We finally launched our Ximda new website. Our focus is on Mobile . Web . Social Media

We will be adding a lot of useful information to the blog area. So check it out and subscribe to our RSS feed.

ShareThis

I went yesterday to DemoCamp Dallas1 to present DealBurnr. And I had no intention to go live soon. But my friend Giovanni insisted (yelled at me) to go live ASAP.

So I came back home worked until the morning on fixing problems, adding image uploads and doing last minute integration with OpenID.

Here is the video of Giovanni’s interview with both Jim Young and me.

DemoCampDallas1 video

ShareThis

Christopher St. John is hosting the first DemoCamp in Dallas history

Date: Thursday, February 15, 2007 – 6:30-8:00
Location: Sabre Labs

A DemoCamp is a lighter-weight style of un-conference. It lasts only a few hours on a weekday evening. Unlike a BarCamp, you don’t have to present. You are welcome to come along and give feedback to the people who do (or just watch and absorb if you don’t feel like talking). Demos should have roughly a 2 minute introduction, 8 minute demonstration, and 5 minutes for questions. 15 minutes total.

If you are interested in knowing what Dallas entrepreneurs are up to then come and join us.

ShareThis

BarCamp Dallas III turnout was great. There were a lot of good sessions covering interesting topics. I was able to have very good conversations about emerging technology trends and to exchange ideas with local entrepreneurs.

Erica and Caleb showed great leadership and excellent organization.

Giovanni Gallucci did an excellent job covering the event in audio, video and pictures.

Special thanks to all the people who attended the event and to Microsoft for letting us use their Las Colinas building.

ShareThis

See you at BarCamp Dallas

When: 3rd Weekend in January (2007) – Jan 20th – 21st

Where: The 4th floor at the Microsoft Las Colinas Campus.

ShareThis

If you are a web entrepreneur, you know that driving traffic to your website is very vital to its survival. But how do you generate traffic?

The most effective way (in my opinion) is to encourage users to contribute content to your website and then to do some SEO (Search Engine Optimization) to enhance the visibility of this content. Thus driving more users to your website by exposing the content to search engines.

But isn’t that the same “egg and chicken” story? we need users to get content and we need content to get users….

Getting the content

Jim Young and I have been always thinking about ways to collaborate by integrating Data and services between Jambo and TagMyCity. We decided to focus our efforts on creating the next small thing and then integrate with other websites to form the next big thing.

This picture got much bigger when I met with Christopher St. John

Christopher had a much bigger goal… his goal was to create a standard license to govern and facilitate information sharing via RSS and Microformats.

The idea is great because it will allow people to utilize shared content by using a simple technology (RSS + Microformats) and by following a standard public license.

We don’t have a clear vision on how this license should be, but we are inviting everybody to participate by editing the wiki.

ShareThis

This wiki doesn’t try to match options offered by more mature products such as MediaWki. Instead, it focuses on simplicity and ease of use.

Lately I’ve been playing with it to create a public wiki and private one and the only thing I can say about it is … AMAZING.

If you know how to use textile then you will love it, you can actually use this wiki as a CMS to build websites.

I am thinking about Instiki more as a framework rather than a final product.

There are so many things that could be developed on top of this great and simple wiki. Just imaging the possibilities…. no seriously this is an awesome application.

So if you are a Ruby hacker and you haven’t looked at Instiki source code yet, then you know what you need to do this weekend ;) Don’t forget to buy your favorite bottle of wine too. Because Ruby goes best with wine :)

ShareThis

I’ve been lately digging in RubyForge trying to find good open source projects built using Ruby. Unfortunately there are only few mature projects out there. However, there are plenty of new ones with great potentials.

The adoption of Ruby in open source projects is as important as adopting it in the enterprise.

There are so many reasons to use Ruby to build open source software, here are few:

• Fast gorwing community of developers and supporters
• Short learning curve
• Easy to read syntax, allowing developers to understand the code with minimum documentation
• Posses an excellent MVC framework (Rails) making it a great fit for web applications.
• Supports trendy technologies such as RSS, SOAP, XML, REST and AJAX.
• High code reusability by utilizing plugins and engines

And of course Ruby is open source after all …

ShareThis

In the upcoming weeks, Ximda will roll out a new website called DealBurnr.com. The website is a web 2.0 approach to bargain shopping.

We took Digg.com concept of story voting and applied it to deal hunting.

Users can submit deals to dealburnr where people can vote on these deals with either Hot or Cold. The hottest deals rise on top of the queue.

dealburnr is built using Ruby On Rails and utilizes a lot of web 2.0 nifty functionalities such as tags, RSS, social networking and AJAX.

ShareThis

They’ve been promising a very smooth migration between the two services. But if they call loosing Internet connectivity for 12 hours (on a businesses class account) a smooth migration … then god help us.

Not considering that you have to wait on the phone for an hour at least to get a real help. Why did Comcast leave Dallas???

ShareThis