We are absolutely thrilled to announce the public beta release of Dragontape, a great new tool to create your own mixtapes of YouTube videos. We are extremely happy EU Edge had the chance to take part in the making of this hugely entertaining app.

Dragontape is built on the charmingly simple idea that most people who’ve ever enjoyed a YouTube party in their lives would probably welcome a bit more sophistication in creating and sharing selections of their favorite clips (sorry Google, but that’s just a fact).

What Dragontape does and how it works is summed up very clearly in the app’s name – there’s a kind of tape, and you drag clips on it to make a mix. You can then save the mix and send a simple URL to your friends to enjoy anytime they wish. The smart bit here is that the vids themselves are left as they are – Dragontape simply threads the links of the individual YouTube clips together.

And all this happens in a very easy going and beautiful interface. One of the best user experiences I ever had in a browser window.

EU Edge was called upon to put its programming skills behind the project, turning the ideas of the guys behind Dragontape into executable code. It was a really fun piece of job to make, and it didn’t lack surprises and challenges. A good bit of Flash wizardry was needed, there came the usual game of browser compatibility to keep us entertained, and of course it runs on the infinitely scalable Google App Engine cloud platform, which we always love to work with.

As advertised on the site, the current release is still a beta, but works well enough to give you some good time.

All in all, we believe Dragontape has every chance of becoming this years top hit on the interwebs, so don’t waste any more time and go try it out yourself at www.dragontape.com.

Or you can first watch one of our own mixes

As a group of IT specialists and biking enthusiasts we are doubly thrilled by the launch of Budapest’s first automated bicycle traffic counter, a sort of meshup of our two favorite kind of cycles.

The counter will help city planners better understand bicycle traffic habits and patterns, but even more importantly, it is the first hard-science tool that we city cyclists have to demonstrate our growing numbers to the transport authorities.

The Hungarian Cyclist Club is the main driving force behind the initiative, while the cost of the counter itself was collected from donations. As holder of the Bike Friendly Workplace Award, EU Edge full-heartedly supports this excellent idea, and in fact we have immortalized our pledge of support by chipping in for the counter, and getting our name on the commemorative plaque.

If you hold any interest in making our city a cleaner and friendlier place to live, get on your bike and give this first counter a first spin by pedaling along the bicycle lane on Múzeum körút.

Join us at the ceremonial flipping of the ON switch, taking place from 5 p.m. to 6 p.m. on Friday July 2, 2010.

For more information visit: http://kerekparosklub.hu/mutassuk-meg-hanyan-vagyunk (hungarian only)

Congregar is a sort of house pet to us that we launched in November 2008 and in the past year, it has learned some nice new tricks we hope you’ll enjoy. The new beta adds more flexible event options, and brings improvements in poll status tracking for event organizers and participants. Those of keen eye will notice some subtle tweaks to the UI too.

Try it out! – and of course, we’re itching to hear what you think

eu.edge team

New Features:

• Text-based choices: you can now offer choices for different venues, menus, anything
• Multiple choices per day: you can now offer alternate choices for the time or venue of the event for a given day
• Administrative link: sent in an email to the event organizer, this allows you to easily check back on the event status anytime.
• Google Account login: allows participants easy access to the vote and poll results
• Private link: allows participants who do not use a Google Account to return to the event and update their votes, check the poll outcome.

We’re proud to report that EU Edge received the 2009 Bike Friendly Workplace Award, distributed by the Hungarian Ministry of Environment and Water.

Praise for winning the award should go to our avid bikers for being relentless in keeping our office’s carbon emissions to a minimum (the fact that we cover biking-related expenses from the employee transportation funds might have helped).

A special shout-out is due to our CEO Viktor who can be seen roaming the streets of Budapest on his fixie even in the frosty winter months, and has been a major driving force for the whole issue. We would also like to thank our building managers for submitting themselves to our every demands, providing storage facilities, installing showers, and ultimately making it possible for us to keep in our saddles.

The wheel was man’s first great invention. Two wheels were the next.
Keep it rolling.

The interview was made during a recent event of the Budapest New Technology Meetup group, where our CTO Akos Maroy and our excellent friend Zsolt Máslányi from Spearsong Inc. spoke about experiences in
doing outsource work for global companies, on how the local talent stands on IT skills and business savviness.

