I feel like we are going back in time. Instead of Microsoft and Google taking Open Source to the top, Apple, is taking everything back 20 years. It feels like all the advancement in the industry is lost. Microsoft is definitely loosing relevance, but Google might still be able to pull it off.

I am a big fan of Larry Page, but mostly of Sergey Brin. Their vision makes sense. It is a strategy of business with freedom. They might not be as ‘not-evil’ as they used to be, but the ideals are still there.

Sergey Brin did an interview where he spoke about the open web. How the current ecosystem is becoming too closed. Companies like Google, Yahoo, eBay, and Amazon would not be able to survive in this environment. Even thought Sergey mentions governments as part of the problem, I believe the problem is concentrated on the companies inside the industry. It has become a monopoly-friendly ecosystem. The industry and the government have not been able to set protections for another Microsoft to rise. And the problem is, it already has, and this time is going to be worse. It is Apple.

Nobody notices what is going on in the industry right now. How can a closed ecosystem exist in this era, where open source, freedom and open apis coexist ? It makes me think that maybe freedom is not that important. Comments like this one, make me think that even people I respect are blind to the situation.

The comment is missing the whole point. It is open because NOT ONLY Google can search through it and sell ads against it, in fact is not the only one. It is not about how Google dominates the search market. Because the biggest difference is that Google can be beaten any time by a worthy competitor, Apple can’t. Apple created its own ecosystem, effectively locking out competition. Only Apple can decide what happens in the App Store and in their devices. Google, actually provides a service, which works in the open. Google hasn’t been beaten, not because is the only one that can search through content and sell ads against it, it is because Google does it better.

I believe it is stupid how many people think Apple products are perfect, and lack the understanding that even thought they are quality products, they are on par with the industry. We have been hearing about how Macs are invulnerable to viruses. That idea is not only wrong, is naive. Macs are more vulnerable than Windows. Microsoft has been really good lately at securing the operating system. It is still not perfect but it is way better than Macs.

It seems Apple solution to security is lockdown. They seem to be taking MacOS to a model just like iOS, where only apps from the App store can be installed. They believe that the way to security is removal of freedom.

Segey Brin added more comments this morning through his Google+ account. He focuses more on governments, and leaves Apple and Facebook out of the picture. And even thought I agree with Sergey that governments have too much power now over the internet, I still think the main threat comes from companies like Apple and Facebook.

The whole idea of Freedom is what brought me to create iKnode. I call it my Black Pearl. When we started we saw all these companies like Parse, Kinvey and Stackmob focusing on mobile, specially iOS. And after the market analysis, it does makes sense. But we strongly believe in the Web and the future of it for organizations and software developers; so we put all of our efforts in the Web. We still consider mobile as part of our business model, but the Web is our primary focus.

I believe in the power of freedom, and I believe it is in the web. It is not about opening your source code, it is about allowing innovation to happen freely, and to be able to create an ecosystem where my daughter can be able  to create the next Google.

MongoDB stores data using BSON, which is a superset of JSON. While testing, we needed to set the default Database state to run our tests, we encountered a couple of problems while serializing C# code into JSON.

We followed these considerations to transform C# code so that it could be embedded in a JSON string:

• Convert Tabs to Spaces. (In Emacs you can do this with the M-x untabify command)
• Escape carrier returns (\n -> \\n) (In emacs yo ucan do this by replacing C-qj with \\n)
• Escape double qoutes (” -> \”).

The next things we did was validate the resulting JSON. You can do this with a web JSON Formatter like CuriousConcept’s JSON Formatter. We tried others like JSONLint, but the only one that gave us a detailed error description was CuriousConcept’s JSON Formatter.

In the end we now have C# code in a JSON store. Hope this helps anyone trying to do store c-like type code.

We just posted the iKnode’s team position on the SOPA outcome, you can read about it here.

It is good to see we can still make a difference.

I enjoy Tweeter very much. I can’t say I fully understand their current business model (if there is one), but it is a fun add-on in my life. With these new changes, I see a Business Model and also a service that could become the center of focus not only an addition. This new path clashes in direct competition with Google+ (primarily) and with Facebook.

Twitter now is a worthy competitor of my time against Google+ and Facebook, and this makes it all very exciting. I am eager to see the new Twitter.

Additionally, since all I can think of lately is iKnode, I began to focus on the validity  of our vision, specially looking at it as clear as the new Twitter (or at least it seems to be clear), or as fuzzy as the current one. iKnode’s whole vision is based on the three basic aspects that make a Back-end system:

1. Application Execution
2. Data Storage
3. Task Scheduling

As we add functionality, iKnode has been growing complex and that has been reflected in the UI. That is exactly why we are taking the time to make it more friendly.

