dieBeschleuniger

It's time for a change - inside recommendations

2012-03-09T17:29:00.000+01:00

Lately there is has been a vivid and fruitful discussion about the filter bubble created by recommendation services all around is. The hyposis is that filtering data based on what we want to hear will stop exposing us to stuff we don't want to know but should. And the more this kind of filtering happens the less people care about stuff outside their circle which could have potentially a bad influence for society. While thinking about that problem I realised that recommendations - as of today - don't work in the long run anyways because they are too static.

The way recommendations algorithms work today is basically on top of an so called intrest-graph: The system looks at the stuff you liked using those a link of other people, who liked the same. Then it looks for stuff the other "who are very like you" liked and recommends this as something you probably like, too. And every time you tell the system another thing you liked or disliked it gets more accurate the next time. This is how it works from last.fm to netflix, from facebook to twitter. Smart system, don't you think?

But how come I - and with me so many others - stopped using last.fm? With more than one and a half years of historical data it should be able to predict the stuff I like pretty good, shouldn't it? So what happend? The algorithm didn't change. Neither did the data. But I did. Almost over night, I switched from listening hard rock/punk to trance (electronic). I realised I am way more productive that way. So when I wanted to listen to the new stuff, last.fm kept interrupting me with the wrong stuff - the stuff I didn't like anymore. And it was almost impossible to make it change. Because trying to fight two years of recorded history is like fighting wind mills. The more data you have in the recommendation system the harder a transition to becomes. As a result I quit last.fm.

This may sound rare and uncommon, but think about it for a second; Everyone who has ever moved from one flat to another knows how liberating it feels to start from scratch. And you'd also agree that there is at least one box you won't open ever. In there is mostly baggage that you don't need anymore; It could be old (hurtful) picture of your ex or a box of books and CDs you never were able to throw away. Similar to last.fm, where the baggage was all this music I used to listen to. And as it was impossible to make last.fm adopt to my changes, I had to move on as well.

Social Networks in comparison are still very young. But eventually they have to face the same problem. Someone I totally admired last year and all his posts can be very annoying to me today. And I am not only thinking about the break up - as the hardest of all relationship changes - I am talking about everyday life; we and our relationships to others change constantly. A bunch of people already face the problems like having their ex-girl friends liking the post where you are complaining about your wife. In relationships you have a lot of baggage - way more than your music history. But it is not in the interest of Facebook or Twitter to offer a you clean slate. And this is also true for the relationship to companies and other fan pages.

But you know me, I don't bitch about a problem without a at least looking for a solution: When we were working on the relaunch of happyYuppie.com, we ran into a similar problem. The way stock forecasts work is called time-series-analysis. You look at the values in the past and try to find a mathematical model describing it in a way that allows you to predict the future values. While rewriting that algorithm, there was a huge collaps in the Solar-Panel-Market in Germany; all over the places their stocks fell. And though this was a common case of market cleansing, our models predicted that they'd get back to old strength soon. Based on the old baggage (the long-term history) and not taking into account the latest strong trends, our prediction models were simply wrong. As recommendations algorithms are when there is a huge change or general transition.

The way we solved this was by creating a series of models for different time periods: one for monthly data of the last three years, one of weekly data of the last year and another of daily data for the last three months. While doing this over a series of different data and time horizonts we've learnt one common thing: the shorter the time span the more "trend aware" the forecast is. What follows is mixing those three models to create one surprisingly precise model. The weight of each models depends highly on the volatility and some other parameters of the stock, which I can't disclose here. But essentially it means the model for solar panel companies are much more aware of the latest trends of losses happening.

Resulting in a system that creates forecasts for in a slowly fading weight the further you go back in history. You could apply these principles to recommendation systems easily; taking into account when it happened and put a higher emphasis on the younger event when there is an detectable change in taste, the recommendation system would become much more change-aware and long-lasting. On top it would also allow the user to influence his personalized system easily and break out of his filter bubble by actively including something that hasn't been there before. This would give him immediate insight on that topic with the best content available and slowly something the user is less interested in now fades out.

Two Things About The German Tech Startup (Job) Market

2012-02-03T14:22:00.000+01:00

Lately I've met quite a few people from silicon valley coming to Berlin to check out the startup scene. Thought the local Startups scene is often compared to the one over the great lake, a few things are very different. Often mentioned are the missing network of founders and investors as well as longer history in tech entrepreneurship. But today I want to discuss two urgent problems concerning the tech job market in Berlin, which not even the local founders understand entirely, as far as I can see. But we need to understand their roots to be able to tackle them and find solutions.

Very few tech-founders
When you look at the number of students in computer science and how many tech founders you have you quickly notice a huge difference between Germany and other places like the valley. One of the reasons for that lies in the university courses in Germany (and Europe): you learn about the bigger picture, the higher concepts, the theories of computers and informatics here. As the term "computer science" describes it so very well: after your studies you know your way around the science part. But you don't learn to code, to design a software architecture, to create a product nor a UI that users understand. Product development is not part of these courses, don't event hink about entrepreneurial or administrations.

