We have just got hold of a recent (March) issue of Business Hungary, an English language monthly of the local arm of the American Chamber of Commerce, in which you can read a nice piece about the outlooks of IT startups in Hungary written based on interviews with two local examples: Hungarian-American startup Spearsong Inc. and EuEdge.

The interview was made during a recent event of the Budapest New Technology Meetup group, where our CTO Akos Maroy and our excellent friend Zsolt Máslányi from Spearsong Inc. spoke about experiences in
doing outsource work for global companies, on how the local talent stands on IT skills and business savviness.

I don’t want to be a spoiler, so get hold of a copy if you can manage. Anyway, a great honor this is, a fantastic possibility to plug our company and the New Technology Meetups, and a strange contentment
from seeing our names printed on high-quality glossy paper.

“What would be the best date for that weekend cookout with my friends? When is everyone available for a class reunion? Which night would work best for that company outing?”

The usual pattern when organizing such events is a mass email to your friends, followed by a thread of 80 emails, where everyone throws in their preferences, witty remarks, corrections, retractions, etc. Then, after a bit of confused silence, you try to draw a conclusion from all this, and in frustration usually end up picking the date you preferred anyway, followed by further negotiations and griping

We thought this could be improved, so we have put together a web application to scratch our own itch. You can very quickly create a poll about the best date, send a link to your friends, and follow all responses. No registration, no fuss, no muss. Everyone can see the most likely date at a glance, and also drill into the details of when individuals are available.

Check it out at www.congregar.com!

More features are on the way, but we thought this is quite useful as it is. We appreciate your feedback too!

Last week I took part in in the establishment of the Hungarian Open Standards Alliance, as a founding member, and became vice president of the organization. The Alliance will focus on promoting open standards in the Hungarian IT industry, both in the commercial and government procurement areas. Founding members include key figures of the Hungarian branches of major IT companies, such as IBM, Novell and even Google.

Having spent 3 months as artist in residence at The Arts & Genomics Center in Leiden, the Netherlands, also collaborating with the Waag FabLab in Amsterdam gave me a good opportunity to work in different fields than usual. Working in a biology lab in a sterile environment, working with a 3D fabber is all refreshing and inherently physical. Creating something that somewhat resembles an early version of photography using living bacteria.

But now I’m back, ready to take on commercial-grade software engineering challenges that we tackle here at EU Edge. I was missing this field actually, working on pragmatic problems, making people’s lives happy.

Now is the second time, that the fundamental difference and source of all major conflict between an engineers and managers approach is revealed to me as I’m reading Kaizen and The Art of Creative Thinking by Shigeo Shingo: engineers, they want to ‘fix’ problems, while for managers, it’s sufficient to ‘manage’ them – that is, have them under control. The first time I encountered this comparison was reading The Hacker’s Diet by AutoDesk founder John Walker.

The solution, as most of the time, is in between.
(more…)

I was invited as a panelist to a “business underground conference”, called StartUP (link in Hungarian). The event was truly grassroots: it was organized in just two weeks and sponsors were not given publicity – despite (or perhaps due to) this it had a great lineup, with fresh startups, marketers, VCs, government represented. The audience was also thoughtful, and had fun with commenting online via the projector. Check out some photos from the conference.

Topics covered an excellent 101 for startups, with a surprisingly good signal-to-bullshit ratio:

• Brief presentations of some startups. I especially liked iGlue, coining buzz-worthy terms such as “information iron curtain”
• APIs and the role of opening data sources. Brief summary: APIs are good for your service. My note: data portability is better for users.
• The role of advertising: how to use it effectively as a startup. Lesson: if you have money to spend on ads, by all means do it. But do your homework and look for the grassroots, guerilla models first, do some basic SEO, and only then consider banners.
• Ad revenue in the business model. As expected, usually not a solid model in itself for small players.
• Investor expectations. It was interesting to hear government representatives talk about the ineffectiveness of government.
• How to get funded: from those who got funded. I was on this panel for some reason – I suspect as the token entrepreneur, who’s actually happy without external funding. Hey, there are so many ways of not obtaining angel or VC money – I was delighted someone actually wanted to hear more about that Luckily for the audience there were also some veteran entrepreneurs on the panel with a background in economy, who could provide very insightful comments.

Thanks to the organizers for such a great, down-to-earth conference (call that “underground” if you will). Looking forward to more!

In the evening we held our monthly Budapest New Technology Meetup. Despite some serious initial challenges with electricity and burning out a projector, we’ve managed to get the presentations under way. An interesting observation from the Meetup was that people presenting agile development methodologies tend not to be agile enough to fit into the five minute timebox. I guess it might be the classic case of “Those that know, do.”

Update: A video of the session intro is now available.

A project I’m doing in my spare time, called Corpora has won the opportunity last week to appear at this year’s Venice Architecture Biennale in the Hungarian Pavilion.

Very thrilled and excited to show our project at such a prestigious venue.

The project is interesting from an architectural standpoint, but is also very interesting technologically, as it involves cellular automaton models, Zigbee wireless mesh-networked sensor motes, Augmented Reality viewports among other things.

I also held a presentation on the Zigbee motes used in this project at the Budapest New Tech Meetup this January.

Yesterday I had the rare opportunity to have dinner with Craig Larman and Bas Vodde at Kőleves here in Budapest – two demi-gods of Agile Development & Scrum. I’ve been a long time fan of Craig’s books, and have several editions of his Applying UML and Patterns title.

It was very exciting to speak with these guys and to absorb the knowledge and wisdom they hold. Craig’s repeated reference to the 14 principles of “The Toyota Way” really reminded me of Miyamoto Musashi’s The Book of 5 Rings.

“I’m not worthy” is all I can mutter

(And thanks to Stefan for inviting me in the first place)

EU Edge is proud to announce the release of another Open Source project, called The Widget Jones Library.

The Widget Jones Library is a lightweight, flexible, template driven widget build system. It is intended to simplify creating portable widgets. Write your code once, build it with WJL, then run it on several widget platforms like

• Apple Dashboard
• Windows Vista Sidebar
• iGoogle
• add your own…

The Widget Jones Library is licensed under the Mozilla Public License 1.1.

To learn more about the WJL, visit the Widget Jones Library project page.

Earlier, we have published an article on how to run Google Android on a Sharp Zaurus SL-C760 device. Since there was considerable interest in the article, we have decided to publish some videos of this hack. Check them out on Google Video:

Since this PDA and Google Android were not really designed for each other, don’t judge the capabilities of either from these videos