• Implement some enhancements – mainly involves updates to the UI flow – this would also involve updates to the model
• Ensure that security issues are taken care of
• Look at setup configuration (web-server, phusion passenger) and do the tweaks to handle higher concurrency loads

This would require understanding of our model, application flow and implementation. The technical knowhow needed is

• Good knowledge of Ruby, RoR
• ERB, Ajax.
• Also if the person has deployed small to medium scale SaaS products on the web it would be great.

We also have a backend implementation in Ruby that performs resource (CPU, memory, Bandwidth) intensive operations. We have identified some optimizations for this. These need to be reviewed, implemented and tested
This needs

• Good knowledge of Ruby
• Knowledge of Unix IPC would be useful

Contact rajag [at] zebugroup [dot] com

One of the most attractive features is link analytics provided by bit.ly and several others. The link tracking is unobtrusive even as I am redirected to the target web page and the quality of reporting varies by service provider.

However, some services, most notably ow.ly and digg.com have taken a more extreme role. Instead of redirecting the URL, they keep the user on their domain and display the target website in a frame. One of the biggest problem with this approach is that, inserting the shortened link in my twitter message or other posts will not count to that website’s incoming link. Trackbacks, on your blog will not work with these links. Google’s crawler will not give credit to the target website, for this shortened URL as it technically does not point to that target web page. This is a serious limitation in a SEO conscious world. Secondly, they use up pricey real estate on your browser, for free, by placing a top bar with their own branding . Talk about being intrusive!? And finally do we want to be reminded yet again, against the usage of frames?

Digg succumbed to pressure from user complaints and removed the top bar for regular users. A Google search on “remove digg bar” shows that people just don’t want this feature, and in fact a lot of those motivated people have designed ways to disable it.

For applications on Twitter that analyse what links people mostly talking about, URL shortening introduces a whole lot of challenges. Typically to just know what a shortened URL is pointing at, You need to issue a HEAD request to the service provider (bit.ly/ow.ly). Since usually it’s a redirection, just taking the ‘location’ value from the response is adequate. The HEAD request just gets the header response as against the whole body with a GET request. This is optimal if you have to process say a half a million links a day.

Now, if you apply the same logic to digg.com or ow.ly, things get squirrely. You get a 200 response from digg.com and a 403 (unauthorized access) response from ow.ly. A 200 response is essentially the html document itself, whereas 403 error prohibits that http request (HEAD). In either of these cases do we get information about the target page? NO. For these services, you’d actually need to download the page (a GET request), parse the HTML, and extract the target address. Obviously this model is not only sub-optimal, it is highly nonscalable. You’d have to manually add parsing code for each such service. Moreover, if they change their layout tomorrow, your parser will fail. There are numerous other services which behave this way.

URL shortening services are here to stay and touches almost every web user. If you are providing such a service you are owning up a certain responsibility towards people using your service. You just cannot be insensitive to them.

Remember with great power, comes great responsibility

With the virulence of a jilted lover I ran back into the arms of that rule-lined temptress Microsoft Excel. I’ll admit I flirted with ACT, had a drunken evening with GoldMine and actually paid $29.95 for Iambic‘s SalesWarrior on my Palm powered Kyocera phone (circa 2000). Yet I always returned to Excel. By the time Salesforce.com began its meteoric rise, I had become a bureaucrat. So I watched from the sidelines – a C-level executive who no longer used anything other than Excel.

Starting again on our own, and boot-strapping Zebu meant I was back to donning the sales hat, working the phone, pressing palms and mailing my heart out. So we were back to looking for CRM software! Of course with the world having moved on, we never bothered looking for a PC client, and decided to go Web 2.0 – the bulk of my evaluation time was spent with HighRise, ZohoCRM and BatchBook. While I briefly spent time playing with PipelineDeals and Oprius, I was already too far along, with the others, for these to ever be serious contenders.

For those of you looking for the Quick & Dirty summary version here it is:

BatchBook – we picked this finally because of

• its simplicity – unbelievable simplicity
• the fiendish power of superTags
• its incredible support

and while we have become paying customers of BatchBook now, when we started its pricing (which began with a free offer for three users) tipped us over!

For those of you who want more, check out the presentation that was made internally to share why BatchBook.

HighRise We began with unabashed admiration for 37Signals. We found ourselves reading, watching and discussing DHH & JF.

• we started as (paying) BaseCamp users and struggled with use of separate tool for contacts
• we also stumbled initially because their free version did not support three users(our team size then)
• they’ve arguably led the simplicity (less is more) movement;  But we kept running into things, we wished were there in HighRise, and did not get the feeling of being listened to.
• pricing was a niggling more than BatchBook, but was not a deal killer

One of the mysteries I never figured out was, I got going using HighRise, but could not never get the other members of our team rolling – maybe ‘coz they were moonlighting then or for some other reason. But by the time we got to evaluating BatchBook, my partners got active and BB edged out HR! Once we got rolling with BatchBook, while we did find many things missing in BatchBook as well,  that we’d have liked to have, superTags almost always gave us workarounds.

ZohoCRM Personally, I have been a big advocate of Zoho (Projects, Writer & Sheet)

• ZohoCRM is almost the antithesis of BatchBook or HighRise – every feature imaginable is available
• Even a highly motivated user, as I think of myself, needs a one or more unit college course to use it
• alas – the near poetry of Zoho Writer or more recently Folders is totally lacking in the ZohoCRM UI design – the sheer complexity resulted in loss of ease of use and the UI left much to be desired. Seems like someone not yet steeped in the ways of early Zoho products designed it. Deal killer!

This might explain why, despite Zoho’s 3 user free license, I could not get any of my partners to use Zoho CRM.

Now that we have been ardent, paying customers of BatchBook, key areas we are hoping to influence include:

[a] more extensive reports (of anything v anything in the database, ala Quicken, my all time favorite)
[b] better sales deals/opportunity tracking without losing the ease of use, nor contorting too much with superTags
[c] even stronger API support, so that  can extend reports and synch with other apps.