As a result IT graduates in Germany have almost no experience in Software Development nor knowledge of business. There is a good reason why established companies like Microsoft, SAP or IBM expect a transition period of 6-12 months for a graduate in their company before they can even consider him able to be part of a development team. But at the same time there is a huge demand for software and hardware engineers world wide. So established companies don't only pay very well in this sector they also give techies a lot of freedom and ensure they have fun at work. So there are only very few techies capable and interested in founding a company as product development and business are rarely part of studies in informatics in europe (other than at MIT or Berkley) and the tradeoff is very high.

Though back in the first dot-com bubble* even in Germany a lot of techies founded or co-founded companies. Being really happy to find someone to take care of the business-side of things most took MBAs and took care of the non-business-part only. Only to learn that they got screwed over by their business "partner" big time when things heated up. This experience became part of the collective memory of hacker scene here. It is rooted in there so deeply that even though it is a totally new generation of hackers now they are still alienated by business and marketing people and simply consider them not trustworthy. The second big reason why so few hackers are interested in taking their idea up another level and found a company. Most tech innovation still happens hidden from the majority of the society and even hidden from the startup scene in the members-only-area of hacker spaces.

Barely design-driven entrepreneurship
Secondly there is a huge lack of good designers in the startup community in europe, although the roots for this are to found totally elsewhere. They have not had the bad experience in the 2001-bubble and product development is actually a huge part of the design process. Well, yeah, similar to developers not learning anything about design, designers barely learn how to code during their studies. But that ain't the reason, the reason lies within in the system: While the arts are free, studying design is not.

Almost any half-way decent university in europe offering some kind of (web-) design course is privately run and therefore very expensive. And most of them take up so much time that there isn't any time left for a job on the side. Of course there are scholarships but they barely cover everything, so many, many design student take a student loan and you can get them easily. Leaving them with a huge debt (100k-120k isn't that unusual I was told) when they graduate. So even though they are totally in-experienced they have to ask for a lot of money just to pay off the loan and have enough money left for the rent. They simply can't work for shares or lowered cash because they just can't afford it. That is why design is so expensive in europe.

But what does that mean?
Because of all of that, it is very hard to find those passionate Tech-Teams with this great solution for a common problem that you just need to give some money for marketing and everything else just happens on its own. Even if you find a founder team of tech people, you probably have to help them a lot with the business- and marketing-side of things. But most startups are founded with a lack of technical skills by business administration graduates, who "see a market for it" somewhere and just need "someone to program it" anyway. Though there is no one willing to do that. And just opening another startup-jobs-offerings-website isn't going to change that. There are just so many more benefits - for a developer - to work for big corp than for your startup (as I showed earlier).

But there are things we can do. And with reading this article down to this point, you made the first and most important step already: realizing that the market is different than in the valley, that great product aware tech-teams are the exception and most techies need help with their business-side. The second thing is about emphasizing the offerings big corp can't make to developers: do a startup is about making a dent in the universe. And by that hope to find those few that are willing to take upon that risk and join a startup instead of heading for the safe bet at IBM or SAP.

And then there is the third and probably hardest part: be honest and fair with the techies. I already told you, that there is a huge distrust from developers against business people. And unless we can change that nothing is going to change. So, tell your techie co-founder the truth, tell him to get a lawyer (or talk to me about the gig**) for the contract, give her the shares she really deserves, talk about exist-strategies openly and negotiate in his favor when there is an investor. In short: stop screwing with him.

When we do that, there is a real chance more techies are willing to join the startup scene and help create awesome products.

* Yes, I said "first".
** I offer free advice and help for techies, who are unsure about the co-founding they are doing

Polaroid Photo Stack with Animation

2012-01-11T11:23:00.000+01:00

This "Show me code or it didn't happen" features the rotated photo stack and its animation as seen at Nachbarschaftsauto or in this video.

Right from the first time we discussed the idea to show featured cars in a polaroid photo stack with flipping animations I fell for it. This gently rotated stack reminded me on a project I've worked before where we represented photo-albums and folders with a pile of pictures. I always liked this way of represent content. But looking for such a jQuery plugin I couldn't find anything that was half-way decent looking nor programmed well. Most snippest were made for photo-albums and didn't work on div-elements or did some really bad canvas-hacking to rotate things, making it impossible to animate it nicely nor include links in the code.

So I took the only thing I could do: take the one that looks best, read the code and write it yourself. As most of them, this one wasn't using the latest technology nor was it backwards-compatible, but at least it had some rotation and the animation in a way I wanted it to be. Lucky me, I had a designer to my left, helping me out with the Polaroid and stuff. Most of that is very straight forward. But there are few pitfalls, which took me one hour or the other to figure out. This article is about those insights we've won working on this particular part of the project.

To make it easier for others to find and understand the code used for rotation and animation, I created a little gist containing only the relevant parts of the project. I assume you can read and understand HTML, CSS and Javascript and therefore won't explain every line of it, if you have questions for one line or the other just use the github comments features and I'll gladly answer them. Over here I want to go over some bigger and smaller issues, work-a-round or hacks (on HTML I am never sure which it really is) we had to do to make it look and work as it does today.

