Looking Back, Looking Forward
So, only a few days into the new year and I'm already late writing this.
2010 was frankly a brilliant year for Arun & myself. We launched stuff, and we saw that it was good. Looking back at our heady 9 week sprint to take Gameplan from nothing to product was super productive. Now it may not have been the soaraway success we had hoped for, but it does what it says it does and technically is probably the proudest I've ever been of anything.
The future of Gameplan lies in a 'pivot' (ugh, dreadful startup cliche ahoy!) we need to work out a better way of attracting users, in short we built something useful for people who don't know they need it.
We also built our first (and Arun's second) iOS app, Today's News a Guardian iPhone App. We subsequently launched a major improvement, a version for iPhone as well as iPad and implementing Apple's iAds. Today's News is as much an experiment as it is a money making venture (just as well given the performance of banner ads!) but we have thousands of users every day who find the app as useful as I personally do. So that's awesome.
We finished the year taking on a contracting role at ViKi, working alongside the development team there and a micro-army of Pivots. It's been good to broaden our pairing partners and simply by working with a talented group of people on the rewrite of a high traffic site has been enlightening. We also launched with little to no problem and after ironing out some minor bugs (only to be expected!) over the first two weeks we have an average response time of under 150ms and that's not even including pages served from the high-speed cache.
If I'm allowed I may write in more detail about what we're using at ViKi, if not I can probably just write a bit more generically about the tools we've used in the process, without incurring the wrath of any NDAs!
The next year holds many excitements. We have a few more weeks at ViKi, I'm doing some interesting consulting work with Paul G and we may have a big announcement in the next few weeks about our future plans. Oh plus there's going to be a Ruby Conference in April in Singapore with top international speakers, you'll want to come.
