Mihai Mafteianu

Challenge Everything as a Design Philosophy

Mihai — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 13:47:39 +0000

Working on a startup teaches you a lot of things. Actually it might be the most powerful experience one can get into learning how to make something from nothing and overcome difficulties and conquer challenges.

An effective approach we developed towards design at iCartApp is to challenge every single design decision we take and create ways to test those decisions. Brainstorming, random app testing, focus groups, split testing are some of the ways we challenge our own approaches to a UI or UX decision.

We think of ourselves as providers and supporters as opposed to know-all entrepreneurs. We’re working on creating something remarkable and then let our users decide how it should behave and feel. Stay tuned!

Google Will No Longer Give Access To Internet Explorer 6

Mihai — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 08:50:21 +0000

I’ve just received a very interesting email in my Inbox. Will attach it to this blog post and would like to know your oppinions on the subject in the comment section. Personally, I am very happy Google has taken this decisions.

Dear Google Apps admin,

In order to continue to improve our products and deliver more sophisticated features and performance, we are harnessing some of the latest improvements in web browser technology. This includes faster JavaScript processing and new standards like HTML5. As a result, over the course of 2010, we will be phasing out support for Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 as well as other older browsers that are not supported by their own manufacturers.

We plan to begin phasing out support of these older browsers on the Google Docs suite and the Google Sites editor on March 1, 2010. After that point, certain functionality within these applications may have higher latency and may not work correctly in these older browsers. Later in 2010, we will start to phase out support for these browsers for Google Mail and Google Calendar.

Google Apps will continue to support Internet Explorer 7.0 and above, Firefox 3.0 and above, Google Chrome 4.0 and above, and Safari 3.0 and above.

Starting next week, users on these older browsers will see a message in Google Docs and the Google Sites editor explaining this change and asking them to upgrade their browser. We will also alert you again closer to March 1 to remind you of this change.

In 2009, the Google Apps team delivered more than 100 improvements to enhance your product experience. We are aiming to beat that in 2010 and continue to deliver the best and most innovative collaboration products for businesses.

Thank you for your continued support!

Sincerely,

The Google Apps team

Why one should be involved in more than one project at once

Mihai — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 13:51:55 +0000

Spreading yourself across multiple companies, startups or projects forms a good approach in shortening ones path to success. Main motive is the increased pace at one gathers multiple skills, having the opportunity to watch and participate in multiple work cultures. The more you do, see and learn, the bigger your chances to succeed at whatever you are planning to do.

The number of projects one can pursue depends on his skill set, level of commitment and time availability. A skilled project manager, for example, can look into managing a couple early stage projects at a time and still obtain good results if he or she has good knowledge of productivity and management techniques and great communication skills.

Such approach is common on freelancing (where one usually works on many projects at a time) and it can also be applied with success on personal business projects. Setting a clear timeframe per week for working on the project and sticking to it ensures a commitment as well as a clear separation between the project and any other tasks.

Diversity usually keeps people excited. Spreading your time and attention across multiple projects along with the fact that one can never know for sure if a business will succeed or not can increase his or her’s chances to create something remarkable.

When one feels that a project has more changes that others will usually allocate right away more time and resources in that directions to increase it’s chances at the expanse of the other projects with less potential.

What is your opinion on the topic? Do you think people should focus from day one on projects or set a timeframe and spread the available work time across multiple projects?

Would a startup accelerator help Romanian entrepreneurs?

Mihai — Sun, 27 Dec 2009 15:45:53 +0000

After the tremendous number of entrepreneurship meetings, websites, TV shows, podcasts, blogs, wikis, etc. have emerged in Romania to promote the IT entrepreneurship movement would the industry benefit more from a startup accelerator?

I’m not thinking here of just advisory stuff, where you can call or meet with your advisors every couple of weeks or even months, but daily support in topics like:

finding the right market for the startup
creating a product
marketing planning
compiling a business plan
raise funding (and don’t get screwed)
connecting with the right people
incorporation help
legal & accounting advisory
getting in the right mindset
polishing the idea

The benefit for the entrepreneurial team is either:

get a proof of concept to the market faster and maintain or strengthen the first mover’s advantage
validate the idea faster so seed funding can come sooner than later
have a well put together company when it’s time to receive the first round of funding

I need your help here as I would like to know how useful would you find such program and what benefits would you see entrepreneurs getting out of it. What should the entrepreneur give back for those services? How would the added value be measured? Please comment even if you’re not involved in any way to Romanian startups. Any kind of feedback is highly appreciated.

Review of what I did in 2009

Mihai — Sat, 26 Dec 2009 19:03:57 +0000

Just a short review of the amazing things I had the opportunity to do in 2009.

