Fogbeam Labs  The FogBlog

I've (Fogbeam Phil) have been somewhat remiss in not posting this sooner, but I wanted to take a moment and introduce the newest member of the Fogbeam Team (all 2 of us, as of now!). Sarah Kahn is an old friend of mine from back in the Lulu.com days, and from the time I met her I noticed that she was one incredibly smart and insightful lady. And, as luck would have it, she's a UI / UX goddess, which makes her a nice complement to me, since you *really* don't want much to do with any UI that I develop.

Given that, and that she has a degree in Information Science from UNC Chapel Hill, I was thrilled when she said "yes" to joining up on this Fogbeam adventure.

In addition to her technical skills, she's probably a little bit more pragmatic than I am, which makes a nice counter-balance to my idealistic tendencies. We've been working together on Fogbeam stuff for a little while now, and I think this team is going to work out really well. At the moment she's putting a lot of time into revamping the Quoddy UI, and I, for one, am champing at the bit to see how it turns out.

Hello Gentle Reader, let's step aside from our (more or less) chronological review of Fogbeam Labs events, and skip to the present for a moment... as you may know, we are working to become recognized as The Next Great Open Source Company; or - as we sometimes word it- "The Red Hat of Information Retrieval, Knowledge Management, Business Intelligence and Analytics."

To that end, we have three projects under active development. In keeping with our focus on shedding light on otherwise inscrutable things, and our commitment to helping you "cut through the information fog," all of our projects are named after famous light-houses. This is a constant reminder to us, to focus on illuminating the insights and knowledge that you need to work more productively and efficiently.

For those of you who aren't already familiar, the three projects under development at the moment are Heceta, Neddick and Quoddy. Quoddy is the primary subject of this blog post.

We are putting a lot of energy into ways to use "social" information for actual productive uses. To that end, Quoddy is our social-networking component. You could think of it as "Facebook for the Enterprise" but that is an imperfect analogy... Quoddy is an information and knowledge sharing tool for real-world use... not a way to send banal updates about silly games to everyone you know. There's no Farmville or Pirates Vs. Ninjas here.

In addition to the well-known, Facebook or Twitter like "friending" or "following" that most of us are familiar with, Quoddy will allow users to make semantic assertions about the relationship between individuals, and to make meaningful semantic assertions about the members of those relationships. This rich semantic information will in turn be used by Quoddy, Neddick and Heceta to help users locate, filter, route and share information.

Quoddy is still in a fairly nascent state, but a substantial amount of the basic functionality is started to round into shape. Given the progress we've made in the past few weeks, now seemed like a good time to post some screenshots. To that end, I've posted a number of screenshots to Google+. To check out the images, see:

https://plus.google.com/u/1/114301088526097505896/posts/3NVEkHxRVUY

While you're checking those out, we'll be cranking away on more features... and we'll be back soon with more of the Fogbeam Blog. Until next time, Fans of Fogbeam...

So, where were we, Gentle Reader?

Right, our intrepid hero had just written a mission statement and some core values for the Next Great Open Source Software Company. But, as important as a mission statement is, and as much as core values matter, it takes some action to get the ball rolling... So, now, let's talk about:

Mission statement and core values. Wait, what? Didn't we just say that this mission and values stuff isn't enough? Well, yes, but we didn't say it wasn't important? You think I (Fogbeam Phil) spent all that time writing this stuff just because it sounds good? Action must be guided by values, or you're not congruent. So, given our values, what actions have we taken recently, to support them? Well, if you go back and look at the previous post, you'll see that one plank of our mission statement is:

Promote entrepreneurship as the best tool available for raising the standards of living for people worldwide, by sponsoring educational initiatives and supporting charitable organizations which promote: STEM ( “Science / Technology / Engineering / Math”) education and education on Economics, Business, and Entrepreneurship.

So, how can a startup, a self-funded, bootstrapped start at that, do anything productive in this regard? Well, I'm happy to announce that Fogbeam Labs is already attempting to make the world a better place in this regard, by sponsoring two local organizations that are devoted to education and the spread of useful knowledge. In recent months, we have signed on as sponsors / contributing members of:

SplatSpace - the new(ish) Hackerspace in Durham.


and


TriFunc - the Triangle Functional Programming Group.

