Closed. This question is off-topic. It is not currently accepting answers.
Want to improve this question? Update the question so it's on-topic for Stack Overflow.
Closed 10 years ago.
Improve this question
OpenFeint has a content delivery system for those who want to have IAP support in their apps. You can just embed the purchasable content into the app on distribution but a much more versatile approach is to use a server that delivers the content to the device. OpenFeint charges 15% of your sales to use their service. I believe this is ridiculously high.
I plan on making this service and making it available to anyone but first I want to know what you would think is a fair price. This would come with a simple SDK to interact with the service and download you content but it would also manage Apple payment verification server side. I was thinking 5-8% would be fair but I want to hear your thoughts. Do you have any ideas on ways to make the service stand out amongst others?
TL;DR - What would you be willing to pay for a content delivery service for your IAP feature in you apps? It would also help if you mentioned how big of a studio/company you are behind.
I don't think 15% are too much, if their service is reliable, secure (as in: people can't easily steal content) and fast. There are costs for decent file servers (you'll need multiple to reduce downtime risk), UPS, rent for the place you're storing the servers in, big pipes (best would be multiple as well to reduce the downtime risk), maybe load balancers, development and administration. It's one of those things that might look simple at first sight but once you break down all the requirements to get this job done you'll see there are a lot of costs, actually.
If you take a look at some of the competition you would be facing, e.g. UrbanAirship you are not that far off from what they are charging for a similar service.
One thing you should make sure, is that it requires a rock solid infrastructure on your part, meaning that it will be costly to host. A few percent on or off the price doesn't matter much, if developers can't trust you to deliver the content with something like at least 99.7% certainty (probably higher).
One thing to remember is that developers will also have to pay 30% of their IAP revenue to Apple. This means that for OpenFeint, developers will have to hand over a total of 45% of their revenue. That deosn't leave much to to development, testing, support, etc. if you also want to make a profit in the end.
So, keep your price as low as possible, but high enough to pay the costs of reliable and secure hosting.
Related
Closed. This question is opinion-based. It is not currently accepting answers.
Want to improve this question? Update the question so it can be answered with facts and citations by editing this post.
Closed 6 years ago.
Improve this question
I am trying to decide between two development firms. One wants to go with Parse while the other wants to build a backend. I would like to get feedback and reasons why building a backend or using a BaaS such as Parse, Stackmob is better in terms of scalability and performance.
For example let's use SnapChat a highly used app that handles millions of users and data requests. What would happen if a newly created app were to experience a large increase in users and data request. Would the backend be able to handle this? Would I be looking to have it fixed shortly after the increase in users?
Something like Parse.com gives you a lot of value for very little capital investment. With BaaS, all of the gory details of infrastructure management are hidden. Deployment, system capacity issues, system availability, system security, database administration and a myriad of other task simply go away when using a good BaaS. Parse.com for instance, uses Amazon Web Services and elastic load balancing to dynamically add more capacity to the system as usage increases. This is the nirvana of capacity management.
Parse.com is a special kind of BaaS. Parse.com's intended purpose is to be a light-weight back-end back-end for mobile apps. I believe Parse.com is a very good mobile backend-as-a-service (MBaaS - link to a Forrester article on the subject).
That said, there are times when Parse.com is not the right solution. Estimate the number of users for the application and the number of HTTP requests and average user would send in a day. Parse.com charges by the number of transactions. The Pro Plan has these limits:
15 million HTTP requests per month
Burst limit of 40 requests per second
Many small transactions can result in a higher cost to the app owner. For example, if there are 4,500 users, each sending 125 HTTP requests to Parse.com per day, then you are already looking at 16,850,000 requests every 30 days. Parse.com also offers a higher level of service called Parse Enterprise. Details about this plan are not published.
The services provided by a BaaS/MBaaS save much time and energy on the part of the application developer, but impose some constraints. For example, the response time of Parse.com might be too slow for your needs. Unless you upgrade to their Enterprise plan, you have no control over response times. You currently have no control over where your app is hosted (Parse apps are presently run out of Amazon's data centers in Virginia, I believe).
