Dominik Balogh, startups and iOS

"What problem are you solving" is just obsolete

Thu, 24 May 2012 06:47:00 -0700

Whatever problem you think people have, there always is a solution already available. The question is, how cumbersome the current solution is.

There wasn’t a problem with transportation 400 years ago. People were riding a horse.

Then the cars came. They didn’t solve any problem, because the problem is subjective to what most people in a group think. Most people didn’t see riding a horse as a problem.

Cars just made the ride more easier and more comfortable, but only after that people learned that riding a horse is a nonsense.

Most people in a group don’t see the “cumbersome” as a problem until you hand them a simpler way. And that is a post-PC era. Mobile apps replacing desktop and web software make people’s lives easier. Yes, you can’t really do all the stuff on a smartphone. But you can’t drive a car to the jungle either, and 1 billion car owners still wouldn’t trade their car for a horse just for that.

It’s 2012. The internet business is different than in 1998. We should ask a different question: What are you making simpler than ever before?

Only 1 motivation exists, after all

Wed, 23 May 2012 13:33:00 -0700

I believe only 2 kinds of motivations exist:

to receive currency or other trade value unit
to achieve a personal growth (a peace of mind)

Anything else is just an indirect path to the same finish, and these two mentioned actually almost always overlap. Like working 3 jobs to save money for your children’s study, for them to achieve growth and receive easy money, and for you to finally achieve the peace of mind. And so, we can nail the motivation types to just one, because receiving money is, in fact, just a way to reach the personal growth or the peace of mind.

Lives without motivations are not worth much. Set a long term goal, start working on it today and stick to it. Plans may change overtime, but always having at least one will ensure that you’re motivated. Ikea started as a teenager selling matches on the street. High motivation was what made it the largest furniture maker in the world.

How to quickly obtain D-U-N-S number for iOS Enterprise Developer program (for free)

Fri, 06 Apr 2012 17:34:13 -0700

If you’re applying for an iOS Enterprise Developer program, you need a D-U-N-S number.

The enterprise program provides many benefits, such as deploying private apps to other devices without registering their UDIDs in the provisioning portal (according to the terms of use, you may only distribute such apps to internal company devices).

D-U-N-S number is provided by a commercial entity Dun & Bradstreet. Apart from the fact that the company’s products look like a scam, the D-U-N-S identifier is free and has become a worldwide standard for identifying business entities.

Apple basically uses it to outsource the validation of entities.

I found the registration form below provided by a German D&B branch to work well and fast. This registration form also supports international appliers and non-domestic company structures, whereas the official US form doesn’t.

http://www.upik.de/en/upik_anfrage.cgi

D-U-N-S received in 10 days (in the Gmail’s junk folder). No need to pay over $200 for “expedited service”. Just make sure you don’t miss it in the junk folder.

iOS hacking adventure: Rich text library with images & video, outputting clean HTML

Thu, 05 Apr 2012 10:53:00 -0700

If you need rich text capabilities with images and video embeds in iOS today, you don’t have many options. Matter of fact, there are no existing solutions available whatsoever.

Current state of iOS:

Bold, Italic, Underline and indent support in Mail.app, incorporated in a popup for selected text (UIMenuController)
All sorts of rich text features, alignment and font-face in Pages.app

Unfortunately, these controls are completely private. We don’t see many apps supporting rich text (without using geeky HTML tags) in iOS either — even Tumblr and Wordpress guys have probably decided it’s not worth the trouble. Evernote has shipped a pretty nice rich text engine in 08/2011, but it doesn’t combine images and video in between the content at the moment.

