I have researched a software and also have surfed on the internet and came to know that no such software exists, So there can be a possibility that this can be patented, and as this is unique and I know unique things can be patented. But as this is a software so can this be patented. Should I refer an attorney for this. I told this to one of my friends, she stays in Sydney she suggested me to consult cotters registered designs which are in Sydney. She said they have senior attorneys so they can help. Should I go with her suggestions or someone can suggest me a better company to go with.
Short version: No.
Software is not meeting a typical patent requirements.
Long version:
Patent protection is something heavily related to a business model. If there are reasons to spend heaps of time, money & efforts, the business-potential of the patent-licensing fees ought be orders of magnitude higher, than the lump-sum of all the patent-agenda administration in all national ( regional ) domains + the initial / applied research & development costs, such patent-protected intellectual property has already accrued ( and will continue to heavily accrue, as the business-licensing process is also not a cost-free, nor a perpetuum-mobile self-powered and self-driven flow of a fully automated work-flow, running without a single touch of a human-hand ).
From some reading and input from a couple of seasoned developers, it appears that I'm down to a choice between Recurly and RailsKits.com SaaS Kit. I'm hopeful to get some broader experiences from folks in the community here as to the pros and cons perhaps you've experienced.
I'd really like to be sure that I put together an apples-to-apples comparison here.
First, I'm offering a service that has two subscription levels of about $1 and $5 / month recurring. These may be paid in either monthly, yearly or every three years (get some discounts at the longer subscription levels). I obviously need to keep transactional costs as low as possible, but I need to maintain this and be sure that recurring billing is reliable and not problematic.
I'll be building this atop Rails 3.
The bag seems mixed as you get a more robust admin feature set it seems with Recurly, yet I may be able to save enough with a SaaS Kit + (for example) https://merchant-apply.com/tesly to make it worth it.
I have reviewed Chargify vs Recurly and Recurly seems to be the winner for my particular model and so that's why I've kinda eliminated many other options at this point.
If you've faced this before, what has worked for you or do you have some practical input in this regard?
I work at Recurly, so I'll try to not make this a sales pitch :)
As I noted in the comments above, PCI compliance can be tricky, time-consuming, and expensive, so please check each product and see what is required for your business. You can see documentation on Recurly's PCI compliance requirements at http://docs.recurly.com/security/pci-compliance/. SaaS Kit reduces some elements of PCI compliance by storing the payment information with the gateway, but this means you cannot easily switch payment gateways - most gateways will not allow you to take your data with you. If you choose to use Authorize.net's CIM service with SaaS Kit, this will be an additional $20/month gateway fee for the credit card storage.
I also recommend you take a look at the API docs of each product. Depending on your integration complexity with Recurly, some merchants never need to work with the API (instead using hosted checkout pages and the admin virtual console inside Recurly), but other merchants will have a more complex billing scenario that involves use of the API. The docs for each product should give you a good idea of how easy they will be to work with.
I'd be happy to answer any questions you have as you continue to look!
As it currently stands, this question is not a good fit for our Q&A format. We expect answers to be supported by facts, references, or expertise, but this question will likely solicit debate, arguments, polling, or extended discussion. If you feel that this question can be improved and possibly reopened, visit the help center for guidance.
Closed 10 years ago.
Myself and a friend have created a startup, but we are both software developers. We are quickly realizing that we are going to have to deal with and understand, all of the intricacies of business.
Are there any resources that can help us avoid common problems encountered by the non-business-savvy? How do you balance creating your product with maintaining realistic goals to reduce time-to-market.
It's like you need to take off your programmer hat and put on the business hat, and vice versa.
My software business was in a very, very small niche market centered on computer aided design of the magnetic layer in hard disk drives (www.micromagnetica.com - please note that I am in the process of closing down my business as the number of potential customers has shrunk to the point of making the business not viable. The web site reflects this point). I have been in business for 10 years and have done pretty well. My competition was a series of commercial and open source programs (mostly university or government sponsored), so, although the market was small, I was able to create a unique product that sold well.
Pitfalls:
Putting your needs above the customer - Customer comes first - always listen to your customer's needs and make sure your development follows their needs rather than yours. Every programmer has a list of things they want to learn or do. Don't use this list a guide for your development unless it solves an issue or helps create functionality that the customer wants/needs. This one point can make or break your company.
Not clarifying your business idea - Put together a business plan - it will help clarify what you are doing. Read the book, "The Art of the Start", by Guy Kawasaki to get the business perspective of starting a business. If you need money then you can use this to help secure financing from either angel investors or venture capitalists. Otherwise, it will help clarify what you are doing.
Not marketing yourself - Do this the following:
(a) Find a good name for your company and secure your domain name. Even though a bad choice for company name won't kill you (my first company was called "Euxine Technologies" and it doesn't get much worse than that), but my product sold itself and was not encumbered by the name.
(b) Put together a web site as soon as possible with a good description of your product. Google will eventually find you and traffic will start flowing to your site.
