Nestoria Blog

The Silicon Milkroundabout is a two day hiring bonanza taking place this weekend, May 11th and 12th. The Saturday is focussed on Product and the Sunday is all about Engineering. Historically the venue has always been in East London, and this year is no different: we’ll be at The Old Truman Brewery on Brick Lane. Good news for us, a short taxi ride from the Lokku offices from whence we’ll be hefting some iMacs and such for our pitch.

We currently have a Web Developer role open, so we will be attending on the Sunday only. We’ll be competing with and collaborating with 120 or so other top UK startups who are all looking for the best engineering talent they can find. As part of my tactics when choosing our Tier 2 pitch location I managed to get one next to a Tier 1 “big money” company, my hope being that a) they will bring people over to our side of the room, and b) they will be good fun to talk to. Looking forward to finding out who our neighbours will be.

This isn’t our first Silicon Milkroundabout. We actually attended the very first event way back in May of 2011. It was a hectic but extremely fun day, and that was only 30 companies in total. My mind is boggled by the idea of 120 startups!

We have a pretty good track record though: we did successfully hire at the last SMR we attended, and I’m happy to say that Savio is going to be joining me to see what things are like from the other side of the table on Sunday. He will be our secret weapon - as a previous job-seeking attendee of the Milkroundabout he’ll know just what to say to tempt people over to our pitch. And if that doesn’t work we’ll have bowls of candy or something :-)

Hope to see you there! Please do drop by our table and say hi, and if you’re interested in becoming a Web Developer for Nestoria get in touch!

Today we continue our blog interview series with a discussion with Luke Razzell, a London based entrepreneur who likes the team here at Nestoria works in the realm of aggregation. Luke is the founder of Wiiv, a service that helps address the issue of “cloud sprawl” by making it quick and easy for you find your files across several web-based services. 

As well as co-directing and designing Wiiv, Luke directs design consultancy Weaver Digital, where he works with startups and established brands to create amazing digital experiences in complex business areas. He counts playing the piano and speaking Japanese amongst his interests.

Thanks for speaking with us Luke.

1. What is Wiiv? What problem does it solve? Who is the target audience?

Have you ever cursed as you trawl through old emails and nested folders for those files you need for a document, presentation, task or discussion? Or wished you could get a simple, intuitive overview of a project across the various cloud services you, your team and your collaborators use?

If you work collaboratively online, you probably don’t have the luxury of spending your work time on non-productive tasks. You already have way much to do as it is!

Surely the cloud was meant to simplify collaboration, not make it harder? Yet as the cloud continues to expand - and fragment - with ever more storage and productivity services, online collaborators are finding the cloud’s promise of simplifying their workflow to be an elusive one.

That’s where Wiiv comes in.

Right now money is tight. Charitable giving in the UK has dropped by £800million since in the recession. There has been a 10% reduction in headcount within the third sector (charities, non-profits and social enterprises), and the majority of the government spending cuts (£3.3+ billion) haven’t even started. To survive, charities and social enterprises are going to need to access new forms of talent and expertise. And that’s where GoodPeople comes in.

GoodPeople.co.uk makes it easy for charities and social enterprises to connect with the right people. Think of our site as a LinkedIn for Good. Our mission is to build community that is driven by a genuine desire to collaborate, to care and to help.” Check it out… www.goodpeople.co.uk.

We soft-launched by sending out a few small (3x300) Mailchimp campaigns just over a week ago and we are now closing in on 400 registered users. The response has been very positive. We have learnt a lot, especially in terms of the user-experience. We can’t wait to see what happens when we really start to promote GoodPeople properly over the next few months.

Nestoria was the first internship I ever had. I got to experience how a real-world tech startup worked. I learnt that building a product is only 10% of what it takes to run a business. Nestoria also encouraged me to use the web to find answers for myself. This is a very important habit to get into. There is always someone out there who can help you find the answer. The challenge is figuring out who to ask and how to ask.