With this restructuring we also took the chance to replace the template with a fresh HTML5Boilerplate. You'll see later how this helps us fix the lack of css-transform in Internet Explorer < 9 by using the included Modernizr. Aside from that we also use less now to structure our CSS internally. I won't get into detail on how they work, but will explain all areas necessary to understand fix the particular bugs. Let's start from the top.

Position and Rotating
This first problem is to rotate the stacked photos. For that we have a container around our div-elements, that we give a position: absolute css style so that we can position our elements inside above each-other using position: relative; top: 0; left: 0;. Now all divs are "sitting" on top of each other. So far so easy. We could add the rotation here as well, but we wanted them to be stacked randomly otherwise it feels to fake, if they have the same position every time you reload the page. So the rotation happens in javascript.

For rotation we take the css-transform-feature called the same way. you specify it by using setting transform: rotate(13deg); in HTML5. As soo many other features of HTML this has been around for a while before it was part of the official specification. So for older firefox and gecko-based browsers you also want to specify -moz-transform, -webkit-transform for safari and chrome and -o-transform" for Opera. Even Internet explorer 9 knows this if you set it as -ms-transform. Unfortunately, jQuery checks the items passed to the css-function and the version we are using there (1.5.2) doesn't know this property. It allows msTransform though...

Old Webkit rendering issues
Now, this rotates our stack easily in a lot of modern browsers already. But on some old webkit browsers the edges appear like huge stairs, no smoothening happens. For that I found a little work-a-round. It seems there are multiple rendering modes in webkit browsers for css-transformations. The newer one supports is more advanced, it supports 3D-rendering and uses graphic acceleration. On old webkits you can smoothen out those edged by triggering that mode. This happens here by setting the style -webkit-backface-visibility: hidden.

And IE < 9.0
I wish we could ignore that one. Because it is nasty. But it turns out, almost 15% of your users use IE < 9. Sucks to be me, but what can I do about it? The most common method to get around the lack of css-transform support in InternetExplorer is by using the DXImageTransform-Filters. Though the name suggests otherwise they work on any DOM-Element, not images only. Sadly, the Rotate-Filter only rotates in 90° steps, so we have to use the much more general Matrix-Tranformation. But matrix-stuff is hard, so we - like many others, too - fallback to a libs to do the heavy lifting for us there. It is called pb.transformIE and uses the sylvester library to do some math. Both are included in the gist.

Now we only want to have these libs loaded, when cssTransform isn't there. For that we use Modernizr. That is very important because pb.Transforms is a bit older and the "am I run in IE"-Part on the top breaks on IE 7 and 8 for no good reason. By using modernizr, the code is only inlcuded if csstransform is missing in the first place. So we can outcomment that part and don't have to worry about that bug. Now, in case TransformIE is loaded, we tell it to look out for any changes on .polaroid elements. Now we can trigger transformIE by setting the -sand-transform style to our rotate, too. It understands and translates it into DXImage-Matrix-Transformation. And we have rotated images.

But the position...
Yeah. There is one major difference, though: when you rotate use the DXImage Matrix method, the point around which the rotation happens is on the top-left, while in css-transform it is in the center of the object. So the polaroids in InternetExplorer don't look stacked but fanned out. That is not what we want. To work a round that problem, we use another difference between those methods: In css-transform it is defined that the width and heights stay the same while in DXImage-Transformation the size changes as it is always calculating the pixels per row from the perspective of the screen and not of the element. This results in bigger elements when rotated with DXImage-Transform.

Using this information we don't only know whether it was rotated wrong, we also know pretty exactly where to move it to make it appear as if it was turned correctly. To use this, we calculate the size and position of the element before the transformation is applied, then we apply the transformation, check the size again and adapt the top and left style if necessary. All this happens, everytime $(x).rotate(deg) is called. This way it also takes care of transformations that changed the size before this one. That happens everytime the animation stops, turns the image and puts it back into the stack.

But this one text doesn't rotate
Looking closely at the rotated elements, one of the texts isn't rotated correctly. It isn't rotated at all actually. At least not as the other texts are. Though it is the same kind of child element of the div that gets rotated. And everything else rotates correctly. Turns out there is a a bug in the Internet Explorer 8 with DXImage-Tranforming: the child-elements can't be positioned or they aren't transformed. Using: margin-top: -1px instead of top: -1px fixes the problem. Weird though...

Now. Animate. Animate, I say. Stupid Internet Explorer...
What's now, internet explorer? Why you don't animate the photo stock. All others do. It is just a simple margin-left and -top set with jQuery-Animate, then we replace the position in the DOM - to make it go to the back of the other polaroids - turn it back and animation the margin back to the original position. You can do margin-setting, can't you? Turns out, you can, but you can't properly read it. If it isn't set explicitly, you return auto instead of the correct 0. Well, then let's add a check for that, too (line 80/81).

