Category Archives: modular innovation

DokDok… It’s Advice!

Posted on by Jeremy Horn
3

dokdoklogo_thumb15Email will be with us for a good time longer. DokDok, along with founder Bruno Morency, is seeking to evolve this often cumbersome communication mechanism, solving the often onerous challenge of exchanging documents via file attachment, tracking them, versioning them, facilitating interaction with them, and extending this vision to facilitate other products.

In Part 3, of this 4 part series, I sat down with Bruno to pick his brain and see what advice he may have for other entrepreneurs and startup pioneers.

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Learn

TPG: What are some tips/advice you can offer entrepreneurs?
Bruno: There are vast amounts of very good blogs written by successful entrepreneurs that cover all aspects of starting up a company. A good starting point is to read them regularly, debate these ideas and post comments.

bruno-pic I would add one simple piece of advice: just do it. A lot of people wait for the perfect time or opportunity to come. It just won’t. Is success more about luck than anything else? That question misses the point. Luck and opportunity knocking are consequences of what you do. You have to become a magnet for these. Build your first prototype now. Show it and iterate on it until people care enough to pay for it and/or invest in it.

TPG: How can DokDok help startups or others in the community?
Bruno: The startup community in Montreal has been coming together really nicely over the past 2 or 3 years with many great social and tech events and we’re actively involved. We share offices with other startups and we’re aiming to host regular events and workshops opened to everyone interested. We had a first one about automated QA a short while back; we’re hoping to host more of these in the coming year.

See DokDok

DokDok began as an email enhancer, working with your Gmail, Google Apps, Highrise to overlay concepts of a robust document management and version control system to email attached documents. As many resilient products do, it has now evolved to tap more deeply into the trends of Modular Innovation that are propelling many of the most successful and emerging companies out there. However, my conversation with Bruno covered many other topics. We can all look forward to the next part in our conversation with Bruno and DokDok, understanding how DokDok is surfing the Modular Innovation wave.

Part 1: DokDok: Who’s there?
Part 2: More than Just Email Being Brought to the Future
Part 3: DokDok… It’s Advice!
Part 4: More Companies are Becoming Modular Innovation Enablers

Subscribe now (click here) to make sure you don’t miss any part of this series exploring DokDok, as well as other insightful posts from The Product Guy.

Enjoy!

Jeremy Horn
The Product Guy

More than Just Email Being Brought to the Future

Posted on by Jeremy Horn
3

dokdoklogo_thumb1Email will be with us for a good time longer. DokDok, along with founder Bruno Morency, is seeking to evolve this often cumbersome communication mechanism, solving the often onerous challenge of exchanging documents via file attachment, tracking them, versioning them, facilitating interaction with them, and extending this vision to facilitate other products.

In Part 2, of this 4 part series, I sat down with Bruno to understand more about the future of DokDok, as well as from finances to fundraising.

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The Future & Finances

TPG: What’s your goal with the company?
Bruno: In a few years I’d like people to think back and ask themselves how they could ever use email without DokDok. If we get to that point, I’ll be one happy guy!

We have big objectives in mind for DokDok. Whether the best way to execute that roadmap is through venture capital or as part of a bigger company remains to be seen.

TPG: What are your near term and long term goals for DokDok?  Where would you like to see DokDok in 3 years?
Bruno: Our near term goals is to work with our active users to really refine the product and get feedback on the features we’re about to add. Longer term, we’re aiming to expand the service outside of Google Apps. In 3 years, I hope to see DokDok support most email systems with our API implemented by a majority of email clients.

As a matter of fact…
Our effort will be focused on the Email API (behind the initial DokDok presentation).

TPG: What are your growth plans?
Bruno: There are more than 2 million companies that adopted Google Apps for a total of over 50 million users. It’s a great customer base that includes many early adopters of innovative technology.

We’re currently in beta so the product is completely free to use. We will offer a paid account with premium features for a monthly or yearly cost in the coming months. We don’t plan to monetize through ads, referrals or anything else than our users paying us because they love our product.

TPG: How successful is your business?  Profitable yet?
Bruno: We launched on the Google Apps Marketplace on June 15, 2010. Feedback so far has been really good and we’re happy to see more users register daily. Putting a price tag on our premium account will be a good first step to profitability ;)

TPG: Did you ever consider taking on any investors?
Bruno: We funded initial development through my personal savings, revenues from consulting contracts and R&D grants.

Also noteworthy, (DokDok) closed a seed round of funding with Real Ventures a few weeks ago (http://nextmontreal.com/real-ventures-announces-first-two-investments-fabric-technologies-and-dokdok/).

Following DokDok

DokDok began as an email enhancer, working with your Gmail, Google Apps, Highrise to overlay concepts of a robust document management and version control system to email attached documents. As many resilient products do, it has now evolved to tap more deeply into the trends of Modular Innovation that are propelling many of the most successful and emerging companies out there. In this part of the series, we learned a good deal about DokDok, its finances and future plans. However, my conversation with Bruno covered many other topics. We can all look forward to the next part in our conversation with Bruno and DokDok, gleaning valuable advice from this exciting company and its founder.

