January 2012
3 posts
1 tag
“Of course the story is the same when the company “runs off a cliff without...”
– It’s a torturous chaos until it isn’t
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“We live in a highly individualistic culture. When we’re shopping for a vacation...”
– Spend 2012 on the Right Side of the Haimish Line
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December 2011
5 posts
1 tag
“5. Learn to fear not shipping Seth Godin attributes much of his success not to...”
– 10 lessons from my startup journey so far
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Monocle 24 →
My new music companion.
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The Twelve-Factor App →
In the modern era, software is commonly delivered as a service: called web apps, or software-as-a-service. The twelve-factor app is a methodology for building software-as-a-service apps.
August 2011
1 post
“The problem with talent, though, is that in most cases the person involved can’t...”
– Haruki Murakami: Talent Is Nothing Without Focus and Endurance
July 2011
2 posts
1 tag
3 tags
Coimbra Startup BBQ →
Friday, July 15, 2011, 8:00 PM
June 2011
2 posts
1 tag
The MongoDB ecosystem is growing
Developing an important application under a new technology is always a bet. That’s what we did when we choose to use MongoDB as our only database system for Bundlr. It helped that 10gen, MongoDB’s creators, were funded by Union Square Ventures. It also helped that there were already a few somewhat solid ORMs for Ruby on Rails.
Recently we had two great news: first MongoLab and then...
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News update: Bundlr launched
During the last month, I’ve been busy with the Bundlr public launch and a trip to London, San Francisco and New York. Now, I hope I can resume blogging and continue sharing what I’m learning with this adventure.
May 2011
2 posts
1 tag
TeuxDeux →
A todo list tool I can actually use.
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“In normal times investors will look for “traction” before investing. We want to...”
– Invest in Lines, not Dots by Mark Suster
April 2011
1 post
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“If there was a secret formula for getting an audience, or gaining a following, I...”
– HOW TO STEAL LIKE AN ARTIST (AND 9 OTHER THINGS NOBODY TOLD ME) by Austin Kleon
March 2011
2 posts
2 tags
Coimbra Startup Coffee →
I’m organizing a local startup coffee meeting tomorrow. If you’re nearby, come and say hi.
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February 2011
7 posts
1 tag
“We have reached a major checkpoint. The point at which we are only just a bit...”
– Yesterday was an important day for us. We released Bundlr and started sending invites. If you want to get an idea of what you can do with Bundlr, checkout my profile. Meanwhile, you can now follow updates on our blog.
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Ultra fast web development with Sinatra
Me and Pedro Gaspar decided to do a small workshop about Sinatra at our University department. We focused on using it for small pet projects and prototyping. The workshop also included a couple of demos like integrating Sinatra with Arduino or capturing Notifo calls.
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Build a Killer Product Faster! The Secret of User... →
Two great ways to track service users. I got to implement this.
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Free Ebooks On Creativity And Design
This post was originally written in January 2009.
Continuing the free ebook spree, I’ve found 3 more on creativity and design.
The first one is a bit old, from 2004, but I still hadn’t heard about it. It’s How to be creative by Hugh MacLeod, the famous cartoonist behind gapingvoid. It’s a great read, very stright to the point like his cartoons and shares some inspiring experiences. Recently he...
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Rethinking Education
This post was originally written in September 2008.
Sir Ken Robinson talk at TED is one the top talks of the famous conference. It discusses the developed countries’ education systems and argues that it has several faults when it comes to identifying the true talents in children. It might work well for some cases, but it is mostly headed for advanced academic education (University professors...
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“Bundlr wasn’t intended to be a journalism tool but journalists can take...”
– New curation tool Bundlr sets sights on ‘untangling the web’
January 2011
7 posts
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Where's The Middleman? - Content Intermediaries On...
This post was originally written in September 2007.
A post about content providers and intermediaries at innovation playground got me wandering about what role can intermediaries have on the web?
In offline media, content providers can’t, by themselves, contact directly with consumers on a regular basis. Intermediaries provide the ability to make distribution possible for a wide audience, using...
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Blog archaeology
Since I’m taking my old blog down, I decided to do a bit of blog archaeology and choose three posts to publish here. They bring up many memories from as far as 2007. Some of the posts I gone through I don’t even remember writing. Hope you like the ones I picked.
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Seed Capital invests in Bundlr
Good news: we’re being funded by Seed Capital. After Kickstart 2H10, we kept in touch with Mário Valente and finally last week we signed the papers. We’re very happy to count with a great team of advisors and join the growing group of companies also funded by Seed Capital:
Tarpipe
Sysactum
Quirkafleeg
FashionPolis
This deal will help us keep focus on building Bundlr.
