Balsamiq Blog

Books Books Books

by Peldi Guilizzoni. October 15th, 2007 under Books — 1 Comment

I have been reading a lot of books in preparation for “the big jump”. I thought I’d post links here for the ones that I keep going back to, since they might be useful to someone.

Keep these within arm’s reach

• Micro-ISV: From Vision to Reality
• Eric Sink on the Business of Software (Expert’s Voice)
• Getting Real
• Crossing the Chasm
• Joel on Software

Keep these on the nearest bookshelf

• The Best Software Writing I: Selected and Introduced by Joel Spolsky

These were “just ok”

• Code Complete, Second Edition

And these are on my bedside table, either half-read or waiting for me

• The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century – I read the first part, I wonder if I need to read more.
• Founders at Work: Stories of Startups’ Early Days – so far I’d say this is “just ok”, I’m having trouble finishing it
• Dreaming in Code: Two Dozen Programmers, Three Years, 4,732 Bugs, and One Quest for Transcendent Software – I have been told this will scare me
• Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change (2nd Edition) (The XP Series)
• The Art of the Start: The Time-Tested, Battle-Hardened Guide for Anyone Starting Anything – Curious to see if Guy Kawasaki is worth his cult status
• Bootstrap: Lessons Learned Building a Successful Company from Scratch
• Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap… and Others Don’t
• Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies

You can also look at all the blog posts in the Books category.

One frustrating issue with these books is that they get my mind racing, so I can’t read these at night or I won’t be able to sleep. Which basically leaves no time for me to read, aside from a couple of nap-times during the week-ends and my weekly breakfast-alone outing (20 minutes). Oh I wish there were more hours in the day…

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Igor Naming Guide

by Peldi Guilizzoni. October 15th, 2007 under Books, Branding / Marketing — No Comment

I just read this excellent PDF I found while thumbing through Micro-ISV: From Vision to Reality again in preparation for my meeting with the branding gurus tomorrow. It made me like the name “balsamiq” even more. We’ll see what Rob thinks about it tomorrow!

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balsamiq

by Peldi Guilizzoni. October 11th, 2007 under Branding / Marketing, Company / Business — No Comment

So no-one liked WOPStudio, I was never really in love with it either. Plus someone pointed out that WOP doesn’t really have very good connotations, given that I’m Italian and all. I had no idea!

Anyways, after much thinking I am now (hopefully) settled on Balsamiq Studios, or “balsamiq” for short.

The word “balsamic” conveys richness, smoothness, craftsmanship…and is something that improves whatever it is added to (just like my plugins will make any software better). Plus it’s Italian like me.

The “q” makes it modern and Web2.0-ish (thanks for the idea Beau!), and I have already talked about the word “studio”, though I am adding an “s” to it because I think that’s the more common variation of it.

Anyways, I like the name, a lot. I feel like it reflects the qualities that I want my software to have: smooth, rich, the result of a lot of hard work, and made in Italy!

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The web has come a long way

by Peldi Guilizzoni. October 3rd, 2007 under Company / Business — No Comment

Before wopstudio.com, the last website I created was maybe 6 years ago. I have of course been staying in touch with technology and developments in web applications, but I gotta say…it’s a lot easier these days.

Aside from my Web Office Suite I mentioned yesterday, in 3 days I was able to set up a whole website (thanks Wordpress), complete with full-fledged visitor statistics for pages (via Google Analytics) and for RSS feeds (via FeedBurner). I have my Amazon Associates account all hooked up, as well as the nifty Snap Shots link highlighter (I could easily add Google Ads to the site too if I wanted). Not to mention that the look and feel of the site would have taken me forever to do…thanks to a talented and generous designer I stumbled upon (and probably will never meet) called UtomBox it took about 2 hours to set up and tweak to my liking.

Oh, and when the time comes for me to sell software through this site, I’ll just hook up Google Checkout and/or Paypal, which will probably take a whole hour to do.

And of course all of these services are web-native, so I can access them from anywhere, they are always updated and all that good and powerful stuf. I tell you, there’s no going back.

The Web has come a long way in the last 5 years, it’s good to be back.*

Peldi

P.S.The fact that all of these services are free freaks me out a bit.

*Of course I never really left the web, I was just developing networked applications instead of websites or traditional web apps.

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Welcome WopStudio

by Peldi Guilizzoni. October 2nd, 2007 under Branding / Marketing, Company / Business — No Comment

I decided on a company name today: WopStudio. Wop is for Web Office Plugins, but you don’t have to remember that…just remember wopstudio, or wopstudio.com!

I like the word “studio” for a number of reasons: it has a creative connotation to it. I would like my customers to be able to feel creative when using my plugins (even if it’s “for work”) without my UI getting in the way – plus the process of creating software is very creative! The word studio also conveys a level of quality higher than “shop” for instance, which I like: I’m aiming to create high-quality, high-usability, love-to-use-it kind-of software. Plus it’s spelled and pronounced the same way in both Italian and English, bonus!

So webofficeplugins.com will, starting tomorrow, redirect to wopstudio.com. If this field does grow like I think it will, I think I might have snatched two pretty good domains if I may say so myself

My startup is called WopStudio. I like the sound of that.

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My Web Office Suite

by Peldi Guilizzoni. October 2nd, 2007 under Company / Business — No Comment

Today I registered an account with Google Apps for webofficeplugins.com (I’ll register another for wopstudio.com tomorrow). So now I have a pretty complete Web Office suite for my startup:

• email and mailing lists at mail.wopstudio.com (Google Apps)
• group Calendar at calendar.wopstudio.com (Google Apps)
• word processing, spreadsheets and presentations, at docs.wopstudio.com (Google Apps)
• an iGoogle-like start page for my “employees” at start.wopstudio.com (Google Apps)
• internal Wiki at www.wopstudio.com:8080 (Atlassian Confluence personal license, 2 users)
• internal blogging system (Atlassian Confluence, not that I need it right now, it’s just me remember?)
• the blog you’re reading (Wordpress)
• the rest of the site (Wordpress)

That all took 3 days to set up, a whole IT infrastructure accessible from any computer on any platform, always backed up, easy to manage, collaboration enabled…beautiful. There’s no going back guys!

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Web Office Plugins

by Peldi Guilizzoni. October 1st, 2007 under Branding / Marketing, Company / Business — No Comment

Today I registered webofficeplugins.com – not a snazzy abstract Web2.0 company name, but it’s descriptive and sums up nicely what I’m setting up to build, or at least the niche I’m planning to play in.

I’m still not 100% sure this will be the company name (it sounds more like a directory), but maybe I should add a directory section to the site as well! That’d be good for my Google ranks and would be a nice thing to do for “the sector” (i.e. my competitors, of which I have only identified a couple so far). We’ll see, if this niche does indeed grow I will certainly consider doing that.

Anyways, the way I arrived at the domain was by realizing that two terms are starting to take hold for the online productivity web apps I am going to build on top of: Web Office and Work 2.0. I am betting on the former because anything with a “2.0″ after it makes it sound too hype-driven, and now I also just realized that Web Office has a Wikipedia entry!

On a related note, it seems like WebEx (now part of Cisco) is betting on “Web Office” as well, since they own weboffice.com – they don’t seem to support custom plugins…yet!

These 3 articles linked off of Wikipedia are a good intro to Web Office:

• Web Office White Paper at innovation Creators (big PDF, worth the wait)
• Web Office Defined – How it’s Evolved From 2005 to Present
• The Web-based Office will have its day

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