Building our own rich text

We needed high-quality rich text control, so we started hacking. This is what it takes:

Forget UITextField and UITextView
Write a new control from the ground up, conforming to the CoreText’s UITextInput protocol
Write custom methods to handle and render attributed strings
Clone current features of UITextField/UITextView, with loupe, magnifier, selections, suggestions and spell checking
Write HTML import/export methods reliably with reasonable level of abstraction and configurability
Hack UIMenuController to handle custom popups with rich text formatting options

International support

Write custom methods to enable the suggestions box and spell checking menu, accessing the current dictionary
Visually mark unknown words
Suggest replacement words from the current dictionary
Issue #1: iOS doesn’t provide, as far as we know, a public method to check whether user has enabled spell checking globally. This has to be incorporated into application’s settings separately (note: Evernote can access this global configuration, possibly using a private method?)
Issue #2: Right-to-left and BiDi not yet supported

Hack the UI, engineer the UX

iPhone display size is too small for huge menus taking up your screen. We needed to provide a meaningful UI without clutter, and decided to create a custom UIMenuController clone with formatting options - with custom UIView and paging support.

Also, rich text formatting wasn’t enough. We wanted to implement images and embeds right in between the text and allow rearranging them. We’ve identified these issues:

Users must be able to combine text with media (images, video embeds)
Must be able to rearrange placement of elements
Include the indicator area to recognize and distinguish between new line and soft-wrapped line
Allow selecting multiple lines of text more conveniently, by swiping across the line indicator area
Support splitting and merging text fields to insert media in between the text
Drag & Drop approach failed. Dragging an element in a view which can be thousands pixels long with automatic scrolling on such a small screen turned out to be a pretty bad experience.

After trying 8 different approaches, this is what we’ve came up with:

Enough talking, a video is worth thousands words. Obviously, we took some inspiration from Path for the buttons.

Example HTML output on the website

Code, sharing, licensing:

The reason why we’ve started building this was that we just wanted to let our users do what we felt should have been available a long time ago. The editor was built for our new “post-PC era” Webie app to create desktop-class websites and blog from the iPhone, currently in early alpha.

Overall, hacking took about 50 days for 1 super-skilled iOS hacker @pavelserbajlo (and I was designing). We’d possibly never jump into it knowing how ridiculously complex the whole iOS CoreText implementation is. The documentation is lacking and there are long-reported bugs in CoreText as well (we’re looking at you, Apple). But hey, at least it was an adventure.

So, where is the source code? There isn’t any. We don’t feel like sharing yet until we release it to public and have some exclusivity first. But we’re not just showing off. We’re asking people and looking for feedback and opinions.

Does it make any commercial sense? Is such a library alone worth licensing to enable all sorts of apps leverage rich text with images & embeds? Is there anybody in the wild likely to spend money on this?

Please let us know (and upvote!) in this Hacker News thread.

You should follow me on Twitter @dominikbalogh. I am the interface hacker.

Getting lost in perception in a B2C market

Thu, 22 Dec 2011 03:24:00 -0800

We build the biggest things, we engineer, we can captivate and eat any animal. Humans are the most important beings. The most intelligent, most capable.

But according to what? Well, humans are the most capable according to… humans. There’s seemingly no jury to evaluate us, so it made sense to evaluate ourselves.

So we measured the importance and intelligence based on the range of factors that matter most to us in the range of a given environment surrounding us.

This perception is, of course, very relative and very human.

When you zoom out to a distance far enough, there’s not a big difference in capabilities between ants and people. The significance of each on a large-scale interactions is negligible. The features or capabilities to achieve anything is very close to zero for both.

Ask a dolphin who is the most capable and intelligent — he’d say it’s dolphins, because they can survive water-only conditions for billions of years and visualize communication using long-distance sound waves. These are the metrics of ultimate importance, at least for them.

An ant would say ants, because their unconditional ability to cooperate in coherence is the most intelligent way for life to not collapse on itself.

Not so long ago it seemed very clever and important to build hardware and software with lots of choices. “People love choices. Let’s include a lot of features. Many buttons. Let people build their own system. Offer them 76 different variations.”

Dell has failed in the B2C market for getting lost in perception, Microsoft is hard in the recovering process. It just turned out people don’t want complexity and choices in software and hardware. Features seemingly important were not important at all for most of the market. Only Apple and a few others came and made the decisions by ignoring the “general knowledge” perspective. Facebook guessed we don’t want to share with options in a new window. We want to like with no options in the existing window.

