Archive for November, 2009

PointKit is still in stealth mode but you can request an invitation to be one of he first people to take a peak and play with this awesome productivity service.

Yesterday, I read that a couple of very important ex-facebookers, Dustin Moskovitz (co-founder of Facebook) and Justin Rosenstein (Facebook Tech Lead), decided to leave Facebook to start their own company called Asana.


Nerdy looking ex-Facebookers Dustin Moskovitz and Justin Rosenstein

Nerdy looing ex-Facebookers Dustin Moskovitz and Justin Rosenstein

Asana is working on what they believe will revolutionize the way people collaborate, much in the same way Facebook has revolutionized the way people share and stay connected.

They just got $9 million in funding and are actively using that money to recruit very smart engineers. They plan to keep the core of the company small and hire only super smart people.

I decided to drop them a line telling them about PointKit. All I wrote was that the only reason why I would stop developing Pointkit was if I was given the chance to work at a super hot startup like Asana.

Next day I got an email from Justin Rosenstein requesting an invitation for PointKit.
To be very honest I was very surprised that anyone would reply to my email. Let alone, that the reply came directly from one of the co-founders and not some lame automatic canned response from the HR department.

I haven’t heard back from Justin or anyone fro Asana so I assume they are not interested or simply they are too busy.[ EDIT: I just heard from Justin and he thinks PointKit is really cool! (exactly his words). He asked me if I did it all by myself which I did. I told him the only reason I've gotten this far with PointKit is out of sheer passion and determination and suggested that he interviewed me (or flew me over.. why not?) if he and his team wanted to pick my brain about PointKit and working at Asana ]
I would love to have the chance to work for a hot Silicon Valley startup like Asana.

If you check their rather simple site, you can see that they already have a top notch team of genius engineers and the most amazing group of investors one could ever dream of, including, Mark Andreesen, the founder of Netscape, Mitch Kapor, the creator of Lotus 1-2-3, Peter Thiel, founder of PayPal, and many more famous, rich, and successful entrepreneurs and investors.

I am happy that a cool startup founded and funded by some of the smartest coolest people on the planet has taken a quick and probably meaningless look at my application.
It means a lot to me, it feels like some type of validation that all the hard work I have put over the last 18 months has some value and great people are curious enough to ask me directly for an invitation.

Then again, it just could be that they are looking for fresh ideas and they could simply be interested in seeing what they can rip-off from PointKit’s interface and unique functionality. Even in that case, I still would be pretty honored to have built something so cool some smart people are willing to copy.

They say that you should not worry if people copy your work, only start worrying when they stop imitating you!

Coming soon splash page completed

by Miguel on November 19, 2009


You can go now to http://pointkit.com a request an invitation to become an early beta tester for PointKit.
There is still quite a bit to do before going live but soon, probably before Christmas I will have worked out all the major bugs and PointKit will be officially be released to the world.
I think when that happens my girlfriend is going to explode of happiness because I have been over a year working on PointKit and she can’t wait for me to finish and take a little holiday maybe to South America.
Trust me, I also want to release Pointkit and we are getting really close.

Last week I got PayPal integrated using their API. It wasn’t to difficult but it sure took a lot of testing.
First I developed and tested setting up recurring payments using their testing sandbox and after signing up for their Website Payments Pro program ($30.00 USD / month) I was able to test payments for real!.
I used my second credit card to signup for Pointkit and it worked! You cannot believe how excited I was when I got a confirmation message from PayPal with the successful transaction details. I jumped up and down for ten minutes full of happiness. yes! I got my first customer! who cares that that customer was myself. Now I am paying $24.00 USD a month to use my own program.. hahhaa!

Money is now flowing in a circle, from my credit card to PayPal to my bank account. Obviously I am kidding, this is not very sustainable, specially having into account that PayPal takes about %3 of every transaction..

I did subscribe to PointKit using my credit card but once I saw the payment went through I cancelled the newly created account. Because there is a 30 day trial period, I was not debited the $24.00 so I didn’t lose any money while testing.

Integrating payments is a very important landmark for an online business. It means that now I can officially charge people for a product and start generating an income.

However there is much to be done.

About 80% of PointKit is fully functional. The 20% remaining is mostly debugging at this point. All modules are working but there are many small glitches that can affect the user experience considerably. I must thank my dad for taking the time to do some beta testing and point out many issues I wasn’t aware of.

In the following post I will go over what is remaining to be done before PointKit can go live.

Ibizaah! – YouTube Video Mixer

by Miguel on November 7, 2009

ibizaah_main_page_Nov_23_2009

Ibizaah! is a free service that leverages the powerful YouTube Video API to help people DJ at parties.
Ibizaah! has two YouTube video players, a cross fader, and each player has each own playlist.
Videos can be played and new songs searched simultaneously. Users can also add songs from their playlists in YouTube, reorder playlists playback order, and even animate crowds with a fun air raid siren button.
Ibizaah! original purpose was to be used to teach myself and experiment with the YouTube API, jQuery, and Internet marketing. I have submitted Ibizaah! for review to about 50 different blogs and sites and it already has got some attention.