Strechting the body
Eventually, we have our animation now. Simple. Elegant. Aside from the stupid body. Since we are moving the element a far way by using the margin, it runs out of the browser-window quickly. Totally okay, aside from the fact that the body stretches out during the animation so that the ugly scrollbar appears, grows with the animation, becomes smaller and disappears again. Gooosh... soo ugly.

But don't worry, uncle Ben has a solution for that problem, too: setting width: 100% and overflow-x: hidden for the body makes the elements move out without the stupid scrollbar. Bad though that it also means very small screens, like the iPhone don't allow you to scroll to the side though 60% of the content is located there. The better way is to set min-width: 960px instead of width. That way we receive all the space the screen gives us but at least 960px for scrolling. But after the screen we hide the content - no scrollbar for elements outside of that. As it happens during our animation.

Unbelievable that such a simple looking feature can trigger so many bugs and incompatibilities. Most of the code I wrote now really is for working around various problems and bugs, while the actual code is just fraction of the code. Javascript really is a language written to work-a-round Browser bugs. The only way to make our lifes easier is by documenting them. I hope we save somebody some trouble with those insights. If you have any questions, just let us know.

Understanding the Nachbarschaftsauto Redesign

2012-01-03T14:34:00.000+01:00

Recently, we've relaunched the main page of Nachbarschaftsauto. While the obvious benefit is that it looks better it is also an adaption to the change in the way people use the site. This articles will give you some insights on the structural designs decisions we took for the new design and reason why we went there. There is going to be another article going into the technical details of this awesome polaroid stack animation and the pitfalls we had to get around later this month. Now, let's take a look at the design from a user interface and design perspective.

The new design

When Nachbarschaftsauto started almost a year ago, the concept of giving your car to strangers was something very new and totally counter-intuitive to most people. In case you don't know, most germans really love their car; it's the number one status symbol over here - way before the house. So, by all means the concept needed to be explained. That was reflected in the way the page was structured; it had a clear focus on introducing the concept, the insurance and the idea to both lenders and takers. Almost a year later, the founders had a lot of press coverage, the media loves the topic and explains the idea every week to everyone who wants to listen.

By now most people coming the page already understand the basic idea and are curious to look further into it. Their approach had changed and so did our page. We changed the page to make it easier for the user to find what she is looking for. And that - we found out - is very diverse, too. While we have a bunch of recurring users coming there to look for a car straight away, a lot of users just "come to check it out". As mentioned before our press coverage has been great, so the name is dropped on TV almost every week, driving a lot of traffic to our site. There was an obvious need to change the design to fit those needs.

If you look at the page now (or at the screenshot atop) you'll notice that we've separated the website in roughly three areas above the fold. As the eyes come from the top left, they go through the first area of interest: Searching your Nachbarschaftsauto. A slightly smaller logo and a clear and bold claim explain the user that she's on the right page. Right beyond there is the search box, making it quick'n'easy to get into the main process of the page - looking for a car. A big call to action button right next motivates the user to go ahead. Before the redisng this was mostly the only way the user could dive into the content.

For those just "checking it out" that involves to much interaction: having to type a place means having to think of a place you'd like to look for a car, which means thinking of a reason why you'd need one. And if you are unlucky you typed in one of the few places, where there aren't any cars just yet, leaving you with an empty result set and a really bad user experience. Instead, we added the browsing-section on the right. In case the user doesn't have any concrete place he is looking for a car, the eye can just continue its way to the right side of the page. There is a nicely rendered polaroid photo stack of featured cars.

Annotated areas of the new design

To put some eye candy on top, we added a nice animation to the photo stack, flipping you through the photo deck. Whilst there is enough time to not only enjoy the animation and the picture but also notice the corresponding content and if there is something interesting, the user can see more details with just one click. That way the user can approach the data in a more relaxed way than having to think of the use case.

Beyond those two most important areas, we have an area with further information, like the testimonials, the press coverage and the possibility to add your car easily. The button ain't that huge and colorful, because we wanted to focus on searching as the main call of action for the page. As by definition there are always more people looking for cars than those looking to register a car.

The footer mostly stayed the same. Aside from the reference to our partners, there is the full sitemap-like footer to all the static content like press information and imprint. On the right we also added our new Google+ Nachbarschaftsauto Page to the list social networks.

happyYuppie reloaded

2011-12-14T14:55:00.003+01:00

At the beginning of this year, when dieBeschleuniger was just about to get founded, we were asked by little startup from Berlin, Prozentor, if we could take a look at their online platform for financial forecasts: happyYuppie.com. So we did. And today is the day relaunched Product is presented to the public for the first time; at beta.happyYuppie.com everyone can see and experience what the next generation of that platform is going to be like.

This happyYuppie "reloaded" - how we called it internally - relaunch was mostly our responsibility. As Prozentor was restructuring its internal structures, we came in to take over their long-lasting (10 years!!!) web-service. We did everything from market evaluation over product development and design up to development and marketing. And today we can celebrate that we made it out of the private into the public beta. Which is also the first time, we officially talk about this project and our involvement.