Both of these organizations are fighting the good fight to educate and inform people, and help people tap into their innate ability to create things, through software, hardware, art, etc. As an aside, if you live in the Research Triangle area, and aren't part of SplatSpace and/or TriFunc, you should definitely check both organizations out!

Now you're probably thinking "Ok, that's nice, but where's the bit about doing something to lead this startup towards actually making money?" Fear not, Gentle Reader, that work remains in progress as well. So let's move our topic of discussion to:

Customer Development. Yes, this again. Since getting on the lean startup bandwagon, we've been working hard to progress through the steps laid out by Steve Blank. The first phase of Customer Development is Customer Discovery, and it starts with a step titled "Friendly First Contacts." In the FFC step, a startup founding team basically calls on anyone and everyone they know, who works in, or is associated with, the kinds of firms that they believe may represent part of their eventual target market. Now that probably sounds a bit fuzzy.. but this is OK; it's by design. The thing is, in the early phases of founding a startup, you only have (guesses|hunches|hypotheses) about everything: the product requirements, the target market, the customer problem, pricing, distribution channels, etc. So the goal in this earliest phase is to "get out of the building" and start talking to people... find out what problems they have, and start assessing whether or not your model of the world has any grounding in reality.

As you iterate through this process, you collect feedback which may eventually be used to guide a pivot, where you make substantial changes to your product and/or business model. As Steve points out, however, the goal is NOT to collect an uber list of requirements, and then try to build a product with every feature that anybody asked for! This way lies madness. No, the idea is to find a market for the product, as currently spec'd. If, and only if, you determine that there is no market for the current product, do you pivot... and at that point, you use the feedback gained earlier in the process to guide the new, reshaped vision.

So, this is where Fogbeam Labs has been for the past couple of months... interview after interview after interview, with people from companies around the Triangle, collecting information and validating (or invalidating) hypotheses.

Happily, we've done enough "Friendly First Contacts" interviews to feel like we may have a handle on customer problems. So now we're moving into the "Problem Presentation" step. More about that next time...

... in which our heroes embark on a mythical Joseph Campbell'ish quest for fame, glory, money, sex, drugs, rock and roll, and world peace.

Wait, wrong story... actually, this is about a guy (perhaps soon, multiple guys, and / or a girl or two) from the Research Triangle area of North Carolina, founding an enterprise software startup that should become the Next Great Open Source Software Company. We like the phrase "The Next Red Hat," but then again, the great folks at Red Hat are practically our neighbors.

In short, this is the story of Fogbeam Labs and it's going to be quite the adventure. Or, maybe it already was quite the adventure... sssshhh... spoilers!

So, where do we start? How about Customer Development, that gets right to the root of things in short order.

About a year ago, Phil (that's me), started mulling over some new'ish ideas for a software startup. Being an open source ideologue anyway, and aware of the growing trend of enterprises preferring F/OSS, and long having been fascinated with tools like Reddit, Delicious, Yahoo Pipes, etc., the natural thing to do was to build an open source suite of tools using the same approaches and principles, but targeted towards the enterprise. And so that's what I did... 7 months or so later, Neddick was rounding into shape, and the ScrewPile vision was starting to take shape. And then somebody pointed me to Steve Blank and his book The Four Steps to the Epiphany... and that's when everything changed.

For someone who had spent his entire career as an engineer, reading TFSTTE was like "taking the red pill." When I finished, I had a very Keanu Reeves'ish "Whoooah" moment where it really did feel like I could see the Matrix. Steve's book was amazing in that it laid out a detailed, step by step plan, for taking the gleam of an idea that every startup founder begins with, and gradually, methodically, and iteratively massaging that into an actual business.

Before this book, I had only the vaguest notions of what it takes to build a startup... now, I still have no clue what I'm doing, but I have a plan... and more importantly, a plan for how to learn the stuff that I need to know. The Customer Development process is all about feedback, iteration and validated learning. Yikes! To summarize it in a nutshell, the core idea is "you have only guesses (Steve likes to call them "hypotheses") in your head... and only customers have the Truth. Go forth and talk to customers and find out if there is an actual market for the thing you're trying to build. Explore until you find a market, or - if and only if you can't find a market - change the product vision and go back to the beginning."