I gave a TEDx talk about this and wrote a blog post too… http://tmblr.co/Z_HSltbHdgSc The headlines are…

1) Find your cause

2) Develop skills that will make you indispensable to any team

3) Bury yourself in research and follow the trail of good content

4) Find your tribe and then take it offline

5) Give Before you Take

Building a career used to be like climbing a mountain. You know your destination (the peak) and you work your way up the organisational ladder one promotion and qualification at a time. I don’t think this is how the world works anymore. Today, building a career is more like helicopter skiing. You are dropped on the mountain and you have to find your way down without getting buried in an avalanche or falling off a cliff. There are no tracks to follow. All you can do is point your skis down the mountain and try to dodge the trees and rocks in front of you. The best way to get down the mountain safely is to have a trusted group of friends with you.

Successful careers are built on a strong network of friends and connections. So.. start building yours today.

Many thanks Anton, and best of luck with GoodPeople! If Anton’s answers inspired you, perhaps a paid internship at Nestoria can be the first step on the digital ladder. We’re always on the lookout for motivated, talented people.

Back in 2006 Lokku opened up Nestoria API in hope to create a field for serendipitous connections. Yesterday, we got another reminder that this strategy is working.

Granted, Colin Eberhardt is not a new acquaintance. Colin’s pioneering HTML5-based property application for Windows Phone 7 grabbed our notice back in 2011 and not only because it was using Nestoria Listing API.

Only yesterday we’ve heard from Colin about his latest project - PropertyCross. As it turns out the project addresses a problem that we’ve been grappling for a while: selecting a cross-platform mobile framework to use.

We talked more with Colin about the PropertyCross project and we thought to share the news with you.

Tell us, what exactly is PropertyCross project about?

In the past couple of years mobile and tablet usage has exploded. No matter what line of business you are in, you will almost certainly be under pressure to release a mobile version of your existing website or desktop app.

The problem is, the different mobile platforms - they are many and all are different. If you want to release your app on all of the major mobile platforms you have to write it multiple times using the native languages and tools of each mobile platform. This is clearly a costly exercise!

Fortunately there are a number of cross-platform frameworks available that allow you to target multiple mobile platforms from a common codebase. The problem is, these frameworks vary significantly in terms of their quality, how much code can be shared and the end user experience they deliver. Many of these frameworks are HTML5-based, however, there are a number that deliver a fully-native UI, that do not seem to get the same media exposure as those based on HTML5.

PropertyCross aims to to allow developers to compre a range of cross-platform frameworks quickly and easily. This is achieved by presenting exactly the same app, a property finder (which uses the Nestoria APIs!), implemented using each framework for each mobile platform. This makes is much easier to compare these frameworks side-by-side.

* How did the idea for the project came about?

The idea came about for a few reasons. 

Firstly, I had previously done some work with jQuery Mobile and had found myself disappointed with some aspects of the end-user experience. My feeling is that HTML5 is a little over-hyped, it certainly isn’t a silver-bullet for cross-plaform development.

I think it is important that projects like PropertyCross allow you to easily compare HTML5 implementations with a native equivalent so that you can see exactly what compromises you will have to make by going HTML5.

Secondly, at Apps World earlier this year I stumbled across another two cross-platform frameworks that I had not heard of before, and since then I have found many more. This is an exciting and rapidly moving area of technology, my hope is that PropertyCross will reflect the broad range of frameworks available.

Finally, I was very much inspired by the TodoMVC project, which helps developers compare JavaScript UI frameworks. Both myself and Chris Price (a PropertyCross co-founder), are contributors to TodoMVC and have used the project on  number of occasion when talking with clients and fellow developers.

* Which framework did you find the most useful in your work? What did you take away from the project?