It is one of our first projects but we have been very heavily involve in it as said before. In agreement with Prozentor we will be writing about the whole process, our steps and decisions over the next couple of month. So that you, as our reader, can understand our way of working and reasoning. And maybe to help some other standing in front of similar decision. Just look out for the articles tagged hyr and insights.

Of course we'll also keep you up to date on the progress of the project as well.

New Nachbarschaftsauto Main Page

2011-12-13T16:35:00.001+01:00

It just a few weeks ago that we've announced our engagement with Nachbarschaftsauto, but as I already mentioned before, we've been helping them for much longer already. About the time when we were signing the deal we also discussed the new Nachbarschaftsauto main page. Last week we eventually got it into a state we were happy enough to launch the new page. But aside from that obvious feature we also added two new nice features to the backend.

New Main Page Design
(with totally new HTML and CSS, too!)
Those of you not knowing what HTML5, CSS3 and CSS-Transitions stand for don't care much, but we still do: In order to create the new Homepage design we decided to start from scratch using latest technology available. And we are very pleased with the result, aren't you? It really simplifies a lot for us developers, is much cleaner and therefore loads way faster. As a result we decided to roll out this design allover the application in the next couple of month, too. I'll be posting another blog article about the technical topic later this month. Until then you can enjoy the animations on the website or by watching the following youtube video:

Facebook Login

Craved for a while and a feature we had on our list since the early days: log in with your Facebook account. But this time done right. Most platforms allow you to register with your Facebook, twitter or whatever but then you have to use the same method every time, and normal users - like me - tend to forget which method they used. On top of that, if I access the website from a different computer than I am used to or, for example, with my smartphone, where I'm not constantly logged into my Facebook or twitter, I suddenly have to log into that service to log into the platform I really want to use. Stupid Concept.

At Nachbarschaftsauto we decided to go a different way: we added Facebook as a service to also authenticate against - meaning: you can but don't have to use Facebook. Whether you register with Facebook or without, you can still use the normal user/password authentication and password-reminder functionalities. You are not obliged to use Facebook to authenticate, you can always enable and disable the connection within your account settings.

Booking Calender
Last but not least, we added a really neat new feature to Nachbarschaftsauto: the booking calendar allows the user to specify when the car won't be available: The user can just click on the specific day, drag over a couple of days or even click on rows or columns to state. A very simple UI to make the User specify things like "the car won't be available that week" or "my car is never available on mondays". I really love it. And we are currently working on way to show you, when the car won't be available because it is booked.

What do you think about that. Ain't it neat? Anyways, stay tuned for the behind the scenes of the new main page...

Nachbarschaftsauto beschleunigt

2011-11-16T17:22:00.000+01:00

Though you've probably already heard, we haven't said it officially yet. As of now, all papers are signed, so I am very glad to announce: We joined Nachbarschaftsauto.de, helped them out for a few month already and are looking forward to the adventures ahead of us.

For the few of you who don't know it yet, Nachbarschaftsauto is a private car-sharing plattform - similar to airbnb but for cars: Everyone can post his car, decide on a hourly, daily and weekly price so that others can rent that car. It just takes a few clicks, some papers to fill in and the car is insured during the time of renting over the platform. Then just a call to the owner to discuss where to pick up the car and you are ready to go.

Such a simple and elegant concept and at the same time powerful and genius. Not only is there a huge market all around the world, it also provides a great benefit to society. Just think about it, the car is parked 23 hours an average day - huge wasted potentials. While at the same time the road infrastructure is exploding and more and more city are looking for other ways to manage public transporation. The simplest solution would be to own less cars and instead use the existing ones more efficiently. Creating a platform to enable people to do that easily- even with an insurance for their cars - is just an awesome thing to do.

On top of that we are very psyched to do this with such an exciting team. Way before there was any web appearance the founders sat down and discussed what needed to be done. Very quickly they saw the need for an insurance to back them up. Though it took them almost a year of consulting and negotiation, eventually they got a signatured with one of Germanys top insurance Companies: R+V. Going through such a dip, is what I'd call being passionate.

With their great experience in business development, long time work in marketing and PR the founders were only lacking some technical experts - exactly our field of expertise. We are now taking care of the current platform, fix bugs, develope new features in the frontend and backend. And aside from that, we help out everwhere we can, like when I staged for this spot for the RTL-News Network. 'cause that's what a Beschleuniger does.

With joint forces Nachbarschaftsauto is now getting faster than ever to bring a great product to more and more people. And Club der Beschleuniger eG is proud to be make this go faster than ever.

Just for the record

2011-10-27T17:03:00.001+02:00

I am happy to announce that with this day, we are registered as a collective by law in Germany. This is an important step for us especially as it took a while since we officially founded. Time to celebrate...

Though the 24th is the day of our registration our official foundation date is still the 1st May 2011 - yes, we've founded on "International Workers Day". It took us a while to get registered, because of the lengthy approval process you have to go through to be allowed to establish a collective in Germany. But I just received note that we've conquered even that last ofr them two days ago. Therefor I am hereby removing any reference to iGr - in Gründung - which stated we are still in the funding phase. We are not. We've made it.

