Headworx

I see the explosion of startup activity in Krakow, my home town. There are many groups, communities, events. Young, energetic people meet, exchange ideas, talk. Having a startup has become a lifestyle. But the Dragon Valley (the nickname for the Krakow entrepreneurship community) is not the Silicon Valley. At least not yet. There seems to be a cult of entrepreneurship lifestyle and bright ideas. There are plenty of very good ideas. But what seems to be missing is the focus of turning the ideas into successful businesses and products. We need more high profile successful businesses and products. Here is my call: stop gadoing and start doing ("gadoing" is a phonetic construct, in Polish it means talking). So yes, stop talking and start doing the job. Creating an idea is fun. Turning the idea into a successful product is still fun, but requires a lot, and I do mean a lot of hard work. Work, which not always is fun. But without actually doing the hard part, there won't be ...

Efficacy. The entrepreneur's dream. The reward is priceless when the vision and the hard work meet together at the point of product delivery. The product is ready to be shipped. Four years of research and development. Two years of implementation. One year of beta testing. Six months with early adopters, during the time we trained more than 200 professional system installers. Software certification. Documentation. Manufacturing line test equipment. Supply chain management. Packaging. User's discussion forum, already humming. Ready to go. Our first product, delivered. At WiHo.me , we do not make products. Through the research, development and design we make our customers' products better. The first commercial fruit of this symbiosis goes to market in May. It is the most important milestone our company have reached. We have this deep feeling we deliver the quality. The customers will be the judges. Myself, I strongly believe in investing in quality. Quality is expensive an...

The Pebble Watch (the black one) arrived a week ago. It was after many months of anticipation and waiting. And many months late, if we refer to the original schedule. The short story is: I like it a lot. Not that it is perfect. Far from that. But it is the first smart watch that feels like a watch. It is reasonably thin (much thinner than the Sony brick ). And it is way less cumbersome to use everyday. There are three aspects why the Pebble stands out as a smartwatch: The e-Ink display meaning it is always showing the time and does not require a second hand to press a button to activate the display The low energy consumption (it is now running for the eighth day on the initial charge - the Sony could barely handle eight hours) The waterproof case with magnetic charging cable clip I backed the Pebble Kickstarter project to get an insider's view on the entire process of creating a software - hardware project from scratch to the market. After all this is what I am doing now ...

Your app should be cloud - based. This is obvious. But which cloud? This probably is the most difficult  question today. There as several clouds to choose from. And they are not equal. I am far from judging which is the best one (if there is one that is the best). I have to warn you switching clouds is close to impossible. A cloud system is not an array of machines hosted somewhere. It is the API. The cloud operating system. Platform wars are no longer between Windows and MacOS (their time is gone). Nor among Microsoft Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Opera. (webkit has won). Nor among Android, iOS, BlackBerry and Windows Phone (to be successful, you can't support just one, no matter what). There are wars among the Cloud systems. Amazon AWS vs Microsoft Azure vs Google App Engine. The Cloud Wars. The investment required to build a good Cloud Application is not small. The better the app or the broader reach, the bigger the investment (obvious). And the bigger the...