In his famous 1961 inaugural speech John F. Kennedy said to his fellow American citizens, “Ask not what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country”. In the same spirit I can’t help but ask myself, what would it take to modernize and restart Italy?

Though easy solutions do not abound, there is something that young Italians can do to greatly help this situation: create startups. Over the past 30 years American startups have generated 44 million jobs. Starting a company is perhaps the most noble act Italians can do to improve their country and their own economical condition, while at the same time helping to create jobs for their fellow Italians.

I know that starting a company is not an easy or straightforward process in Italy. Doing so means facing a labyrinth of laws (plus very high taxes). The fiscal system is inefficient and often rewards tax evaders with a laissez-faire attitude, while showing a cruel persistence against honest small business owners.

It’s also hard because there are virtually no angel investors or venture capitalists. Though parents are sometimes seen as angel investors (of sorts), to some, for providing young Italians with a place to stay rent-free well into their twenties and sometimes even thirties.

The existence of obstacles shouldn’t be a good enough reason to prevent you from trying at all though. When you have very little to lose, because you’re already unemployed (or are not making anywhere near enough to get by), why not try and start something of your own? It’s obvious that without an initial capital, funds, or credit you can’t launch a physical retail outlet or start having goods manufactured for you in China.

Thanks to the web however, it’s possible to bootstrap a company and encounter relatively negligible monthly costs. The only real capital required is knowledge, which is freely obtainable online, paired with the ability to work both diligently and smartly towards a goal.

With rampant unemployment in Italy, particularly in the south, one would expect a huge surge of technical startups in Italy. You’d imagine people staying up until 3 AM in order to fulfil their dream of running their own business. Sadly, these are not the droids you are looking for. Unemployment figures are appalling, yet there are very few self-employed people or entrepreneurs to be found throughout the country.

The real limit is the mentality that most young Italians have.

Risk aversion. Even when there is very little to lose and you’re 20-25 years old and without a family of your own to sustain yet.

Recently a great deal of people from all over the world applied to temporary leave their respective countries to go to Chile, in order to create a startup and take advantage of a $40,000 fund for startups that the country is offering without any strings attached. Americans jumped at the occasion, despite the availability of local funds. How many Italians have gone so far? Very, very few. And yet they are the ones who could truly use – and need to avail of – chances like this.

Fear of failure. Italian society has never come to terms with the fact that failing is an opportunity to grow and try again. If you fail once in Italy, you are often seen as a failure forever (short of doing amazingly well later in life).

In North America it’s pretty much established that statistically you’ll fail a few times before getting it right. Nobody would attach such a negative label to you because you tried to create something of value and didn’t end up succeeding. You’ll be respected far more than timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

Real experts are usually people who have failed more than most people and have learned important lessons in doing so. This is true in any field, not just the business world.

Sense of self-entitlement. People in Italy still expect to obtain a long term post office or government job where you’re unlikely to get fired and will remain there for 40 years, just because they got a college degree.

I’ve interviewed several Italian job applicants throughout my life, and it’s not unusual to see them become visibly upset when a fellow Italian wouldn’t hire them over someone from a different country (simply on the merits that we’re both from Italy) – even when they’ve never written a single line of code outside of their university courses.

Fatalism. In Italy there is the belief that your future doesn’t depend on your own efforts, rather that it’s mostly influenced by impregnable external forces. When you are not convinced that you can take charge of your life, it becomes really hard to make the sacrifices and jump through the hoops required to achieve success.

Why work like a dog if you don’t believe in your heart that you can change your life and live the Italian take on the American dream? (I refuse to believe that the real Italian dream is to become a soccer player or a show girl, or to have a unionized job where you can’t get fired no matter how bad you behave.)

The following chart shows the results of some research that was carried out by the the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. As you can see, many Americans, Swedish, and English people replied “no” to the question, “Does success depend on forces outside our control?”. Italians however showed their fatalism, with more than 70% replying “yes”.

(By the way, tip of the hat to Fabrizio Capobianco for spotting this image on a slide by Richard Boly.)

I understand that as a whole a strongly catholic country may hold onto the popular belief that everything comes down to “God willing”, and that in many fields corruption and nepotism are the norm, not the exception. However it must be really sad to live a life in which you don’t believe in your ability to change your own destiny. Real change often derives from the ambition and desire to improve one’s situation in life.