This might sound as if we weren't doing any work yet. Au contrair, mon frére¹, we've been very busy. As the time of this writing we are already supporting some projects, others we are in heavy discussion about the amount of our involvements. Heck, we have enough work that we are already looking for more craft people to join our quest. And guess what, we think we even found some already². I am looking forward to announcing the deals as soon as they've been closed with official signatures.

Stay tuned, there will be more.

¹ I am not good at this language...
² Does not mean we stopped looking: If you know someone, let "ben | at | dieBeschleuniger dot de" know!
³ Who knows the Movie the picture refers to?

about copycats and deutsche doggen

2011-10-26T11:25:00.002+02:00

Lately there has been a vivid discussion about the german copycats, a topic that resurfaces every couple of month in our local (meaning Berlin) startup community. This time it has been started by the call for an Anti-Copycat-Revolution by our dear friends at 6Wunderkinder receiving a lot of public attention. This discussion peaked last week when the usually not-very-bloggish Gründerszene felt the need to critize 6Wunderkinder. Their point being that copying has always been part of how creative innovation is achieved from BMW until today. Also pointing out that some the companies promoted in the 6Wunderkinder article are actually copiest, too. Heck, this ToDo-List-App-idea ain't remarkably new either.

Thought that seems impossible, I agree on both their views. The reason why those articles look contradictory lies in a classic misunderstanding. It roots in a too vage definition of the term copycat. What does it really stand for? That someone else had that idea before? That someone tried to execute this business before? Or that you literally copy-paste their website into yours? Your view on the topic depends highly on what you think copycat means. That's why I can savely agree with Gründerszene: creativity and innovation have always been based on the basic concept of stealing ideas, improving them and trying again. And if it fails, you start over.

On a side-note: Dear Americans, if you have a great service, product or business idea over there and you are too stubborn, lazy or busy to execute it over here in europe, what are we supposed to do? Wait until you show us soo much mercy that you might extend your business to our place? Guess what, we are developed enough to execute it ourself. So, who are you to blame us, for doing it ourselfes when you just don't care about this market place? What you are calling the german copycat system, I call "taking a great business one step further by introducing it into a new market place"*. At least for most startups.

But some startups over here work different. And that is, where I agree with the 6Wunderkinder. Just the other day I was talking with Mathias Fiedler (CTO at ArtFlakes) about this topic. We realised that as a description for the thing we were talking about, the term copycat is way to cute. After some back and forth we came up with a much better fitting term: the Deutsche Dogge. Some may also know it as the Great Dane, a dog breed known for its huge size and massive figure. Already its impressive size is a big threat to a lot of people, but if it starts barking and aims at you, you should really be scared to the heart and run for your life. I think this terms describes this certain kind of copycat companies much more precise**.

Similar to industrial meat, the startups we call Deutsche Doggen are optimized for an industrial manufacturing process. Other than for big breast (as chickens) these Deutsche Doggen Startups are optimized for appearing big and important with aggressiv barking skills. Often achieved by throwing marketing money at it until every kid knows how to spell the brand asleep. So when any competitor tries to enter that market, just looking at them scares the hell out of them. Leaving them with the assumpotion there would be no way of entering the market without paying them the Deutsche Dogge its tribute. Most of the time, this means, buying the hound.

Optimization for the industrial process has some known side-effects though: similar as in meat production, when the huge-breast-chickens are barely able to stand or breath, the Deutschen Dogge seems to be barely sustainable on its own. At least looking at the what happens the day after they got acquired: they get castrating and put into a muzzle and in most cases a major parts of employees are let off. But this biggest disadvantage of this highly optimized proces is: the business loses its personally. Similar to chicken in a breeding farm, those Deutsche Doggen are not allowed to have a real character, not to mention a real life. They are simply not build for it.

A business that is barely able to sustain itself, where every second person is left off as soon as they are acquired, that's not what I would call a great business. But, hell, trading Deutsche Doggen is a highly profitable business, so I can understand why people would do that. It's just not so great if you are the Deutsche Dogge to be traded. So, though I respect this type of business model and those executing it, it's not the way I do business. Because it's not the kind of business I consider great. I think this is the kind of business the 6Wunderkinder ment when they were talking about copycats. A term that is to vage to describe it.

It all boils down to this simple message, I think the 6Wunderkinder were trying to send: Instead of building something to bark aggressively at other, build something great, something you love and with its own character. And most importantly: do your own thing and don't be someone else's pet!

* This said; I would love to see someone bringing threadless.com to europe, germany specially. If you are interested, drop me a line!
** With the additional feature of referring to germany ("Deutsch"), as these are the only startups I know well enough to give such a precise description. I don't know whether there are similar copycat-systems in india or somewhere else and I wouldn't try to reach out describing them all with this term.

