Tag Archives: Market

Last Month in Spain – April

Posted by Julie on 16/05/2012 None comments

These series of posts are a compilation of what has happened in the spanish startupsphere within and outside our borders. As part of our efforts to promote Startup Spain movement, we want to increase the exposure of the our startup ecosystem. If you want to contribute, please do not hesitate to ping us on Twitter @startspainwith any news you want us to feature here. Thank You!

If you want to learn more about what has happened lately in Spain, you can read last month’s post HERE.

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For most people, April in Spain has been mainly famous for its concerning news regarding its national public debt risk premium, the “rapid” implementation of several austerity measures by the central government and the TWO different hunting accidents in TWO different occasions by TWO different members of the Royal Family (One of them, being the King of Spain himself). Yet, in the startupsphere, we don’t have much time for supra-national economical mumbo jumbo, political smoke-screens or outrageous (and quite karmic) gossip about our Royal Family. We have more important things to do!!

If you want to keep reading this post, click HERE.

 

If you want to know all about these great spanish entrepreneurs and want to be updated on the evolution of the Spanish startup ecosystem, you can Follow us on Twitter @StartSpain, Like us on Facebookand/or Subscribe to our NewsLetter

If you feel that we have left out of this update any important deal that is worth mentioning or you have any feedback regarding these series of blogposts, please let us know in the comments section below. We would gladly update the post with your inputs as fast as we can.

Stay tuned for next month’s update!

 

 

Is the Market ready for your product?

Posted by Letzee on 03/04/2012 None comments

These series of guest posts are written by the teams attending the Tetuan Valley Startup School 2012 Spring Edition. This post is from the Letzee team, formed by Juan Diego Gonzalez and Victor Manuel Lozada

Companies spend millions of dollars doing market research when preparing to launch a new product into the market. Sometimes spending big amounts of cash doesn’t guarantee a successful product. An example of this case is the Oakley OVER THE TOP® sunglasses. These were a very innovative solution for sport sunglasses. In contrast with the traditional sunglasses, which you wear beside your head, and use your ears for supporting the sunglasses legs, you would wear the OVER THE TOP® sunglasses on top of your head, just like a helmet. Apart from looking like a creature from another planet while wearing this innovative design, it had its advantages and added value to what was currently available in the market. First, they were more comfortable; you didn’t have the pains beside your head compared with the tight fit of other sport sunglasses. And second, you could move very abruptly and they wouldn’t fall. So, what went wrong?

The design was way too futuristic, and even if the product solved some issues, the design itself wasn’t going to be adopted by the users. They sold some, but had to discontinue the product because there wasn’t enough demand. The comments were, “They are cool, but I wouldn’t wear them.” How to avoid this before its too late?

There are many things to consider while improving or creating a new product. As an entrepreneur, you are very aware of what the market needs, or else you wouldn’t be an entrepreneur. I believe there are two ways of making sure your new product doesn’t fail.

1. Extensive market research. By extensive I mean expensive as well. The problem is that entrepreneurs don’t have the money needed for an extensive/expensive market research. You can do a market research, but be aware that the outcome might not quite represent the whole market. So be creative and make sure to get key answers to your market questions without breaking the bank.
2. Common sense. It might sound easy, but entrepreneurs tend to fall in love with their product and believe that it will be the next “BIG THING” and when people say otherwise they go deaf. So I recommend opening your ears and use common sense, if many people say, “That won’t work” don’t ignore them, ask questions instead and be smart about it.

You might come up with many products that you think people need. You may also come up with many improvements on other products in the market, but the need has to be clear and usable. Everyone would love a flying car, but how many people will actually pay and use one? Open your eyes for opportunities, open your ears for feedback, and most of all be smart and don’t treat your idea as your child, don’t spoil it. Grab it, criticize it, shred it, build it again from the ground up, and repeat as many times as necessary before going to market.

Differences between Android and iPhone development

Posted by betonsofa on 10/11/2010 1 comments

These series of guest posts are written by the teams attending the Tetuan Valley Startup School 2010 Fall edition. This post is from the betonsofa team, formed by Luis Aguilar, Ernesto Arredondo and José A. Gil.

We are going to compare Android vs iPhone development, as a continuation of a first article about the differences between Google and Apple TV. This post is mainly based on two papers wroten by David Green and Eneko Knorr, developers in Android and iPhone platforms.


Language
The Android development language is Java.
The iPhone language  is Objective-C.

Objective-C:
- The IDE doesn’t help much.
- You need to do many things to declare a property: declare in the class definition, again to declare getter/settter, initialize in the init method, @synthesize in the implementation, release in dealloc. In general, you have to type way to much to express a simple concept.
- Pointers in Objective-C, though powerful, are also another time-waster.
- The patterns that must be followed (p.i: implementing correct init and dealloc methods) are non-trivial.
- Objective-C’s imports and forward-declarations are a pain

Java:
- The Eclipse IDE helps you define properties
- Java really shines with its garbage collection.
- Imports and forward-declarations exists in java, but Eclipse’s JDT is so good that you can almost forgotten them.

API Libraries
- On Android many Java libraries are available (Java IO, Java IO, network and regex). It make development easy. In general, the layout, organization, and naming conventions of Android platform classes are more consistent and predictable.
- On iPhone,  classes and methods are poorly organized. Depending on the framework used, naming conventions and code organization would differ.
- Android has the benefit of being open source. You can see how things were implemented in the Android platform and learn by example.
- On the iPhone when things didn’t work as expected you had to resort to Google and hope that others had encountered the same problem.

GUI Model
- The iPhone platform does a great job of encouraging an MVC design pattern.
- With Android’s support for multiple processes and component reuse, it does introduce some complexity for the developer
- Both Android and iPhone provide a way of declaring user preferences in XML. Both platforms provide a default UI for editing those preferences.

Resources
- Apple does an excellent job of providing lots of resources for developers. Apple provides lots of sample applications and code to demonstrate API usage.
- Android developers also have access to loads of resources. The guide and API reference are installed with the SDK, so everything is available when offline. You also can download many open source Android projects for ideas on architecture and API usage.

IDE
- Android development leverages the excellent JDT tools. JDT is its incremental compiler, which provides immediate feedback with errors and warnings as you type.
- In Objective-C in XCode, waiting for compiler feedback break the flow of programming.
- Eclipse is better than XCode in content assist and editor management system.

UI Builder
- iPhone app developers are given a pretty good UI builder. It does a great job of showing the UI as it will actually appear. It’s flexible and can model some pretty sophisticated UIs.
- The Android UI builder is pretty useless: it can’t display UIs how they’ll actually appear, and it’s UI is way too inefficient.

Debugger
- XCode debugger UI extremely difficult to use.

Profiler and Heap Analysis
- An area where Apple development tools excel is in profiling and heap analysis. These tools seemed mature and easy to use.

App Store and Google Market
- The iPhone app store is excellent in that you can sell into many countries worldwide with a single setup. Getting an app into the store however is frustrating to say the least. Apple must approve every app before it is accepted into the store. Mine got rejected multiple times without any explanation. The delate is similar for patches resolving bugs of  your own applicattions.

- The Google market by comparison to the Apple app store is terrible in that you can only sell into a handful of countries. On the other hand when you upload your app to the app store it’s available within minutes, so you don’t have to worry about an approval process.
In Google market, people is more reluctant to pay than in iPhone app store.