Meanwhile,...
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PechaKucha Night Coimbra #01
Last Saturday I went to the first edition of PechaKucha Night in Coimbra. I really liked it, even with the wide range of themes and performances.
The folks at xDA have a good detailed report on the event:
For those who don’t know what pechakucha is, well, then you should check their website: it’s an international event, started in Japan, mostly aimed for architects, designers and...
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10 Business Models that rocked 2010
One of my favorites, Kickstarter, is mentioned.
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Sinatra & Mongoid template app
At Codebits I had some problems configuring a Sinatra application to use MongoDB with the Mongoid ORM. And then I had some other problems deploying it on Heroku with the MongoHQ add-on.
Eventually I got it all working smoothly. To avoid going through the hassle again, I uploaded to GitHub a template application which works out of the box with the above configuration. Looking at it now, it looks...
December 2010
5 posts
3 tags
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My best sources of 2010
Startups: A VC
Online journalism: 10.000 words
Coding: The Changelog
Random inspiration: FFFFOUND!
Stochastic interesting links: My Del.icio.us network
Music: Shuffler.fm
Books: Book depository
Conferences: Lanyrd
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Watch“Normal people have jobs. Entrepreneurs are irrational.”
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More conferences: Congresso de Ciberjornalismo and...
This week I’ll attend two more conferences, Bundlr related. One about journalism online and another about online communication. I’m hoping to meet some interesting people over there and learn a lot. If you’re also coming to one of these conferences, meet me and Filipe there.
November 2010
4 posts
3 tags
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Selling from day one
I really believe any team developing a product should be talking with potential costumers from day one. Being a technical person, it’s really easy to hide behind the code and make all the decisions from my guts. But you end up playing roulette at the product launch: either you have a stroke of luck and nailed exactly the critical need, or, more commonly, few people like it and no one loves...
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MongoDB cloud hosting platforms comparison
I’ve been researching on platforms to host MongoDB databases. The next table compares the three services I found so far:
table {
text-align: center;
}
td {
padding: 10px 4px;
}
PlatformMongoHQMongoMachineMongoLabFree planYes - 16MBNoYes - 240MBFirst paid plan$5/month - 256MB of space$25/month base + $2.50 per GB storage$10/month - 500MB of spaceDedicated...
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LeanTalk - Community around lean startups
I’ve joined LeanTalk a month ago. It’s a community where a specific topic about lean startups is discussed for 24 hours only, like “How do you know what a good metric value is?”. New topics are suggested and up-voted by the members. To get in you have to apply. There’s some really insightful advices there from time to time.
Note: The lean theme is becoming a...
October 2010
5 posts
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On the new content curation tools
Lately, many curation products have been announced. Scoble mentioned Curated.by, Storify, Keepstream and Bag The Web. More recently, Robin Good did a really thorough analysis, including comparison tables, covering about 20 tools. And here we are, developing a product to help professionals aggregate content. Should we give up now and go home?
Not really. These are the reasons we really want to...
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“a startup is an organization in search of a business model”
– Bean a while, from Celso Pinto. Original quote from Steve Blank.
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October events: FOWA and TEDxCoimbra
Had a great time at FOWA London. It was a great oportunity to present Bundlr to new people and to do more general networking. We had the chance to talk with people like Josh Williams, Ryan Singer and Jason Calacanis, and profit from their valuable feedback. The venue was great and, surprisingly (it’s England after all), also the food.
While I’m catching up with the videos of the...
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Using PickFu to get feedback for your startup
After reading this article on Hacker News I got curious about PickFu. It’s a service that allows you to ask a single A/B question to hundreds of persons, through Amazon Mechanical Turk.
It has several shortcomings though:
The sample is skewed both geographically (USA/India) and in genre (more females)
The sample is probably not related to your desired audience
Your paying them, so expect...
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Future of Web Apps 2010, London
Excited about going to FOWA London. New business cards ready, some great early contacts made and awesome talks to attend to.
If you’re also going, let’s meet up!
September 2010
8 posts
2 tags
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Bundlr: introduction
The Seven Needs of Real-Time Curators from Robert Scoble was the trigger. I started researching on content curation, specially aggregation. Then I felt curious about the lack of tools available. Nothing I would use at least. After some brainstorm with my colleague Filipe Batista, we came up with a concept: Bundlr.
Never wished, at the end of an event, someone could compile easily the best videos,...
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“The solution is synthesis: to never compromise two essential principles. One,...”
– The visionary’s lament in Lessons Learned
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