I don’t want to be a spoiler, so get hold of a copy if you can manage. Anyway, a great honor this is, a fantastic possibility to plug our company and the New Technology Meetups, and a strange contentment
from seeing our names printed on high-quality glossy paper.

“What would be the best date for that weekend cookout with my friends? When is everyone available for a class reunion? Which night would work best for that company outing?”

The usual pattern when organizing such events is a mass email to your friends, followed by a thread of 80 emails, where everyone throws in their preferences, witty remarks, corrections, retractions, etc. Then, after a bit of confused silence, you try to draw a conclusion from all this, and in frustration usually end up picking the date you preferred anyway, followed by further negotiations and griping

We thought this could be improved, so we have put together a web application to scratch our own itch. You can very quickly create a poll about the best date, send a link to your friends, and follow all responses. No registration, no fuss, no muss. Everyone can see the most likely date at a glance, and also drill into the details of when individuals are available.

Check it out at www.congregar.com!

More features are on the way, but we thought this is quite useful as it is. We appreciate your feedback too!

But now I’m back, ready to take on commercial-grade software engineering challenges that we tackle here at EU Edge. I was missing this field actually, working on pragmatic problems, making people’s lives happy.

The solution, as most of the time, is in between.

Faced with an issue, engineers, having a perfectionist stance, deem any ’solution’ a failure, unless it is a 100% solution. If the tap is leaking, the only solution is such that there are no droplets coming from it if it is closed. Whereas for managers, the goal is to keep the issue at bay, and know how to maintain a status quo. Using this approach, placing a glass under the tap, and making sure it is emptied regularly is solution in itself. After all: there’s no unknown leakage anymore, and everything is kept under control.

Of course, the best usually comes when these worlds are combined: let’s improve on the valve, so that dripping is very limited, but still place and empty the glass underneath, albeit emptying with much less frequency – something that would not be considered a solution by an engineer at all. But from a managerial perspective, the maintenance resources are decreased considerably, and thus this is a major improvement in itself.

Shigeo Shingo suggests that this is actually a very good way to eventually achieve a ‘perfect’ solution, as it is easier to tackle only parts of a problem than the whole. One can ’solve’ say 60-80% of the cases with a naive approach, and put it into effect right away, already harvesting the benefits. And then there’s time to go for the remaining 20-40% later.

To the frustration of perfectionist engineers, this latter improvement sometimes never happens, and then there’s a feeling that ‘everything is broken’, ‘nothing is done properly’. And from his perspective, this view is understandable. But then again, making 60-80% improvements on other parts of the process is most probably a time much better spent than attacking 20-40% yields for the sake of perfectionism.

Nevertheless, the source of the conflict is ever there, and one must be wise to mitigate it regularly.

Topics covered an excellent 101 for startups, with a surprisingly good signal-to-bullshit ratio:

• Brief presentations of some startups. I especially liked iGlue, coining buzz-worthy terms such as “information iron curtain”
• APIs and the role of opening data sources. Brief summary: APIs are good for your service. My note: data portability is better for users.
• The role of advertising: how to use it effectively as a startup. Lesson: if you have money to spend on ads, by all means do it. But do your homework and look for the grassroots, guerilla models first, do some basic SEO, and only then consider banners.
• Ad revenue in the business model. As expected, usually not a solid model in itself for small players.
• Investor expectations. It was interesting to hear government representatives talk about the ineffectiveness of government.
• How to get funded: from those who got funded. I was on this panel for some reason – I suspect as the token entrepreneur, who’s actually happy without external funding. Hey, there are so many ways of not obtaining angel or VC money – I was delighted someone actually wanted to hear more about that Luckily for the audience there were also some veteran entrepreneurs on the panel with a background in economy, who could provide very insightful comments.

Thanks to the organizers for such a great, down-to-earth conference (call that “underground” if you will). Looking forward to more!

In the evening we held our monthly Budapest New Technology Meetup. Despite some serious initial challenges with electricity and burning out a projector, we’ve managed to get the presentations under way. An interesting observation from the Meetup was that people presenting agile development methodologies tend not to be agile enough to fit into the five minute timebox. I guess it might be the classic case of “Those that know, do.”

Update: A video of the session intro is now available.