Mode details here:
_ Official Google Blog: 30,000 new Google Apps business users at Valeo

This marks a significant moment for Google Apps, because Valeo has 30,000 Internet-connected employees, making this one of the largest enterprise deployments of Google Apps to date. Valeo is moving to the cloud with the support of Capgemini, one of the world’s most highly regarded technology advisory firms. This deployment across Valeo’s distributed workforce of 192 business entities in 27 countries and five continents demonstrates the vast scalability of Google Apps. Whether your company has just five employees in a single room, or tens of thousands of people scattered around the globe, Google Apps can easily provide powerful messaging and collaboration tools.

Hopefully this is something of a beachhead for web services as a whole…

Living and breathing what we’re doing every day sometimes means that often we don’t see the wood for the trees. Having people external to our team try out what we’re doing then give us feedback, is such a valuable process, and we’re hoping that it will help us to discover new bugs, problems, and cultural differences that will enable us to give our users something truly exciting. Of course, we are already aware of many bugs, but having our friends help us to find more is both important and rewarding. We like to think of it as continually polishing our masterpiece.

To do that we’ve created an area we’re using to discuss everything related to what we’re doing, because we want to keep things real. We’re hoping that as we grow and develop further, you’ll help us to make the right decisions about what features we add, and tell us what you think we’re perhaps doing the wrong way. After all, we’re only people, and we’re making the assumption that getting things right for users is going to be an interactive process involving everyone!

So today, while getting the Alpha out the door, it felt incredibly rewarding, both to be working with such a cool team, but also to actually get something out that people are using and testing.

Our initial stats show that the trend we were hoping for is in fact happening, which is also very rewarding. We’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how to take something very complex, and turn it into something visually simple and easy to use. I’m not saying we’ve achieved that, but we’re certainly most of the way there.

So, it’s almost time to go home and do some more work, but it sure feels like today (even though it feels like we’re in a heat wave) was a good day

If you know any business analysts looking for an exciting gig/role, then please get in touch with me

Job description below, can send word doc if you like.

~~~~~~~~~~~~
Business Analyst – Job Description

Openads is seeking a highly skilled Business Analyst with a level of technical expertise, to work within the Product Management group.

Candidate will help formulate and define the scope and objectives of systems and technology. Based upon user needs and a thorough understanding of the business and industry requirements, the candidate will assess and present the business case. Must help assess the implications and impact of deliverable on the current and future business environment.

Working closely with the Product Owner, the candidate will be responsible for translating the project vision and consequently lead developers to solve business requirements. The analysis of business and user needs, then translation of those requirements into system specifications will be an important aspect of the job. Will also be required to build relationships with users, functional managers and consultants regarding specific deliverables.

Must be happy to pick up knowledge and expertise quickly in a fast-paced environment. Ideal candidates will have experience in the advertising industry and Agile Project methodologies.

Responsibilities:

• Work closely with Product Owner
Will help translate key requirements from the Product Owner and translate them into a form that developers can work with. Will also aid the Product Owner in making key decisions

• Strategic Planning
Sit between the development group and the Product Owner. Must be able to provide input as required, communicate decisions and strategies and then help implement that strategy on specific projects.

• Process Improvement
Work within and help refine the requirement processes.

• Business Consultancy/Liaison
Play a supportive role in advising areas of the business and technical staff on the implication of new initiatives and ideas on existing applications.

• Business System Selection
Play a leading role in the identification and assessment of business systems solutions for specific projects. Ensure that the solutions are in line with Product Owner’s requirements

• Business Systems Development
Provide input into the development of new business systems through detailed analysis. Write specifications for external parties and internal staff to develop projects.

• Business Systems Delivery Mgmt
Play a lead role in the implementation of projects for business systems solutions. Assist in unit and integration testing, and manage sections of acceptance testing. Ensure components are delivered to satisfactory levels.

• Testing
Will play an active role in testing and identifying defects in deliverables

Mandatory Skills:
• Excellent interpersonal and communication skills
• Extensive experience of leading business analysis
• Good experience of process analysis
• Good experience of data analysis
• Ability to resolve issues without clear or predefined solutions
• Motivated, quick thinking and have an interest in learning various technologies.
• Must be happy to work within a structured Agile project methodology

Desirable Skills:
• Experience of Advertising industry
• Experience of working with Agile project methodology, ideally Scrum
• IT Development background
~~~~~~~~~~~~

Thanks in advance if you do
Gareth

We’re growing faster than I can keep track of, so I’m looking for a senior php person to join our team of ninjas.

Details below:
A growing web applications company based in Putney Bridge, London, specialising in Web 2.0 work in the LAMP stack, seeks an ambitious, talented, enthusiastic and motivated PHP Developer.

You will have:

1. 3+ years PHP experience with an excellent knowledge of object oriented PHP 4/5, MYSQL 4/5, and a good understanding of CSS, xHTML, AJAX and JavaScript?.
2. Apache and MYSQL administration experience would be ideal but not essential, as would experience with the Seagull framework.
3. Exposure to Open source technologies/frameworks/classes eg PEAR, prototype, scriptaculous is essential. As is exposure to web-based APIs (using SOAP, XML etc).
4. Experience writing/working with CMS, E-commerce systems is beneficial.
5. You must be able to manage a development environment, be able to accurately quote time for completing required tasks and be comfortable working with Trac and svn.

