Jed Tiotuico

I want to share with you a great motivational speech by Arnold Schwarzenegger.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JdTPwnk1Kl0

1. Trust yourself
2. Break the rules
3. Don’t be afraid to fail
4. Ignore the ‘nay’ sayers
5. Work like hell!
6. Give something back.

I couldn’t agree with you more Mr. Schwarzenegger.

Btw, This I got from:

http://www.startupfreedom.com/how-to-be-successful-at-anything-arnold-schwarzenegger/

This month I was inspired by this huge list of project ideas to think of something I will make for educational purposes. And if you want to learn a new framework or you want to study a new language for example, objective-c. Which I myself have been studying (slowly). You may want to put your efforts into something useful. Something that hopefully may pay you extra in return.

On the other hand, I absolutely agree with Jeff’s tweet that ideas are worthless. Real value of an idea comes after patience and hard work. So here are my project ideas so far. Note, that some of these can be a shareware or Iphone product which you charge for one time fee or a web app which you can charge monthly.

• Home Inventory – An application which will maintain an inventory of your home collections. Categorize dvd’s books or CDs, Toys or Bags. Set date and price of the item so you would know how much is your collection worth.

• Book/DVD/Games Rental – have a book rental app which has a book reminder due and how contact no. and How much is your income/expense. should send automatic email reminders to the lender and borrower when it’s overdue.

• Car Repair Shop Manager -  a management system for a car repair and maintenance business. Record and print Invoices to customers and a summary reports for their earnings and expenses. Have an inventory module for the repair parts and a module for supplier accounts payables.

• Hotel Booking and Accounting System – An application which manages the guest bookings and the billings of hotel guests. Create a calendar application which displays the bookings of the hotel rooms. Have a daily occupancy report and a guest list. Lastly the Income from occupancy and Expenses.

• Helpdesk Software – a system where customers can email a service representative and all of the email conversation is recorded. the application requires an email address setup where it can check pop emails and display them on the unresolved ticket lists. If the issue couldn’t resolve by the service rep it can escalate the ticket to a technical service representative. As a bonus add an online chat capability.

• Multi Forum/Blog Hosting – A web app which allows one to create his own community forum. Each user can setup his community forum which allows registration of many sub-users or members. it’s very similar to ning but more into the discussion and have less features.

• Simplified Accounts Payables – Have an app which manages a person/small business’ accounts payables have a list of suppliers or lenders and when was the last payment to the accounts payable. set-up a reminder when is the payable is due and how much you must pay.

Your turn, share your project ideas below.

I recenty bought an iMac which costs about x3 of a regular clone PC. First week of experience was really impressive. I get to learn bash commands a lot and the interface is just stunning. I have used a mac before when working as a Java developer in Clark. So now that I had enough savings to buy one, I did because I liked the working environment of an iMac.

Unfortunately, after just two weeks. It had terrible fan problems the cpu fan is somehow reporting 0rpm which turns on the loud exhaust fan. It feels like working beside a jet engine. I returned it to the store and I have to wait for 3 weeks for the repairs. Now I have to revive my old pc.

My old 2006 pc had a damaged motherboard so I bought parts replacements on a motherboard and cpu. And I decided to use ubuntu because vista didn’t return to normal after putting in the new hardware. And most of all, don’t want to buy another vista license again.

Having only a burned cd iso, Ubuntu 9.10 (aka Karmic Koala) installed without any problems. All hardware were detected and I was able to return to work after the installation was finished.

Coding about a week now in Ubuntu 9.10 feels like I don’t miss my iMac. I have the same toolset that i had in my iMac.

I have the following:

1. Terminal
2. Netbeans 6.7.1
3. XAMPP
4. svn
5. git-core (from sudo apt-get)
6. Firefox
7. Dropbox client
8. IM client like iChat which in linux is Empathy

Yes, I have a feeling of regret. Not because the iMac is terrible but because Ubuntu 9.10 is such an awesome OS. Now, I don’t have apps such as iTunes, Garage Band, iPhotos and etc.. But all I need are the tools above to be back to work immediately.

I’ve been a windows user since birth. I did try the old redhat os of the early 2001′s but it didn’t made good impression to me. But Karmic Koala amazingly puts you in an environment that is very easy and comfortable to work with. my only problem right now is the disk space I might need to completely re-partition the linux disk because i’m at 36/40GB of disk space right now.

So many windows users might ask, What’s the major advantage? It doesn’t rot.

Things have changed since the shareware era of the 90′s today you don’t normally see bundled shareware CD’s. You don’t need Microsoft Office to write documents or use spreadsheets. You download Open Office because it’s free and open source.

Ever since I read Cathedral and the Bazaar and Homesteading the Noosphere it always confuses me why is it better to give away your source code to everyone? Why should I throw away my hard work?

Well let’s have a few examples,

Linux  which has no single dictating entity, meaning unlike Windows which has MS and OSX which has Apple. Linux alongside Apache web server (also open source) has continuously dominated as the being the backbone of the internet.

PHP a language created by Rasmus Lerdorf was preferred to use by Facebook and Wikipedia instead of ASP/ASP.NET by Microsoft or J2EE by Sun/Oracle?

Mysql, now bought by Sun/Oracle, an open source databse being used majority of websites today.

What does this mean is that a lot of funds of these open source customers are being redistributed somewhere. Surely, income is generated from these websites; so the money is spent somewhere else besides software. This is where I think I can make a profit.

Here are the major sources of income in open source software:

1. Consultancy; selling of expertise.

To study this how we go to John Resig’s about page

John Resig is a JavaScript Tool Developer for the Mozilla Corporation and the author of the book Pro JavaScript Techniques. He’s also the creator and lead developer of the jQuery JavaScript library.

Imagine if you are the creator of Jquery, world’s most popuplar javascript library, hired by Mozilla Corporation how much will you charge hourly? I have no idea how much but I believe it’s higher than most of us. but let’s compare the guys at debuggable.com. This company was a major code contributor to cakephp in their homepage they charge as high as 90 euros/hr (that’s $121.5/hr or P5,346.00/hr.)

But this company is not even the founder nor the creator, they are only contributors. When you develop an open source project you are the most knowledgeable person there is.

Another example, Guido van Rossum creator of python is hired by Google. His hourly rate must be astronomical!

2. Develop an Enterprise Version

This would be one of my favorite. A simple explanation would be you have your open source software forked at another branch but is sold at a premium. It’s also open source and same license as the community edition but you provide a solid customer support and a dedicated team.

Examples:

http://www.magentocommerce.com/product/enterprise-edition

http://www.webyog.com/en/buy.php

http://www.mysql.com/products/enterprise/

3.  Certification / Training / Book sales

Basic explanation, offering your customers the necessary training and manuals for them to use your software properly. The certification is more suited for Companies who provide IT services.

5. Souvenirs & Donations or a.k.a Beer money

Great passive income for your business. If you provide your users the best some of them will give back. Even they don’t give back if they love your project so much they will even tell their friends or write a plug-in.

This may not make a lot. But making money while sleeping is always welcome.

7. Website Advertisements

Good examples I can think of are adsense income and affiliate marketing income. If you have a popular product the traffic on your download page can be monetized.

That’s everything I know, remember I wrote this because I have tried selling CD’s with my accounting software before and I failed these are only my thoughts on my next project. Hopefully this open source model will be successful.

So what do you think is best? Would you develop an open source project soon?

This month of February I released my first Cakephp plugin Spark Plug to github so far as of this writing it has already 7 watchers and 2 forks already! I’m also proud to say that it’s being watched by Cakephp member and core commiter Lorenzo. For more information on the plugin visit it’s github page.