Apart from playing the great game of PuyoPuyo I also read the news. Unfortunatly, the English mobile news website don’t satisfy my Web Technology reading needs. Therefore I spend two hours yesterday to make a mobile RSS reader.

Now - whenever you’re in Japan - you can view your latest feeds at:

Updated hourly and I’ve made it so you can easily add your own feeds e.g. http://mobile.topoints.com/your.favourite.blog

Gotta love RubyOnRails and RSS feeds :]

It displays the latest confabio activity. I would like to enhance this so it will also display more business and strategic information. Naked development and naked business!

Short term wish list:

* latest #confabio irc chatter
* date of latest production deploy
* shareholder/ownership information

But a little Hyo time can give you:

We are using the latter one because it reminds us of [southpark](http://www.flickr.com/photos/59198954@N00/1208537608/) and because it has a low IQ threshold of understanding :]

lol, ok here it is:

* time: 1200 CET, every Sunday
* server: irc.darkwired.org
* port: 9999 (ssl)
* channel: #confabio

Ofcourse we want to start doing those coding sessions on Confabio once we get a nice premium version rolling. But for now, I’ve hacked [this nifty IRC bot](http://blog.evanweaver.com/articles/2007/01/02/a-ruby-eval-bot-for-irc-kirby/) which can monitor SVN commits. I also gave it the ability to: SSL connect and monitor production deploys (pop me an email for the sourcecode):

To make the development of Confabio as a service and business more lively I will start preparing an online boardroom of some kind. The key concept here is *Open Source Business*, that means that basically everyone who clocks hours and commits results will get a ownership according to their effort. I really like to make this open, because it will show the outside world what’s going on. More about this later.

Today’s release:

* get an XML list of users, their locations and meetings:


* or by clicking:

* Flash video bugfixes: camera will be remembered based on first motion detection, special hack for macbooks so that the proper camera is chosen.
* IE6 compatibility hacks (the old balls n chains)
* many technical detailed bugfixes

At the bottom of the screen there is a link ’set a meeting’:

After adding a meeting, all will get a notification email:

And it will show up for everyone in the conversation URL (meetings can be edited by their owners, still no need for signup!):

Half an hour after the meeting it will disappear from the conversation.

Still need to:

* make things a bit more user friendly
* better styling
* make timezones clear

So what needs to be done as soon as possible:

* Finding a Flash Video hosting company that wants to make a nice deal. (Really, we need to make sure that we can scale up the video streams) Red5 currently is a high risk.

For Confabio Free:

* Opening up Confabio: providing an API, inviting others to the conversation and setting meeting times.
* Thinking about providing some kind of widget (like ToxBox) to use on sites, blogs and facebooks etc.
* A downloadable trayicon that notifies you when people join a conversation.
* (Video) advertisements to try to sustain the bandwidth costs.

For Confabio Premium:

* Audio/video toggleable (new word!) chat.
* Settings screen to set preferences (like password).
* Some kind of signup procedure.
* A real time easy to use whiteboard.
* A proper test case with a real team:

Let me introduce you two of my friends and fellow programmers, both studying Computer Science at Hogeschool van Amsterdam:

Sil, aka skill. Will focus on the c++ coded trayicon that will make regular conversations between people painless (read: without using IM like skype). More about skill here: blog.skill-online.nl.

Aram, aka aczid. Will be responsible for bringing business value to the Premium, he’s now working on the whiteboard. More about aczid here: aczid.digigen.nl.

Welcome guys! And stay tuned, because things are about to roll!

* I need to send an invoice to my customers every month.
* Right now, I have to make a backlog of 10.
* I want some tool that gives me a list of customers with invoices.
* I don’t want to manually change any Word documents every time or learn how to use automated Excel generation with Word templates and all that stuff.

Ok, here we go. First you open MS Word and make a one time document:

You save the file as .rtf and upload it to your Invoid account. In your Invoid account you can manage a list of customers and invoices. When creating a new invoice, most fields will be auto-filled-in, making it a very quick process. When clicking on ‘download PDF’ or ‘download RTF’ the fields DELIVERABLES, DATE and CUSTOMER etc. will be replaced with the data of that invoice.

Here’s a little layout mockup (trying to use avocado colors :p):

Most of this is already working in a Rails mockup I couldn’t resist coding. So once I’ve solved this problem for myself I will add a user model on top of the functionality and roll it out :]
Still todo: support a Open-DOC and Mac format too, RTF2PDF conversion can be done with tool called ted, making some forms, lists and logins, finalizing layout and domain, roll out, drink beer.

I know there are numerous other tools to do this, like the horrible (not working on MAC!) tool: [reeleezee.nl](http://reeleezee.nl) or just doing MS Office magic. But I don’t care! HAHA!

Unfortunately, due to an unfortunate timing of events I have to relocate back to Japan next week, which makes me unable to make the three month commitment. Also, I have to tell you that we had a mayor flaw in our application: our team was fabricated together just 2 days before the application (after Seedcamp sent [this notice](http://blog.seedcamp.com/2007/07/finding-fellow-travellers-for-your.html)). I really believe that the success of a project is determined by the power of the team. In other words, Confabio wasn’t ready yet.

But hey, I’m pretty sure we didn’t really need that 50k. Also, this once more proves: confabio.com is a great prototype. The thing which is great about Seedcamp is the business guidance you get. How to make a business out of a cool prototype is still a mystery for us geeks. Guess we will have to figure that out by ourselves.

Stay tuned: [http://topoints.com/blog/feed](http://topoints.com/blog/feed)

Last week [aczid](http://aczid.digigen.nl/) notified me of a project called [TokBox.com](http://tokbox.com/) which is pretty similar to Confabio. ToxBox can be summarized as follows:

* free video chat
* no downloads
* create your video-profile (a tokbox?)
* embed your tokbox into your blog, myspace, facebook etc

Also, it allows you to do easy video mailing. To solve the same notification issues Confabio is facing they use IM triggers. Unfortunately they only have AIM notifications so far. Confabio is trying to solve this problem with a downloadable tray icon (like [wakoopa.com](http://wakoopa.com)) and by providing open API’s / easy accessible URL’s.

tokbox pros:

* looking good, especially the flash parts
* embedding makes it good to share
* your video-profile is a simple url: tokbox.com/dominiek for example

tokbox cons:

* another site to register for, don’t know if you need to do it to chat with someone too (I assume not)
* not very clear how you can actually chat with someone
* IM alerts only through AIM

I think it’s quite obvious that Confabio will go a different direction then sites as Stickam and TokBox. We aim to provide:

* a free means of personal communication (without downloads or signup)
* an easy accessible way of having a meeting with a team of coworkers

I’ve applied [confabio.com](htttp://confabio.com/) for the SeedCamp competition. SeedCamp is a European startup incubate competition funded by several European companies (including Skype’s investors).

One of the 20 winning teams will get:

* 50K in funding (in exchange for 10% ownership)
* 3 months business drilling in London

I figured confabio.com would make a nice application and I’m quite confident they will like it after looking at some of the other applications. The only weakness is not having a team. At the moment I’m urgently searching for a commercially strong partner and I’m considering enrolling more developers in the team:

[http://forum.seedcamp.com/forums/3/topics/36](http://forum.seedcamp.com/forums/3/topics/36)