Projects 2009

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2008 was an eventfull year for me, I left Kapow to start my own company just to mention one thing. But now it is a new year, with new projects and new things to learn. My plans for 2009 include at least these projects:

  • Blendapps.com – this chat solution started in 2008 and has gone quite well, so far we have Meebo and Userplane chat rooms seemlessly integrated into Ning and Facebook. In 2009 we will add more platforms, more features etc. The last few days we have gotten some nice attention for Blendapps – feedmyapps, killerstartups and eHub have all written about us. Hopefully this is a sign that 2009 will be the year for Blendapps!
  • gefeedback.nu – in just a week it is time for 24 Hour Business Camp, a Swedish conference where everybody has 24 hours to implement a web application/business idea. I will do this with Mattias Järnhäll and our project is gefeedback.nu (in swedish this means litteraly “give feedback now”). The goal is to make a customer service service to help ourselves and others to make customer service for internet projects as efficient and easy as possible. My aim is to go with Django and Pinax for this one, since we that way can get lots of functionality for free, something that is desperatly needed since we only have 24 hours!
  • The worlds best F1 site? (name & domain TBD) -Yes, you heard it right, I am going to do something with sports, however unlikely that sounds. Teaming up with a very dedicated F1 fan I will launch a F1 site during 2009, one that really is for the hardcore F1 fans that love statistics. Considering Adobe Flex for this one, would really love to have a Flex project to give myself an excuse to get deeper into Flex (and Flash seems to be the right choice of tech for the project as well ;).
  • Big Project X – my most ambitous project is a swedish niche site, it is still in stealth mode (at least until we have decided on a name and got a domain) so i will keep the details for myself for now. Probably another Django/Pinax project (even if I plan to spend lots more than 24 hours on this).

Those are the ones lined up so far, but I suspect I am going to add more to my plate. During 2009 I will really try to do fewer projects and spend more time on the ones I already have going – like enlatele.com.mx.

One thing I do not promise for 2009 is to be a more frequent blogger, I do not want to promise things that I am not sure I can keep…

Some of my projects – WebHostNinja.com and EnLaTele.com.mx

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WebHostNinjaA few days ago I was finally ready to go live with one of the projects that have taken up my time since leaving Kapow – a price comparison search engine for web hosting called WebHostNinja.com. The site is all written using CodeIgniter and thanks to Kemie at monolinea.com it also looks great. What I am trying to do is a usefull site where you can compare different hosting providers and their plans so that you can find exactly what you need as cheaply as possible. There are already quite a few such sites out there, but they are all static, hard to use, ugly as hell and more focused on selling hostig than on providing a good service for the user. I think and hope that there is a market for WebHostNinja.com as well, if nothing else there is a chance of doing some cool images of ninjas.

There are still some bugs to work out, I want to add a lot more web hosting providers to the index and of course there are also loads of features I want to add. In my database I do have quite a lot of information about each hosting provider and their plans, so it would be cool to mash that up with some other data, but at this point in time my mind is blank what to do. If you have any ideas about this please let me know!

EnLaTele.com.mxAnother project that I am involved with is the Mexican TV-listing site enlatele.com.mx (“en la tele” = “on TV” in spanish). We have just finished an iteration in our continous development, and vastly improved the search and added other nifty things like channel logos and filtering channels based on your cable provider. I have several entires about writing widgets/gadgets for enlatele.com.mx for sites like MySpace etc, so that will give me a good excuse to soon dig deeper into the OpenSocial specs.

I have more things up my sleeve, projects that have much more to do with mashups. As soon as there is something I can tell you about I will, so watch this space.