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When I launched numeroom.com last month I planned on running a simultaneous ad limited ad campaign to promote the business. I had to figure out which of the many options to use, I could have gone with ads on Google, yahoo, the Microsoft network or any of many of the old school (ok some may not consider Google that yet but it is older than Facebook and Twitter) but decided to go with Facebook because of the ease with which they allow existing "Pages" to advertise to the Facebook community and because it seemed they were providing very competitive pricing on the campaign. I ran a limited test campaign of an ad that was created to introduce the numeroom site and the features it provides. It was to run for only two days, at the end of the campaign I used Facebooks basic analysis tools to see that in the run time of the campaign which cost $5 total, the ad was shown to exactly 41,623 people. Of course the number of people that actually look at those side banner ads is a small fra

Since launching the beta of the www.numeroom.com web site I've contemplated adding a formal forum for feedback from the user community. I have "help" rooms set up for real time interaction but the critical mass of users is not there yet to take advantage. Setting up the forum would not be too much work as the AgilEntity framework has "forum" as a managed entity type, however that would require some integration time (say a day) ... while going over the results of an test twitter ad campaign that I started with the site www.magpie.com ( a post to come on how efficient this seems to be compared to Facebook ads...) I noticed the "feedback" tab they have prominently displayed on the right side of the screen. I clicked on it and was taken to a well designed voting system for "ideas" submitted by users of the site. This was a custom implementation of exactly the feedback that I needed for my site. So rather than spend a day adding it using an AgilE

My life has always revolved around two general class of interests that most people see as separate and unrelated but that I see as intimately linked. I have the artist , who requires expression in the form of poetry, digital photography, illustration and graphic design. However, the other part of me, my Mr. Hyde is the engineer, who requires the engineering, technical designing and trouble shooting that have defined my work on the AgilEntity platform  the last few years. With the recent launch of numeroom.com and the initial purely viral based limited marketing I've done for the site, I have been feeling the urge to do more art. It seems the artist has been feeling neglected, the last 10 years or so were devoted primarily on database design, object oriented programming, workflow design and algorithmic efficiency, the deep minutia of software engineering. The artist however has been able to come out from time to time, as I sit at my computer desk writing code, in the form of fast

The beta launch of the numeroom.com web site over a month ago finally allowed the debut of the various collaboration functions that are uniquely provided by the site. One of these services is the real time implicit language translation. It allows free users of the service to implicitly translate the text they type in a selected language to and from the languages used by other users they are collaborating with on the service either through chat rooms or in private one on one IM's. The translation on agent demand feature (as it is also called) makes chatting with a group of people typing in different languages easy and efficient (from the business perspective). It was in fact one of the charter features of the collaboration API that I built into the the AgilEntity platform that is exposed through the numeroom.com website. In order to provide the service I realized that the best way to make it extremely efficient was to distribute the necessary horsepower in multiple dimensions. Towa

With the beta launch of www.numeroom.com just over a month ago, I've been inundated by the requirements of the next stage of business. Acquiring users (to convert to customers hopefully at some time in the future), tenuously looking to acquire angel and VC funding, crafting my marketing and sales plans and networking, networking and networking. This part of running a business is the most arduous for a technical minded person who would much rather play around with algorithms than work on contacting potential users, however the usefulness of a product or service won't immediately present itself to those who might find it most useful and the leg work is required. That is the road I am on and it is at times a frustrating one, but with each new user one that gets closer to the magic critical mass of users where the unique utility of the numeroom.com collaboration ecosystem is harnessed. That said the rate at which new users are acquired has necessitated my investigation of avail

The following is a response to an article posted at Silicon Alley Insider a blog I frequent. I'd been mentioning the danger that Twitter faces in the form of competition from Facebook here and (ironically) on Facebook. This details the key reasons I see Facebook as becoming increasingly resistant to the theory that once people get "bored" of it they will go else where. It won't be so easy to do, and that is exactly Facebook's plan: Nice to see you guys finally getting it, Twitter is fast on its way to being irrelevant. They are going to wish they took that half bill offer down the line when Facebook fully replaces everything they offer. In fact Facebook already fully does everything twitter provides. All this other talk of the cyclic nature of social networks is missing the important distinction that makes Facebook a bookend compared to everything else. Namely , Facebook did more than just try to be a destination among many, it has systematically outflanked and i