Picture credits: stock.xchng

The biggest challenge in software projects, in my opinion, is defining the client’s needs. This might sound like an easy job, but if you don’t do it on a daily basis it will be a hard one. Just try to describe your preferred car to someone. Are you sure you are going to get the car of your dreams? I wouldn’t be too sure.

Describing business requirements that have to be converted into a well tested code is even more challenging. Fortunately, many tools are available to support this process. A method that is gaining more and more market attention is Behaviour Driven Development. We start to fall in love with it as well.

Seesmic desktop based on Adobe Air used to be one of my favorite Twitter clients up to the moment that FleetDeck desktop arrived. Seesmic had too many performance issues, Tweets were missing. Today I received the announcement of the Preview Version of Seesmic for Windows which made me very curious again. The first impression looks promising.

We get many requests to increase website PageRanks and to make websites search engine friendly. In many cases I really don’t understand what people are bothering about. Why would a rather locally oriented company be willing to spend a fortune for a high PageRank on keywords that nobody is going to use? To be honest I think too many companies are wasting too much money on an issue that will never pay-off. Please check the conversion rate on your website first before you start thinking about spending any money on SEO and PageRank improvements.

I just noticed that Twitter added a new feature to one of my Twitter accounts. On the Twitter blog I cannot find any official announcement. It looks like Twitter is testing a new retweeting mechanism among several users. The basic idea looks nice. First of all you can notice by an icon that it is about a retweet, but more important is that you directly receive statistics about the amount of retweets.

Some weeks ago we received an invitation @GOYELLO to evaluate a new Twitter related application TweetMiner. Probably you won’t be surprised we receive many of such requests and we are usually short of time to evaluate them all. Anyhow I couldn’t resist testing the application after visiting the website. Although it doesn’t disclose too much information, which is something that could be improved, I became even more curious. What do they mean with: “Bring the best content to your followers. Schedule today’s tweets in 10 minutes. Be the SIGNAL not the NOISE”?

Windows 7 was released less than a month ago and it’s being adopted rather quickly. According to w3schools.com in October it already had a market share of 4,4%. Knowing Mac’s OSX has a share of 6,8% we could say this is pretty impressive. Given the speed at which the percentage is climbing, Windows 7 should pass the install base of OSX sometime in the next two months.

It looks like LinkedIn is working hard to make up for the delay in their development over the past years. Soon a new redesign will be available and yesterday LinkedIn announced they will offer Twitter integration. For a long time LinkedIn has been already providing a Twitter and Facebook alike status update, but it turned out that hardly anybody is using it. Gradually the new service will become available in the upcoming days. [Updated after the functionality appeared in my profile]

We have been using Google Apps at GOYELLO for our communication and collaboration for quite a long time now. We use their mail server instead of managing our own one, we communicate by means of Google talk and we use their online collaboration tools to work together on the same documents. The continuous development of this platform makes it more and more a platform that suits almost every business from SME, governmental up to corporates. Recent announcements that big corporations like Rentokil and Jaguar Land Rover will move their users towards Google Apps proves this.

Have you ever wondered how much time you waste using social networking sites during your work day? According to surveys carried out in the UK, an average Joe spends around 40 minutes a week which leads to around €1.56bn annual income decrease. Over half of the 1460 office workers surveyed claimed that they use social networking sites for their personal use during office hours.

In general we share our knowledge and experiences with you without too much self promotion. This post will be an exception to that rule. Last Tuesday we won the “Young Entrepreneur Award” and we want to share our pride with you. Some of our friends mentioned that this is the reward for three years of diligent working. We treat it as a stimulation to continue the direction we have chosen.