Zoom out to a large scale. Don’t get lost in perception of what is important by asking dolphins or ants. Don’t ask humans too much either.

Women, startups and yellow elephants

Tue, 13 Dec 2011 05:36:00 -0800

“We need more women to start a business.”

- Why?

“They offer fresh thinking and disrupt different segments.”

- So…?

“So we can make more money.”

- Why do you need more money?

“To make more money.”

…

Oh, right… so it’s not about women. We might as well say we need yellow elephants. Imagine how many people would travel around the world and pay you to see a yellow-born elephant.

My understanding is that in the economy, if you can multiply an investment, it doesn’t matter what or who you are. Although these factors are tightly related, we don’t really need anyone, we really only need money.

Why McDonald's is so successful

Thu, 11 Aug 2011 04:27:00 -0700

Stop in the restaurant area on an international airport and look around.

What you mostly see is 5 or 6 restaurants each positioned just by the other one. But the long lines are only at McDonald’s.

Children, tourists, pilots, stewards, asian people, indian people, white people, black people, airport staff, terrorists, whatever.

How is it possible that everybody likes McDonald’s food? Now if course it’s not the food itself. It’s the consistency.

If you’re hungry and you know you have a certain amount of time before you need to leave, the only thing that matters is no surprises now, please.

You’re just not in a situation to try an unknown restaurant if you 1) don’t know how much time you’ll need to spend there, 2) don’t know how the food is going to taste and 3) don’t want to risk leaving dissatisfied with unfilled expectations.

You’ll rather eat something totally generic. Not as tasty, but in 20 minutes, and with no surprises. McDonald’s has built a network of exactly same restaurant branches with exactly the same generic food all over the world, and you know it best, because no franchise is as widespread as theirs.

I’m curious to find out how “no surprises” analogy can be applied to other businesses as well.

The contrast (of stock cultures)

Tue, 31 May 2011 13:25:00 -0700

There is no stock culture in Europe. In contrast, for United States, incorporating is the only way to go for a startup. The reasons are obvious. Selling equity quickly and easily to the right people can be a key part for a startup to be successful. From what I understand:

You need to motivate early employees so they do their best to make their (yours) equity grow in value
You need to raise funds by selling stock to accelerate quickly and again, grow in value

Obviously, in a limited liable company, none of this is possible. Here’s what’s happening in Europe:

Universities do not educate and governments do not provide a good stock environment
The result is that general public have very limited knowledge about it
Then very few lawyers, bookkeepers and accountants understand stocks
Then startups choose to form limited-liable companies
Then they can’t motivate employees by offering stock
Then investment market is complicated and fewer people/angels invest

See the chicken-egg pattern? Nobody is interested in stock because nobody is interested in stock. Even if you form a stock-based entity in Europe, how much is your lawyers, contracts and accountants going to cost you? Who are you going to sell your stock to? How can you motivate your employees? Employees don’t even realize why stock is valuable, since there is no acquisition knowledge in the first place.

Motivated employee @ Google parking lot, Mountain View.

A system which works so well in US is almost non-existent in most of the EU countries. The technology culture is different. I’m not sure whether this is one of the primary reasons why US has a better startup track record, but I suspect it is.

Cyprus or Luxemburg aren’t changing the culture, they just provide a stock-friendly land. I think EU badly needs a stock enlightenment as a whole. Until this contrast between two largest markets is smoothened out, EU will always play the second league. Only the investors have the power to blur out the edges and enforce a new culture.

Paperwork in California

Sun, 07 Nov 2010 07:51:00 -0800

I’ve been in the belief for quite some time that legal business paperwork is minimized in California to provide a less “hostile” business environment. I have recently found that this is not the case. The amount of paperwork and energy required to file a basic report is about the same as in European Union, if not more. Surprisingly, most of the forms are actually very similar to those in EU.

Processing times in CA are currently from about 20 to 100 times higher than anywhere else. The stock management advantages still prevail, though.

