Technically Speaking

Revlayer is going to rock. How do I know? Well because Allen Stern is part of it. Ok, so I am being biased, but I have had many conversations with Allen, and he knows Web -1.0, Web 1.0, and now he is becoming part of Web 2.5. I feel that his past experiences lend to the success of the new startup.

Not only that, but he has a great developer onboard who I have interviewed in the past - Felix Shnir(SaneBull). The combination of Allen’s business sense, the need for this, and the development team means one thing - success. Hopefully it will be to the tune of the next article that is written will be something like “Revlayer $5 million… “. I don’t see why not, as this is something so simply done, but it so far has not latched on or been done right.

Let’s all keep an eye on this, as the need is great and Web 2.5 is something that is upon us now. I feel that there are a lot of (will be) competitors in the field. I for one will go with a startup such as Revlayer as they have the solid base that they have built on. That will be the difference. Base operations is what will make this company succeed.

Technically Speaking, yes, I was being a cheerleader, fanboy, overly biased if you will, but I’m happy to see Allen do something in the startup world. Best of luck dude!

Q1: Today we are talking with Felix Shnir of SaneBull. They are a very nice web 2.0 stock market tracker that I talked about back on December 19th, 2006. Felix, first, thanks for taking the time to sit down to answer these questions. Here we go - What impressed you enough to say “Hey, there needs to be a web 2.0 stock tracking tool!” - what I mean is, there are a ton of ways already to track the stock market out there, so how come you decided there needs to be SaneBull out there?

SaneBull is a live market monitor — in essence, while you browse, read your news, or do anything else by a computer, it will continuously poll server for updated data and visually show you most recent information in a noticeably different way then anybody else currently handles it. Almost all sites provide delayed quote data, but we have aggregated the best resources for the data and make sure it’s always up to date on the client’s browser.

The thought was sparked by the fact that when mining and reading financial data, most of the time, we need to see the relevant info about the stock and keep track of our portfolio (preferably in live!)… A lot of the companies provide such services as Java applets or desktop applications, but being a Linux user, we’re on the short side of the stick for such applications.

Q2: Are you going this alone, or is there a small team of developers already working on making SaneBull the site to use for stock watching?

Rex, we are a small team of internet engineers with a business streak. We have a company that covers a small number of projects: ideAjax ( http://www.ideajax.com). There are 2 Ajax and server-side developers (me and Samer), a professional DBA (Artem), superb flash developer (Roman), and occasionally (depending on projects we’re working on) 2 more people. We have several projects under our belts, specifically for ideAjax: sinkmyship.com & sanebull.com.

We’re also working on another covert project (you’ll see it soon). We have concentrated previously on games and have finished several, Roman is now also doing more social oriented games using flash framework we wrote ( reduxgames.com). We also do a number of consulting things, such as, viddler.com that launched recently.

Q3: Where do you envision SaneBull going in 2007? Do you hope to catch on in the mainstream or would you rather remain niche, to a tech crowd of people or users?

We are at a crossroad right now. Going through feedback, there is certainly a lot of interest into turning SaneBull into social networking platform. This is certainly possible, and we are investigating it. However, we would rather integrate with a social net that’s out there already than build our own social network framework — of those, we currently are in talk with 2 separate, but interested parties.

If we come to an agreement with either (or both?), we will then become the gateway to that social networks’ data, and a front end to its users — adding value to both by providing features and data not contained in standalone versions.

The other route, turn SaneBull into a market analytics and research tool. This is a much narrower path to take, but, it is a much more exciting and interesting one. We have plenty of ideas on how to mine and manipulate unique sets of data — RSS, known non-federated content publishers, and other sources; into one powerful source ala Monitor110. We do not have the financial backing of it though So we are still deciding what we will accomplish with our limited resources.

Bottom line is that we’re waiting and collecting feedback for the next few month and we will decide what to do after.

Q4: Are you looking for more developers at this time, and what can you tell us about your company that can be released to the general public at this time?

We are always looking for developers and business minded people (who isn’t?)! Anybody interested should be contacting us through our ideAjax web site ( http://www.ideajax.com).

As far as releasing info, there are several exciting ventures we’re working on right now that we will soon release, but in short, they are flash management CMS and UMS tools that hopefully will fill a need that hasn’t been filled yet in a game market.

Q5: Thanks again Felix for sitting down and taking the time to answer these questions. Now as always, here is where you can say what you want to the readers; anything I may have not asked or what not.

Nothing really ground breaking here, but for all bored developers out there, do something you love, doesn’t matter if its going to bring you anything, just do it.