Michele’s Freeminding

If you’ve been reading this blog in the past months, you should know that after announcing I mentioned working on another secret project, every now and then — mostly as an excuse for not blogging…how lame of me! ;)

Incorporating

First thing, we needed to incorporate our company in order to be all set up for launch date. And we did.
It’s a really tiny company as you can guess and with no big budget, but we’re aiming at the top spot nonetheless. :)

Revealing it

The project, which is now up and running, is called Unilife and is a social networking website for Italian universities — so no luck for most of you… :(

We’d launched the private beta in mid-August and opened it to the public mid-September.
So far, it’s been a great ride, but I feel we still need to do a lot of work, mostly in terms of marketing work.

Why?

You may be thinking: “So? Yet another social networking website”
And I’ll reply: “Not really!”

I mean, of course we have been seeing a plethora of SN sites popping up recently, and while most are just downright useless, others as Unilife try to fill a void.
Of course, Facebook is now open to anyone, but I think Facebook is, as of today, kind of useless in Italy: it doesn’t suit the Italian market. And the same goes for MySpace.
So that’s why we decide to create Unilife.

How’s it going?

It’s going well, but as I said, lots need to be done to make it big.
We’re adding new features and making improvements almost every day and trying to consider as much feedback as possible.

In the end, it’s much more difficult when what I predicted, but this is not discouraging me and I’m trying to do as much as I can to make things work.

The geeky stuff

For those of you interested in technical info, the whole website is built using Ruby on Rails and our storage needs are covered by S3. These are two products I started appreciating when working on 16bugs and am loving them more each day that passes by.
We offer unlimited file storage, so we need plenty of space and S3 has been great in providing it at an exceptional price. It has a few hiccups every now and then, but considering it’s still in beta, it’s amazing!

Overall, it wouldn’t have been possible to build such a complex infrastructure in such a short time without those tools. They helped us build a fast, reliable and secure system in a fraction of the time and money needed for, say, a PHP equivalent using a redundant SAN system for file storage.

For the future

Now that I have two projects in the wild, I’d like to look after them for a while and make them perfect — or at least, aiming at perfection.
Ideas for new projects are always coming to my mind, but I’m just writing them down at the moment, because I need to focus on what is already live.

Sure enough there’ll be a new secret project in the near future, just not now. :)

This post was written 1 year, 7 months ago on December 8th, 2006 lunch time.