The BaaS providers I have looked at do not provide quality-of-service metrics. Even if they did, there is no community agreement on what metrics would be meaningful. You just get what you get and hope it is good enough for your needs.
An application is a good candidate for an MBaaS if :
It is simple or the application logic can run entirely on the client (phone, tablet...)
It is impossible to estimate the number of users or the number of users could be huge.
You don't want a big upfront capital investment.
You don't want to hire infrastructure specialists to handle capacity/security/data/recovery/network engineering.
Your application does not have strict response time requirements.
Parse's best use case is the iPhone developer who wrote a game and needs to store the user's high scores, but knows nothing about servers. That said, complex application like Hipmunk are using Parse. Have a look at Parse.com's portfolio of case studies. Can you imagine your application in that portfolio or is it very different from those apps?
Even if a BaaS is not the right solution, a PaaS or IaaS might be. Look at Rackspace and AWS. In this day and age, buying hardware and running a data center is tough to justify.
BaaS providers like apiomat or parse have to handle the requests of thousands of apps. Every app can have lots of users there. The providers are forced to make the system absolutely secure and scalable because if there are any issues about one of those points it will be the end of their business... Building scalable secure backends on your own is not as easy a you would expect. Those companys mentioned above have invested some man-years in that.
Closed. This question is off-topic. It is not currently accepting answers.
Want to improve this question? Update the question so it's on-topic for Stack Overflow.
Closed 10 years ago.
Improve this question
We are starting to use Kanban and my boss just asked me a question, as one of two people with prior Kanban experience within the group, that I don't really know how to answer.
My previous experience and training with Kanban had developers pulling stories in from the backlog by priority, in our case that was the topmost card. However, my boss would like certain stories to go to the developers that have domain knowledge for particular areas. For example, let's say Joe has the most experience in working with Contracts and a contract story comes onto the board. He would like Joe to be the one to work on that particular story.
This, to me, feels a little "off" and could lead to some developers having significant extra work due to having worked in any given area of functionality. My previous experience with Kanban worked under the assumption that any developer should be able to pick up the next card and figure out what to do and that this practice would eventually eliminate any single functionality area experts and level out developer expertise over time. However, I can also see how using subject matter experts can help move a story through the process faster.
What is the most "Kanban" way of handling priority vs. expertise when it comes to pulling in the next story?
Every system I've ever worked with allows a little bit of developer-level of prioritization. If the next card has the absolute (top-down driven) priority, then you have to pick that card. Mostly, though, I tend to work in places where "these next 6 cards are up, pick the one you like". This gives the developer a little bit of room for type of work he or she prefers. Plus, it gives the developers a greater sense of ownership since they did get to pick (to some extent) the work they were doing.
Regarding your example, it's a little off base. In an ideal world any developer should be able to pick up any card. In reality, this isn't always true. If I give this project to Jim, it might take 2 days. If I give it to not-Jim, it make take all week. This is a sign! What information sharing is missing? How do you get the other developers to understand the Contracts component as well as Jim?
If the priority is a little bit gray, this stuff tends to work itself out. All the other developers know that Jim can handle the Contracts stuff. However, if Jim has no capacity, then someone else must take up the challenge. Kanban is supposed to alert you to blocked stories.
Kanban is great for visualizing work flow, limiting WIP, and exposing bottle necks.
Henrik Kniberg has a great book, 'Lean from the Trenches'. He talks through many techniques he has used in real world examples. He described one approach to having avatars (that represent developers) that can be placed over task to show who is working on what.
One idea for your situation, would be to use this avatar approach to pre-assigning who should work on a task in the buffer leading into development.
If those pre-assigned tasks are not causing bottlenecks and flow is natural, everything is good. If they are causing bottlenecks early in your flow, you have a problem, but now you have an easy way to visualize and see that it is the pre-assigning that is causing your bottle neck!