(c) As soon as you have a working prototype create a mechanism where potential enthusiastic customers can download it and start helping you find bugs. You can make this the full version with a limited time or a limited version with no time limit. I have done both and both work. Make sure that users know it is a beta (or alpha) version of the software. The most important part of creating the beta user relationship is they will ask for features that you did not think about and this could take development along an otherwise unforeseen (and lucrative) path. This will also give you a way to keep your hand on the pulse of potential users.
(d) If your product is applicable to a particular industry go to relevant conferences
(either get a booth or make contact with potential customers) and sell your product through demonstrations, flyers, and the distribution of free limited versions of your software on CD.
Not Branding yourself - come up with a logo that you will use to identify you and your product. This logo will show up on your web, your business stationary, and business cards.
Not Managing your money - initially there is going to be a long spell before the money starts coming in. Be very frugal with your seed money. The money will not start coming in the moment your deem the software is ready to sell. There could be a time-lag of at least a couple of months between when people show interest in your software and when the sale comes in. This will depend on how much your software costs. The more costly the software the longer the time-lag.
Once you start making sales, there will be seasonal variations in how much money comes in. Always try and keep at least 6 months worth of money in the bank to cover salary and operating costs.
Not knowing who your customers are - Once you start selling software, make sure you know who your customers are - they might be different from what you thought they were. When I started my software company, I thought my customers would be all R&D engineers who were doing research in magnetic layers. After a while it became clear that most of my users were the subset of this group that couldn't program, but understood the physics behind the software.
Not acting in a professional manner - When interacting with customers be professional - act and dress in a professional manner.
Creating a product because the technology is cool, rather than because there's a market.
Creating a product because you want it, rather than because there's a market.
Creating a website that lists the features of your product, rather than the benefits.
Assuming that advertising on Google AdWords will work for you.
"Build it and they will come."
The #1 rule of StartUp Club: Every startup should have both nerds and businessmen.
Most computer nerds don't know anything about how to run a business or market and sell a product. There should be at least one businessman at your top level (but watch them like a hawk, lest they steal away with the fruits of your labor :-).
Not understand/knowing who you are competing with.
Not understanding/knowing your target market.
Not including your customers in the design phase.
Not spending enough time gathering product requirements.
Spending too much time gathering product requirements (analysis paralysis).
Not enough marketing.
Have a strong team so you can trust the people you hire to do their job.
Be prepared to do whatever it takes to succeed (ethically of course).
Not having a direction (business plan).
Not having goals or having unreachable goals.
Not understanding cash flow. There are a vast number of profitable businesses who do not succeed because of clash flow issues. Just because you sold a 1000 units doesn't mean you can afford to pay your staff and or other expenses. As I have heard it before "Cash is king!"
These are just some things that might get in your way. I would recommend not only worying about the business side, but worry about what are reasons software projects fail. There are numerous books about how to collect requirements, produce quality code, testing code (e.g. TDD), project methodolgies (e.g. XP, Agile, ...), and many more topics.
Your startup will likely fail if you can't deliver a product or if you can't deliver a product that doesn't solve the problem.
Finally, it is hard to judge success if you don't define what it means to succeed. Is it staying in business, doubling your revenue in 1 year, breaking the $250,000 mark, or doubling your staff size. You need to define what it means to succeed not only in your business, but with each product you create.
Do your homework. If you are in the US, the small business association is a good place to find resources.
Trying to be all things to all people.
Often in trying to create a product that appeals the everyone, the product becomes so general that really no one can get excited about it.
In my opinion, it's better to target your product to a niche community of people with a very specific need and then fill that need better than anyone else.
Here's a common pitfall, but it's not restricted to just small companies: Lack of diversity in the management. The kind of diversity that's important is diversity of experience. I've seen a couple small companies that suffered from this pitfall. They can often go along for a while making good decisions. The problem is that it's almost impossible for them to tell when they're making bad decisions. This doesn't necessarily mean that they'll fail, it just weakens them to varying degrees.
Company Development - in the software industry you can make a lot of money (respectively to other trades) in a very short-time. most people tend to get greedy and want more money so the accept more projects and hire lots of people - but they don't develop their infrastructure, their communication-lines, their responsibilities, their developers etc. Because it costs money and you don't have a direct benefit from it and you lose your cool "flat-hierarchy-everyone-is-a-boss"-image (which is not the case anyhow)
I myself witnessed two promising start-ups fail because the grew way too fast.
So keep an eye on that one.
Shiny! Don't let developers chase the latest shiny thing on the internet that catches their attention. Keep developers focused on the core strategic needs of the company instead of steering your product in different directions as their interest is caught by other things.
There's a blog full of tips at OnStartups. A few recent, relevant posts: learn from the underpants gnomes: have a business model, and here are some marketing tips. The author is a developer-entrepreneur himself, which sounds like exactly your perspective.
Update: Dharmesh just set up a StackOverflow-powered site for just this sort of question: http://answers.onstartups.com/
Make sure you know your target users and their needs.
I worked in a really cool startup where we thought we had a great product, but we were unable to generate that great user story to really demonstrate how our product filled some need for them. This shortcoming prevented them from "connecting" with our product in an exciting way.