This is a tricky one, I don’t want to focus too much attention on any one framework because I want to encourage further submissions. Having said that, I was pleasantly surprised by the end-user experience delivered by SenchaTouch. For a HTML5 framework it is very slick. I am also keen on frameworks that deliver a native UI (I don’t like compromises!), and Xamarin, which uses C# and .NET code, is a personal favourite of mine.

* Anything else coming out of the pipeline?

PropertyCross went live just two weeks ago, so for the time-being my pipeline is PropertyCross, PropertyCross and more PropertyCross. We have some frameworks that are currently in the works, including KendoUI, RhoMobile and jQTouch. I’m also hoping to present the findings of this project at some conferences over the next year.

* Having worked with our API - is there anything that you’d like us to improve there?  (Don’t feel like you have to be nice to us, we can take it!)

I’ve used the Nestoria APIs a number of times, and think it is very good. The only thing I’d really like to see improved is the data, I’d love to see a more detailed description of each property. Also, I generally use Nestoria in technical articles, as most of the readers are US-based, it would be great if you could cover the USA with your property database - although I doubt that is feasible!

While Colin’s wish for more detailed description or the US-based data will have to wait for a while, it is great to see another imaginative use of Nestoria API data such as helping developers pick the right cross-platform mobile framework.

Recently my Mac Mini, which had possibly been around since the very dawn of Nestoria, moved on to other things.  It ran well, and when we were contacted by Mark Simpkins from the Ministry of Stories about donating to their worthy cause, it seemed like the perfect pasture to put it out to.  Based in East London, the Ministry is a creative writing and mentoring centre for peeps from 8 - 18, founded in 2010 by Nick Hornby, Lucy Macab and Ben Payne.  It runs writing workshops and projects for school groups and keen individuals and is a great place for old machines to end up, especially since my little fella probably has some start-up stories of its own to tell.

As a follow up, and to help spread the word about the cool work that the Ministry are doing, I got in touch with Mark, a freelance Cultural Engineer, and the Ministry’s Chief Technical Advisor, to find out how our old Mac Mini’s fitting in.

What’s in store for my old Mac Mini post-Lokku?

Well, we are trying to get a wonderful installation piece running on it. It was written by a multi-media artist back when the Ministry started, basically its a Monsters Helpline that you can listen to in the Hoxton Street Monster Supply shop. The problem was it was running off an old eMac which is too big to have set up in the rather limited space in the shop. Once we get it resaved to work on an intel chip we will have ths running nicely in the shop.

Monster Supplies is the Hoxton shopfront the Ministry is run behind - it sells all sorts of interesting stuff, including stationary supplies and tinned fear…

What are the Ministry’s main challenges?

Well, continually the main challenges are around funding and community engagement. It works in the local community, all the schools that attend workshops are local schools. It is very much embedded in the community in which it is located.

From my point of view, there are opportunities for more digital engagement, more tools and ideas to be explored but we do not have a volunteer army of geeks to build and run such ideas. That is what I would like to get going.

Hint hint, Nestorartu…

What’s your part in the Ministry as Chief Technical Advisor?  And how did you get involved?

It is a volunteer role and my job is to really help out with anything technical. When the Ministry started this role was performed by Nathan Mathias. He was there installing the network as well as overseeing the website being built. Nathan left to join MIT Civic Media Lab so the Ministry advertised for someone to help cover the kinds of things that he did for the Ministry. I applied and got the role.

What part does technology currently play in dealing with the challenges you mentioned, and what part might technology play in future?

At the moment technology is used in creating an online space for the Ministry, the website, the presence on social media. We dont use the technology in workshops much yet. Part of this is the fact that it needs more technology to make sure all the kids have access. 

We are looking at some online tools that might be useful in facilitating creative writing and still plan to run some kind of hack day in the future to see what ideas the geek community can come up with.

What are some of the other ways that you personally push for a better future using technology?  And what inspired/ allowed you to see these sorts of possibilities?