A Kanban system shall display the real process. If the manager is assigning stories to developer then the system should reflect that. This can be done in several ways, you could have a specific item for developer X or you can write the developers name on the card. Another option is to have one swim-lane for each developer.
However, all of this is probably not good from a "global" perspective. You should share your Kanban data with your boss. What are your lead-times, what is your throughput etc? Then you should invite the boss to the process improvment meeting. How are we going to improve our figures? Hopefully he sees that Joe probably will be a bottleneck if he is assigning tasks directly to him. Teach him Littles Law, teach him about bottlenecks and Lean in general.
Don't forget to make your policies explicit, that is, it should be written on the wall how your prioritzation policy looks like. Good luck!
Closed. This question is off-topic. It is not currently accepting answers.
Want to improve this question? Update the question so it's on-topic for Stack Overflow.
Closed 10 years ago.
Improve this question
We have an internal software development team in my company that are building a set of software frameworks and some infrastructure (database hosting) to be used by other teams. Since they are not delivering software directly to any external client, they are trying to figure out how to chargeback to recoup their costs / budget They are trying to determine the correct payment model for other teams to use their services. So essentially we would be paying for the following resources:
Using the software frameworks
Using the infrastructure (servers - disk, memory, etc)
The support people in this group to maintain the infrastructure
The developers that are building the frameworks.
This seems like a generic problem that must exist with other software shops so I wanted to see if there was some standard or a suggestion here?
The fact that you are considering this kind of relationship within a shop is probably very symptomatic of our times. If you think the framework team is useful, then measure its usefulness, in a somewhat fine-grained way, and just give the team the budget to keep being useful!
For example, have other teams assess their use of specific features in the framework and their wishlists, and check that the framework team only works on parts of the code relevant to those.
Paying for services could have some problematic drawbacks, as with any such arbitrary metric. For example, it gives other teams an incentive not to use their services: it encourages homegrown indrastructure, custom code(so you get a more potent NIH syndrome).
What about estimating the cost of each tasks?
Every company I worked at, used a classical man/day system.
When a task has to be done, the human resource cost is assessed in man/days, that is, how many days would it takes if only one worker was on this task?
With that in mind, with an estimate of the time spent to do a task (often done by the more experienced people) and since you (should) know how much a worker costs, it's easy to find how much doing the task would cost (time estimated x cost of worker). That way, some very basic and redundant tasks, like reading a new database, a new server, creating new accounts... can easily have a basic man day cost.
And to optimize the budget the company can easily look at the tasks that are the most redundant and expensive to automatize them and reduce the overall costs of a team. Of course, the automation of a task is a project in itself and need to be estimated. And depending on the productivity gain of project some priorization has to be done.
I think that the main driver of this cost assessment is having projects/tasks and time tracking system. That way it's easy to produce statistics on what takes times.
Closed. This question is opinion-based. It is not currently accepting answers.
Want to improve this question? Update the question so it can be answered with facts and citations by editing this post.
Closed 6 years ago.
Improve this question
Say I am required to build an E-Commerce website that could eventually become very very large. The site would start with at least 100,000 different products, and would include features like Amazon. Would you advise me to use a CMS? or to build this website from ground up?
Something to take into consideration is that if I use a CMS, there would still need to be lots of custom coding, since we want many features not commonly available.
Taking into consideration factors such as Speed, Security and Scalability.
Features would include: Different sets of details for different products, product comparisons, reviews, customer management, customer points system, and all the basic ecommerce features.
If you say CMS, Can you also suggest CMS's that would be great for this kind of store.
Thank you.
Well you have to consider many things. in general means, using CMS is good idea.It reduce development time as well as development cost. But you may need to make modifications on source code in order to gain what exactly you want from it. On the other hand build such application from scratch allows you to obtain exactly what you want. but its will takes time as well as much cost.
follow through bellow link
http://www.mykeblack.com/web-design/how-much-does-an-ecom-website-cost
and also if you choose an FOSS CMS find something has higher community involvement as well as support.
If you use paypal as payment method , check their web site. they suggest couple of good commercial CMS.
