August, 2011

This week we speak with Cyrus Ghalambor who heads up Adigami, a web analytics platform that allows a company to review how successful their online advertising has been from one simple dashboard. He tells us he tips on launching a new company and the importance of putting the right team together.

How would you describe what Adigami does?

Adigami is a web analytics platform that allows advertisers to see activity across all their online advertising efforts in one simple dashboard. For example, if you’re advertising on Google, Bing, and Facebook, you’ll be able to see all three campaigns in one place and compare them. It removes the need to log into different accounts and download the data into a common spreadsheet as we’re essentially doing that for you every day. Adigami can also help track inbound marketing efforts.

How is it different to other competitors in the space?

There’re a number of companies doing similar things, but they usually focus on a particular aspect of the problem. For example, some are purely focused on SEO, while others do goal funnel analysis. We try to cover a wider range.

How did you come up with the idea?

A friend of mine runs an agency in San Francisco and was telling me about all the reporting problems they have. They had so many data sources that it was hard to keep track. That’s when I knew that there needs to be a way to simplify the daily chores involved in managing many clients with many data sources. More importantly, I realised that the ways people “advertise” their product is growing, and fundamentally changing. For example, just look at how social media is beginning to influence the ad world.

How long did it take you to get Adigami off the ground?

It took about three years. That’s a bit longer than expected, but it was because we had to shift gears a few times. The current product is the third incarnation of the idea and we’re already working on the fourth one!

What’s been the most difficult aspect of setting up the company?

The most difficult aspect – by far – has been identifying the right clients and their needs.

What is your business strategy for growth?

We’re going after big clients now, so our strategy is to grow organically, one client at a time. Word of mouth is still the most powerful marketing tool a company can have and I want each Adigami client to become a champion of our product.

What has been your biggest success?

Putting a good team together is not easy to do and that’s why I view that as our biggest success.

What piece of advice would you give to someone setting up their own startup?

Find at least one client and build something you know they’ll buy. Then you’ll have time and money to experiment and build what you wanted to build.

Where do you hope to the business in the next five years?

I want us to be a recognised leader in a space that is still being defined. There will be a lot of competition, but we want to continue to offer the best overall experience.

The Apache Web server that powers the majority of websites in the world has been found to have a serious vulnerability.  While the Apache Software Foundation are applying stop gap measures to try and fix the problem, a long term solution is likely to take much longer to develop.

Denial of Service attacks have been in the news a lot lately, with hacker groups like Anonymous and AntiSec managing to frustrate a number of governments and corporations with this kind of attack.  The Apache Software Foundation has warned people that Versions 1.3 and 2 of the Apache Web Server have a denial of service (DoS) vulnerability, so it looks like we can look forward to more of these attacks in the future.

The Apache Software Foundation has also released a warning bulletin about the vulnerability, and have listed some short term solutions that require website admins to update their Apache HTTPD Web servers.

This flaw is serious for two reasons.  Firstly, the widespread use of the Apache Web server around the world means that this vulnerability affects the majority of websites.  According to Dirk-Willem van Gulik, former president of the Apache Software Foundation, “Many millions of Apache HTTPD servers around the world need to be upgraded.”

Secondly, it is serious because it is relatively easy to exploit.  Hackers can launch a DoS attack with as little as “hundreds of requests,” and do not require “a flood of tens of thousands or more,” said Dirk-Willem van Gulik.

According to Marc Gaffan, cofounder of Incapsula, a complete solution is “most likely to take months,” with an increased number of attacks exploiting this vulnerability likely in the meantime.

AnythingZoomer is a jQuery plugin for zooming in images and text.

For images, you need, of course, to have a larger and a smaller image to use this plugin, but for text you have to specify size for the zoomed and default version.

AnythingZoomer is a great tool for optimizing your designs and fitting detailed elements into your website design.

imagesLoaded is a jQuery plugin for telling if your images are loaded.

The plugin executes a callback after all the images in a parent are loaded.

You can use imagesLoaded when creating galleries and for image preloading events.

imagesLoaded is easy and simple — and that’s what you expect from a jQuery plugin.

OpenDNS, Google, VeriSign, and others are hoping to speed up the Internet, through the introduction of new technology that is being dubbed the “Global Internet Speedup”.  This technology augments the Domain Name System to narrow down the location of data, and then uses this geographic information to move data around quicker.

“Anybody using OpenDNS or Google Public DNS will immediately get the benefits of this technology,” said OpenDNS Chief Executive David Ulevitch, adding “the worst-case scenario is that things remain the way they are today, and the best-case scenario is that network delays are as low as they can be.”

This technology has been worked on by Ulevitch for many years now, with Google officially proposing it last year.  Google obviously have a big interest in making the Internet faster, and are one of only a few stakeholders who are capable of making a real difference by implementing this technology when requesting and sending data around the globe.

“Google is committed to making the Internet faster–not just for our users, but for everyone,” said Google Distinguished Engineer Dave Presotto in a statement. “We will do that any way we can, by improving protocols, browsers, client software, and networks.”  However, this technology has not yet been standardised, although it is being described in an informational draft at the Internet Engineering Task Force under the name “Client subnet in DNS requests.”

When speaking about the standardisation process, a spokesperson from Ulevitch said “I think it’ll happen within a year. There have been a couple false starts…There were people who were ambivalent about it. [But] once something gets a significant amount of vendor adoption in the real world, that ends up speaking loud enough to make something a standard anyway. It’s more likely fast-tracked for the standards process.”

Diapo is a pretty jQuery slideshow with numerous features.

Diapo supports loading HTML content directly into the slides, and has an eye-candy design with an animated timer, lots of transition fx, and options that make Diapo mobile-friendly.

Diapo is very easy to use with numerous methods; however, design customization could have been easier.