-11-26T15:16:00.000+01:00

I felt like in clouds this week. I joined three presentations and all of them were about cloud computing. All three were indicating and predicting the new cloud-computing trend, the advantage of the economy of scale. Large number of computers managed by relatively small staff, the elasticity, the capability to scale on demand. Great applications shared by many small companies and charged per use, no upfront payment, with fast and for the user invisible improvements. Gartner, other analysts and technologists predictions are clear: move to cloud or perish.

It started on Monday morning with Gartner and EMC joined presentation. In the Gartner presentation Jana Ridziova has pointed out the trends and risks of cloud computing. She also gave some interesting numbers. The main message: IT technology is becoming massively scalable, standardized and offered as a service. Many companies will get rid of their IT infrastructure and will use the SaaS.

The next presentation by Sanjay Mirchandani a CIO of EMS can be easily characterized: virtualize, virtualize, virtualize. No wonder EMC owns 80% of the X86 virtualization leader VMware. But frankly, the most important point was the savings EMC achieved by virtualizing 70% of the company. The realized benefits are $12M in power and space, $74M in the data center equipment, 170% in data storage and admin productivity, and 34% increase in power efficiency. These are great numbers and we have to learn out of them.

Steven Willmott, the CEO of 3scale networks has visited the CTU on Wednesday. His presentation has been inspired by the Wired article “The Web Is Dead. Long Live the Internet”. He has been arguing that the web has changed from the static HTML pages to a set of API supporting wide range of functionality for different devices. He has been showing some of the cloud technologies used in his company. His talks were presented to students and overall they received comprehensive breakdown of the new wave of Internet technologies.

The Google Developer Day 2010, Prague

2010-11-17T22:18:00.000+01:00

The Google Developer Day was started as last year by Eric presenting the main topics: HTML 5, Cloud and Android. He started showing simple snippets of HTML 5 code to access disk files, to support drag and drop. Most impressive was a code keeping text on screen horizontal while tilting the notebook. This is a very handy feature for mobile devices. He has shown two impressive 2D and 3D graphics in HTML 5 running inside a browser. There are many browsers including mobile supporting HTML 5 except of the IE, but it still will take some time before we see more HTML 5 applications.
Eric has introduced the enterprise App Engine, which is in its preview version supporting the BigQeury and Prediction APIs. The famous Mapreduce will be also soon available. Great, Google will make these technologies available to programmers. We also have seen a great presentation of a rapid application development tool Roo. It has been developed by Spring owned by VMware. Roo allows development of web application and launch it on many different platforms including the App Engine.
One the fastest growing product is the Android operating system. There are 200k new Androids activated each day. The Android Market is offering more than 100k of applications today.
The whole Google developer gathering was very inspiring. Google Apps, the App Engine, Androig and Chrome are a very strong combination for creating complex and exciting cloud applications. They are putting Google to the leaders in the cloud computing.

Steven Willmott - Presentation

2010-11-15T11:09:00.000+01:00

Steven Willmott is the CEO of 3scale networks - an API infrastructure provider based in Barcelona, Spain, London UK and Sunnyvale California.
3scale provides tools and services to companies opening APIs to partners and developers and helps them reach their audiences.
Abstract: Wired Magazine's incendiary article on the 'Death of the Web' may have used some questionable reasoning but underlined how quickly the structure of the Web and the Internet are changing. One of the biggest factors of change is in how companies delivering services and content are re-orientating their offerings around Web Services and APIs in order to server partners and users in new ways - making HTML websites just one of the many channels for creating Web/Internet experiences. While this trend still has much to play out, in this talk we'll cover trends, examples and changes that are already visible and guess at how they might play out in the future.

When: Wednesday Nov 24, 18:00
Where: Dejvice (T2:C3-337)

Cloud computing and it's impact on IT society

2010-11-15T11:04:00.000+01:00

Sanjay Mirchandani, Senior Vice President and Chief Information Officer, EMC Corporation will share his 6 years of experience building and running private cloud, the core technology for internal data center of worldwide IT leader EMC. He will speak about the main enablers of the cloud technology like VMware virtualization tools and data center hardware resources. He will present the best practices and the business drivers generally adopted by leading IT companies today.

EMC Corporation (NYSE: EMC) is a U.S. Fortune 500 and S&P 500 provider of information infrastructure systems, software and services. It is headquartered in Hopkinton, Massachusetts, USA. Its flagship product are the Symmetrix, VMware and RSA.

Date Monday 22. 11. 2010 at 13:00 Location building E, Karlovo náměstí 13, room: KN:E-301.

2010-10-25T17:08:00.000+02:00

Eilif Trondsen, Strategic Business Insights

Eilif Trondsen from Strategic Business Insights was the second speaker on our tour in Silicon Valley. SBI is a consulting comapany, they work for their customers to identify new opportunities based on emerging technology. There are several programs focused on different details. SCAN program is an intelligent tool to realize the early symptoms of a change in the industry. It is interesting to find out how they do it. The following picture depicts the process, look here.

