Rastin Mehr

At least by the contemporary context of Witchcraft, programming involves putting down mathematic symbols, alphabets, and characters that influence the forces of universe. This craft can be used for both good evil.

Today software is powering the world. Everywhere from communication, transportation, medicine, manufacturing, and agriculture, software is playing a very important role. Software is what telling the inanimate machines and silicon chips to come alive and do things or create virtual realities with unlimited possibilities. When hackers and developers have been putting together code to create blogs, wikis, and social networks, they had little knowledge that their creations could lead to fundamental social and cultural changes to the point that powerful governments and corporations would go under and new ones would arise.

Software is made out of many programs. A program is made out of lines of symbols, characters, and numbers. They are the spells that manipulate the forces of universe. Coding is the new Witchcraft and hackers are the wizards and witches who manipulate and exploit the forces of good and evil, the yin and yang, in our everyday world.

One common mistake that a lot of our prospective clients make is not realizing that their mobile app projects are often software as services delivered on the mobile platform. In this model the mobile app is mostly acting as a client that connects to the service.

Some good examples are the apps for Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Foursquare, Paypal, Netflix, Path, Pinterest and so on. Most of these services are available via desktop and mobile browsers while they also provide applications developed using native OS environment such as iOS or Android where users can access all or some aspects those services. Some of these services are only available through mobile apps. For example: Instagram and Path.

When it gets to mobile services, most of the work is actually happening on the server side. That means a server application on the cloud becomes the brain of the system to which all the different mobile and desktop apps (Clients) connect to.

Some entrepreneurs, by mistake, call the server side the “database”. Yes, the server application does in fact use a database in a lot of cases, however most of the logic, communication, and data management happens through the server application. Building mobile services requires both mobile and web software development knowledge and skill sets.

Such services are eventually aiming to serve millions of people. In the beginning, these systems are often developed in smaller scales for a smaller group of users  and then in many iterative stages grown and scaled up until they can serve a very large user base. This also means these projects require round the clock attention for maintenance, community management, marketing, etc. They also require lots of experimentation and modifications until a lot of people would want to use them. That is why an entrepreneur cannot just hire a software company to build an entire system and deliver it on a certain time and date.

These types of projects are better done as startup companies where technical founders, co-founders, or dedicated software teams babysit their projects until they grow and thrive. In the mean time outside software companies can supply infrastructure technologies and consulting services to help these startups save significant amount of time and financial resources.

Depending on the complexity and nature of the mobile service, different types of web application technologies can be used to develop the server side. Some of the existing technologies are as following:

1. Content Management Systems (CMS): WordPress, Joomla, Drupal
2. Social Networking platforms and frameworks: Anahita
3. Software Development Frameworks: Anahita, Nooku, Ruby On Rails, or other MVC frameworks

It is often a challenge to find software companies who are willing to develop both the server and clients side for a mobile server. Many of the mobile app developers in the market are not so keen on developing server side software and many web application developers are still testing the waters in the iOS and Android environment. Some entrepreneurs try to find separate mobile and web application developers, hoping that these people may spark enough chemistry to work together, however in our experience we yet have to see some impressive results.

Questions? Comments? Woud like to know what you think. Please post them as comments.

Last week Ash and I were interviewed on the BobBloom podcast show from the www.southlasallemedia.com  and we talked about the Anahita Social Networking Engine project and how Anahitapolis.com has become an environment for Hackers, Entrepreneurs, and Hackerpreneurs to build and launch their business or hobby projects using the open source infrastructure that we are providing.

We also discuss how the new generation of hackers and developers who have become entrepreneurs are the very competitive forces in technology market.

You can listen to the podcast here: Hackerprenomics with Rastin and Ash

We would like to thank Bob for having us on his show. BobBloom is a technologist, consultant, developer, and podcaster in Toronto, Canada. He produces shows about Joomla and Nooku Framework from the perspective of consultants and developers with an eye on the business side. You can visit his website http://www.southlasallemedia.com and follow him on twitter @BobBloom

We have one or two desks available in our office that we would like to share with like minded, quiet, and responsible people. Our office is located in the beautiful yaletown Vancouver at #111-1118 Homer street on the first floor of Empress Galleria building. There is also a meeting table that we could share and Internet connection is included when you rent a desk with us.

You will fall in love with the brick and beam heritage look and the hard wood floors. If you are a startup or freelancers who would like to have an office space of your own, we wouldn’t mind sharing it with you at a monthly rate which is a very good value.

If you are interested please call: 778 885 0807

and please do call in advance before you drop by.

We have just launched the landing page for a new project of ours called TinyRecipe. It will be a mobile social networking app so people can share and find recipes that are 200 characters or less accompanied by a picture.

Imagine if you could post a recipe like this:

Cut a +baguette into slices and toast slightly +sundriedtomato +goatcheese +cilantro or +basil w/ chilled +whitewine of choice #appetizer #fingerfood

And that was done in 149 characters where + identifies the main ingredients and # hashtags for the folksonomy (categories)

Working on many different projects in the past several years one of the skills that we had to acquire was to learn and come up with quick and short recipes that are healthy and don’t take up much time. When you devote your life into building technologies that are about real time and short bit sharing of information over the net and mobile networks, it will eventually start to affect your eating habits as well.

This idea first came to me after listening to a BBC podcast about people who were already sharing small food recipes over twitter in 140 characters. Being a flickr addict for many years I’ve been aware of the popularity of food recipes and pictures in many flickr groups. Problem is that all the existing available options for sharing small simple recipes are either not specialized and specific enough, such as twitter, facebook, flickr, or they are way too elaborate and aiming towards people who would want to play chefs in their kitchens.

I figured that we need better tools and services for sharing our edible creations. It is one of the many ways that we connect with others and express who we are.

I even tried pitching the idea to a few of our clients but unfortunately fortunately they weren’t interested due to the high development cost. Yes it does cost them quite a bit more to build such services.

So I shared the idea with my business partner Ash (from Peerglobe Technology) and him being a foodie person got quite excited about it. In fact we think we are quite ideal candidates to make this project happen. After all we have devoted over 3500 hours developing social networking infrastructure called the Anahitaâ„¢ Social Networking Engine and have done well over 2500 hours of iphone and ipad app development in our team The PurpleRat Tribe of Companies. With over 6000 hours combined experienced in mobile and social networking technologies and the fact that we were both born hungry, making the TineyRecipe project happen seemed like a no brainer.

Regardless of whether or not this project turns out to become the next best hit in the mobile social networking niche, we still think that it will be a quite fun venture to do. We think sharing food recipes goes back to the caveman era. It is a human way to connect and share the love. Taste buds are the path to other people’s hearts.

This project will also be contributing quite a bit of knowledge and experience to the Anahitaâ„¢ project in areas such as developing saas services, mobile accessibility, scaling up, and developing iPhone and iPad SDKs that will be released under open source licenses to the community. That means many future startups will be able to benefit from the developed knowledge to launch their own world liberation plans.

Stay updated about the TinyRecipe Project

If you want to be the first to be notified about the TinyRecipe service please go to the www.TinyRecipe.com and sign up. You can also follow the project on twitter @tinyrecipeapp and like us on facebook www.facebook.com/tinyrecipe

and if you tell others about this project, we will love you for ever!