Please get in touch if you are interested.

Emails / responses where the applicant does not fit the above requirements will not be replied to.
__________________________________

If you use Basecamp, it’s worth checking out…

Hat tip to Ido

It is really easy to set the test suite up and to get going, all you really need are the following two downloads:

1. Selenium core test suite
2. To record tests the Selenium IDE in Firefox

Once you have installed the Selenium core web application and the plug-in for Firefox (Firefox rocks!!) you good to go:

1. Plan the various tests which you would like to run
2. Set the Firefox IDE to record your actions
3. Once you’ve completed a certain test save the test in an .html file
4. Include a link to your test file in your main index.html (TestSuite) file, which acts as a table of contents for the various tests
5. Then you can either run the tests individually or as a batch

If you would like a more detailed tutorial, I found the one on the thinkPHP blog to be quite useful.

As Demian says, you start getting “addicted” to creating tests and eventually try to become a perfectionist – which is a good place to be in if you want to produce error free sites for clients.

So, that’s great but who are the speakers?
In alphabetical order, here you go for now (more on the way):

We’ll be announcing more speakers as we confirm, and if you’re interested you can view what people are asking for at the conference, at our feedback results page.

The guys at cowboysengines wrote a pretty cool article about the conference idea and they are giving us some solid support!

Please visit the site, at www.technologyforafrica.org and give us some feedback, so that we can give feedback to the speakers, justify sponsorship and organise a really worthwhile event.

Cheers

Instead we will be hard at work in a cold and gloomy London, which is really not as bad as it seems. One of the things we have been working on is a project which is really close to the heart and will hopefully benefit the whole of Southern Africa.

The aim of this project is to hold a “web and emerging technologies conference” in South Africa. We want to get international speakers, who are industry leaders and who would like to give some advice to Africans involved in the Web and IT industry.

I have been doing quite a lot of research over the past few months and I really believe that a conference of this nature will be beneficial to the “African technology community”

We have a site up at and running (www.technologyforafrica.org), which is still undergoing some final testing before we start to contact Southern African companies involved in the IT industry. However, if you have any comments or suggestions please contact one of us, or just post a comment to this article.

I am hoping that we will get positive feedback from the majority of people who we contact because I think the concept of “Technology for Africa” is a fantastic opportunity.

For the uninitiated, user generated content (UGC for short) is basically where instead of creating valuable content yourself and then letting people read/consume it, you rely on your users to create that content for you. Two notable examples that have recently been acquired for absolutely stupendous amounts of money are MySpace and YouTube.

OK, so where do you start?
Adsense – let’s just throw this out the window straight away – you can’t start and build a business from advertising revenue that relies on people clicking little text based adverts on your website. At least, you would have to be insane to do that.

Advertising – sounds like a good option. But to make that work, you have to do advertising deals or have an advertising network at the ready that will provide you with contextual advertising that still gives you a good enough cut, and/or you have to have so much traffic that your advertisers would be stupid not to consider your channel for their ad spend (but of course the problem here is that you don’t get really good huge amounts of traffic overnight); and/or you have to have contacts that can give you an inside track to advertising spend where your growing number of users and traffic is worthy of someones attention.

Either way, advertising revenue as a viable sustainable business model only works when you scale to a large enough user base to make the revenue model work.

Build it and they will come – is where you assume that whatever you are doing will grow big enough and quickly enough to attract the attention of your friendliest 800 pound gorilla on the block, so that they will acquire you and make the founders / shareholders richer than they were the day before. Here you’re making some big bets – some might say stupid bets…

Find value to offer, and make it cheap enough to afford and easy enough to scale – is the attitude where your core offering is free, but if the users want a value added “widget”, then they have to pay for it. So, you’re not pushing people away ‘cos your offering is paid for, but you’re saying to them that you can have this little piece extra, and it will cost you a dollar a day/week/month (or whatever) – most people probably won’t go for it, but chances are a smallish percentage of your user base will go for it – so your revenue model needs to be really conservative (not “if 10000000000000 people use this, we’ll be rich!!!”), where “relatively small number of users x low cost per widget” == “enough money to keep the lights on”.

The only problem is, what in the sam hill is that widget going to be?

So – where is the middle ground? How can you offer a service which is useful to your users, and still earn enough money to get it off the ground while not killing your credit rating and making enemies with your bank manager?

At the moment, I think it’s a mixture of advertising and widgets, probably with advertising dominating once you scale up to a large number of users – the question is how you grow initially to a large enough critical mass to make things work.

I don’t know the answers to this, but rest assured I’m going to ask my sub-conscious to think about what widgets make sense to users, and are easy enough to implement, while also trying to do some more reading on revenue models for user generated content.

For now, I have the following URL’s open in FireFox:

http://www.e-consultancy.com/news-blog/361871/jakob-nielsen-s-tips-on-increasing-community-participation.html

http://www.gertismedia.com/blog/category/ugc/

http://mrwavetheory.blogspot.com/2006/09/zecco-is-free-business-model.html

http://paulstamatiou.com/2006/08/04/wordpresscom-adds-pay-feature-custom-css/

What do you think?