For completeness reasons still a brief blog post about our latest release. For once a more inward looking release with only a few improvements in the user interface. For you to see:
For more information check the release notes.
In our series on startup hints & tricks here tips 5 & 6
5 – Time tracking pays
Well time tracking sounds so big lame company. And yet the effort pays. Why? It’s not about control but about the allocation of your most precious resource: Time. We simply want to know for what topics / development efforts we invest how much time. And to keep track of this only time tracking will do.
6 – Start with a good founding contract
Startup euphoria often obscures the fact that the majority of startups fail. Or that the business plan requires substantial rewriting. Or that a team member quits for perfectly valid reasons (A great love on the other side of the planet). Each point for itself is plenty of potential trouble.
For that reason a number of subjects should be dealt with before. Amongst them:
In our series on startup hints & tricks here tips 3 & 4
3 – Get a businessperson into your team (and vice versa)
Basically if a techie, usually wearing jeans and T-Shirt, shows up in a suit at a table full of suits worlds collide. Both worlds – techies and business folks – don’t normally talk to each other. Knowing this, get the type of person on board that you miss in your founding team. A first-rate techie for a business driven team and a fine business mind for a techie driven outfit.
4 – Get a professional bookkeeper
It’s the product that counts not accounting records. True. A successful startup earns money and earned money wants to be booked. True, too. That’s the reason that a shoebox is a bad idea as accounting standard.
A clean book keeping setup is a hallmark of any well-managed company. And actually important to get the intricate book keeping details of social security charges and value-added taxes right, right from start.
Free additional hint: Swiss law stipulates that company executives are liable with their personal finances for all unpaid social security charges even in the case of a bankruptcy. So better pay up.
Plain Text Editor - Efficiently save your thoughts on Memonic
As a Memonic user you always had the possibility of composing your own Items and use our tool as text editor, brain dump, shopping list creator or more. In order that you're able to save your thoughts and ideas more efficiently, we added a plain text editor that allows you to simply write text. Not more, not less. Compose a new Item in your account and switch between the Rich Formatting and Plain Text editors at any time. Your preference will be stored for the next use. When converting from Rich Formatting to Plain Text, you will lose the images and text styles but we're trying the best to keep some reasonable formatting, such as lists. Searching all languages We added support for searching in all kind of languages with non latin character sets, such as Chinese, Arabic, Vietnamese, Hebrew or others. We hope that this improves the use of Memonic in your favourite language. If you encounter problems, don't hesitate to contact us. Smaller Improvements and Bugfixes For more information on further features and bugfixes check the release notes.
Joel is a software developer at liip, a web consultancy here in Zurich. He is a Memonic user right from start. We recently asked him a few questions:
Question: To warm up we asked: Why do you use Memonic?
Joel: I'm a Memonic user by discipline. I try to teach myself to use it because it solves a problem we got used to and we shouldn't have.
If I buy a nice tshirt and place it in my cupboard at home I really expect it will still be there a month later. On the web it's different. I won't really freak out if that page I found some weeks earlier is not online anymore. That's actually crazy if think about it. And no one's really complaining. It became normal. Memomic provides me the tool go around that problem. Saving stuff to my own space, organizing it and make sure it'll be there whenever I need it.
Q: Surely there are plenty of things that you don't like about Memonic?
Joel: What I don't like with Memonic is that I don't use it for everything I should. I guess I still haven't really realized all the benefits of collecting my stuff for the amount of work it requires to save and organise it. But I use it because a such great team like yours has certainly lots of ideas for features to motivate me using it even more.
Q: To conclude: What has cooking and Memonic in common - or not?
Joel: I would compare : the capturing tool to the kitchenware the items to the recipes to use again and again the sharing collections to inviting friends for tasting your dishes the items editing to your the own touch you add to given recipes the items organizations to our freedom of mixing dishes the mobile access to.... ok that's harder... so I guess this is what's different with cooking. There's no app for using your mobile phone as a stove. Not yet.
Thanks Joel!
At Memonic we use a lot of Amazon's cloud services. I talked about our experiences with those at yesterday's Cloud Suisse conference in Zürich, Switzerland. The presentation (PDF, 1MB) is in German, but most of the information is in the graphics anyway.
I also created a Memonic Set for this presentation with some background material and additional links.
Thanks to the Cloud Suisse committee for organizing the interesting conference!
A couple of days ago the second StartupCamp took place in Basel. Toni and Dorian collected a couple of tips from their current experience and their previous startup gig at local.ch. These random hints complement the startup series published on this blog some months ago. Thanks to popular demand we also publish these hints (in German) over at Swissstartups, Dominik Tarolli's excellent blog on the Swiss Startup scene.
1 – Start with a simple plan
Building a company is tough enough. Don’t complicate your life with a complex plan. A simple plan stating a simple goal will help you, your future employees, any partner and any future investor to understand quickly what you’re at.
Example: At local.ch our game plan was a simple line: “Best local search in Switzerland”. At Memonic it’s: “Keep the Essential”.
Sure there’s plenty of explanation to each tagline. Yet the essential is summarized on one A4 Page.
2 – A few commonly shared rules
At both local.ch and Memonic we defined a kind of „company constitution“. Why? A few commonly shared rules expedite decision-making. You have a frame of reference for any decision.
It is not so relevant whether anyone on the team knows them by heart. Yet if the team is in a decision-making impasse, the rules help you to get out of this gridlock quickly with a minimum of emotions involved.
Another good challenge of our application: The Business Chuchi is a gathering of folks here in Zurich talking about the business aspects of online applications. Tonight was our turn. Great feedback from the folks present. Thank you!
Today we rolled out two new features on Memonic.
With the badge you embed a Memonic Set into any web page. There are many potential uses for that. Just a few examples:
We're sure you have many more ideas on how to use this.
To create a badge, use the context menu of a Set and then use the option "Embed into webpage".
The badge will only display public items. So make sure you use the toolbar drop-down "Permissions..." to change the permissions of your Items to public.
Free accounts now have limits. If you want to use Memonic to the full potential, you'll need to purchase a Memonic Premium subscription. We currently offer an introductory price of €29 Euros. Students profit from an additional €10 Euros discount.
As part of the renowned Lift conference series the ThinkData Conference takes place in Lausanne on March 18. An afternoon on social, semantic, manipulation, real-time, and mobile data. Raphael Briner, the organizer and founder of Hyperweek, states a simple goal: "Learn from the data, letting it influence our ideas for the next iteration through the loop"
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