I have been playing around with some small projects, around social media and the cultural space. Sharing on interest in art for example. I have always been interested in art and technology and recently the ease in being able to create something and deploy it quickly to the web has meant that ideas can be quickly tested. I have been very lucky in that I have been able to work at a number of creative institutions and organisations, at the BBC or more recently working with the UK Vogue team exploring how the magazine might work on the iPad. Not everything works but it is the fact that you can try things out quickly using the cloud that makes this a very exciting time.

What are some other ways you’d like to see people using web technology to push forward?  And what about some slightly as yet out of reach possibilities which some of the kids from the Ministry might come up with?              

I want to see more art. I want to see more linking together of ideas and systems, I sometimes feel that the rush to commoditise the users signing up to a service that we build can be rather depressing. That should not be the primary driver to what we do, we should have some kind of social responsiveness in what we do, so it’s less technology wise more a societal way of thinking about how we design and build systems. Not that everything should be free and open. We work in a capitalist system so livings need to be made, but the drive to huge IPO or similar should not be the ‘only’ driver in things.

Hopefully the Ministry will be able to engage some of the young kids to think about new ways of involving us in stories. We have been using games as a way of engaging kids, so hopefully we will contribute to a whole new creative generation who will think of interaction and how we communicate as much as just telling stories. 

Is there anything else you’d like to add?

I’d like the geeks and technologists out there to think about pro-bono work, sharing ideas around creativity and learning. There are some great things that will come out of this, and I hope that in London, we can create a geek culture that actively lifts culture and community using the underlying technology that we use everyday.

And thanks again to Lokku for donating the Mac Mini to the Ministry, it is things like this that add to the rich texture of the whole Ministry experience.

Very much our pleasure, Mark.  Thanks again for chatting to me about this.

Here at Nestoria HQ we regularly sit down together for a Tech Talk where we learn about impressive, new things that are going on with the site, or the industry.  Sometimes one of our team speaks and sometimes the office is graced with guest speakers.  Two of our most recent guests being the impressively new and talented Ainsley Escorce-Jones and Tom Hartley.  In fact, at 18 and 17, quite a few of us were slightly green about just how new and impressive they are.

These guys recently won the ‘Best in Show’ application at Young Rewired State 2012 - using the Nestoria API to create an app. called SmartMove.  Their app. is designed to help people decide where to live, based on a breakdown of the communities they’re considering joining.  

Post-Tech-Talk we tried them out on the interview process, so here are their comments on their project and on us:

Firstly, what’s SAP YRS 2012?  And how did you come to be part of it?

Ainsley:  SAP YRS 2012 was a week long hackathon hosted by Young Rewired State, young programmers were assigned to centres and then given from Monday to Friday to produce an application using any form of open data they could find. I actually first read about it whilst reading Ars Technica on holiday and thought that it would be quite enjoyable as I’d never really written anything with people my own age or attended a Hackathon. So I registered on the site and was assigned to the centre over at Profero, a creative agency in Camden along with Tom.

How long did you think about SmartMove for before you got involved with the competition?

Tom: We actually hadn’t thought about the idea at all. The team first met each other on the Monday,  and we spent all morning brainstorming. We came up with a couple of ideas, and eventually settled upon the idea of creating an app which helped people find an area they’d like to live in. Many of the other features we added, such as giving the user detailed information (crime breakdown, percentage of population unemployed, etc.) on an area, were thought of later on during the week.

What functionality, if any, is it missing that you’d like to be able to add?  And what other datasets would you have liked to include, but that aren’t available (yet)? 

Tom:  After using the app, testers felt that allowing them to create a shortlist of houses they’re interested in (for later review), would be a really useful feature. Unfortunately, we didn’t have time to complete this during the week. However, I’ve been working on it recently, and it will hopefully be present in the version we release on the App Store.

Regarding additional data, I thought it would be pretty cool to include broadband speeds, so that users could choose a house based on the quality of the Internet connection (This criteria was close to the whole teams hearts!). However, we couldn’t find granular enough data on this for London.

