Arhiva completă: engleză

I am a gamer, so I think this blog is perfect for my girlfriend :D

We’ve met Steve Collins from Swrve in Ireland, while starting MavenHut. He has a really interesting entrepreneurial background (co-founder of Havoc, the physics engine), but he is talking in this video about how to make more money from the games you are building for mobile and social networks.

This is one of the best videos I’ve seen on gaming in a long time.

Just to let you know: these days, the guys at GOG.com sell lots of things at insanely reduced prices. The games weren’t expensive to begin with, but now they are even cheaper. I bought Neverwinter Nights 2, Planescape: Torment (again, since I already had it) at $1.99 and so on.

Go ahead, they are going through the same cycle and you can still buy (or even get for free) some great games of the past :)

Me and one of my co-founders are speaking at How To Web on Wednesday :) We are gonna talk about the lessons we learned taking MavenHut from 0 to 5 million users in one year.

If you are around, let me know :)

Ah, we speak from 3pm on Wednesday, ok? >:)

One of the things you really need to do when you start up your company is to grow constantly. Do not stop the growth no matter what: pull all the resources into growth. Investors love this kind of proof.

If you don’t want investors, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t grow continuously. After all, it doesn’t hurt you.

Photo: close up of finance business graph from Shutterstock

I’m away from Bucharest for business along with one of my co-founders, Cristi, so it was only fitting that Elvis (the 3rd cofounder of MavenHut) went on and picked up a prize I won at Wall-Street.ro Gala for The Entrepreneur of 2013 (Younger Generation). It was great that Elvis picked it up because it’s a team effort (really, we are 3 co-founders, MavenHut exists because we all got together and created something great).

Even better was that one of the people I really admire, Radu Georgescu, was picked as the Entrepreneur for 2013 (Older Generation :D ).

Here is the article with all the winners, in Romanian.

Photo from the article on Wall-Street.ro

I am an avid Evernote user. Everything I find interesting I clip it into Evernote and find it there whenever I need it. The biggest issue I’ve had, though, with this is the fact that you do not have an addon for iOS browsers (Chrome/Safari).

Well, not anymore :D

Today I’ve found a workaround that is actually quite interesting and easy to use.

1.Step 1

Create a Keyboard shortcut with the webclipper code. I don’t use it generally, but you can do it by going to Settings -> Keyboard -> Shortcuts (see the screen below).

Create a shortcut by naming it whatever you want (mine is called evwc, from EVernote WebClipper). It’s better to use a combination of letters that is not easy to find in websites, because then the autocomplete of Chrome will kick in and it will not work.

The code you need to put in the shortcut is this:

javascript:(function(){EN_CLIP_HOST='http://www.evernote.com';try{var x=document.createElement('SCRIPT');x.type='text/javascript';x.src=EN_CLIP_HOST+'/public/bookmarkClipper.js?'+(new Date().getTime()/100000);document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0].appendChild(x);}catch(e){location.href=EN_CLIP_HOST+'/clip.action?url='+encodeURIComponent(location.href)+'&title='+encodeURIComponent(document.title);}})()

Hit Save, then get back to Settings -> General

2. Step 2

Go to Chrome/Safari and open the page you want to clip. Click on the top URL (this will select the entire URL), then write your shortcut name (evwc is mine), press SpaceBar and then press Go. It will open a

See the steps below:

At the end, you can see the Evernote window and.. that’s it! :)

Though the example above is shown on Chrome on iPad, it also works on Safari and on iPhones.

Got the info from these two pages: Cute Chrome iOS easy workaround and CTRLQ

For everybody that played RPGs in the late 90s, Fallout is one of the games that made us lose countless hours in the wasteland of a postapocaliptic America.

The first two games are the games I wait for the most to come to iPad (well, and Planescape: Torment). So, while I already had them bought on Steam, I also got them for free, DRM-free, from GOG.com. The promotion is up and running for one more day, so go there and get them. It is really worth replaying them when you have the time.

MavenHut is growing. Faster than we expected, actually. As a consequence, we are bringing more people on board (adding to the 16 we already are in the office). And one or more of them should be an iOS developer :)

So, if you are an iOS developer and you want to program fun games, played by millions of users around the world, you want to experience a Silicon Valley like startup life, but closer to home (our dev HQ is in Bucharest), you should give us a nudge (mail to beatrice.galatanu A T mavenhut.com).

Actually, to see more of MavenHut’s offices and attitude, you could read this article in Adevarul or see this video from Antena3 (starting with 11:30 mark or so). We are a fun team to work with :D

Here are some details on what we are looking for:

– iOS development – minimum 2 years
– Objective – C and iOS API
– Socket programming on iOS
– experience in migrating web apps to mobile apps
– experience in delivering complex apps to market which interact with an online API
– Familiarity with XML/ REST Services
– Portfolio required, personal or teamwork
– Game Center integration experience is a plus (though it’s actually not that difficult anyway, even I could do it… in a much longer time :D )

If you are interested, fire an email to beatrice.galatanu A T mavenhut.com.

Photos by Dragos Asaftei

We started MavenHut in February 2012. Right from the beginning we decided to not bootstrap the company, but raise investment and grow as fast as possible.

This also meant one more thing: if we didn’t raise money by December 31st, 2012, we would close the company. What this did was to focus our efforts and energy into the most important things for the company: generate users, generate engagement, focus on delivering on our promises to the would-be investors. And it worked: SOSventures invested in us in November 2012.

The thing is, though, that I see a lot of people not setting up a “company deadline”: if we don’t reach “this” by the “then”, we will close the company.

Why you should do this?

Because then you will focus on the things that will move you ahead faster, because you just don’t have the time anymore and you need to choose what to do next in a much more efficient way, especially in relationship to the resources at your disposal (money, people, whatever).

Last time I’ve seen this, somebody has been dragging away the company’s product, putting in new and new features, without actually adding the most important one: allowing potential customers to pay for the product. And the founders were complaining of not generating revenues… It might seem obvious, but this is a mistake I see often: “we will implement monetization/whatever, but before that I will add a more pinkish color to the sidebar/a new logo/redesign the product”.

So, what is your startup’s deadline?

Photo: Grim Reaper on the Road, from ShutterStock