First of all thanks for everyone that’s been around. It’s next to impossible to make anything worthy on your own so everyone that sees a connection to things on the following list should know that I am very grateful.

January 2009:

Started year with some rather important foreign clients for management consulting and local business representation. High-level meetings with local IT&C people took place. Great way to start the year.

February 2009:

Been attending regularly the weekly OpenCoffee Bucharest meetings. There’s a bunch of great people meeting there every week discussing all kinds of geeky topics.
On the management consulting front things were really intense. Got three active clients plus a couple more on queue.

March 2009:

Finally gave up hosting my websites on GoDaddy after a dozen major issues and hundreds of support emails. Moved everything to HostGator to a much better level of service & support. Kind of important decision when you receive tens of thousands of daily hits spread across tens of websites.
Romanian economy has really slowed down at this point. Getting any deal done is next to impossible as companies lost any expansion appetite while struggling to survive. Major local IT companies become extinct. Things are not looking too good.

April 2009:

Co-founded TwiMarket.com, a startup meant to become the place for classifieds on social networks.
Start blogging at Mafteianu.com. Still on of my better decisions regarding personal branding. It’s great to have a place to post your ideas and thoughts. Find it rather interesting that I owned a blogging network for about 5 years but did not start a personal blog for myself in the meantime. Think urgent vs important.
The need for external aid got me to buy an iRobot Roomba. Things became really busy for me at this point so any help was highly welcome…

May 2009:

Start discussing the selling of some of the more important news blogs from BloggerWork. One month later I stopped worrying about traffic spikes, keyword density and daily articles as a deal is reached and the blogs get sold.
Pitch TwiMarket.com at some local events to warm up for the event to come. Also we get featured in a local startup news website among other Internet buzz.

June 2009:

Attended Seedcamp Berlin w/ TwiMarket.com. I meet an amazing group of investors & entrepreneurs there. There I also find first hand what venture capitalists are looking for when choosing who to invest into. Looking forward to attending either as an entrepreneur or as an advisor yet another Seedcamp event in the future.

July 2009:

Started the eWiki.ro project meant at becoming the ‘Online Wiki of the Romanian Internet Market‘. It has got some traction from the community and got some cool projects and people featured there.
Started discussing about getting seed funding for TwiMarket.com though some connections obtained from the participation at Seedcamp. Happily the deals felt through.
Upgraded from the original iPhone to the new 3G one. Gave up the Blackberry soon after as I got tired of carrying three cellphones with me everywhere.

August 2009:

Start attending Startup School at the recommendation of a Seedcamp advisor. Soon afterwards I accept the invitation to become their Romanian ambassador as I was amazed at the number of great entrepreneurs they managed to bring to the community.
Consider starting a local (mostly) online lead generation business. Test the concept with some people but do not find the right partner and delay starting this business indefinitely.

September 2009:

Organize OpenGrill #2, a road trip to the ‘best road in the world‘ attended by some of the best Romanian entrepreneurs.
Start an IT hardware/services business. I’ve been reminded this way of the joys of the Romanian employee and what great culture inheritance we got from the communist regime regarding how employees see work and deliver results. There used to be an communist blue-collar worker saying ‘We pretend to work and they pretend to pay up”. Go figure…

October 2009:

Become a co-founder in iCartApp.com. The desired outcome of this project is to create an easy entry point for anyone wanting to extend their ecommerce store to the new mobile commerce market. Along with a very focused development team project lead by a visionary co-founder we manage to get a private beta in just one month.

November 2009:

I turn 22 years old. Feel really old as something is now fundamentally changed. I am not longer the youngest guy in the room at every meeting.

December 2009:

Graduate from Dragos Roua’s mentorship program of. Been reminded that doing things your way it part of what makes doing business great.
Visited Budapest and Vienna. Both are really beautiful cities.
Start thinking more seriously of starting an iPhone apps development business as augmented reality gets more and more hype.
Request one of those new biometric passports as they are required to travel to the place where Silicon Valley is located.

Disclaimer: The list is not meant to be complete, but rather on overview of why I think this year was great for me and what I learnt from it.

Using Google Wave for Project Management / Collaboration

Mihai — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 13:38:24 +0000

For one of my latest projects I decided to invite everyone on the team to use the Google Wave for team collaboration. Wave is still full of bugs and slow but we managed to do a good job at using it as a project management / team collaboration tool to sharing tasks, comments and discussions. Is it also very useful for copywriting collaboration (better than Google Docs as it is faster).

Below you can find some basic principle we are using in Google Wave for project management.

First and foremost you will want to organize all waves related to a project in a separate folder. It’s nice to set a color to that folder so the waves stand out in your Google Wave Inbox. Below you can see a blue example of the ‘New Awesome Project’ (TM).