Smart people can recognize smart people

Fri, 27 Aug 2010 13:29:09 -0700

When you read short online biographies of successful people, they mostly start or end with a level of education, usually a university degree. Big companies’ HR bureaucracy aside, I’d like to understand what message they’d like to deliver by including this information, and in fact, it’s hard for me to recognize whether it’s a negative or positive one. It goes something along the lines:

“John Smith graduated from Harvard University with an A. B. in Computer Science. John worked at Amazon as a VP of marketing and developed a known and very successful expansion strategy. John later founded project.com and sold it to Google for $900 million after 3 years of operation, with 20 millions registered users”.

Translated:

“At school, John Smith learned from old smart people how to build a sand tower by using a beach bucket. John is also known for studying architecture on his own and building an astonishing 200-acre golf course in the middle of San Francisco with his bare hands over a period of 3 years, working 16 hours a day. Tiger Woods called the course most enjoyable and challenging he’s ever played on. The planet’s most famous golf course has been later acquired by Nike for $900 million, making John one of the hardest working, most rich and successful startup entrepreneurs in the world”.

Now, I had to strongly overexpose for the difference to be more clear - much more people can use a beach bucket and fill it with sand than those who can successfully graduate from Harvard. But my point is simple. Study is important, in some fields critical, and can also be a part of business strategy - but with the level of some people’s accomplishments, I’m personally not very sure what their degree means in the bio. Smart people recognize smart people. You are not going to ask Larry Ellison where he graduated from before you decide whether you want to conduct business with him, are you?

An entrepreneur can care and consider his graduation to be a big notable accomplishment, but before including it, he should ask himself a very basic question first: “Does my target audience care?”. I think only the dumb one does. Your target audience better be smart.

Knowledge

Fri, 13 Aug 2010 08:02:00 -0700

I recall Seth Godin’s quote that every day is a great day to start your own blog. By the time you’re thinking about it, yesterday was already late. Not having enough time to publish is just an excuse, we all know it. You need to find the time for those things which you believe they may help your business in some way.

Myself, I have been pushing the idea of starting a personal blog away for the last 3 years and always for the same reason. At any given time, it’s almost granted that you do not possess as much knowledge as someone else interested in the same field of art. There’s always someone who knows better, so why being pathetic with sharing your knowledge?

Blogging usually involves presenting one’s personal opinions, often based on one’s previous experiences in a particular field. People talk about what interest them. It’s widely known that many smart people also became rich just by blogging about their interests.

But enterpreneurs, hackers, investors, founders and nerds mostly blog to continuously produce a self-promotion, which concludes making money indirectly. By creating an array of people which are interested in the same art as you, it’s highly probable that you’re increasing your business opportunities for you or your company. You’ll eventually meet interesting people.

To be effective in approaching that business goal, you need to gain trust of your readers. But how do you gain trust? Obviously it’s not the best idea to start advising on proper drifting on a race track if you haven’t even driven a car yet. People will very soon find out, your opinions will be challenged and your efforts ignored. You need to publish your true skills, whatever skill it is. Providing advices, advices on examples from your own mistakes, or other valuable information, are all efficient tools in gaining trust. In the end, your readers can too become better in the art discussed. It’s a free lecture.

The thesis above suggests that you can always teach or make an impression only to people who are more stupid (or less educated, if you prefer) than you at any given time. Ironically, the problem is that people more educated than you are usually the ones you want to make your friends and the ones you’d like to do a hypothetical future business with. Those who feel they know more than you don’t have the time to read your opinions or advices. It’s natural that people tend to listen to those more informed and educated, not less. We constantly learn more from the environment. I bet you’ve already found yourself making fun of your own personal and professional opinions from the recent past either on your own blog or just in your mind.

So how could one possibly also teach and interest people more skilled than himself? Ironically, the answer is the same infinite loop theory which kept me from going for it sooner: at any given time, a person does not possess as much knowledge as someone else skilled in the same art. A business method which seemed very obvious to you for months or even years can be completely disproved by your colleague in ten seconds. We all keep studying forever.