Imaginary Blog

We’re about one month away of celebrating our second anniversary. I can’t believe we’ve been in business for almost two years. Most companies fail during this period, and we’re very happy to have Imaginary Cloud on the minority side.

I can’t say these two years were easy. They weren’t. We’ve worked on a lot of projects and tried to put some products on the market. From all the lessons we’ve learned, here is the most relevant one. Get some focus you f****** bast*** (excuse my French).

As a company that operates in the Portuguese market, and looking around to our competitors, I can say that a lot of things are changing. Before, there were lots of companies following the “Jack of all trades” approach. They worked with .Net, Java and tried to attack several markets at the same time. And you know what they say, “Jack of all trades, master at none”.

But now, we can see that the new startups pick up a technology and stick with it. That’s good. I’m sure we’ll have some pretty good companies operating in our market in the following years. Just one thing is currently not right – services and bad product cycle.

Our market is small, and the startup funding culture in Portugal is crappy, to say the least. With luck you can go for a series A funding, and that’s it. And even the Business Angels in Portugal can’t really get involved in the companies they invest in. There are not enough synergies to help them with that. The country has no dimension.

So why do Portugese startups keep doing services instead of focusing in products? Because they need money to keep them operating.

So why is the product development cycle bad? Because companies need to do services to keep them operating.

Don’t get me wrong. There are some Portuguese startups with good products out there. But IMHO it takes too much time to get them out to the market, and the evolution of the product itself is painless, because the team needs to work on services.

Get the point? Where is the f****** focus?

Regarding Imaginary Cloud, we will keep doing services. Not just because we need to, but because we love our customers and their projects. But we will realign our product development strategy. We will reduce the number of products currently on the pipeline. We’re going to select only one, and work it out as fast as possible. Fast and focused. Get the point?

Our team wishes a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to all our costumers and partners.

And to match your devices with the Christmas season, we offer a Wallpaper for PC, iPad and iPhone. You can download it here for free.

PC & Mac Wallpaper:

iPhone Wallpaper:

iPad Wallpaper:

Two days ago, Matt Silverman posted an infographic, sumarizing how businesses are taking advantage of the cloud computing technology.

I would like to highlight three facts:
- only 14% of the companies reported to have downsized after adopting cloud computing
- 82% of the customers saved money, but savings are small
- 93% of the users reported improvements in their IT department

We can conclude that savings can be made when adopting Cloud Computing, but that shouldn’t be driving the decision. Overall, one should expect better availability, security and documented setup and deployment processes.

After a long journey, that started in last December with the initial visual drafts of the project, PagePong is accepting registrations.

We’ve developed this application because we also feel the pain of having to monitor several servers. We need to know if a server is down before the customer. We need to know it fast.. and cheap.

We also want to start monitoring a server with just a few clicks. There are a lot of monitoring services out there, but creating an account and adding a server to the list, can be a real pain in the but. It’s just an URL! And serious, we don’t need uptime reports and all that crap. What for? If the server is down… we just want to know it fast, preferably through SMS…

Ho, wait. Pingdom and similar services already have SMS. Hmm… how much does it cost? Really? Well, PagePong doesn’t charge for SMS notification. Why… well, we believe no one wants to have their sites crashing every day just to receive an SMS. So let’s offer flat plans without variable costs.

We like to make it simple. And a PagePong is all about simplicity.

And to make it even more fun, we are doubling all the credits purchased in July. Pongs are nice people and just want to make you happy.

It is with great joy that we celebrate our 1st Birthday today!
We would like to say a big “Thank You!” to all our customers and friends that
made this achievement possible.

We also would like to give you something back on this special day,
so we prepared a pack of Birthday card and wallpapers to embellish your devices: PC, iPhone, iPhone4 and iPad.

Birthday card:

iPhone wallpaper:

iPhone4 wallpaper:

iPad wallpaper:

PC wallpaper:

Thanks again,
Imaginary Team

Labialfarma Mobile:

We just published our latest case study.

