Processes at Uraan: a developer perspective

On Monday, one of our ex-team members, Zeeshan dropped by to say hello. He is currently working in a financial services firm in Dubai Media City on one of their portals. The firm is a small 20-person firm. According to him, the processes at Uraan are much more sophisticated than his current firm’s processes and the opportunity for developers to “learn” in Uraan is a lot more than most companies he has been to in Dubai. According to him, the main thing that sets Uraan apart from other firms is our willingness to learn from our mistakes and improve our processes. Furthermore, the rate of growth for developers at Uraan is a lot more than the average growth in a lot of other firms.

News reports on our presentation in Nürnberger

Das Netzwerk leadventures bringt Experten zusammen

Konfuzius und die Innovationen

Die Sache mit den Innovationen ist so eine Sache. Jeder will sie. Jeder braucht sie. An dem Thema Asien – und China insbesondere – kommt man dabei nicht mehr vorbei. Doch wie stellt man es richtig an, um dort möglichst dauerhaft einen Fuß auf den Boden zu bekommen? Mit dieser und anderen Fragen beschäftigten sich kürzlich die Mitglieder des Nürnberger Netzwerkes leadventures, in dem sich Unternehmer technologieorientierter Firmen zusammengeschlossen haben.

Thomas Dillig hat sich rege mit der chinesischen Kultur auseinandergesetzt. Der Unternehmensberater und Asienexperte hat selbst lange Jahre in China gelebt und dabei viel über die Mentalität der Menschen gelernt. Um das Werteverständnis der Chinesen begreifbar zu machen, hält er sich an Konfuzius. Eine der Weisheiten des Gelehrten besagt: Der Mensch hat dreierlei Wege klug zu handeln: erstens durch nachdenken, das ist der edelste, zweitens durch nachahmen, das ist der leichteste, und drittens durch Erfahrung, das ist der bitterste.

«Die Deutschen wählen oft den bittersten Weg», so Dillig. «Wir produzieren hier zu Lande unter einem enormen Aufwand von Ressourcen.» Dass die Chinesen meist einen ganz anderen Weg einschlugen, sei dem Umstand geschuldet, dass sie nicht wirklich gelernt hätten, kreativ zu denken. «Unter Mao Zedong war das ja verboten.» Ein Beleg dafür ist laut Dillig allein der Umstand, dass China bei der Anmeldung von Patenten weltweit so gut wie keine Rolle spiele. Selbst an den Universitäten werde Wissen vor allem auswendig gelernt.

Doch die Chinesen lernen schnell. Während sie früher ins Ausland gingen, um zu lernen und auch, um dort zu bleiben, kommen sie heute von ausländischen Universitäten mit ausländischem Know how zurück.

Wie gut das Gelernte umgesetzt wird, machen allein ein paar Zahlen deutlich, die der Unternehmensberater nennt: Nicht nur, dass das Land der Mitte seit etwa 20 Jahren jährlich um zehn Prozent wächst. Inzwischen verfügt China auch über 300 Labors für Schlüsseltechnologien, 54 Zonen für industrielle und technologische Entwicklung, 30 Software-Parks, 5 Umweltschutzparks sowie 15 Freihandelszonen.

Der Perfektionsanspruch kann für den Markterfolg hinderlich sein

Doch wie gelingt es einem deutschen Unternehmer, dazwischen seinen Platz zu finden? «Tauschen Sie sich mit Firmen aus, die schon Erfahrungen gemacht haben», rät der Experte. «Bücher lesen hilft nicht so sehr. Fliegen Sie lieber für eine Woche nach China, schauen Sie sich um, auch an den Universitäten, wie die Menschen leben und arbeiten.» Und sein wohl wichtigster Rat: «Geben Sie Ihr Know how nicht leichtfertig aus der Hand. Suchen Sie sich als Geschäftspartner eher einen in China lebenden Ausländer statt mit einem Chinesen, den Sie auf einer Messe kennengelernt haben, ein Joint Venture zu gründen.»

In der Qualität und dem Ruf, diese zu produzieren, sieht Ali Naqi Shaheen, Chef der pakistanischen Software-Firma Uraan und Gastredner bei leadventures, einen der großen Vorteile der Deutschen. «Qualität ist ein echtes Statussymbol.» Dieses Bewusstsein mit den Fähigkeiten asiatischer Ingenieure gepaart, könne zu großartigen Ergebnissen führen.