Part 1: DokDok: Who’s there?
Part 2: More than Just Email Being Brought to the Future
Part 3: DokDok… It’s Advice!
Part 4: More Companies are Becoming Modular Innovation Enablers

Subscribe now (click here) to make sure you don’t miss any part of this series exploring DokDok, as well as other insightful posts from The Product Guy.

Enjoy!

Jeremy Horn
The Product Guy

DokDok: Who’s there?

Posted on by Jeremy Horn
3

dokdok-logo Email will be with us for a good time longer. DokDok, along with founder Bruno Morency, is seeking to evolve this often cumbersome communication mechanism, solving the often onerous challenge of exchanging documents via file attachment, tracking them, versioning them, facilitating interaction with them, and extending this vision to facilitate other products.

In Part 1, of this four part series, I sat down with Bruno to understand more about the product and its origins.

00_dokdok_homepage

Background

TPG: How would you describe DokDok to the average person?
Bruno: Have you ever spent a few hours editing a document only to realize that you didn’t start from the latest version? That01_dokdok_ui shouldn’t happen and this is what we solve. When a document gets emailed to colleagues or clients, typically, a long sequence of emails follow.  DokDok makes it easy to keep track of who said what and list versions of the document attached from different emails.

 

TPG: Tell us about yourself and how you decided to start DokDok.
Bruno: My first company, started right after graduating from McGill Engineering in 2001, developed a web-based knowledge management application and was bought in 2003. Before founding DokDok in 2009, I was involved in other hi-tech startups as head of marketing and product development.

02_dokdok_ui

Since being introduced to Pine on an old UNIX terminal, I always had a love-hate relationship with email. I kept on trying to find a better way to share documents rather than sending attachments but always ended up coming back to email. With DokDok, my goal is to make attachments a sensible way to share document. That effort made me love email even more as a user but, coincidentally, hate it more as a developer.

TPG: What is your business model?
Bruno: DokDok is a SaaS product. It’s offered as an hosted service and once we’re out of beta, we’ll have membership options with added premium features.

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TPG: Who is your competition?
Bruno: Currently users manage attachments and documents in email in an ad-hoc way. As it is, the process of handling document revisions in email is time consuming and prone to error. The competition mainly includes solutions addressing this problem by trying to eliminate email: folder synching (Dropbox, SugarSync, …), collaboration rooms (Box.net, Huddle, SharePoint, …) and traditional enterprise document management systems.

Fact is, unless you can force everyone to create an account on these services and check it regularly for updates, you can’t escape from email. Products like Xobni and Gist brought relationship management to the inbox because that’s where it happens. We’re doing the same for documents.

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TPG: What is your work environment like?
Bruno: Amazing! We’re still a small team and we’re sharing an office with a few other tech startups in downtown Montreal. Being surrounded by people close enough to your team (you see them many times per week) yet not directly involved (they’re working on their own startup) has given feedback, ideas, opportunities and connections that just wouldn’t have happened if we all worked from home or in a tiny office just for our small team.

It’s DokDok

DokDok is an email enhancer that currently works with your Gmail, Google Apps, Highrise to overlay concepts of a robust document management and version control system to email attached documents. In this part of the series, we learned a good deal about DokDok, its origins, and environment. However, my conversation with Bruno covered many other topics. We can all look forward to the next part in our conversation with Bruno and DokDok exploring the company’s finances and future.

Part 1: DokDok: Who’s there?
Part 2: More than Just Email Being Brought to the Future
Part 3: DokDok… It’s Advice!
Part 4: More Companies are Becoming Modular Innovation Enablers

Subscribe now (click here) to make sure you don’t miss any part of this series exploring DokDok, as well as other insightful posts from The Product Guy.

Enjoy!

Jeremy Horn
The Product Guy

jQuery Plugin: BetterGrow Your Words

Posted on by Jeremy Horn
9

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Many things grow, but none grow better than when they BetterGrow.  Used by products such as Facebook and Basecamp, textareas that can adapt to user input, growing or shrinking their height to the demands of the text entered, provide an oft-desired minimalistic user experience of progressive enhancement – providing just what is needed by the consumer when it is needed.

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Despite the widespread appeal of dynamic height textareas, I have been unable to find one such code snippet or JavaScript plugin that would meet all my needs; the most important of which was responsiveness.  Every dynamic textarea plugin that I found had some shortcoming, from delayed reaction to required grow/shrink event, to annoying visual flickers and blinks.  BetterGrow was designed to have none of these quirks, and simply grow (and shrink) better, based on the specified options and text content.

