Ex-Facebook Elite Raising Funds From Facebook Benefactors

Two of Facebook’s elite, Dustin Moskovitz (co-founder, Facebook) and Justin Rosenstein announced in October 2998, that they had severed their ties with Facebook, one of the biggest social networking websites and were planning to start their own project. Now, according to reports, the duo have begun their highly anticipated project and have been able to acquire funding for the same from the same investors, who funded the Facebook project.

The Facebook duo had left Facebook citing reasons that, they wished to create something more personal to the users, that would be more useful to users than a social networking website. Even though both the collaborators haven’t shed much light on their pending endeavor, yet, it has been confirmed that their project is known as Asana. However, this website is still in the developmental phases, and perhaps, that is the reason, that its creators have raised funds.

According to Dustin Moskovitz,

“But something else exciting happened in the year and a half since I joined Facebook. I started spending a lot of time after work talking to Dustin. Efficiency-through-software was dear to his heart as well, and we would stay up till 3am raving about how shortcut keys and high-level abstractions would Change The World. We shared a passion for technology, for entrepreneurship, and for using them to solve the same set of problems.

As our visions for how productivity software could work came into alignment, we thought about building it inside of Facebook. It was an attractive option in many ways, and neither of us was eager to exit a company that was in such an exciting phase of its development. But at some point it became clear that doing so wouldn’t be good for Facebook or for us. Facebook needs to continue its mission of making the world more open through social software, without distraction, and the new project requires a company built around it from the ground up, with the goals of efficiency and group collaboration embedded deeply into its DNA from day 1. So we’ve decided to leave Facebook (in about a month) and start a new company, to build an extensible enterprise productivity suite, along with a high-level open-source software development toolkit, built for the Web from the ground up.

We see this new venture as very complimentary to Facebook. We hope our products will become to your work life what Facebook.com is to your social life. Our software will use Facebook Connect as the default option for identity and authentication. Our user interface will adopt many of Facebook’s conventions, creating a seamless and familiar experience for current Facebook users. And if our new development tools turn out to be useful, we hope the Facebook engineering team will come to adopt them.

Source: http://trendsupdates.com/19600/

Ghana hosts first Business Process Outsourcing conference

Ghana will host the first business process outsourcing (BPO)conference in the country this month.

The conference organized by the Ghana Association of Software and IT Services Companies (GASSCOM) is under the auspices of the Ministry of Communication, the ITES Secretariat and the World Bank.

The two-day Conference on Tuesday July 22 and 23, 2009 is under the theme “Outsourcing to Ghana, Africa’s Golden Gateway.” The venue is the La Palm Royal Beach Hotel in Accra.

A press release from the organizers says Ghana for some years now has been a technology leader and the ICT hub of West Africa, with its great people, strategic position on the equator and GMT timing (same time zone as the UK).

The already attractive investment climate in the country is being further enhanced through additional government incentives for the ICT sector, and the recent oil find, projected to bring over US$1 billion annual revenue, is expected to create unique business opportunities, in particular for the service sector.

It added, Ghana is also fast emerging as a major destination for Business Process Outsourcing/Offshoring (BPO) in Africa, and has already attracted a number of international players from the US, Europe, India and Asia.

This, according to the release, is confirmed by the 2009 AT Kearney Global Services Location Index Report which confirms Ghana as 15th overall ranking in location and 1st in Financial Attractiveness in Sub-Saharan Africa (out of 50 countries) for Business Process Outsourcing/Offshoring.

Indeed US lawmakers have identified Africa as a destination alternative to India for BPO.  According to a report by the Central Chronicle, US lawmakers and think tanks believe that Africa could be a cheaper destination for call centres as against India and Ghana was specifically mentioned.

Source: http://ghanabusinessnews.com/2009/07/21/ghana-hosts-first-business-process-outsourcing-conference/

Is Software Management Obsolete?

Committees don’t make great software. It takes a single person, an author. Maybe he gets some help. Teams don’t do it. Nobody sees the whole elephant.

I’m pretty sure I heard that basic sentiment first in about 1986, from Dave Winer, who was then the author of a Macintosh outlining program named More (now he’s better known as the de-facto father of blogging).

What reminded me over the weekend was my son emailing me about Jeff Atwood’s Software Engineering: Dead post on Coding Horror. He’s looking at this article by Tom DeMarco, author of Controlling Software Projects, a software management classic.

What DeMarco seems to be saying — and, at least, what I am definitely saying — is that control is ultimately illusory on software development projects. If you want to move your project forward, the only reliable way to do that is to cultivate a deep sense of software craftsmanship and professionalism around it.

The guys and gals who show up every day eager to hone their craft, who are passionate about building stuff that matters to them, and perhaps in some small way, to the rest of the world — those are the people and projects that will ultimately succeed.

That sounds to me a lot like Dave Winer was getting at about 25 years ago. And if it takes a single user, someone writing code and working the application because he or she wants to use it, then that’s hard to manage.

And if you’re interested in software quality, creativity, and management, you might want to look at an exchange between user interface designer Justin Curtis and an interface designer at American Airlines. It starts here with Justin’s rant about the hostile interface on the AA website; and gets more interesting here with an AA interface designer’s answer.

The group running AA.com consists of at least 200 people spread out amongst many different groups, including, for example, QA, product planning, business analysis, code development, site operations, project planning, and user experience. We have a lot of people touching the site, and a lot more with their own vested interests in how the site presents its content and functionality.

It seems that frustration was had by all.
And it certainly won’t make you wish you had a creative or design oriented position in a large company.

Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tim-berry/is-software-management-ob_b_241970.html