Are we there, yet?

Well guys! Its almost a joke among us that Team Bloozle is in stealth mode. We have actually stayed in stealth mode for too long now - its been .. ummm .. what - 5 months since October when we 'unleashed' the concept in front of the barCamp audience. With the next barCamp coming - and we not having progressed much, it does feel a bit bad - but guess that's what happens when you work outside your day jobs.

But anyway things are not very bad, we have done some work - one of them being starting this blog and updating it on and off. We have also created huge laundry lists of the tasks we need to do on the technical and functional side. And most importantly, we have got more people on board - though with everyone working part-time, scheduling and synchronization of work becomes a challenge.

How do we overcome this challenge of 'distributed team'? Well the answer is - knowingly or unknowingly - we use concepts of Agile development. We are currently working on the 4th iteration of bloozle; the first one was made by me in 2006 (it was never released to public), thereafter Manpreet (our tech lead) made one more which was also scrapped as a test version; then came the version which we released in barCampMumbai2 and post comments from initial test users - we are today working on the 4th iteration.

But of course the classical Agile development doesn't suit us to the tee - for example, we all work mostly alone and coordinate over email, chat and phone. Also - we have been iterating (and improving) our versions mostly based on inputs from closed user groups. Even after the barCamp, though a lot of users were exposed to the app - most inputs came from people whom I met after the event face-to-face to get feedback about the app.

But all that's soon to change, we have started working on a 4th and almost 'launchable' version of bloozle and the web app will soon be released to the world and we will start getting 'mainstream' users soon. And of course, then its again a roller coaster ....

Wish us luck!!

RSS is HOT

These days, a lot of action is taking place on the RSS (Really Simple Syndication) front. Quite a few startups have sprung up playing around with feeds, mashing them ,etc to come up with a number of different products/services. We have already seen start ups integrating existing services such as instant messaging, blogging, commenting, etc with the concept of feeds to deliver an interesting breed of utilities.

Marshall Kirkpatrick has a good article here detailing the major action in 2007 while Jeff Nolan highlights the action most likely in 2008 here. Even Newsgator, which targeted companies with their enterprise products made their desktop readers freely available to the general public. Surely a sign of the of RSS gaining mainstream recognition . Meanwhile, an interesting concept utilizing an individual’s RSS output file (OPML) is Attention Profiling Mark-up Language (APML). I would recommend these links for beginners.

Coming back to the original discussion, all this action validates our belief that RSS would be the prime source of information(anything that the user is interested in) in the not-so-distant future. This includes social networking updates, blogging and may be even email or any other source of communication. Victor Hugo’s quote springs up in my mind

“An invasion of armies can be resisted, but not an idea whose time has come.”

Hope we reach there in time!

Of Meetings and Updates

The Bloozle team wishes all our users a great year ahead! While Bloozle promises to take care of your “information overload” problem, there are some things that we can’t help you with.

Let me shed some light on the working of team Bloozle. As of now, the team is an informal ensemble of internet and technology enthusiasts gathered together in helping people navigate through the cluttered world of information and data. Bloozle is primarily a labor of love. You could crudely say we are similar to Startup Weekend, with a much longer time horizon. We are a loosely knit team of 7 people working from across different locations, most of us being in Mumbai.

Since the last post, we’ve had three meetings. The agenda was to induct new people onto the bandwagon and give them an overview of the concept and lay out their roles in the team. So now, we have Kalpesh Muchhal, Raza Sayed and Rohit Pal as a part of Team Bloozle. The last meeting was centered around finalizing the design

We’ve realized that we need to be even more agile and move fast now that the action on the RSS front is hotting up (more on this in a later post). However, the major problem is that none of us is working full time on this, so occasionally things do seem to be stuck up. That’s when the motivation factor steps in and after the exchange of a few mails or a teleconference, things start moving again. I often keep hearing of teams operating across different location facing similar problems. Nothing beats having the entire team in one place! We do hope for it sooner rather than later.

10th January,2007