The ideal e-commerce solution for that volume would be Magento
The only downfall is that its very robust and has a steep learning curve. I do NOT recommend using a framework that is a blogging site first, with an e-commerce plugin or add-on such as WordPress. It will not be able to support the traffic, the product volume, or the security precautions that should be taken.
Obviously is better if you use a CMS, I recommend you OpenCart if you just want to do an E-Commerce web site, it's is so simple and Open Source.
For something bigger you can try Joomla as CMS and a great extension called VirtueMart (http://virtuemart.net)[3], it's very complete an extensible..
Any time you use pre-made code, you are at the mercy of the features included. Adding features can be significantly harder than with custom code.
That having been said, it is definitely not unheard of to START your site with pre-made code (or even a whole platform - like selling via Amazon) and only the included features so you can start making revenue while you write your own solution.
Closed. This question does not meet Stack Overflow guidelines. It is not currently accepting answers.
We don’t allow questions seeking recommendations for books, tools, software libraries, and more. You can edit the question so it can be answered with facts and citations.
Closed 7 years ago.
Improve this question
http://blogs.msdn.com/somasegar/archive/2009/06/19/microsoft-bizspark-serving-15-000-startups-and-counting.aspx
Any recommendations on this topic ?
I heard about this a while back and thought that the "Network Partner" requirement was a little weird. Now, you don't have to do that. You can make your request directly to Microsoft without a network partner.
I think the network partner idea is good but it's poorly implemented. They do nothing to help introduce startups to partners that are willing to help.
I went ahead and signed up for the service a few weeks ago. You basically get a full MSDN subscription for free. That means you can get legitimate versions of Visual Studio, Expression, even operating systems for free.
I find it very helpful to have access to various Windows operating systems so I can test my software (I run a software startup, not a web startup) on various platforms.
After 3 years you just pay $100.
I would say, yes, it's worth it.
I know several people enrolled in this program. As long as you meet the requirements it seems like a good deal.
1. The startup must be less than three years old,
2. The startup company's revenue must be less than $1 million,
3. If the startup goes public, you are out of the program.
You do have to pay a $100 program fee but that is not due until you exit the program.
My personal experience and comment on this for startups is that microsoft are incredibly unhelpful, terminally slow in responding and answering emails and applications, there is no way to speak to a real person... no phone numbers, no address, no contact names... They specify simple criteria on the web site, but when you apply they say you are not eligible... and don't give a reason, if you then push and say why? the response you get is obvious that they have not even looked at your website let alone your business and what you are trying to do. So, as a result, I feel that they are offering the service for purely for good PR, but are actually in no way actually wanting to help startups, I have been 6 weeks emailing every few days, they have an auto responded which says they will answer in 2 business days and its been 6 weeks.... So I am getting nowhere... I don't think microsoft really want to help startups at all . Very disappointed and annoyed with them. I can't see how this approach to interacting with startups will work for them? My recommendation would be to pick somebody else and avoid Microsoft.
So I just went through the process of signing up and I have to say that if you are start-up building in the .Net stack then BizSpark is a no brainer. I especially love the free Azure credit and the exemption that you can use the benefit for production purposes whereas normal MSDN users can only use it for dev/testing purposes. This shows that Microsoft gets it and at this stage of the game it really helps our little initiative.
Throw into the mix Visual Studio online that allows up to 5 devs free and suddenly its really amazing to build something using MS tech if you are a small start-up.
Regarding the slowness, I initially had the same problem after signing up with my support emails being ignored and all that. After a few weeks on a whim I sent a hail mary to my country's BizSpark contact detail instead of the .com one and that made all the difference. I got an amazing response from the local team being phoned within a few hours of dropping the mail. By the end of the day my application was approved.
My only suggestion to Microsoft would be to throw in an Office365 benefit to host your start-up Emails since then you quite literally can start a 1-5 man company with zero infrastructure and tool overhead and obviously MS wins in the medium to long run since products get developed in their stack.
+1 Microsoft.