And so the real journey began... coding was set aside, and much time was spent writing down the initial hypotheses, and then the process of arranging meetings with potential customers, and other sundry players in this little performance, began. For the past few months Fogbeam Labs has been heavily into "Customer Discovery" mode, which is why we haven't made much progress on the open source stuff. Have no fear, though, we've just paused coding so we could make sure we were building something that the world actually needs, before investing a gob of time into a white elephant.

And so, here we are. Except that's not quite all of Episode 1. As an aside, Steve Blank heavily promotes Jim Collins and his work in Good To Great. So, taking Steve's advice, I sat down and read through the Good To Great book, and decided to put some serious time and thought into actually writing out the "Mission Statement" and "Core Values" for Fogbeam Labs, as we know them today. So we'll break here, at the end of Episode 1, by looking at what values form the underpinning of the Fogbeam Way... enjoy. Comments and feedback are always welcome! In Episode 2, we'll talk more about the Customer Discovery process, hit on business model innovation, and perhaps talk about the quest for that most elusive of prey: the perfect startup co-founder.

A few days ago, a very interesting thread about fictional user data was posted to programming.reddit.com. As I happened to be needing large amounts of fictional user data myself about the same time, I took some inspiration from that thread and wrote a simple "Dummy Data Generator." The code is now up on GitHub for anybody who wants to use it.

This generator will make realistic looking, but totally fake, names, addresses (US and Canada), email addresses, phone numbers, etc. If you want to load some social networking software - or something similar - up with a large number of accounts, maybe to do some performance testing, this might just be useful to you.

Enjoy!

Fogbeam Phil (that's me, hi!) will be presenting at TriLUG next week, delivering the "Introduction to the Semantic Web" presentation on July 9th.

This is the same presentation I gave at Refresh The Triangle a few weeks ago, so if you missed it then, now's your "make up" opportunity. This is a slightly (ok, considerably) less technical version of an "Introduction To Semantic Web Technologies" presentation that I gave at TriJUG some time ago. This version is meant to be more conceptual and focuses on background, high-level overview, and justification for the Semantic Web, as opposed to low level details of coding applications using Jena and Java.

If you'd like an advance peek at what's going to be presented, the slides are linked from this page and there's also a page with more links to background material that you may find interesting.

I'm looking forward to seeing everyone at Red Hat on July 9th!

The slides from our presentation on "Introduction to the Semantic Web" at yesterday's Refresh The Triangle are now available for download. Click Here for a page with links to the slides and some other related info. Enjoy.

@deprecated - circa 2010 - we've moved away from the consulting / custom development business and are working on some product offerings now.

Welcome to Fogbeam Labs! We are an Information Technology consulting, Management consulting, Information Technology training, and custom application development firm located in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Fogbeam Labs specializes in helping small and medium sized businesses use computer systems and information technology to help their businesses grow, profit and succeed.

At Fogbeam we hold a passionate belief in the importance of entrepreneurship and small business to a strong economy and a society with opportunity for everyone to achieve their dreams. This passion for assisting entrepreneurs and small-business owners in becoming more successful is what keeps us coming to work.

Thanks to a number of advances in the last decade: the rise of open-source software, the advent of Agile development methodologies and Rapid Application Development tools, the emergence of cloud-computing and Software As A Service (SaaS), the evolution of Commodity Clusters, and the development of Social Media, small businesses can now leverage the same technological advances as the largest multi-national behemoths; and can compete on a playing field which is more level than it has ever been.

At Fogbeam Labs, our mission is to help our clients take advantage of these advances to compete successfully in the global, flat-world economy. We specialize in helping our clients understand the latest technological advances by translating the techno-babble and jargon into understandable, down-to-earth terms. By making technology more accessible and helping entrepreneurs and small-business owners find the point where advanced technology and management merge, we help them become leaner, nimbler, more responsive and agile, more efficient and - ultimately - more successful. This is what we call "Cutting Through The Technology Fog."

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