Cynicism and envy. In Italy, people tend to ridicule, envy, or be distrustful of those who actively want to create a better future for themselves or to change the status quo.

When Mashape’s founders wrote an open letter to the Italian tech community in which they suggested that they were leaving Italy for Silicon Valley, people mocked them to no end. Many derided them and said they’d be back in a year with their tails between their legs and nothing to show for leaving Italy. What actually happened (as non-Italians might expect) is that they received $1.5 million from some of the largest investors in America, and in the process were able to get more investors to pay attention to wannabe Italian entrepreneurs.

This story speaks of a generation of cynics and discouraged people who not only struggle to produce something of value themselves, but who also actively sabotage others so as not to look incapable or lazy by comparison.

Overall Italians are a smart and (in the technical field) a generally talented group of people. Perhaps Italy will never have its own Silicon Valley, but it has a huge amount of human potential that should be put to good use. Change and innovation in my native country must start from the ground up, beginning with the attitudes and belief system of its youth.

I urge fellow Italians to fight these negative tendencies and stop, once for all, looking for excuses. If you wait for the ideal conditions to come along, you’ll never achieve anything important in life.

All change requires is for people to start taking action and trying for real. After all, just look around at the way Italy is these days: you don’t have a lot to lose. Yet there is so very much to potentially gain in the fight to reshape and transform Italy into the country it truly deserves to be.

[An Italian version of this article is available on Stacktrace.]

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A couple years ago Tim O’Reilly invited a Web 2.0 expo audience to “stop throwing sheep” and start doing something worthwhile. More recently, a post with the title America Lacks Meaningful Innovation went so far as to question the ability and willingness of American companies (particularly web companies) to be innovative.

Nearly three years on and today we’re throwing birds instead of sheep. Damn angry ones for that matter. Nevertheless, the point could be made that we’re still throwing animals instead of doing something supposedly worthwhile (as a typical web startup isn’t exactly revolutionizing health care, the energy industry, the environment, or other highly important areas for the future of civilization).

It could be argued however that entertainment is an important part of life. Granted entertainment doesn’t do anything as necessary and urgent as curing cancer, but it isn’t as though the expectation that every entrepreneur should focus on such a noble and almost unattainable problem is there either. Furthermore, innovation can – and does – happen even in places where you don’t expect it.

The Angry Birds team could, for example, make some serious improvements to WebGL, which would in turn serve startups that are focused on more solemn, and “truly innovative” matters quite well. In a way this would be akin to how the Wii and Kinect didn’t end up being useful only to gamers.

Both viewpoints have their own merits, and the truth lies – as it so often does – in some shade of gray between the two. That’s why I don’t like to think of startups in terms of their quadrant on the Cartesian plane of worthiness and innovation.

O’Reilly can’t be blamed for wanting to inspire a new generation of developers and high-tech entrepreneurs. Mike Eaton, and his thoughts on innovation, shouldn’t be dismissed either. I’m just not fully comfortable with passing judgment on people who work hard on projects like Angry Birds, Minecraft, or other seemingly less important or worthy startups.

I like to look at the issue from a different perspective. I start by assuming, axiomatically, that every profitable startup that’s trying to solve a problem that someone, somewhere has, is worthy of existing and has the potential to be innovative in some capacity. Then things shift to being a matter of finding problems that people have, and how you might be able to go about solving said issues.

Developers have a tendency to be attracted to a common set of problems. This leads to a great number of startups competing against each others in an attempt to solve the same type of issue (e.g., freelance time tracking and invoicing a la Freshbooks). This isn’t a negative thing; competition is good and solutions to all but the most trivial of problems can always be improved upon.

It is however suboptimal. We end up underserving a great number of niches and markets that need our help. It also makes the lives of many of these aforementioned startups unnecessarily difficult. It’s hard to succeed when you are competing against so many other smart people all working at a problem that is largely solved (you may improve on Freshbooks, Freckle, and other hundreds of exciting services, but the market isn’t exactly begging for a new time tracking solution.)

This problem is a particularly big one because there exists a great web-reality divide. When you spend your work life on the Internet it’s hard to see it, but the world is still mostly offline. As a trivial example, an overwhelming number of small business still don’t have a web presence, and often your best shot at gaining information about them is consulting the good old yellow pages.

