You can say it’s our own startup.

The platform is more of a scratching-an-itch type of project. We wanted to integrate physical documents with softcopy versions of them. I remember when I worked for a certain company years ago that I had to haggle for the photocopying machine just to give physical copies of the project plan I did for a client. Since then, I wished there was some way for people to read documents online and won’t have to bother asking for a hardcopy of them.

Dropbox came into the scene and it was good. In fact, it’s awesome. The only problem I have with Dropbox is that if I were a non-techie and don’t appreciate documents as mere files in my computer, but actual business intelligence assets, I won’t bother organizing documents the way you organize (or disorganize) files in your Desktop. I’d rather look into a log or a diary of the dates I got my documents and see their facsimile copy. It can be done using actual hardcopies of documents and organize them by category or by date. Of course, as we all know, physical documents tend to make finding them quite sad, as well as tedious. Basically, you can’t simply do Ctrl-F on all of those file cabinets.

Now that the iPad came in, opportunities opened up for documents-based applications, and we, the Qream Team, want to take the opportunity.

The Qream Team will also participate in the first ever Joyful Frog Digital Incubator Bootcamp to be held in Singapore later this month. We’d like to think that this is also a Filipino representation thing for the event (as if the pressure weren’t high enough, haha). After almost a month of planning and deliberating the architecture and resources needed, we will be starting our first codejam today, considering we’ve done a lot of code and research already for this. You can think of our first codejam as our first formal code-athon to integrate what we’ve learned in building a huge platform like Qream.

Hopefully this will also serve as our first diary entry for our long but superbly thrilling ride towards making the Qream Platform a reality. We’ll let you know later what it does specifically and hopefully we can tell you how it actually works without overpromising things (we want to keep user expectations aligned with our actual implementation progress).

And now people sing Auld Lang Syne without thinking what it really means. According to its Wikipedia page:

Auld Lang Syne is very widely used to symbolise other “endings/new beginnings”

Auld Lang Syne also translates to “old long since”, which could mean “days gone by”.

Surely, days really have gone by and I really hope all the bitterness and bad vibes will remain in the year that was. And hopefully, as the year 2012 progresses, we will be the ones sending off fireworks this time.

I remember one birthday celebrating it on my own in an Open Source camp in Cavite, another one in Binondo, and another watching a movie just for the sake of dating myself. I always liked this type of birthdays…

Until recently, I had an event that almost changed my perspective about life. I realized it’s too short to be lived alone and to never share those triumphs and joys to anyone. I now want more birthdays to come. Happy ones. This one will really sound silly, but I am actually picturing myself enjoying with my brothers and sisters, popping balloons, spraying shaving cream at each other and laughing with our parents in a game of newspaper dancing.

I miss my being young, innocent, and fun-loving. I want to start over and spend more time with my family. They never left me in times of crisis, and even though I am helping out, I don’t think I can pay them back enough.

Or maybe we could all go to UP today. Have fun in the park.

Maybe we don’t need to do it on someone’s birthday. Maybe any day could do.

Kidding aside, VIM has been my lifesaver when it comes to editing stuff from a remote server, especially those ugly bugs that can be squashed by either removing a line, or just changing spellings. For those who don’t know what VIM does, VIM is a commandline-based text editor with a cool TUI (text-based user interface), sporting tons of features and supporting almost all programming languages. If you started in DOS like me, you might remember using Wordstar or the “edit” command in your DOS prompt. VIM is similar to these, in which all of these programs run in that blackened screen called the command prompt.

I remember my mentor teaching me VIM, and all I can think about is why would someone make colons as menu shortcuts? Those were my first days learning Linux and I can barely mount a floppy disk from the terminal.

Still, VIM played a huge role in my entire career, and I always tell my students and colleagues that if they don’t learn VIM, they won’t survive pro Linux.

For more history about VIM, go to the Ars Technica birthday tribute article to appreciate it more.

A lot of our Android friends (including me) have already enjoyed using the GMail native app, and we all loved its simplicity, less distractions, full labels support, and, of course, local searching. With iOS now being blessed by good ol’ Goog with a new mail app, I wonder what other apps they still have in store for the Apple platform…

Below are screenshots from GMail’s blog:

iPhone Screenies

Photo Attachments

GMail Message Menu. Notice the "Report Spam" and "Mute" choices.

Labels show up when screen is swiped to the right

iPad Screenshots

iPad Screenshot with Thread View

Real awesome stuff since you get to have full features of GMail in a native speedy way. As exciting as it may seem, Google unfortunately pulled the app from the App Store due to “a bug which broke notifications and caused users to see an error message when first opening the app.” 

I would love to have a clean and speedy (also, free) version of Google Reader inside my iPad, so it could compete head on with Reeder, sort of the top-selling Google Reader client for iOS. If they could do it the Flipboard way, the better.

Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson

Based on more than forty interviews with Jobs conducted over two years—as well as interviews with more than a hundred family members, friends, adversaries, competitors, and colleagues—Walter Isaacson has written a riveting story of the roller-coaster life and searingly intense personality of a creative entrepreneur whose passion for perfection and ferocious drive revolutionized six industries: personal computers, animated movies, music, phones, tablet computing, and digital publishing.

This one’s a no-brainer. Everyone loves Steve. I love his way of seeing things, how less could be more. I always tell my students and colleagues Steve’s best contribution to society, more than the set of gimicky gadgets he came up with, is the idea of celebrating and enhancing life as we know it, everything from work to non-work. And if you could earn billions while doing it, why not?

The Lean Startup by Eric Ries

Eric Ries defines a startup as an organization dedicated to creating something new under conditions of extreme uncertainty. This is just as true for one person in a garage or a group of seasoned professionals in a Fortune 500 boardroom. What they have in common is a mission to penetrate that fog of uncertainty to discover a successful path to a sustainable business.

Truly an enjoyable read, The Lean Startup is a must-have for aspiring startup people who just want to make their share of world-changing things in the history of doing business. But I haven’t finished this one yet.

Startups Open Sourced by Jared Tame

Get inside the minds of today’s leading startup founders with the most honest and candid collection of startup founder interviews. Contains interviews with 33 startups discussing the most difficult topics entrepreneurs face: creating and validating ideas, finding cofounders, obtaining users, growing revenue, staying motivated, acquisition process, and more.

Anyone who knows me, knows I’m an open-source lover… or addict… or worshipper (I think more between being and addict and a worshipper). At work, I live and breathe open source. When I teach, I always make it a point that there are alternatives. I have to say, if ever I will start a business up (not saying soon, not saying never), I’m pretty lost when it comes to keeping IP and / or sharing source code to everyone. This book is helpful in choosing to make developers and go-getters happy, while keeping your business afloat. A must-read for me (I already bought it so I’m forced to read it).

… and for my monthly fiction fix… just wait for my next post. Hehe.

Me and a few friends are whippin’ something out, and I can’t wait to let everybody have a taste of it. We just need a little more whiskin’ and sprinklin’ on it and hopefully it’ll get puffy and creamy very soon.

Clues will come out during the course of its qreation.

Starting from this blog, I’ll try my best to not be too personal about my blogs. Instead, I’ll put content that I always do at work: tutorials, (re)discoveries, hacks… life hacks, too.

For now, let the games begin!