This has been an exciting year for Indiginox. Although we haven’t been blogging much (yeah, we know) we’ve been doing some interesting things and slowly but surely building out our little venture.

So, it is with great pleasure (”drumroll”) that we welcome a new knight to Indiginox castle - Aljoscha will be joining us from January and helping us expand our Rails and Web 2.0 competence.

More on what we’ve been doing over the past year to follow. We promise. Really.

This blog has been pretty quiet for a while and that’s because we’ve been busy on several exciting Web 2.0 related projects. This has meant that Ashley and I now split our time between Hamburg, Paderborn and Munich which means things are slightly hectic at Indiginox castle.

Therefore we’ve now started a serious push to hire some new talent. If you’re in Germany and interested in working with us on Web 2.0 projects then this job description may be for you.

The Heinz Nixdorf Forum is the largest computer museum in the world.

On September 19^th this venue will be the location for the conference “Mehr Erfolg im Mittelstand” (which translates to “More success for medium sized businesses”).

The conference is aimed at a German speaking audience and includes 36 lectures on a variety of topics. I´ll be talking about the relevance of Web 2.0 for small businesses and how they need to understand the changes in technology – and more importantly the changes in consumer behavior - in order to be able to remain competitive.

Attendees also get the chance to visit the museum – and the day will be rounded off with music and cocktails.

So if you´re interested in attending - contact me.

We’ve been in heads down mode over the last few weeks putting the finishing touches to our first major Rails application. Unfortunately I still can’t point to it officially - but will be able to in a couple of weeks.

In the meantime - some links to stuff we’ve gained a good deal of experience with and that may help you if you’re looking to do some serious work with Rails.

• Goldberg - a framework we’ve been looking at for user management, authentication, roles/permissions and some additional features
• Hobo - a framework that shows a lot of potential as a base framework - but we’re waiting for 0.6
• Various gems - too many to list individually
• acts_as_ferret - integrates Ferret with rails for search
• Mongrel and Mongrel_cluster as runtime environments
• Running Monit to keep an eye on our Mongrels

All in all things are playing out well - although there are a few gotchas that can cause quite a bit of frustration until you find out what you’ve missed. Luckily you gain experience by falling into holes and that helps you avoid them the next time round.

Last Thursday I headed down to Frankfurt for the German Rails-Konferenz that took place on Friday. In all it was a very interesting and refreshing event. Kudos to Thomas Baustert, Beate Paland, Hendrik Stier and Thomas Ziegler for organizing the conference in their free time. Everything went smoothly as far as I could see. The sessions I attended were deep and good (very developer oriented). No shiny bubbly hype - the whole thing reminded me of the Cocoon GetTogether community events in the most positive sense. It was our first time sponsoring the conference and I’m sure it won’t be the last.

We’re now looking forward to attending RailsConf in September.

And remember - if you’re rolling with Rails then why not drop us a line? We’re looking to extend our Rails capacity and you may be the person we’re looking for.

We’re extremely pleased to announce that Tobias will be joining us from the 1st of July. We’ve been working with him over the past few months in some Ruby on Rails projects and we’re expanding our resources in this area to meet the growing demand. We’re still very much in startup-mode and Tobias is just the hands-on type of guy (or girl) we were looking for.

I’m proud to announce that we’re sponsoring the German Ruby on Rails Conference that takes place on June 22nd in Frankfurt. Our Rails based activities are expanding quite a bit at the moment and we’re excited to see the gaining traction here in Germany. See you in Frankfurt!

The area that actually grew the most over the past year is that of our Web 2.0 consulting for corporations and Ruby on Rails implementation. We’ve been involved in both consulting, proof-of-concept and implementation projects for companies from various industries. Although the first focus of any corporation is understanding the Web 2.0/Enterprise 2.0 universe, it’s key to be able to demo what the various aspects would actually mean as soon as possible.

It’s the “hey, so that’s what it could look like” remarks that are worth more than anything on paper. It’s been exciting to see how - slowly - Rails is gaining ground in Germany and we are sure we made a good decision in adding the framework to our portfolio. We’ve been using Rails both to prototype solutions to customers as well as to build vertical social network solutions - something we can hopefully point to soon - when things go public.

When we started Indiginox, one of the areas we wanted to go into was that of consulting large corporations on the various aspects of Open Source and helping them understand more about how they could use Open Source inside their environment.

Our goal is to work inside those companies so that we can build up an Open Source strategy that meets their specific business and technical needs.

At the moment I am doing exactly that for a very large company in the UK and the whole process is extremely interesting. Before Indiginox I spent most of my time coming into companies from the other direction (i.e. as a company offering Open Source services and solutions).

Now I am on the inside looking out and it is a lot easier for me to understand the parameters corporations have to go by when deciding on which Open Source projects and/or products they want to take a closer look at. At the same time evangelism is needed inside the corporation to make sure the various stakeholders understand how far Open Source has come in the last years - both from a business and technological perspective.

I’m going to start a series of small blog posts focussing on what we’ve been up to over the past year. Although it’s hard to believe - our little company has officially been in business now for over a year. A lot has happened in that year and this seems like a good time to tell a few stories.

Before I dig down into some more interesting details on the Marketing, Open Source and Web 2.0 side of business, here some short “lessons learned”.

• We started out thinking we could “just” do consulting. We soon found out that this wasn’t enough and that if customers like you then they want to keep you on to do the implementation as well. So, since November last year, we’ve been slowly expanding into the implementation side of things. More about that later.
• Making sure your company is well funded at the start is critical. But that’s relatively easy to remember before you actually start out. Keeping your company well funded over a year is a lot harder and things like finding new customers, new projects etc. are easy to forget once you’re in head-down mode on a current project.
• We encountered a chicken-and-egg problem in that we were hesitant to go after business we knew we didn’t have the resources for. On the other hand we weren’t keen to hire people without knowing we had enough business to keep them happy. Sometimes you just have to leap.
• Whatever you write into your business plan - you can be sure that reality is going to be a lot different. Making sure you stay flexible enough to deal with the real world is really important.

In the next post I’ll talk a bit about what we’re currently doing on the Open Source side of things.