We have the web which is very connected and produces an enormity of data, and then an offline world that is mostly disconnected and local.

There are two major challenges for the next decade, and this is where I think developers should search for problems to solve.

Filtering, sorting, and making sense of the huge volume of data that’s available online (think Big Data) is certainly one of them. The second is bridging the gap between the offline world and the online world, and bringing that massive volume of offline data into the realm of the digital world where it can be analyzed, organized, extracted, searched and made readily available.

As we work towards these ambitious goals tough, let’s not begrudge those who opt to create small game apps, or decide to earn a honest income with web apps that are anything but revolutionary. It’s all part of an ecosystem that contributes to moving society forward.

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Over the past 25 years they’ve managed to deeply influence the world of computing and technology. The ideas promoted by the FSF’s foundation and leader, Richard Stallman, have certainly veered on the radical side. However, even if you don’t agree with this group’s ideology, I’d argue that we are afforded a lot more software freedom thanks to their activism.

Free and Open Source software (FOSS) has made our world a better place, and even if we put certain ideologies aside, software that is expandable, adaptable and often (but not necessarily) available for free is certainly a good thing for the end user.

Yet the business world has only partially embraced FOSS, and it’s rare to see an organization that exclusively runs its operations using only Open Source software and web applications that have been released under OSI approved licenses.

There are many reasons why this is the case, but the fundamental one is that software is only a means to an end for most businesses. They’ll use whatever they feel works best, is cheapest, best supported, and that they’re most familiar with. After all, they’re in business to make money, so religiously adhering to software philosophies is not usually at the top of their priority list.

Open Source business models

You’ll notice that for the most part, companies who develop FOSS don’t make their money from that FOSS itself. While they could theoretically sell it, the existence of clauses that allow their customers to redistribute the software for free makes it a less than ideal business model.

As such, better business models had to be invented to workaround the practical (not theoretical) limitations of making money with FOSS. The three most common of which are: dual licenses, Open Core, and support-based (and combinations thereof).

(Note that I’m mostly talking about desktop software here. Open source web apps tend to capitalize on the hosted nature of the service and are easier to monetize even when the software itself becomes freely available.)

Dual license: A commercial license is often used in conjunction with viral Open Source licenses like the GPL. A company setting up a dual license of this kind essentially relies on other companies’ inability to accept the viral license (because they don’t want to give their code away just because they used it in conjunction with your GPL code).

Open Core: The core product is Open Source, but if you want extra features, that are often indispensable to businesses, you’ll have to pay for them (as they’re commercial and proprietary). A company adopting this model is essentially using a freemium model, in which they use Open Source as a gateway to selling you proprietary software (which is the real way they make their money).

Support-based: Finally, there is the support option. Development companies went from basically having a license to print money to a much less scalable business model where they generate revenue based on the support they provide. Incidentally, while support is not the main “vocation” of most people who start software companies, it can be a lucrative avenue nevertheless.

Open Source as a nice to have

My point is that in all three cases, businesses may appreciate the Open Source nature, but it’s not a key factor in their decision making. In fact, in the first case they are buying a commercial license to escape the contractual limitations of an Open Source license; in the second case, they are paying outright for proprietary software; and in the third case, they are paying for the assurance that the software is maintained and that there’s going to be someone who’s accountable and ready to assist if problems arise (this is a real problem with many less popular community-driven Open Source projects).

In short, as long as the software fits the bill, companies will not take an idealistic view when it comes to software, but rather focus on what affects their bottom-line. It’s fairly safe to say that most companies really care about having software that is reliable, saves them time (their most precious resource), and that’s well supported. Open Source is a “nice to have” for most of them.

Why would you use commercial databases?

As an advocate for the DB2 team I often hear people ask, “Why would you use DB2 when MySQL is free and Open Source?”. The truth is that countless companies use DB2 because they know it ends up being cheaper in terms of both time and cost, when compared to Open Source database solutions.

I don’t doubt that many developers who work with Open Source technologies may care about their database being free (as in beer), free (as in speech), and its ability to meet a subset of functionalities available in pretty much any relational databases. In that case, MySQL is fine. But the needs of companies, both large and small, will often differ from that of your typical solo hacker.

