ideAjax Interview

About two weeks ago, a buddy of mine sent me a link to a game that he wanted to “challenge” me at. The name of the game is sinkmyship.com, and let’s just say that I sank his battleship. I checked out the link for the makers, and found ideAjax. In addition to sinkmyship.com, they also produce a financial site, SaneBull. I thought both were very usable and I thought that it would be interesting to find out more about the team behind both web apps. The team is from Brooklyn, home of the best pizza in the world, and my residence.

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Allen: Can you provide a brief bio about yourself?
ideaJax — our parent company, is a group of friends, dedicated to bringing unique solutions to the web. We are a conglomeration of companies and people and we all specialize in different areas. We have built applications, games, and social portals in Flash, PHP, Java, and most recently, Ajax. SaneBull is a three person project: Artem Ervits, Samer Falah, and Felix Shnir.

Artems bio: Graduate of Brooklyn College Computer Science program. Currently working at large City Hospital as a DBA for a Computerized Patient Order Entry system. I’ve been a friend of Sam and Felix’s for a very long time. Met Sam in undergrad and kept in touch until Felix has asked if I could vouch for someone since he had an opening at Bristol Myers. I myself didn’t find programming fun in the early days. Decided to play safe and stayed with my current job in the Healthcare industry. currently I am refreshing my memory with Java and hopefully soon I will take up more tasks with ideAjax dealing with programming.

Samer’s bio: I graduated from Brooklyn College with a BS in CIS where I met Felix and Artem. I held a few programming jobs after I graduated. This year I co-founded ideAjax.com with Felix, Artem, and a few others.

Felix’s bio: I’m a hacker at heart. I’ve started tinkering with hardware back when I got my first Spectrum Sinclair and an Atari. From there, I have moved on to basic, assembly, c, and many others. I hold a technical architect position full time, and relax doing ideAjax Ajaxy stuff :). We basically started out as tutoring camp on latest stuff in the online world. We have moved on to building experimental stuff, such as, sinkmyship.com and theplops.com, and now are concentrating on building our own start-up. I’m a graduate of Rutgers University and Brooklyn College and I’m applying to graduate school next semester — I really want to do academic research and later, teach.

Allen: What is SaneBull? How did you come up with the idea?
Samer: SaneBull is a financial webtop (desktop). It provides stock information and related news to investors in a simple user interface. I spend a few hours on Yahoo! Finance and MarketWatch daily researching stocks and keeping up with my portfolio related news and I needed a more productive tool, so SaneBull was born.

Felix: SaneBull is a live market monitor — in essence, while you browse, read your news, or do anything else by a computer, it will continuously poll server for updated data and visually show you most recent information in a noticeably different way then anybody else currently handles it. Almost all sites provide delayed quote data, but we have aggregated the best resources for the data and make sure its always up to date on the client’s browser.

Allen: Who is the target user of SaneBull?
Our target user is an investing minded person that holds, or is interested in doing research on stock market. Investors that are looking for a simple application to keep track of the market.

Allen: How are you marketing Sanebull?
SaneBull is a prototype application right now. We have designed and deployed initial version of it back in August to evaluate interest. There is definitely interest, so we have proceeded to build the next version that has been deployed recently with a number of new features. We are not actively marketing the product yet, as we have not finalized where the application will go in the future. There are 2 routes we are thinking about: The Usual — social networking with stock market twist: power of the masses, social suggestions, and so on ala Gradr, FeelingBullish, or BullPoo; and The Unique — turn SaneBull into a really powerful analytic and research tool ala Monitor 110. We have ability to do either and both, but it really makes sense to concentrate on one, as we can only deliver so much at a time. This will also be hugely affected by any commercial deals we will get from SaneBull (or by the investors / venture capital if they invest).

Allen: How many registered users do you have and are there plans to monetize the app?
User registration has been deployed with version 2 of the SaneBull build. We have a certain number of people that user SaneBull.com every day — they are currently pretty low as user registration just went up, but trends show stickiness, and many of the first time visitors come back to use the application more. Traffic is also picking up.

Allen: Whats your funding model look like?
All of the expenses to date have been relatively low, so we have subsidized our own development. Most of the new features, development, and testing do not take a great deal of time and we also have to juggle our full time lives with ideAjax side projects. It is getting a bit overwhelming at this point, so we are planning to have one developer assigned to SaneBull full time to implement new features.

We have toyed with idea of getting interested VCs or angels invest into us, but at this point, I think its a bit too early for us, as we haven’t cemented the approach we will be taking for SaneBull, however, if people are interested in early stage investment, we are open to suggestions.

Allen: Whats the feedback been like so far?
Feedback has been mixed, as different people want different things from the same set of tools. The beauty is, we get a lot of feedback from interested users and we’re working hard to put the most desired of things into the application. At some point, we will start publishing road map of changes based on feedback.

As far as media coverage, we have been featured on TechCrunch in early release.

Allen: What technology are you using?
SaneBull currently sits on top of a Java platform. However, the design of SaneBull front end application is completely independent of server side, as long as, correct replies are received from server. So in essence, we could replace our Java platform with a PHP or Ruby solution with ease.

Front end is build using prototype, scriptaculous, pwc (window class), and a lot of custom JavaScript. SaneBull is designed to run on any Ajax supported platform.

Allen: What’s the web community like in Brooklyn or NYC in general?
NYC is just as hot as that “other” west-coast place. There are plenty of interesting people and places to find new people. User Groups in NYC are the biggest around, Java SIG probably has over a thousand people and Ruby + RoR group meets regularly. There is as much innovation originated here, as in the Silicon Valley, and lastly, many of the silicon giants, like Google, are opening offices in New York City.

Allen: Where do you see SaneBull going in the next year?
Well, as we have mentioned above, we are at a crossroad right now. We are going to decide which path to take and we will build the best application of that kind. Going through feedback, there is certainly a lot of interest into turning SaneBull into social networking platform. This is certainly possible, and we are investigating it. However, we would rather integrate with a social net thats out there already than build our own social network framework — of those, we currently are in talk with 2 separate, but interested parties. If we come to an agreement with either (or both?), we will then become the gateway to that social networks’ data, and a front end to its users — adding value to both by providing features and data not contained in standalone versions.

The other route, turn SaneBull into a market analytics and research tool. This is a much narrower path to take, but, it is a much more exciting and interesting one. We have plenty of ideas on how to mine and manipulate unique sets of data — RSS, known non-federated content publishers, and other sources; into one powerful source ala Monitor110. We do not have the backing of it though :) So we are still deciding what we will accomplish with our limited resources.

Allen: As you look back, what is the one thing you wish you did when you were developing the app?
Start with business users! We had one power user, which by extension was also our second developer, and this hindered our efforts somewhat in building UI. But we have recovered since, and corrected many of the oversights we built initially.

Allen: What do you think a startup web app needs to be successful?
Its always the same, isn’t it? Build something worthy of people’s time and you will be successful.