Klaus Gradischek, Leiter des Instituts für individuelle und angewandte Kommunikation und Produktionstechnologie, nähert sich dem Thema Innovation mit dem amerikanischen Ansatz: «Wenn das Produkt gut genug für den Markt ist – bring es raus», hat er in seiner Zeit in den USA gelernt. Denn während die Amerikaner beispielsweise eine noch nicht vollkommene Software auf den Markt brächten, mit dieser Version und jeder Nachbesserung bereits Geld verdienten, feilten die Deutschen noch immer am absolut Perfekten. «Statt ein ausgetüfteltes Produkt für 70 000 Euro an 20 Kunden zu verkaufen, sollten wir lieber versuchen, ein Produkt für 20 Euro an 70 000 Kunden zu verkaufen», so Gradischek.

www.leadventrues.org

www.aktuellasia.com

www.institut-akp.de

Anja Kummerow
19.4.2007

Ref: http://www.nz-online.de/artikel.asp?art=634796&kat=317&man=4

Demystifying Web 2.0 Media (Audio, Video, Document) Sharing Portals

These days there is a lot of hype (read the zdnet article here) around media sharing portals. Video sharing seems to be the “hot” thing around, especially after the acquisition of youtube.com by Google, everyone seems to want to have their share in the pie. Because of this there is an increased demand in off-the-shelf as well as customized audio, video sharing solutions. Not surprisingly, we have already worked on numerous similar platforms e.g.

http://www.web-idol.tv This site is not live anymore, but basically it was a video competition website where users could submit their videos and compete against each other for a prize money.
http://www.travelervideos.com
http://www.basementcast.com

Other than these we are launching a few of these in the German market as well. We are also looking to launch a few very high profile media sharing portals in recent future. So the question is what does it take to launch a portal such as youtube? What’s the big deal? What infrastructure is required? Who can do it? Are there any off-the-shelf components available? In this blog entry, we will try to answer these questions. We should probably be publishing a white-paper on this but in the new era of web 2.0, we believe publishing a post on our blog is equally good. In this blog entry, however, we aren’t talking about video sharing only. We will be talking about all sort of media sharing i.e. audio sharing, video sharing, document sharing and file sharing.

For our document sharing portal you can visit:

http://www.lawresourceexhchange.com

For one of our file sharing portals (in alpha), you can visit:

http://www.mymindspot.com

On top of all of this, you can now also create mashups, we just created one. It’s basically a portal that lets you create video playlists from multiple sources such as google video, youtube, videoegg etc. and also lets you upload your own videos. (Since it’s in alpha right now, so we can’t post the link here but will do so in near future.)

Okay, so what technologies are involved?

If you are thinking about creating an audio, video sharing web application there are a few things that you need to take care of:

a. How will your customers upload files?
b. How will you distribute the files to the end users?

Uploading the files is a pretty straight forward job. You can use numerous third-party uploading controls or build a custom control. These could be java applet based upload controls or flash or an activeX control. Though, flash controls have the widest support. Remember that using simple html upload is quite inefficient because they have upload limitations, as well as, they don’t really allow you to have “resume”, or “upload in parts” support.

While distributing the files, you have quite a few options. You could just display the files in the same format as they are uploaded. This could be wmv (windows media video), mov (quicktime), 3gp (movies made from mobile phones) etc. Now if you leave the files as they are, they can’t be played “from” the website and the users will have to download them to be able to play them. This is true even for the most common formats such as quicktime and real media. If your users don’t have quicktime player or a real media player, they won’t be able to view the files. To solve this problem, most video sharing websites convert the videos into flash and distribute them using a flash player. So, in order to reach as many customers as you can, you have to convert your videos to flash and distribute them as flash videos.

For documents, the best way to go is FlashPaper. You can also convert documents into jpegs and display that but FlashPaper provides a much better way to distribute files over the Internet. This is the technology we’ve used in mymindspot.com.

How is audio/video conversion done?