IBM has an extensive number of DB2 customers because these companies care about features that don’t exist or are very rough around the edges in many Open Source databases.

Most of our customers care about:

• Proven reliability and advanced security features;
• Utmost performance;
• Ability to natively handle XML documents and data (some industries have to do so as a result of regulations);
• Vertical and horizontal scalability as their business grow;
• Advanced and easySQL Replication and High Availability and Disaster Recovery (HADR) tools;
• Backup compression to save storage costs (it’s not an issue if you have a web app that stores a grand total of 50MB of data, but it’s fundamental when you have 50TB);
• 24/7 support from a reputable company that will truly stand behind the product they sell;
• Ease of administration (DB2 offers autonomic features that pretty much self-adjust DB2 automatically based on the workload and usage it’s handed);
• Overall TCO (which involves a lot more than just looking at the price tag for the software).

DB2 rocks all of these very crucial points. Furthermore, with the DB2 Express-C version, you get to use a production ready version absolutely for free.

Don’t let the name scare you. Oracle has really given the “Express” brand a bad vibe. Oracle XE is full of security holes, hasn’t been updated in 5 years, and is a severely crippled edition. Conversely, DB2 Express-C is regularly updated and impose very little limitations on you.

True, even DB2 Express-C has some limitations when it comes to the kinds of resources that it can use (up to 2GB of RAM and 2 CPU cores). Fear not though, it’s still plenty useful for many startups or small businesses (it’s used in production by many such folks). With DB2 Express-C there are no limits on the number of databases, their sizes, the number of users, connections, etc. It’s the perfect starter edition. The presence of three commercial editions (Express-C FTL or Express, Workgroup, and Advanced Enterprise) guarantees you that as your business flourishes, DB2 will grow with you.

How far can you go with top of the line hardware and the commercial editions? Let’s put it this way: every time you buy something with your VISA, that transaction passes through DB2. Furthermore, DB2 holds the world record for TPC-C benchmarks, with over 10,000,000 transactions per minute.

Let’s make DB2 available to more startups

Today IBM is announcing new pricing to extend the benefits of our support and commercial edition to a greater number of startups and small businesses. You can get the commercial Fixed Term License for about $1,500 per server, per year. (I pay more per year to host this blog.) Aside from 24/7 support, regular fix pack updates, and the clustering option for SQL Replication and HADR, this DB2 Express-C license will also allow you to use up to 4GB of RAM and 4 CPU cores. (There is an Express edition if you’d prefer to pay a one time fee, rather than a yearly one, or if you’d like to pay through other metrics such as per user.)

Commercial databases, particularly innovative ones like DB2, have their place in our industry both today and in the future, even in the face of the indisputable popularity of Open Source options. Businesses should evaluate proprietary and Open Source solutions on technical merits rather than ideological ones. In my opinion, there is space for both of these models to peacefully coexist to better serve the diverse needs of the business world.

DISCLAIMER: These are my controversial opinions on the topic at hand. They do not represent the opinions of IBM or anyone else associated with IBM. In fact, I wrote this post at 2 AM on my own laptop and published it on my personal blog. No executives were consulted (or harmed) in the making of this post.

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If you are a developer who’s interested in starting a new business or even just earning extra cash on the side, you have a few options that can lead to scalable profits and passive income. The most popular choices these days are SaaS (Software as a Service) and iPhone/iPad development.

Choosing web application or iPhone OS development is a matter of personal taste, skills, goals, technical requirements, and so on. If we are looking at things solely from an economical perspective though, it’s interesting to consider for a moment which of the two is most likely to be profitable all things being equal.

In my opinion, despite the horror stories, it is far easier to make money with iPhone/iPad development than with charging for a service provided by a web application. The reason for this is very simple. Users don’t expect to pay for websites. They occasionally do for the useful ones, but it’s a relatively new approach and people are still adjusting to it.

Due to the hosted nature of SaaS offerings, they often require a monthly or yearly subscription as well, which is harder to sell than a single one time purchase. $9.99 here, $19.99 there, all adds up very quickly to an uncomfortable monthly bill.

iPhone and iPad applications on the other hand have a major advantage. Apple created an incredible ecosystem where millions of users are ready to pay for tiny applications that solve one small problem or are amusing enough to install. Low prices without the need for a subscription encourage impulse buyers to purchase applications without giving it a second thought.

