In one short year we’ve gone from building web-based datacenter management and planning tools for our customer’s customers to starting our own web application development and getting ready to launch it. If you’d asked me a year ago where we’d be today, I would probably have said “doing the same thing as now”. I love [...]

Posted in Argolon, Business, LouderVoice, Software Development, Web20, microformats 3 Comments »

I’m thrilled to announce that we’ve finally put up the email collector on the LouderVoice holding page. If you want to be part of the trials, please sign up there.
The plan at the moment is that we’ll be inviting a very small number of people we know into the Beta1 phase in the next [...]

Posted in Argolon, LouderVoice 2 Comments »

And we’re very happy down here in Bandon despite the broadband horrors. At least it proves that LouderVoice is usable on a 5 kb/s connection. The long term mobile version may actually be doable now!

Posted in Argolon, LouderVoice 2 Comments »

If yours is the name at the end of correspondence to us, then yours is the name we ask for when we call to enquire about your letter. Those lovely harridans you have on switchboard in Dublin should then not say “oh no, he’s a director” and proceed to bounce us from one jobsworth to [...]

Posted in Argolon, Suppliers 4 Comments »

It is still very early days over at LouderVoice but I think the time is right to announce the blog and let people know bit by bit what we are up to. I doubt we’ll be as open as Ryan and Gillian were with BareNakedApp but if something is interesting or useful then we’ll blog [...]

Posted in Argolon, LouderVoice 9 Comments »

I know it’s a small thing but I’m really happy Sam is doing the rename. Did Fergus and Tom accost him at the launch party last week?
Let’s give him plenty of news from this side of the Irish sea!
Hopefully our new venture will have something he can write about in the coming months. I just [...]

Posted in Argolon, LouderVoice, Web20 8 Comments »

We’re putting together a simple landing page for the new business whilst we are still in development. It became clear to us recently that we needed a logo for that to give a sense of identity and also to direct the initial colour scheme of the prototype.
I have always liked the idea of sits like [...]

Posted in Argolon, Business, Outsourcing, Suppliers 11 Comments »

When I decided to launch the new business, one of the first decisions I made was to outsource as many of the activities as possible. I spent 14 years providing design services and professional services in a variety of industries so it is something I am entirely comfortable with.
The main areas are obviously software [...]

Posted in Argolon, Business, Outsourcing, Suppliers 6 Comments »

Phil Wilkinson has a great post on “The Feature Arms Race” over at the Crowdstorm Blog. He refers to the same “Creating Passionate Users” blog by Kathy Sierra that Donncha linked to recently too.
Phil’s main point is that we can all get caught up studying the competition and playing keep up with the Joneses rather [...]

Posted in Argolon No Comments »

Key Developer Required
Listed: Jul 15 2006 10:30:00 BST
Expires: Oct 31 2006 10:30:00 UTC

Argolon has started development on a new user-centric web application which will launch in Q1 2007. We are looking for a skilled and ambitious web-developer to lead the creation of our site. The ideal candidate will come from [...]

Posted in Administration, Argolon, Jobs, Web20 No Comments »

I’m still here and still playing. Seems like the Irish contingent got here quickly so there are a few groupings of us already. More comments on features:
Hmm, I’m about to insert some inline HTML, will that work?

For the life of me I cannot find the RSS feeds (neither can Livelines) even tho one person [...]

Posted in Argolon 2 Comments »

The noise about spamminess of emails has obscured the fact that this is an important launch. As an alpha it is rough around the edges and sxip login is broken. I’ll do a full post later when I have had time to play more. Big congrats to Marc and all the team. It looks like [...]

Posted in Argolon No Comments »

This blog has been very quiet of late due to some major activity in the background. Yesterdays look n feel change to the site was just the starting point. I’ll post more details over the coming days.

Posted in Administration, Argolon No Comments »

One of our customers is rightly a big VMWare fan. We have a test-bed in one of their labs running ESX Server with four VMs on one rack-mount. The management and maintenance overhead of this compared to four servers? You do the math(s).
If you test software and you don’t use VMWare Workstation, ESX or [...]

Posted in Argolon, Software Development No Comments »

We are currently involved in a customer project which will probably need an injection of qualified contract developers in the the two months. Ideal candidates will have a background in developing J2EE-style applications (or similar). Head on over to our jobs page for a more detailed description. We will post more information when it starts [...]

Posted in Argolon, Business No Comments »

It was remiss of us not to quickly follow up on a discussion back in early January over at Eirepreneur about the difficulties faced by both job seekers and start-ups in finding each other. The job-seekers have no easy way to identify which start-ups are looking for people whilst start-ups like ourselves find the cost [...]

Posted in Argolon, Business 1 Comment »

A few years back we were pitching to a large customer for a piece of work. This customer had a lot of problems and we spent two days listening to them pour their hearts out to us. Towards the end we identified a few specific things we would be able to improve for them in [...]

Posted in Argolon, Business 1 Comment »

There have been many blog postings over the past two weeks making technology predictions for 2006 and beyond. Bill Burnham has taken a look back at 2005 and sees that the software industry itself has been shrinking. Last year, the aggregate market capitalization of the software sector shank by almost 10%.
From this he makes some [...]

Posted in Argolon, Business, Enterprise 3 Comments »

As the M.D.’s first employer was S3 (Silicon & Software Systems), we were delighted yesterday to read that they have received €10m in funding. Since their founding around 1986 by Maurice Whelan with backing from Philips they have grown from strength to strength. Like us all they suffered badly post-crash but have recovered incredibly well. [...]

Posted in Argolon, Business Comments Off

The Inquirer has a nice round-up of most of the players in the Open Source Datbase Market. Over the past few years, we have dealt with a lot of different customer DBs and here are a few thoughts based on that experience.
Overall what we have seen is an inexorable move from Oracle to SQL Server [...]

Posted in Argolon, Software Development 2 Comments »