In my opinion, the disconnect was due to the fact that we didn't know our target users and understand their problems as well as we should have.
Sales Sales and More Sales. Plus a willingness to release before the code is "perfect" and release features incrementally. There is actually a pretty good Hanselminutes about this very topic and this very site (http://www.hanselminutes.com/default.aspx?showID=152)
Not having some people on the team with different ideas/backgrounds/personalities.
If everyone is always agreeing with each other all the time, and there isn't any friction, you aren't going to get anything done. Oh, you might be alright for a while, but if everyone thinks the same way, when you get stuck (and you will), you will stay stuck. When you're on a roll, a curveball is a distraction; when you're stuck in a rut, or up against a wall, a curveball can get you moving in a different direction. It might be the wrong direction, but at least it's a direction.
Not having enough knowledge and experience in marketing. Although selling a good product is easy.
The problem is what I call IBM OS 2- geniuses build a very good product but the product is not marketed well nor tailored to effectively massage the ears of buyers. I despise some things about business workers like short-term thinkings, perfering quick-and-dirty developers over slow-but-great developers and other issues- but they are the ones who make money and drive software into customers' hands. If a start-up does not have developers who can function effectively work with business issues- then it need to go get someone who can. Failure to do so make is what made Windows 95 a hit and IBM's OS 2 a dinosaur.
Not having a specific market in mind when developing a product. A couple of places where I worked tried to do anything and everything which lead to not enough effort on one market to get profitable first so the business could still be running.
Micro ISV links has some links that were shown in a top secret presentation I attended a little while back that may also be useful.
Closed. This question is off-topic. It is not currently accepting answers.
Want to improve this question? Update the question so it's on-topic for Stack Overflow.
Closed 13 years ago.
Improve this question
I have a discussion point about Codegear's licensing.
Delphi 2009 is sold (more correct: licensed) under two different types of licence:
Commercial license
Academic license
The Commercial license (full and upgrade) is much more expensive than the academic one!
The commercial license has the drawback of the higher price, but its advantage is that commercial applications can be made.
The acedemic licence has the advantage of the low price, but there is a catch: you have to prove that you are a scholar, student or a teacher! Or else you won't obtain your license! The non-commercial nature of this license is a non-issue!
I'd like to see a third one:
-- Non-Commercial license
This license should be as low in price or somewhat higher and the license cannot be used commercially. The license should be tied to the person who purchased it like the already existing types of license.
Does this license have advantages:
Hobbyists have access to Delphi, C++ Builder and other Codegear software.
Illegal usage might be decreasing due to the more affordable pricing.
It's an ideal license for creating and maintaining opensource software with the latest Delphi.
What do you think about this matter?
Turbo Delphi is free to use.
What do you think about this matter?
1) Open Source is commercial. You can sell open source software.
2) Hobbyists can sell software too... and I can't see why hobbiysts are willingly to spend lots of dollars for a camera, a guitar, a bike, whatever you like but can't spend $450 for an IDE - just because you can't copy a camera or a bike??
3) Most people would buy the "non-commercial" version and develop commercial software anyway - how could CodeGear track it? Tracking costs money, and can offset any earning.
4) Illegal usage won't decrease but for 3) - people using illegal software don't like to pay even $30.
There previously was a Personal license that fit that niche. Also the Turbo and Turbo Explorer versions fit that niche. The issue is there are 4 groups:
Buys based on features first, price second (enterprise, etc.)
Buys on price not features - needs to be cheap, preferably free (hobbiest, etc.)
Only for free, with no qualms about licensing (pirates.)
The 3rd group is characterized by the fact the pirate the Architect version when they are only using features in the Professional version (or free version if one existed). They will never convert to a paying customer, although may convert to a free version if it has all the features they want (although unlikely.)
The issue with trying to maximize the 2nd group (turn all of them into customers) is you don't want to move people from the 1st group. If someone is buying based on features, and you offer a lower featured version for less money, they may be happy with that version and just buy it. Why not save money?
Non-Commercial is too nebulous of a license as has been pointed out by others. If you cripple the features too much then it is a wasted effort to make the offer since no one will want it and reflect poorly on the professional version. The only thing that would work is a nag-screen, but that would be really annoying too, and by the very nature of the users would be easily bypassed.
So the bottom line is the money that keeps a company afloat is in maximizing the 1st group. Attempting to appease the 2nd and 3rd groups can actually result in lost money. Although I agree that if they want to target more hobbiests then they really need a free / low-cost offering (an updated Turbo and Turbo Explorer).
Are there any free tools that implement evidence-based scheduling like Joel talks about? There is FogBugz, of course, but I am looking for a simple and free tool that can apply EBS on some tasks that I give estimates (and actual times which are complete) for.
FogBugz is free for up to 2 users by the way. As far I know this is the only tool that does EBS.
See here http://www.workhappy.net/2008/06/get-fogbugz-for.html
According to Wikipedia, Fogbugz is the only product currently offering EBS.