You’ve probably been on the web for many years now, yet how many web applications do you pay for? However if you have an iPod Touch, an iPhone, or an iPad, how many applications have you bought? I own an iPod Touch and rarely use it, yet even I’ve paid for some applications.

It’s a matter of expectations and Apple did a marvelous job in that respect. When you buy an iPhone, you are almost expected to get cool apps for it. That, along with web access, is the whole point of having an advanced smart phone device. There are no such expectations for web applications.

Take a look at this list of applications and their sales. Most of them could be easily ported to the web, yet their limited scope and functionality wouldn’t even justify calling the resulting sites web applications. Few people would pay for them, even if one were to price them at $0.99. (And I’m not talking about apps for which being on a phone is the key feature). Conversely, porting a free Flash game from the web to the iPhone, for example, would almost certainly lead to sales.

Android is an option too, but I feel that Google has done a much poorer job at setting expectations. Furthermore their marketplace is a lackluster version of the App Store, users from several countries are unable to purchase applications or have to jump through hoops to do so, and developers from countries such as Canada, cannot publish and sell their apps on the Android Market.

The question is, will Google do a better job with the Chrome Web Store that was announced yesterday at Google I/O? If so, it may become a good extra channel through which to sell web applications; an App Store for the web if you will. The distinction between web apps and offline mobile apps may even fade away at some point. That would be a great thing for developers. For the time being however, it is my opinion that developing for the iPhone OS is a safer bet in terms of achieving profitability.

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These days, highly popular search engines are worth billions of dollars, mainly thanks to the massive advertisement businesses that can be built on top of them. The incentive to get a slice of that huge pie is clearly there. But can we do better than Google? And will such innovation necessarily arrive from the research labs of giants like Apple or Microsoft?

The answer to the first question is obviously yes. There is always room for improvement. The latter question may appear equally obvious as well, but let’s take the tale of two different search engines into consideration.

One of them was started by xooglers (ex-Google employees) with plenty of experience in the field of search engines; it had a team dedicated to its development and could afford to have a VP of communications. They received plenty of funding ($33M) to get the ball rolling, and garnered a fair bit of press coverage when they first launched.

A very different search engine, however, was started by just one person. It was bootstrapped (no external investors), came wrapped in a silly name, and virtually no one paid attention to its launch.

The first is Cuil (pronounced ‘cool’), which as many know, has become something of a running joke online. It’s the perfect example of how not to create a startup and of everything that could possibly go wrong with an ambitious software project.

From day one the results were so incomplete and irrelevant, that one has to wonder if the $33M they received was spent on developing the technology needed to clone Samuel Becket and place him in charge as the chief architect of the project. The absurdity of Cuil’s search results even led to the development of a highly entertaining Cuil Theory.

A few days ago the Cuil team launched an automated Wikipedia of sort, called cpedia. The end results were so terrible, that they will serve as an eternal cautionary tale against the indiscriminate use of Markov chains.

Unless Cuil/Cpedia is a practical joke aimed at the tech community, they may as well shut them both down. At this point they really are just wasting their time (and ours).

The second search engine, the one with a rather wacky name, was created by a single person (Gabriel Weinberg) and is called Duck Duck Go (a play on the name of that old childhood favorite, ‘Duck, duck, goose’). However, much to the surprise of many, there is real innovation going on here (particularly presentation wise).

Duck Duck Go’s zero click information is very useful – as is dividing the results by topic (for example, the word “ruby” can have different meanings in different contexts). Presenting all the search results on a single page (via AJAX) was a smart and handy feature as well. With this search engine your privacy is respected, particularly since your IP is not even logged.

This site is still as niche as it gets, but it’s reaching a tipping point amongst the ultra-geeks — not to mention that more and more people (myself included) are adding Duck Duck Go as their default search engine within their browsers. Is it better than Google? No, not always. It depends on the type of query. Sometimes it’s better, sometimes it’s worse, but it’s usually quite usable and is a concrete attempt to innovate the search engine realm.

Duck Duck Go serves as a poignant reminder to the software world that David can still strike Goliath.

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BlogBabel, the aforementioned site/web app, is a blog indexing and aggregation service that began in 2006. Amongst its features are the ability to detect and show the most popular blog discussions, weekly posts, books, videos, and even popular blog entries based on their location (through geotagging). It also features leaderboards of the most popular blogs.