There are a number of solutions available to perform audio, video conversion or for document/file conversions. When you are selecting a tool, remember that it has to be used on server side. Because you would be converting on “server side”, you will have to have an option where you can call the converter program remotely. Now this is the real challenge in any conversion application i.e. how to efficiently use the converter program so that there is not too much strain on server resources. For video and audio conversion, ffmpeg is an open source application that lets you convert between a lot of different file formats. However, you can’t really use ffmpeg directly. In most cases, people build custom applications on top of ffmeg to achieve maximum performance. In most cases, these applications are wrappers over ffmpeg to allow for communication with the web application, and to manage data on the server (remember, when your users upload their files, these are in the original format, so converting them to flash means that you will potentially have two versions of every file uploaded). Also these wrapper applications keep track of all errors that may come during conversion process.

For document conversion, you can use many different tools. There are quite a lot of conversion applications available that allow users to convert between different formats. A lot of these are print drivers that let users print a document into a file rather than on a piece of paper.

What are some other issues that I should keep in mind?

Since it’s going to be a “media sharing” portal so the first thing you should take care of is the disk space. Usually hosting provide up to 250 Gb of disk space. Depending on what you are anticipating you will need much larger disk space than that. Now there are a few ways to go about it:

a. You could make a deal with a data center to provide you a lot of disk space
b. You could use Amazon’s disk services
c. You could build your architecture so that you could add more servers to our server farm easily.

For us the (c) option was the most practical one. We could easily build a scalable application and it was also pretty cheap (and cost is certainly a factor for most entrepreneurs).

Another thing you should take care of is the bandwidth that you’ll require. A lot of people are going to watch videos from your website which means a lot of bandwidth will be required. Typically you can do some simple calculations to see how much bandwidth you will actually require:

Bandwidth required in a month = average file bitrate in seconds (bytes) * number of users expected * (total number of seconds in a month)

This will give you a total bandwidth required (approximately, let’s keep things simple here).

You also need to plan how big a bandwidth pipe you need. This can be calculated by estimating how many simultaneous users will you be getting on your website.

So how do all these people make money?

Well, the model is simple. Just put up google/yahoo ads on your website and pray that people click on them. Then you can get advertisers for your website if it goes big. It’s all about advertising.

Can you guys help me?

Most certainly. Why don’t you drop us a message from here?

Q1-07 and outlook for Q2-07

This has been a wonderful quarter for us, in terms of the work we’ve delivered as well as the overall revenue. Comparing to the same quarter last year, our revenue has increased 800%. Compared to last quarter, the revenue has increased 21% (a little less than expected). In terms of head count, we’ve grown by 21% from last quarter and 154% from the same quarter last year.

Looking forward, we expect our head-count to grow by 32% and our revenue to grow by a further 52% as compare to this quarter.

This quarter we’ve made huge strides in growing our business. We’ve acquired new customers from Germany and the US, released 5 products for our clients. In the coming quarter we are planning to release quite a few new products for our clients as well as ourselves. In the coming quarter, we hope to get our office in Ravensburg operational.

In terms of technology acquisition, we’ve developed technologies for media sharing, media mashups, and online collaboration. This quarter we are looking to optimize our architectures and design processes. We are also looking to further improve our project management process.

Keeping with our past policies, we’ve shared the success with all our employees. We’ve promoted a few to team leads, increased the entry level salary by 28% and have given salary increments between 10-25% in a single quarter. This is excluding the bonuses we’ve given in this quarter which are 70% more than bonuses given in the last quarter. We hope to continue rewarding and sharing the growth with our current and future employees.

Say no to no …

This is something we came across a Shell ad in a recent issue of Fortune magazine and thought it applies pretty much to our thinking as well …

Isn’t it high time someone got negative about negativity?
Yes it is.
Look around. The world is full of things that, according to nay-sayers, should never have happened.
“Impossible.”
“Impractical.”
“No.”
And yet “yes.”
Yes, continents have been found.
Yes, men have played golf on the moon.
Yes, straw is being turned into biofuel to power cars.
Yes, yes, yes.
What does it take to turn no into yes?
Curiosity. An open mind. A willingness to take risks.
And, when the problem seems most insoluble, when the challenge is hardest, when everyone is shaking their heads to say: let’s go…

Uraan for most part has out performed our own expectations. We’ve proved that negativity cannot survive on our premises, and we’ve reached a level of growth – almost unmatched amongst our competitors as well as our peers.

By the way, we are working on quite a few exciting new projects ranging from new media portals to exciting new products related to advertising industry. Stay in touch for more updates!