Paul Ryan's blog

Tungle Meeting Scheduling Service

Removing software that refuses to go away

Today I tried to uninstall an evaluation version of Microsoft's SQL Management Studio.  The only problem was it refused to go away, it did not even appear in my list of installed programs.  This old tip saved the day for me...

Digital Pen Integration with Dropbox

As a company that has employees in different parts of the country and often out on the road, we have become reliant on Dropbox for sharing documents that we need regular access to.

It was only a matter of time before we looked at integrating Step Up Forms and the Dropbox APIs to get uploads of pen data into Dropbox.  This afternoon I put together a simple demonstrator using some c# libraries from Dropnet,  a project on github.com.

Eat your own dog food

Whilst not sharing Larry Ellison's predilections for Pedigree Chum, I get the whole "eat your own dog food" thing. If you do not use your own products, why would you expect a customer to do the same?

AWS Elastic Beanstalk

Amazon launched its' "Elastic Beanstalk" service yesterday.  This is a Platform as a Service offering and so will compete with the likes of force.com, Heroku and Makara.  Initially it will support java based web applications, but there are plans to add ruby / rails web apps some time in the future.  You can read more about this on the AWS press release

Step Up Software accepted on to Amazon Web Services Solution Provider Programme

We decided early on that the Cloud was the logical place to host our Saas / Hosted applications.  Amazon's Infrastructure as a Service (Iaas) model suited us better than platform (Paas) based offerings such as Azure and Heroku and the AWS tools for developing and maintaining software instances also made it simple for us to keep our products up and running in a cost effective manner.

Step Up Software now listed on theymakeapps.com

Theymakeapps.com is one of the more useful listing sites I have come across recently (it is also designed beautifully, which always helps) you can see our listing here

Cloud computing 'could give EU 763bn boost'

This article from the BBC has some interesting thoughts on cloud computing.  One insight is that "The move towards mobile computing [is] also driving the move towards cloud computing, which in turn is giving companies a competitive edge" - this certainly echoes our thinking and use of the cloud in our delivery strategies.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-11931841

b2b lead generation machine

Interesting 37signals.com article: Pricing for non profit organisations

37signals.com is one of the more interesting software companies out there, I don't always agree with what they have to say, but they are always frank and thought provoking.  Here is a good article about whether to discount for non-profit industries,

http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2580-why-non-profit-pricing

Syndicate content