Its codebase uses Python and Django, and consists of 27,359 physical lines of code (roughly equivalent to 6.46 person-years, according to sloccount). The R&D alone makes this application worthwhile to an interested party.

At this stage, BlogBabel has an Italian interface (located at it.blogbabel.com) and aggregates almost 15,000 Italian blogs and 5 million posts. Changing the interface to make it an international project that’s available in several languages, or switching to English (solely), would not be challenging in the least (they used to run a Spanish version as well, for example, but decided to discontinue it so as to focus on the Italian one).

BlogBabel has been featured in the mainstream Italian media and has had a noticeable influence on the Italian blogosphere. One could argue that it has been the yellow pages of the Italian blogosphere. Because of this, Ludovico Magnocavallo (the site’s creator) received substantial offers to buy BlogBabel in the past, but he turned them down because he wanted to continue building this site. Now however, due to personal circumstances and lack of time/resources, he’s willing to sell this application for what may amount to far less than its true value. And here’s the real bargain, the starting price, without a reserve, is 4,999 Euros. This is of course, a ridiculously low price for the value being offered. But Ludovico believes in letting the market decide.

If I had the funds lying around, I would buy it myself and gear it towards the English speaking world (in conjunction with the pre-existing Italian version). It’s a prepackaged, virtually ready-made startup with a great deal of potential both in its current state and in terms of what it could grow to become.

To recap, the auction includes:

• The domain name blogbabel.com (it.blogbabel.com has a pagerank of 6);
• The full codebase (almost 30,000 lines of code);
• A database containing 3 years worth of data relating to the Italian blogosphere (more than 30 GB, lots of data-mining opportunities);
• 4 hours of work to help you with setting up the site on your own servers.

BlogBabel has been running smoothly for three years, and is currently under-marketed. Optimizing ads, affiliates, and similar sources of revenue wouldn’t be hard at all, especially if one were to aim this site at the English speaking world.

Also, Ludovico has already implemented most of the code that’s necessary to allow users to have accounts (through OpenID), but since these “social features” are not fully implemented yet, they have not been deployed in production. A buyer could decide to disregard them or finish implementing them and roll out a technorati-like service. The winner of this auction could decide to implement support for Twitter, comments on social networks, sentiment analysis, etc, on their own. The possibilities are really limitless when you start with a solid engine and crawler, and already have a great deal of data at your fingertips.

I know Ludovico and he’s a stand-up guy. If you are interested in this great deal, you can bid here. If you have technical questions about this auction, please feel free to contact him directly through eBay.

UPDATE (September 8, 2009): Ludovico received an undisclosed offer for the site and a few years of maintenance work, so the auction for the site alone was suspended.

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Recently however I’ve been reflecting on the ad-based alternatives that I’ve tended to dislike in the past, as a sentence in John Gruber’s recent article really stroke a cord with me:

Undeniably, there is money to be made in digital publishing with free reader access, but whether that revenue leads to profits depends upon the scale and scope of the organization. The potential revenue does not appear to be of the magnitude that will support the massive operations of existing news organizations. What works in today’s web landscape are lean and mean organizations with little or no management bureaucracy — operations where nearly every employee is working on producing actual content.

He is right. Ad-based models are generally not going to make huge amounts of money and therefore be able to satisfy your grandiose dreams of wealth. You’ll have to keep your team “lean and mean”, and cut down on expenses as much as you can. This is true for any business, but there is little margin for spending extravaganzas in this particular arena.

So long as you are not kidding yourself into believing that you’ll make it big, free sites that sustain themselves through sponsors, ads, and reputable affiliate programs like Amazon, are still an option that’s worth keeping on the table. And this business model doesn’t have to be exclusive, it could easily be mixed with others, like some bloggers/writers do when they promote an e-book they’re selling to their audience.

Last year, without trying to become a new media “conglomerate”, I saw several sites of mine generate a bit of revenue on the side. I ran these sites entirely as a hobby. Yet, come tax time, I figured that last year I made $4000+ from these sites, which happen to be three or four relatively unknown blogs, that get updated sporadically whenever I have the time.

