Most modern software is written by huge teams of programmers. But there is still room for homebrew coders, at least in some unusual niches
Return of the homebrew coder [Economist.com]
via JoelOnSoftware.com
Many colleges and universities have annual business plan competitions that provide companies with the opportunity to pitch to venture capitalists and business leaders. Some competitions even result in an equity investment in the company that could be as much as $1 million. Forbes profiles several companies that got a boost from a business plan competition, one of which is buySafe which provides escrow services for eBay auctions.
Big Plans On Campus [Business Week]
Many small and midsize businesses can’t afford or don’t need full enterprise level solutions or custom development teams. With most of the businesses in America being small to midsize businesses, there is a lot of opportunity for small software companies to step in and fill the gap.
Evolution Sometimes Favors the Small [Intelligent Enterprise Magazine]
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smallbusinessnewz has an article on the benefits of automating your online business as much as possible.
Boris Yankov has started a blog focused on software and shareware. Boris’ recent post talks about a subject that is of interest to all shareware developers, how many downloads does it take to make a sale. Everyone knows that its 100 downloads for 1 sale… isn’t it?
Download-To-Buy Ratio: The Myth [Boris Yankov]
AI Systems, with only 6 employees, counts the Cincinnati Bengals, Federated Department Stores and United Health Care as its clients.
Asbury Park Press profiles Bigstring.com, a service that allows email to be recalled, erased or self destruct.
Profile: Company’s e-mail product allows you to change your mind
An article from the December 2003 MCP Magazine outlines the several roles that go into software development.
The biggest opportunities for micro ISV’s today exist in finding a niche that isn’t being filled by one of the big software companies. The best part is that many of these companies are betting that you’ll do exactly that.
The feed for the site has been updated to use Feedburner. You can point your RSS reader to this URL. The previous RSS2 feed is still valid.
Steve Pavlina, of Dexterity fame and one of the big micro ISV success stories, has started a blog. He has posted an entry on planting the seeds for success that is a must read for every micro ISV.
Eric Sink has released his first report on his micro ISV experiment. I won’t rehash his entire article (although I will borrow gratuitously from his format) so I encourage you to read his article and then come back to my comments below. Eric’s comments are in bold.
1. I think I am disappointed.
2. I think this proves my experiment was fair.
Jotspot is planning to allow people to create composite applications by utilitzing pre-built templates that require no programming. The more tech savvy users can then customize these templates if necessary.
An article from Business Week had this to say:
Backed with $5.2 million from venture-capital firms Mayfield and Redpoint Ventures, JotSpot has created wiki software that lets people assemble, Lego-style, basic components such as mailing lists and calendars. With JotSpot’s wiki tools, users also can create applications that draw on the power of the Web. With a few keystrokes, data and services from other Web sites can be automatically tapped and deposited on the wiki.