Ode to the Startup

2011-10-20T09:44:00.000+02:00

Last week I presented "Club der Beschleuniger eG" in public for the first time at the Usability- and Designer user group upfront in Berlin. I didn't want to do just another "this is my startup and we do this and that"-kinda slide-show-presentation. Not only because they suck but also because we are too different - I never refer to the company as a "startup" in the first place. Instead I presented a little poem I had created right after we founded, explaining the reasons that got me there. So that current and future members of our company known what the goal behind the company is. And well, as it was a designer user group I also created something visually appealing.

So, without any further introduction I present to you the re-recording I did for techberlin.com:

and the live recording of the event. So that you can get a feeling about the atmosphere there. And as a prove I really did present it in front of other people:

I'd be happy to know what you think of it - just leave a comment.

where to meet us next week

2011-10-05T12:05:00.000+02:00

Eventually I got word last week, that I received a lightning talk spot a the next UpFront-Event at co-up¹. I'll be presenting the reasons, why we've founded the company. If that is not enough for you yet, the kind of presentation might be something worth noticing: I'm going to recite a poem - and there'll be visualisations of it, too. So, you better be there!

If you want to meet me even before, I'll be on the webmontag berlin (and on Facebook) at the mobile suite co working space. Looks like I'm gonna hit the co-working spaces that week. If you wonder how to grab me there, just ask for Matthias Fiedler, one of the organizers, he should be able to point you towards me.

Rounded up, here is the list of next weeks event, you can meet me at.

Monday, October10th, 19h30, Web-Montag/Berlin
at MobileSuite, Pappelallee 78/79, 10437 Berlin

Tuesday, October 11th, 19h30, UpFront
at Co-Up, Adalbertstr. 7-8, 10999 Berlin

See you there!

¹ Sadly, as this months Hack'N'Tell is on the same evening, I won't be able to make it there.

So, what language are you programming in?

2011-08-10T11:38:00.000+02:00

It seems to be the one defining question for developers nowadays, at least from the outside. I have spent a lot of time at socializing events talking to all kinds of people about the Beschleuniger-concept lately. Usually when we've talked for a while and the person is interested this question gets asked. Often followed by "see, we currently do [ABC] and we are looking for someone with years of experience with that language and the field [XYZ]. So, what do you think about it?"

I always stumpled on that question. Could I tell a potential project partner that I think the programming language or technology they are using is bad match and doesn't (quite) fit their needs? Would he even hear the message or just think that I am just another programmer defending his most favourite language by goofing on other languages? That is not the impression I want to give. So what to tell him¹? For the first few times I said something useless and switched the topic. But that was very unsatisfying, so I sat down and looked deeper into this topic a few weeks ago.

And than it hit me: It doesn't matter. The language doesn't matter.

No, seriously, if you have a good software developer, it really doesn't. A good software developer is able to get into a new software language in a couple of weeks anyway. Every day longer is only adding experience helping him getting things done more quickly, while the amount he can learn decreases over time. As Jason Fried phrases it: "There's surprisingly little difference between a candidate with six month of experience and one with six years."²

I think this is especially true for good developers. A good programmer is able to read code, understand the conceptional idea and with that learn how to do things the best possible way in that language or framework. And for most languages and frameworks that only takes a couple of weeks. After he only needs to learn the "vocabulary"; the right method-calls, functions and places to look things up. But as soon as he understood the underlying concept it takes him very little time.

So, why is it that there is so much rambling around programming languages? Or even more precise why am I defendant for certain languages and like them much more than others? It is because of the community around it. Each language has a unique community surrounding it, giving it certain characteristics. If you look at the users of a language that is mostly used for science, for example, you'll find that most people in the community will have an university degree.

This is only one obvious example, in reality every language and its public appearance is formed by the community around it. Every language attracts certain kind of people who are in some way or the other like-minded. And it is them who define how to do things within "the language" or framework. That goes from how they share code, collaborate and organize to they way people contribute, communicate and even how they develop, from their style to the methods (waterfall, agile, test-driven) used. This is how the community and with it the language or framework is shaped.

So even when I meet someone for the first time, if he is defendant for a certain language or framework it means he identifies himself with the surrounding community. And only by knowing that community I can expect him to have certain characteristics and ideals on how to do things, even more generally than just coding style. Within minutes I am able to tell you whether we would be a good team or not. This might sound like prejudice to you but if the person acts to be associated with that community, he wants to be part of the community and therefore very much likely likes to work the way the community does.

Of course I always question my picture of community and the people in it. That is why I don't pick on languages: I don't want put the other person in the role of defending what he is doing but rather try to get beyond that and figure out, whether he is actually a good programmer. But this works the other way round, too: if a company is looking for developer for XYZ, they associate themselves with that language, their community and its way to do things. Making you more attractive to some people while least attractive to others.

To put it in a nutshell: The language doesn't matter that much, as long as the developer is good. Be aware of the fact that by using certain languages you also attract certain (kinds of) people. So don't search for people you need but more for the community whose work style you want your company to work with. Or even better: drop the language and start looking for Great Developers instead.