These are small, somewhat uncultivated online “properties” that are fairly under-optimized. I know I’m leaving money on the table. What would happen if I were to have a more business-minded approach in terms of managing them? For example, I could optimize them for SEO/SEM, strategically position and A/B test ads, actively pursue new sponsors, post on a regular basis every other day, invite external writers or pay for some highly sought types of articles, and so on.

My guess is that I wouldn’t get rich even if I took these steps, but I could generate a fair amount of extra income every month. I’ll confess that this idea is tempting me, not just for the extra money, but also for the hidden benefit of having several distinct audiences that I could reach. Not to mention, the thrill of watching those online “properties” of mine, and any new ones that come along, slowly grow and become more useful to my readers. Pulling this off would require hard work in my limited spare time, but it could be done.

DHH recommends building a “small Italian restaurant on the web”. And I agree, but I’m starting to believe that building a “small publishing company” of one’s own on the web is a valid alternative.

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In fact, over the past few days I have been contacted by several people who were curious about ThinkCode, some of whom asked me to send them an email when we release English content. Meanwhile, we found our second native English speaker (who’s a very solid programmer) who agreed to work with us to narrate and create original English videos.

It’s clear that things are moving fast and we realized that the presence of two distinct product lines, one in English and one in Italian, generally appeals to two different audiences. As such having a single (Italian) newsletter just won’t cut it. So today, we are pleased to announce our English newsletter, which I invite you to join if you want to stay in the loop. We haven’t decided yet if we are going the “private beta” route or not, but joining today will guarantee you early access if we do.

This way, English speakers can join our English newsletter (where only English content will be announced or discussed), and Italians on the other hand can continue to join our Italian newsletter (in which both Italian and English content will be announced in Italian; this to account for the fact that some Italians may be interested in purchasing products that are available in English only).

We’re really excited by positive responses we’ve already received and are really looking forward to providing you with amazing educational material. If you are interested in becoming an author, are a company who would like to strike up a partnership with us so that we can adapt and sell your videos in Italian, or simply would like to get in touch, please drop us a line at info@thinkcode.tv.

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1. I’d like to start by tracing your background. What did you do prior to Zooppa?

Programming, programming, programming. I started out working for Neato Europe as their “one-man-band programmer”, building their e-commerce site and taking care of their infrastructure (nothing more than a bunch of servers). In those days my love of FreeBSD, PostgreSQL and dynamic languages started to grow exponentially. As the only employee I had to find a way to produce quantity and quality at the same time, and the technologies above were a perfect fit for the job.

After leaving Neato I did consulting work for a few years, for customers like Monte dei Paschi di Siena and Italian Telecom. Albeit those are big names, it was with the smaller scale customers that I enjoyed working the most. I won’t mention them by name though as they don’t impress people as much as big banks. I used to work primarily with Python, while developing a growing interest in Ruby, which blossomed when Ruby on Rails was released.

In the meantime I was helping Marco Ceresa writing the first book in Italian about Ruby (thus cheating on Python officially for the first time) and working part-time for Assembla on their Hotchalk project.

2. What led to the creation of Zooppa and how did you become its CTO?

Zooppa came from an idea that Davide Lombardi, an Italian journalist, had to found a company with the help of Riccardo Donadon and his firm, H-Farm, an early stage startup incubator. I joined Zooppa almost by accident, having answered a job posting thinking that it was some kind of consulting position for RoR from a forward-thinking employer. I soon found myself talking with Riccardo and Peter Caiazzi (of Netscape fame) at a wonderful countryside farm, full of fellow geeks. I was immediately sold.

I was first hired as a consultant and a few months later become the CTO. I guess the reason is that I’m a good programmer. You should ask Riccardo.

3. Can you explain to our readers who may not familiar with it, what Zooppa is? (Think an elevator pitch.)

Zooppa is a web application for designers and other creative types. It’s based on a new approach to online advertising and on a value proposition that goes beyond the simple “click” formula. We give our users a brand that is looking for a commercial, they create ads through a competition (videos, print ads, radio commercials, banners or simply concepts), and these ads are voted on by the site’s community. Eventually the ad makers win money (I think we’ve awarded $400,000 to date) based on the popular vote and the choice of the customer who commissioned the project.