50-75 employees of SPI are sending two paragraphs long abstracts every month. Abstracts shortly describe something interesting they read, thought or saw. Contributors wear several heads, they are specialists in different markets or technologies. A filtering process at number of levels is narrowing down the ideas. Its is a time consuming process, Eilif reads abstracts on Sundays. In the next stage they meet with 20 – 25 analysts and some clients to do a pattern recognition clustering across different areas. They try to understand and point out why is the cluster interesting. There are people with different specialization politicians, economists, technologists, anthropologists etc. The variety of skills is bringing together many different opinions and views enabling to discover new combinations and see them differently. The result of this process are signals: faint signals of change, discontinuities, inflection points, disruption technologies, outliers, unconventional signals.
There is no guarantee in their research, but the have a very pragmatic metric: the customers are the signal of the quality. If the information is not valuable for them they would not pay. The clients feedback is also a very valuable for improving or altering the research.
Their main customers are SMBs, they do not have easy access to this kind of information. Governments also buy the know-how to look at disruptive technologies and to help their SMBs. EU Science Park use it for analyzing start-ups opportunities. Japanese look at global perspective they are coming to SBI and let them do the market analysis if the results are the same as their own they invest mbugs. SBI has also done some work done for Norwegian government.
I am sure the Czech SMBs, start ups and research institutes including government will greatly benefit from this kind of information to focus their work in the right future direction too.

2010-10-24T18:24:00.000+02:00

Some more comments, SRI meeting

As the previos written for my students.

This is the second part of my report from Emil Wang’s presentation about SRI international, venture capitalists and start ups.

Before we continue let me review some basics. First venture web definition is: venture is a speculation, an investment that is very risky but could yield great profits. This is what venture capitalists (VC) do, they invest to startups. Venture is for them a process of a value creation. Alas, venture is very risky, only few of the startups turn to be prosperous companies. The trick is to invest to the right companies.

Here we continue.

Emil suggested that venture is not driven by technology. Universities have created lot of intellectual property (IP) but did not create the jobs; therefore professors will never get funded. They are too technology driven. SRI recruits experts to run the venture, company. Who is most likely to be funded? SRI and VC’s in general are focusing on successful entrepreneurs who have already been funded. VCs invest to people, they trust people with good judgment. They trust the people not the technology.

Bad news 1: Location, location, location

The only way you will be funded is if you stay no more than 20 miles from Menlo Park, where all the major VCs are located. If you are not here you will be at least 6 months behind the market, research and technology. Second, you have to stay in touch. The major (Google, HP, Oracle, …) companies are next door and this means you can network to know what is going on.

Bad news 2: The idea for venture is in market and competitive research

Researchers, geeks and technologists ask how cool is their technology. The better thing is to ask: what is your market, who is your customer, what is the value for your customer. SRI answer is methodically guided innovation process five disciplines of innovation 5DoI. The advice: the researcher needs to understand what his market is, what the value is for the customer. This should be a starting point.

Good news: Cooperate

Emil and many other think that the best single model to start bio tech, clean tech, IT or high tech companies in general is starting to cooperate. Emil’s advice is do not compete leverage. This is the process SRI is proposing, network with people, work together, develop relations, and collaborate.

Conclusion

I would like to finish with the Emil’s formulation of the SRI mission: There are lots of research institutes and they have different goals. SRIs main purpose is to help the society and boost the economic development.

Great, it was an exciting presentation summarizing modern view on creating the technology and innovation to impact our society. We must learn from his words and start acting.

2010-10-24T18:15:00.000+02:00

First report from sunny California

Originally I have written this for the “Otevrena Informatika” blog. Since my friends wanted my notes, I am putting it on my fresh new blog.

Those of you who are not taking the OI-VIA course may not know, but I am visiting sunny California this week. The weather is very hot for the season, 25-30C. The entrepreneurial spirit is even hotter. I have met excellent people. I came with other coleuses. Lenka from Czech Invest organized for us visits in several institutions, corporations and Stanford University, thank you Lenka, great job. First we have visited the SRI international Research institute originated by the Stanford University in 1946. SRI is a non-profit independent research institute focusing on projects funded mainly from the government. FYI: Mouse has been developed at SRI, and then transferred to Xerox Park. The first message over the network was sent from UCLA to SRI.

Emil Wang gave the first presentation and it was great, very inspiring. Emil is a consultant for SRI and owner of several start ups. The key for SRI is innovation and they approach it very systematically in a much formalized way. The main concept is described in the book: Innovation: The Five Disciplines for Creating What Customers Want [Hardcover] Curtis R. Carlson (Author), William W. Wilmot (Author). Highly recommended!

Emil has conveyed several interesting thoughts. SRI strives to find how is research impacting society, how to make the Earth a better place for living. We were surprised they do not measure the success by number of published articles, but how many new jobs were created, how much money they have generated.

SRI is constantly collecting information from employees for interesting business ideas. Emil is on the board deciding which of these to support. They collect 1000 ideas a year and select about 10. Selected ideas get $10-20k NOT to prove the technology. NOT to make a pilot. NOT to make the prototype, but to create a market study. Find what is the market opportunity, who is the customers, what is the value for customers. The venture concept is not driven by technology. Too bad for us technologist, but that is the fact. We have to work on real problems not on interesting “crossword battles”.

There were many other interesting ideas in the talk, but I will conclude with quoting Emil saying “Do not compete with Silicon Valley cooperate“. I think this a general statement; we all should stick to it especially at the university.

And I am concluding with inviting you for discussion and questions.