You can check the Labialfarma Mobile case study here: http://www.imaginarycloud.com/case_studies/5-labialfarma-mobile.

We hope you enjoy,

Imaginary team.

We’re developing a new service, and hope to release it soon. In the meantime, here is the 404 error page designed by Alberto.

Would be nice to have some thoughts.

When we start working on a new project, it first gets deployed to what we call a staging environment. The objective is to allow the customer the evaluation of the progress of the project.

In order to keep things private and prevent google and other search engines from indexing the site, we need to password protect it. There is already some information out there on how to do this with nginx. But to figure it out, I needed to dig into several sites.

This article is intended to explain the complete process of password protecting your site with passenger and nginx. I assume that the site is already running, but not password protected.

To clarify, framework stack is:

• Ruby on Rails
• Passenger
• nginx

Because the server is already running, there should be a server section on the nginx.conf file similar to this:

server {
        listen       80;
        server_name  staging.example.com;
        rails_env staging;
        root /home/foo/example.com/current/public; 
        passenger_enabled on;
 }

In order to password protect an existing site, we need to first generate a password file. The easiest way is to use a web application like the Htpasswd Generator. Store the resulting text in a file in the server.

Now, edit the nginx.conf file again and change the server section to:

server {
        listen       80;
        server_name  staging.example.com;
        rails_env staging;
        root /home/foo/example.com/current/public; 
        passenger_enabled on;

        #password protect
        location ~ / {
                 auth_basic            "Restricted";
                 root /home/foo/example.com/shared/.htpasswd;
                 passenger_enabled on;
        }
}

Place the location of your .htpasswd file where it says /home/foo/example.com/shared/.htpasswd;

Notice the passenger_enabled entry inside the password protect section. This entry is needed to trigger passenger after completing the password authentication process. Otherwise the server will try to list the web root directory, and probably show an unauthorized error.

Hope it helps.

In line with the Christmas spirit we are offering our wallpaper for iPhone and iPad for all of you.

Imaginary Cloud team,

Merry Christmas and happy New Year!

Over the last few months we’ve been working in a very interesting project, iZoca. Although the project has been live for a while, lots of work has been done over the last months to make the site more appealing and user friendly.

iZoca is a social network, but unlike most social networks out there, iZoca isn’t focused on the individual. Having a good profile and a lot of virtual friends doesn’t really matter.

Instead, iZoca provides services for groups, centering the focus of the user in his/her interaction with others – probably in the real life. It can be seen as a meeting place where people discuss activities, make announcements about events, and probably get together when the event happens (either physically or within a virtual environment). Events can be loaded by an e-mail client or mobile device, just to make sure agendas don’t clash. At the end, the photos of the event can be placed in an on-line photo album and shared between the group. There is also a place for other documents, link word or PDF files (a great place to store meeting minutes). All of this in a single web application.

iZoca’s team also gives a lot of attention to privacy. Groups can be public or private, and the way members join a group can also be configured. Some groups allow everyone to join, others require a simple request to join, while the most exclusive groups can be joined only by invitation.

There is an open directory with groups already out there. Groups can be found by name, theme or zip-code – because having the same interests or being in the same region really makes sense, when you’re looking for a group to join.

And what has this to do with hyperlocal??? So far, not much. But let’s talk about the potential.

So, there is an application where people can create groups, and thus discuss several themes, publish events, documents and photo-albums. The groups can be searched by theme or by zip-code… hmmm, is that starting to ring a bell?

Imagine that, like me, you like some underground events that usually do not hit the cultural agendas – like theater plays from amateur groups or exhibits from young artists. Now image that, all the public events from these groups located at your area, appear on a single page. Something like… a dashboard for events in your community. Does this make sense? Well, this is where the hyperlocal stuff will take place in iZoca. I know (from a very secure source) that there will be a special recognition for people actively involved in their community. So feel free to start practicing.