After we published the new UI, I compared it with past releases and I thought the evolution has been amazing, so I decided to put the UIs in a post. Without further ado, here there are starting from the first UI:

Version 0.8

Version 1.0

Version 1.1

Version 1.5

The story begins in 2003 when I was doing my dissertation for my master. I was working for a model to mine data from Data-warehouses to create a knowledge base using Frames and Protegé. I created an engine to do the transformation and mining, at the time I called it IKnow. It was a single engine that only analyzed, and extracted the data to create Ontology classes.

After a couple of years I got interested in distributed systems, and I made the engine run in a distributed fashion and interact with other engines. They could learn to do things, teach others and perform tasks. I figured that code is knowledge. If I wanted the engines to be able to learn and talk to each other they would have to have a common language. I decided to use C# for that. Now I had multiple nodes running on different machines, and I decided to call each node an IKnode. The product as a whole was still called IKnow.

After talking to a friend back in 2006, he mentioned that the name IKnode sounded more interesting than IKnow.  After some consideration I changed the name and the name space of the code. I even bought the  domain. In this same talk, it also came out that for IKnode to be useful you needed a whole team of nodes to perform tasks. And I mentioned to him, jokingly, “There is no I in IKnode”. And then I thought: “But there is an I in IKnode”. And that struck a chord. I thought: “the I is not important, so let’s make it a lower case I”. And that is how the name came to be iKnode. The only letter that is upper case in the name is the K. Which is the whole purpose of the project: Knowledge.

It is interesting to remember how far iKnode has traveled, and how it has grown. I feel like a proud father right now. :D

It has been a difficult couple of months getting to this point. It was sad, that we were not accepted as YCombinator alumni, but we are not doing this for money or fame. We are doing it for freedom. iKnode is our blackpearl.

If you are interested in checking out iKnode go to iKnode.com and register. If you want to checkout iKnode in action go to our youtube channel. Additionally follow @iknode on twitter.

Here are some screenshots from iKnode’s Command Center application:

I started writing a reply to the dicussions and eveything just shifted. Instead of focusing on the article I started to notice how blessed I was to be a part of the iKnode team. I noticed that my reply was not in the spirit of the dicussion, so I cut my comment from HN’s pasted on Emacs, and just posted the following the comment:

I love the article. Thanks for sharing. I have been there before and it sucks.
I think the biggest take-away for me was this line: “early on, it’s about commitment, honesty, and trust.”
And that is why I decided to embark on an startup adventure with my best friends.

It sums up what I am feeling at the moment and it stays in the same direction of the dicussion. I still felt that I had to write about what I think about our team, so I decided to make it a blog post:

These kind of problems is why I decided to go with my best friends to open a startup. I have tried doing a startup before, but I picked my partners by what kind of expertise they could bring to the table. The fact is that, even thought we were a great group of individuals with a great background, we were never a team. We were just that, a group of individuals. Obviously that failed miserably.

Now, with iKnode, I have made better choices. My best friends from Mexico. We all come from different backgrounds and our expertise is very different. But we do have somethings in common: We love to learn, we are obsessed with books and we know how to integrate and work toghether. This doesn’t mean we don’t collide; we do. We just always find a way to solve conflicts.

The fact is: They will always cover my back and I will cover theirs. On our own we are really not that spectacular, but together We are just magnificent.

I have had really bad experiences before too. I have been let down by very smart people who seem to be in the same mindset you have, but then realize we don’t stand each other. The fact is that even thought a team might look so promising because of the knowledge and experience they hold, their execution might not live up to expectations. Having a team, that doesn’t “Know” everything, but knows how to learn is more important, and it is often successful.

What I have learned so far, is that “Knowing” something is really not that important, the capacity to “Learn” fast is. In this article, looking for a CTO that already “Knows” everything you need, is great, but for us is not required. I would focus on trust first.

We tend to look more for general problem solvers, just like ourselves. People that just tackle the problems they are faced with. If we have the knowledge, great, but it doesn’t stop us.

In short, I think when embarking on an startup adventure, choose the people that you would be willing to give your life for, because you probably will.

It seems the problem is that users are not happy with the release of Final Cut Pro X, an application usedby professional to edit videos and movies. The biggest problem seems to be the lack of features but also the changes in the UI. I am not a user of the application so I can’t really judge. What tihs post is about is Tribes, and how Apple’s tribe makes every single difference in how users perceive changes.

If you read through the news about the topic, there are a lot of bad comments, and the reviews of the application in the App Store are in cases extremely rude. This happened before though, to another company named Microsoft. When Microsoft came out with Windows Vista, their flagship operating system, it was a real backlash, the biggest that anybody has seen in the industry. Even today, Windows Vista is synonymous with Inestability and Failure.

