Hiring Crunch in Beta Testing

Posted on August 23rd, 2009

Wonderful news from Mega Input Data Services, Inc.  A product that we have been working on for some time now is in its Beta stages.  That product is named Hiring Crunch!  Hiring Crunch was designed to fill a need in the marketplace for placing an inexpensive job board on company websites.  If you would like to be a beta tester, please visit Hiring Crunch.com and register.

Battle of the Python Frameworks

Posted on February 28th, 2009

Over the next week, I will be designing a workorder management system system that will be used by my application development business, Mega Input Data Services, Inc., in order to track projects done on retainer with our clients.

As many of you may know from reading my posts here lately, ive become an avid fan of Python and have been testing its many frameworks to decide on which one I like the best.  With that being said, here are the frameworks that I will be utilizing for my test:

  1. Django – Django is a high-level Python Web framework that encourages rapid development and clean, pragmatic design.
  2. webpy – web.py is a web framework for python that is as simple as it is powerful. web.py is in the public domain; you can use it for whatever purpose with absolutely no restrictions.
  3. web2py – Free and open source full-stack enterprise framework for agile development of fast, secure and portable database-driven web-based applications.
  4. CherryPy – CherryPy allows developers to build web applications in much the same way they would build any other object-oriented Python program. This results in smaller source code developed in less time.

Each system will utilize the same web template and will be judged on the following criteria:

The last point is pretty subjective, however, it will allow for my point of view to be expressed on the use of the framework.

As a baseline, I will develop the application in PHP to which the Python equivalents will be judged.  Let the games begin!!!!

Happy New Year 2009 and Management Planning

Posted on January 1st, 2009

This is my first blog post of what should prove to be an EXCITING New Year!

Well, as customary for most people, I do have some New Years resolutions.  All of them are not related to me personally but are for business reasons as well.  I believe that just as an individual has some things about them that they would like to change, a business may as well.  To accomplish this, for business purposes, I and my management team, sit down right before the new year and make a management plan, budget, and monthly task list for the year.

The Management Plan consists of six parts: Executive Summary, Focus (products and/or Service Offering), New Innitiatives, Yearly Recap, Milestones, and Finances.  In the Executive Summary, as in most business plans, we summarize our management plan.  It is a good idea to keep this section to at least a page but no more than 2 pages.  As this is an internal document, you want to have this section setup in bulletted form so that it is easily read by your management staff.  For me, I can take the executive summary alone and keep myself on track; using it for a refresher of activities.

Secondly, in the body of the plan, we target our Focus.  Being in business, it is easy to stray off course as many new ideas come crashing into our business lives.  However, as in the business plan, you want to have a CLEAR focus on what you want to accomplish for the upcoming year.  I tend to, in this section, discuss new web applications to be built, service offerings, and if we are keeping or removing previous business interests.

New Intitiatives make up the third section.  As in the previous section, we take all of our new inititiatives and flesh them out as much as possible.  Whether they are simply new ideas or have full blown components, the idea here here is to place everything on paper so that it may be voted and decided upon whether or not it is worth your time doing.

In the next section, I always perform a Yearly Recap.  This section is used to document successes and to setup next years milestones.  We place financials (balance sheet and P&L) and milestones in this section and rate our performance.  Finally, we conclude this section with a SWOT analysis (Strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats).  Your question at this point is “Why are we doing a SWOT analysis in this section and not earlier in our plan?”  Great question.  Ill answer it in closing of this article.

Based upon information gathered in previous sections, we place our Milestones in the plan.  These are short, sentence based, date driven (month or month and day are fine) action items.  We place dates on them to help us track if we were successful or not in getting our milestones completed on time and if not, what items hindered us from doing so.

Finally, we conclude with our financial plans for the year.  This includes a budget, projected balance sheet, and projected P&L.

So, to answer the question of why we have a SWOT analysis in our Recap section and not one in the beginning of the plan is because the entire management plan, in my view, is the SWOT analysis.  In the recap section, I like to note for historical purposes what are SWOT analysis looked like for the year and how we overcame opportunities and threats and improved on our weaknesses by making them strengths (if possible).  Basically a scorecard.

To assist in your planning you can utilize either a paper based plan or an electronic version like the one at PlanHQ.  At MIDS, we will be launching our take on business planning and scorecard software in the first quarter of the New Year so please stay on the lookout for it.

In closing, a management plan is a great way to keep your business focused for the upcoming year and keep your business ideas fresh.  I wish you all a Happy and Prosperous NEW YEAR 2009!

Turnkey Linux Appliances

Posted on December 5th, 2008

After visiting FreshMeat.net today, I stumbled across Turnkey Linux.  From their website, Turnkey Linux is an opensource project that aims to develop high quality softare applicances that are easy to use, easy to deploy, and free.

They offer a wide variety of packages/appliances from PostgreSQL database appliances to Joomla Appliances.    All of the appliances are based on ubuntu 8.04 LTS.  You can also use the ISO images and run them under VMWare or other solutions or install as a standalone package.

I have installed the PostegreSQL package on a test server and I must say that the installation was painless and extremely simple.  The server is up and running in my test environment and is accessible (with a few tweaks of the firewall) to other servers on my network.  It comes with an easy to use Webmin web based interface.

If you are interested in testing various products on a Linux platform and want a stable system to utilize, give Turnkey Linux a shot!

Use of Patient Focused Social Networks

Posted on November 30th, 2008

As many of you may or may not know, one of my long term interests for many years has been to write a software application that will allow patients to manage their own healthcare record. The product to do so has been namely called, PatientAssist.

Today, I was reading an article on Manhattan Research, which concluded that more than 60 million Americans are using Health 2.0 type applications. For myself, this is absolutely perfect timing. With the new healthcare agenda for President Elect Obama, and general social trends, I feel that this is a great opportunity to release PatientAssist formally to my readers. Its ability to allow patients to communicate to several outlets makes it a truly innovative platform. Ill be posting more information here as well as the PatientAssist website.

Something New from MIDS Coming Soon!

Posted on April 8th, 2008

Soon Mega Input Data Services, Inc. will be transitioning to being a part of Mega Input, Inc. Im very excited about this transition because it will allow us to focus our attention to what we want to do now, and in the future. While Mega Input, Inc. will have various properties, each properties expertise makes us extremely agile, lean, and most important, customer oriented.

As part of the transition, one soon to be name division (well, we know the name, but the press release will come soon), which serves as an idea incubator, will be releasing our first new product. Have you ever wanted to plan an event but didnt have the proper software to organize it? Are products currently available too costly? Well, we have the answer!

Have a great idea? Move forward with it . . . NOW!

Posted on March 11th, 2008

There was a time in which I thought “this idea is TOO innovative. . . no one will come up with this idea”. And out of 5 times of saying this over the years, 5 companies have taken the ideas that I had (not from me though) and turned them into multi-million dollar businesses. The learning lesson? No idea is sacred. Just as your are thinking of innovative ideas, others are doing the same.

So how can you protect yourself?

  1. Get a good attorney.
  2. Get a patent
  3. Get funding
  4. START NOW

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