Afterwards setup a new wave for every distinct topic and invite everyone interested and create inside that wave new replies with tasks lists.

For managing the tasks lists we use the following set of rules.

You can create a to-do list inside a reply with usual tasks in normal text, bold tasks as high priority, done tasks with strikethrough. For attributed tasks you specify at the end of the task who’s responsible. In case of tasks with a deadline you specify before the task when it needs to get done.

For comments I recommend using inline replies as they can be collapsed and leave the list with a clean look.

Separate in each reply tasks in a GTD-friendly way, with next actions, waiting and someday/maybe groups and after a reply has a large number of tasks (and becomes too bloated) make an inline reply at the end of the main reply and move the completed tasks there. In such way you can keep all task lists clean and current just by a daily reviews for the task lists you are directly involved with and you can ask your project manager to do weekly reviews across all waves including tasks lists to ensure the vision and goals are current and well represented in your waves.

Looking forward for your feedback and suggestions in the comments about this project management approach to Google Wave. It is not meant to be a complete approach, but a simple one that anyone can understand and use right away.

iCartApp.com Mobile Shopping Cart Platform

Mihai — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 16:35:11 +0000

Happy to announce today we entered the closed beta state with iCartApp.com, a mobile shop platform. What it essentially does is to enable shop owners to have a mobile store in just a couple of minutes and offer the very best experience in shopping from a mobile device.

Taking into account the recents growth stats for the iPhone and iPod touch we decided to support the iPhone OS as the first platform. iCartApp.com creates an online store accessible from the mobile browser and offers a seamless shopping experience, a major improvement compared to the standard web shop, with many design elements familiar to iPhone users.

Read more info about the project on its eWiki.ro page and request your private beta invite on the iCartApp.com mobile shopping cart platform homepage.

Google Chrome OS Preview

Mihai — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 19:49:17 +0000

Google’s simple Linux distribution formally known as Google Chrome OS was finally previewed. It is fully based on the Google applications for search, editing documents or reading email with nothing more than the operating system stored on the computer’s HDD, but rather accessible online from the Google cloud.

Google’s strength with Google Chrome OS is that it can become the standard OS for new netbooks, lowering their cost as compared to shipping with Windows as well as running on more modest hardware configurations lacking the need of a traditional HDD for storing user data. I admin that currently I am not a fan of this concept as I use my laptop for way more than Internet browsing and find no real use for my existing Windows 7 running netbook.

Pros:

Free & netbook optimized
Instant on (7 seconds on current version)
Free of conventional viruses

Cons:

All your data is on Google’s servers
Currently it is no more than a lightweight Linux distribution
Limited hardware support

Top Gear visits Romania in opening episode of new season

Mihai — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 21:49:30 +0000

Happy to announce the new Top Gear season started with an episode dedicated to the greatest driving road in the world, the Transfagarasan.

Overall the episode was true to the Romanian realities as long as one does not forget that Top Gear is a scripted entertainment show. The episode was focused on showing the extremes of Romania, between the Rex hotel in the center of Mamaia and the hidden gipsy towns located far from the residential areas. Be noticed that between Bucharest and Transfagarasan there are no gipsy towns, but only 100km on the highway.

If interested into watching the Top Gear episode outside UK the guys from finalgear.com might be able to help you Top Gear – Season 14, Episode 1 – November 15th, 2009.

Entrepreneurs on Transfagarasan (OpenGrill #2)

Mihai — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 07:47:10 +0000

I have had the opportunity to organize an event with the OpenCoffee Bucharest people. We have decided on getting to the mountains in a road trip. For this we went to the most famous road in Romania, the Transfagarasan. The view there was amazing and the whole event went great.

Some of the entrepreneurs joining the event include (in no particular order):

Mircea Pasoi – Ex-Google Intern, Co-Founder at Balaur.ro, Software Engineer at uverVU
Cristina Scheau - Google Summer of Code Student
Cristian Strat – Ex-Google Intern, Co-Founder at Balaur.ro, IT Consultant
Adrian Zamfira - CEO at KuBu Stream
Marius Sigheti - Managing Partner at Sigheti & Sigheti
Viorel Spinu - Managing partner at Sety
Iulia Spinu - .NET Developer at TeamNet
Petronela Serban – Co-Founder at BloggerWork
Mihai Mafteianu - Founder at eWiki.ro, Co-Founder at TwiMarket.com, IT Consultant

For more info and pictures refer to the Facebook event page: Cu antreprenorii pe Transfagarasan (OpenGrill #2).

Looking forward for the next event in the OpenGrill series.