Windows Vista was not a bad product at all, it was actually a great “improvement” in everything, from security to Graphic Design. Innovating in so many things. The problem with Vista was that it forced users to change. The operating system required user to change the way the do things, specially with security. Vista was the right step towards a better operating system, but it wasn’t there yet. Vista was “a true ground-up rewrite with the intention of laying a solid foundation for the long-term future”.

If you read the post by John Grubber, that is exactly what he says about Final Pro X. He mentioned making an analogy of initial Mac OS X with Final Cut Pro X:

“..a true ground-up rewrite with the intention of laying a solid foundation for the long-term future, but, in the short term, lots of missing features and frustrating changes compared to what current users were accustomed..”

This seems a lot like the situation with Vista. The biuggest difference is the tribe. Gruber’s article makes it sound like it is ok for Apple to do this kind of thing, because in the end it may be a better fundamental concept. He also adds:

“This ground-up rewrite may well have been the right thing to do.”

Other comments include:

“Great design, like great music, is almost always foreign at first, if not disturbingly strange. You have to spend time with it. But if it is great, and if you invest your attention, it will change the way you look at the world.” (link).

Robert Scoble mentioned:

“I don’t care what the pros say, I love Apple’s new Final Cut Pro. Agree with @gruber on the topic. Great companies piss off users sometimes.” (link).

I guess Microsoft is a great company, but what is the difference between Microsoft and Apple? This is a big difference in attitute from the Vista backlash. The difference is the tribe. Apple’s tribe accept what the tribe leader does, and even supports it. I don’t really have anything against the Apple tribe, I just think this is really interesting. All critics agreed back then that Vista was the best thing that Microsoft could do, and it was also a step in the right direction. I don’t doubt Final Cut Pro X is also a step in the right direction.

The reaction is very different from waht Microsoft experienced. I guess Microsoft should start listening more to Seth Gooding. Success is not only about making great products, it is about creating a trust with its users. This is really what tribes are good for.

Define the word ‘Success’. Is it success to be on time and on budget which what we originally planned? If that is the case, then yes, all of the fix bid projects have gone like that for me. The problem is in the definition of Success. It is just like the definition of ‘Done’.

For those who don’t know what a Fix Bid means: It means that a project’s estimation, cost and requirements are all fixed since the beginning. Everything else becomes a change request. Of course, being real, some requirements can be changed without incurring additional cost.

So getting back to the discussion. All the problem resides in the definitions. My definition of a success is when the customer gets her problem resolved. To the fullest extent. My Success is not when I get paid.

The real truth is that companies don’t know in detail what they want. They can sit down and draw images and write big requirements documents, spending millions of dollars in the process. The only way to get Companies to resolve their problems is to do it incrementally. Once Stakeholders start visualizing the end product, ideas start flowing and the REAL requirements come forth.

With Fix Bid projects, this process doesn’t work. Because requirements need to be created before hand, there is no room for change. And you can try and estimate change. But in my experience, estimation is a failed effort if it is done for a period longer than a month. Even the most experienced ones suck at estimation. The reason is simple: Defining the distant future with certainty is not one of our abilities. It just gets too complex to estimate on top of layers that are not built yet. So if we can make mistakes estimating a single task, imagine that scaled to a project estimation.

Of course experienced managers, estimate with a big Risk factor. But even with that, projects go out of budget and out of time. And both parties are left unhappy.  What you are estimating in a Fix Bid project is RISK not the final product. For me that is a failure. The priorities are not in the correct order.

I know a lot of people pay attention to Risk, but for me Risk is a side effect, which can be minimized considerably if you do incremental and iterative development. Each or both ways work.

Doing a project one Sprint at a time, works better. Requirements get cleared for a period of two weeks (approx) and they get implemented. At the end of the sprint the changes are planned for the next release. And continue this way. This reduces risk and in my experience it is also cheaper. The Risk factor is not added to the Budget, and the best thing of all is that the problem is resolved. This doesn’t mean, in anyway that there are no estimates in place for the overall project. They still exists, but they only provide focus and direction. They can be changed.

I understand that there are places where Fix Bid works, but in all projects I have worked, Fix Bid has never been a good idea. Fix Bid projects tend to become Death Marches.

Just to close my rant, I read this in a comment, and I believe it describes what fix bid is:

“The good thing about the fixed bid is that we could possibly make more money, unless something went wrong.” (Link)

Fix Bid is good for the development company, unless something goes wrong of course which usually happens, and then the client gets charged for the risk. If the client is not happy in the end, then a project is a failure for me. Even if I created what I said I would, and I charged them only what I said I would. On budget, on time and according to initial requirements, for me have no value if the solution doesn’t live to expectations.