In my opinion it’s a wonderful way for people to show what they’re able to accomplish for companies like Google, Nike, TomTom and many others. And based on the number of people from our community who have been hired by these companies, it is clear that the companies agree as well.

4. What kind of funding did the company receive?

No funding other than that of H-Farm. I strongly believe that you need to have a product before you ask for funding. I’m absolutely against the “promise-based” economy we all know. We’re going to be looking for our first round of substantial funding very soon, as we’re now able to show our polished product and our large community (something we couldn’t do one year ago). We have been able to give Zooppa its own character and goals, and we proved that it worked. Now we are able to make promises that we can stand behind.

5. How are things going? At this stage have you been able to be profitable, and can you disclose a few statistics about Zooppa? How many employees, users, pageviews and so on?

No, we haven’t been profitable, but we’re getting very close. We are somewhat akin to a combination of YouTube, Flickr and Facebook (in the sense that we serve videos, images and have a timeline), and we had huge startup costs, so it was basically impossible to be profitable initially, which we knew from the get-go.

We have 40,000 users more or less, 12,000 print ads, 2,000 videos and so on. It’s quite impressive when you consider that these videos are the result of a creative process and not, say, simply the recording of your cat a la YouTube. In terms of employees, we’ve got about 20 people.

6. It seems to me that the idea is innovative, the videos are fun, and there is a solid business model behind it. Why do you think the company has received little attention outside of Europe, especially by specialized blogs that cover all kinds of startups? Can you tell us about your struggle to get exposure?

Oh well, you’re opening a can of worms with that question… We made a huge mistake at the beginning: we focused on our own market without “attacking” the US one. Other than that, we didn’t receive any coverage outside of Italy, even if I did all I could to reach out to the biggest blogs that cover startups. It seems to me that you only get coverage if you are burning VC money or in some way are doing something that’s fashionable at the moment (such as with Twitter right now).

I’ve even seen one of our clones getting more coverage than us, which is kind of ridiculous as that competitor implemented the idea horribly in my opinion. I would say that the originality of the idea doesn’t really matter to such bloggers, just the funding and related issues (not to mention the various possible conflicts of interest…). Honestly this is very hard to swallow.

7. How did choosing Ruby on Rails impact the project?

We are incredibly productive. We normally code a prototype and write specs before putting it online. This is awesome, I can turn ideas into code in no time, test and refactor them later if I realize that performances are not as I would like them to be.

I strongly believe we wouldn’t survive without Rails. I still remember the presentation I gave to RailsToItaly, I just had done a complete redesign and rewrite of the site in 38 days. My presentation’s title was “Productivity with RubyOnRails or how I stopped worrying and learned to love Zooppa”. I think this title speaks for itself.

On a side note, I would also like to say that as an old school web developer and early “Railer” (you can find my posts whining about DB serials stretching as far back as 2004 with answers from DHH himself ). I think we have the best provider ever. I work with EngineYard and their service is terrific. I have no idea how they can offer the sort of support they do and still keep prices so reasonable. Never in 10 years on the web have I experienced the type of service I get from EngineYard. They are one of our most precious assets.

8. As CTO for the company, what are your main duties?

I code like crazy, as I already mentioned, and I take care of our architecture and its evolution. I’m in charge of other developers (http://twitter.com/oscardelben/, http://twitter.com/michelegera and http://twitter.com/smash) and provide them with specs to implement. And I whine about everything. Whining is the defining skill of every CTO, trust me.

9. Where is Zooppa heading and what plans do you have to bring it to the next level?

I want to integrate Zooppa with the major video and image platforms. And with Twitter of course. I would also like to experiment with Sinatra for a Facebook application. As well I’m coding my own blog/static site solution with Sinatra and Metal (I really dislike WordPress). And I do so in my free time, which means BSD license all the way. I also plan to use CouchDB for our timeline.

We have a lot of stuff going, and we’re going to hire more employees, so feel free to send your CV to nwieland@zooppa.com, and be sure to include Erlang and Haskell if you are brave (I received complaints about my choice of technology, because it’s hard to find Ruby developers around here. If I start requiring Erlang and Haskell skills I will definitely establish a record number of complaints here in H-Farm). It’s going to be a lot of fun, really.

I really want to thank Nicholas for his time, and I invite my readers to stay tuned for more interviews. An Italian translation of this interview is available on Stacktrace.it.