Wow – we have officially released http://printscreen.me to the public and within days had users downloading and using our screen capture tool. Hopefully a sign of things to come. We have decided to start slowly, so that we can get some constructive feedback, and so are sending it to friends in groups.

I have spent the last 3 weeks reading a load of stuff on the web regarding SEO. Would love to say I have read everything – but there is just way too much.  Trying to sift through all of this to find out exactly what you have to do is mind blowing!

Although found a great post by Dharmesh Shah http://onstartups.com/home/tabid/3339/bid/9008/Startup-Marketing-Tactical-Tips-From-The-Trenches.aspx

This is a good site to visit for anyone who is thinking about or has started up their own business -  www.onstartups.com

I got the new G1 mobile the other day.  It is impressive but not really a business phone at the moment would go back to my Windows mobile except for one application which gives SSH access to our servers and that tops the Windows mobile.  Everything is slicker, but the operating system needs to be linked to a Google email account which is pretty annoying when you have your own email account.  The email does not update frequently enough, where as Windows Mobile is instantaneous if linked to an exchange account.

However, with the operating system being open source, it is hard on the heels of the iPhone OS and will over take it at some point in the future.  It is a phone to stick with but needs a lot more business functionality before I would recommend to any business user.

Windows Mobile in its original format is pretty useless, but if you can get your hands on a modified version then it begins to excel as a business phone.  It only works well with an Exchange account of which they are many suppliers where you rent an account and normally get a licenced copy of MS Outlook thrown in.  This means that all your emails, contacts, calendar and todo items instantaneously synchronise between your phone and desktop and vice versa with no extra software.

The problem for most people is that they have a windows mobile phone with the default settings which is based upon the same principles as a desktop.  This does not apply to a phone and the interface needs to be simpler and usable with a finger instead of using a stylus.  IphoneOS obviously has moved the goal posts and the up and coming Android OS from Google will as well.  But some of the mods to Windows Mobile are worth a look.

So we have got a web application in Rails that we need to deploy.  The standard convention is to use Capistrano.  Like most things in Rails (due to using the Windows platform), it doesn’t quite work out of box but with a little tweaking, it is brilliant.  We can now deploy to our servers in seconds at the click of a button.  This is how deployment should be done.

When using Microsoft ASP.Net, we would have to check that all the developers had checked in, then compile for 20 minutes, create a setup file, ftp the file to the server, check that no one was logged in (as this generally stopped the installation), run the installer for 5 minutes and then check that nothing was broken and if it was spend 30 minutes rolling everthing back by hand.

Now one of us just presses an icon on our toolbar which runs a batch file, asking which installation we want to install, put in the server password and 30 seconds later the web app is up.  Worth its weight in gold and allows the testers to have fast version turn arounds.