Nice thinking, certainly very relevant to us too…  What were some of the other ideas you saw and liked at Rewired?

Ainsley:  I think the other finalists at YRS 2012 all had really cool applications, my personal favourites were Postcode Wars which was a really cool bit of fun that I could see spreading virally, as Google Wars were once upon a time, it was a simple idea but executed really well and was pretty engaging.

I know Tom was really impressed with “Way to Go” which was an application which allowed disabled people to find places that they could access and also rate them based on accessibility.

What did you learn from SmartMove?

Ainsley:  Developing the backend and API for SmartMove was a pretty enjoyable and sometimes challenging experience, probably most of the issues came from parsing all the various data sources in their different formats into something that I’d be able to work from and also the understanding the quirks of the Geospatial features of MySQL.

I think the main thing I learnt developing SmartMove is how different the dynamic is working in person with a team. I’m used to doing Freelance software engineering online, but being across the table from the frontend developer you’re working alongside was a refreshing change, although it’s nice to work from home and be able to focus solely on what you’re coding, being able to coordinate and work on new features in parallel and get instant feedback on how things were shaping up was excellent.

Tom: From a technical perspective, I learned a lot about working with the different APIs which Apple provides for displaying and annotating maps (which I had not used before), however the greatest thing I learned was the value of teamwork. With Ainsley working on the backend and feeding me data, I could play to my strengths - designing the front end application - and didn’t have to mess around with any scary databases. This dramatically reduced the time it would otherwise have taken to create the app..

What did you prioritise on the front end in this project?  And is this different to your normal priorities?

Tom:  For SmartMove, rather than working from the ground up by creating individual elements and composing them to form an application, I worked downwards from a higher level. This was very beneficial due to the fact we only had one week to create the app - I could ensure that at each stage of development I had a working app., and just add features one by one, until the night before we needed to present it, where I imposed a hold on new features and concentrated on fixing the few remaining bugs.

Furthermore, I focused a lot less on code quality and organisation, and a lot more on just ‘getting it to work’. This provided short term benefits in terms of quicker development times, however it has come back to bite me recently, so I’ve been working on refactoring some of the uglier code.

Always a tricky question, but do you guys have any ideas about how you’d monetise SmartMove?

Tom:  We considered several different approaches to monetization, however we felt that all of them were detrimental in some way. I felt that advertisements would detract from the overall polish and quality of the app.. The whole team agreed that they’d be much happier to see 1000 people using it for free, than 10 people using it for 70p each. We therefore decided that we will release the app for free initially, and if it turns out to be popular, we may attempt to arrange deals with some estate agents, whereby they pay a fee to have their results displayed more prominently in the app..

And how ‘bout any bright ideas for Nestoria?  What could we be doing that we’re not? (Don’t feel like you have to be nice to us, we can take it!)

Ainsley:  I think the Nestoria API is what tipped the balance in favour of developing SmartMove over any other app knowing that the house listing data was available convinced us that we’d be able to make a pretty complete house-hunting experience in a very short period of time we had.

I think what Nestoria is doing is great and I really like that you guys decided to do a fully open API, without the need for any sort of payment or even API keys.

I don’t really think there’s much I could suggest in the way of new features of the Nestoria API, although I think your PHP library was missing bathrooms in the options last time I checked, I added the two lines for it, for use in SmartMove however which can be found here.

Big cheers to the guys for playing with our API and of course congratulations on the win.  And best wishes for the future…  Maybe see you again in a few years time…

Fellow Nestori,

after a long hiatus we return to present you another installment in our interview series with online thought leaders. This time we had the chance to visit with Ian Osborne, CEO of Vehera, which trades as SMEStorage. SMEStorage provide a variety of solutions to offer a single, aggregated view across many different cloud services.

As regular readers will know, we love all things aggregation, and so we’d thought we’d learn more about aggregating “the cloud”.

1. Why is a cloud aggregation service needed?