¹ Most of them are male, that is why I used the male terms here. Sad but true.
² Rework, ISBN-13: 978-0307463746, Chpt. "Hiring", p. 213

Sprinting with the 6Wunderkinder

2011-06-01T10:49:00.008+02:00

Last week we spent a couple of days with the 6Wunderkinder at their office for a little Javascript-UI-Sprint.

Together we created a little frontend prototype for their upcoming project. I'd say we made quite some progress. There isn't more I can tell you about that, but what I can tell you is this: there is a great atmosphere. An atmosphere of collaboration and willingness to work for the bigger goal of creating something ridiculously awesome. Though, they seem big and that might be frightening to some, they are really fun guys to work with. And they are currently looking for people to join their team, so send them your résumé. They won't bite, I assure you!

One open position I like to emphasize is the one for a frontend engineer slash JS-Ninja. At the moment we are helping them out on that matter, but let's face it, they need to have their own frontend engineers. So, I repeat: If you are any good with frontend stuff, send them your résumé!

We'll be back at their offices around the end of June for a second, much longer, Javascript-UI-Sprint and we are looking forward to meet someone more people to work with. Also, you might wanna drop "dieBeschleuniger" while interviewed ;) .

Website relaunch

2011-05-19T17:05:00.004+02:00

Good day to you!

After I've printed the first batch of business cards containing the name of the homepage I was unhappy with our external representation. Too much text, too much design, too much of everything and last weeks upfront_ug inspired me to make it simpler and go for great typefaces instead. When looking over the old version again, I saw that it was actually enough to read the headlines and the two, three words I had highlighted in each paragraph to understand the main concepts and ideas. That made me realise that there must be a way to say the same with way less words.

I talked about all that with a friend of mine and the problem that we have to serve two "sides" at the moment: We want to tell founders how we can help them and we want to show Designers, Developers and others why this intresting for them and why they should join. The problem: not only does each side require different speaking and use of words, in its internals it might be striking against each other. So we came up with the idea to divide the page and take the main focus on each side of it and put a person on each side representing a founder and a geek slash hacker slash designer.

With a wireframe in mind I went through the book I have written before, wrote down the main headlines and highlighted words, sorted them to either side and decided for simple and short headlines. Today I decided to publish them, so I got out of bed, took pictures of me looking geek-ing through a door and some "reaching" for the great idea. I made the shoots against the light so I had a rough edge I could bezire-curve the silhouettes in inkscape.

I then rephrased the words I had written down to become fluently readable and put all of that together. Then I cut half of the words again, rephrased and cut and rephrased. I did various iterations until I had a nice and precise text of the essence of what I wanted to say in a design that looks simple and great.

My lessness drove me. And the pressure that I told a lot of people to not go on the webpage until the end of the week when giving them the business card: "because it looks like a mess and I am going to relaunch this week". It might not be perfect, but it does the job and I am not too embarrassed about it. So here you go, the new Homepage is online!

Aktuelle Termine

2011-05-10T15:07:00.000+02:00

Da die Schedule für das heutige up_front schon voll wahr, können wir unsere geplante Präsentation dort leider heute nicht machen. Ob wir die Präsentation überhaupt noch machen, kann ich daher auch nicht sagen, weil kaum ein anderer Rahmen so gut passt wie up_front, ich aber nächstes Mal leider nicht in Deutschland sein werde. Kommen werden wir aber natürlich trotzdem. Also trefft uns dort!

Oder ihr kommt morgen oder Donnerstag zu den IT-Profits im Messe Berlin Gelände und wir treffen uns dort. Wir haben leider keinen Stand - dieses Jahr -, aber falls ihr vor Ort seid, lasst es mich wissen: ben |at| dieBeschleuniger punkt de und wir machen einen Termin. Gerne auch kurzfristig. Oder ihr kommt morgen abend auch zum Entrepreneurs Club Treffen im Franz Club (Kulturbrauerei) und wir quatschen da.

Ansonsten steht nächste Woche die NextConf an. Da freue ich mich doppelt drauf. Schon mehrfach davon gehört und werde jetzt auch endlich mal dabei sein. Also könnt ihr mich auch dort treffen. Oder halt jederzeit über die oben angegebene Mail-Adresse.

Gegründet und online

2011-05-05T12:29:00.000+02:00

und alle so yeah...

Schreit es in die Welt hinaus: wir sind gegründet und online. Wir haben letzte Woche die letzten noch nötigen Unterlagen an den Prüfungsverband gesendet und dürfen uns damit offiziell "e.G. i.G." - eingetragene Genossenschaft in Gründung. Lasst euch das mal auf der Zunge zergehen und sprecht es laut aus. "e.G. i.G." - find ich klasse. Offizielles Gründungsdatum ist übrigens der 1. Mai - Tag der Arbeit :D .

Darüber hinaus haben wir auch endlich eine rudimentäre Version der Webseite, des Blogs und von Twitter online. Email und Kalender funktioniert ja schon länger. Wir kümmern uns hier fleißig darum, den Aufbau voran zu treiben und sind immer noch auf der Suche nach Verstärkung. Interesse, einfach mailen!