I wanted a dynamic and customizable textarea that kept up with me, that

didn’t wait until I was done typing to resize,
was much more ‘elastic’ than other similar plugins,
never obscured the entered text,
adapted both quickly and smoothly to the user.

So, I wrote the BetterGrow jQuery plugin and open-sourced it under both GPL and MIT License so that I, and everyone else, could benefit from a textarea that didn’t just grow, but grew better when it had BetterGrow. ;-)

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Usage

BetterGrow is a customizable jQuery plugin for enabling the improved, dynamic expansion of a textarea.

<div>
	<textarea id="area51">
	</textarea>
</div>

$('#area51').BetterGrow({ / * OPTIONS * / });

When the text within the target textarea exceeds the initial textarea height the textarea increases its height sufficiently to accommodate the new text.

When the text within the target textarea decreases sufficiently to allow for a lesser height, and the height is greater than the minimum textarea height or initial textarea height, then the textarea height is reduced to the minimum height required to display the text within, while not obscuring the visibility or requiring a scrollbar to view any of the text

Important:  The textarea must reside within an encapsulating DIV.  And, to avoid problems in IE, you should explicitly set the textarea’s width.

Method

When initialized, the textarea object and its parent DIV have their attributes adjusted.  The method implementation supports chaining and returns the jQuery object.

The DIV should add no size to the textarea object or region.  DIV height is automatically set to AUTO.

The textarea’s overflow is set to HIDDEN and the WIDTH is set to the current WIDTH. (FYI:  WIDTH of textarea must be defined to work in IE)

If the DIV is missing, the plugin will attempt to wrap the textarea in a new DIV.  It is recommended that all targeted textareas are wrapped in a DIV before calling BetterGrow to avoid unexpected behavior.

If the textarea already has text within it when BetterGrow is initialized, the textarea’s height is automatically adjusted to fit the text (if a height greater than the initial height is needed to present the text unobscured).

Settings

By default, the textarea’s initial empty height, aka minimum height, is set to 26px, with no special event handling enabled.  These and many other characteristics are fully customizable, and fully itemized and explained below.

To change these settings, they can either be accessed directly…

$.fn.BetterGrow.settings.initial_height = 100px;

… or at the time of initialization…

$('#area52').BetterGrow({
	initial_height:	50px,
	on_enter:		function() {
        				submit_form();
				},
	do_not_enter:	false
});

The default settings data structure is…

$.fn.BetterGrow.settings = {
	initial_height:	26,                // specified in pixels
	on_enter:		null,         // callback function; if specified, this is called when enter is pressed
	do_not_enter:	true         // if true and on_enter is not null then enter event does not cascade / pass-through to textarea
};

The parameters are defined (and all can be overridden) thus…

initial_height

  • minimum height in pixels for the textarea
  • if the textarea is EMPTY, this is the initial height

on_enter

  • callback function that is called when ENTER is pressed within the target textarea(s)
  • by default, on_enter is DISABLED (set to NULL)

do_not_enter

  • if on_enter is ENABLED (pointing to a callback function) and
    • if do_not_enter is TRUE,  then the ENTER event DOES NOT CASCADE / pass-through to the text area
    • if do_not_enter is FALSE, then the ENTER event will trigger the calling of the function referenced by on_enter and be reflected within the textarea
  • In other words, if TRUE then the content of the textarea will not change as a direct result of the user pressing ENTER.

Get It

You can download BetterGrow, dual licensed under GPL and MIT, from…

Git
Public Clone URL: git://github.com/theproductguy/BetterGrow.git
GitHub: http://github.com/theproductguy/BetterGrow

Demo

http://theproductguy.com/bettergrow/bettergrow.demo.html

If you find this useful, or have any questions, ideas, or issues, leave a comment.

Enjoy!

Jeremy Horn
The Product Guy

The Product Guy: Astonishin’ in 2010!

Posted on by Jeremy Horn
Reply

Snowman

Wow! Another year of The Product Guy is now coming to a close… an awesomely astonishin’ 2010! Together we explored many exciting products and enjoyed the perspectives from very smart guest bloggers, from startups to user experience to modular innovation and more — all while getting to meat and speak with many of The Product Guy’s steadily growing readership.

And, once again, let’s take a brief look at the top posts that made this year on The Product Guy so awesomely astonishin’…

#10 Stribe to be Instantly More Social

Recently, The Product Guy had the opportunity to interview Kamel Zeroual, CEO of Stribe — Gold prize winner at Le Web ‘09. And he covered topics ranging from this Paris-based startup’s origins to where it is going and how it is planning to get there.

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#9 brainmates Interview with The Product Guy

Two weeks ago I was interviewed by Janey Wong over at brainmates for their brainrants blog. We touched on some really good Product Management topics in which I think you would be interested.

So, here it is, reblogged straight from Australia…

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#8 Why Startups are Agile and Opportunistic – Pivoting the Business Model

Startups are inherently chaotic. The rapid shifts in the business model is what differentiates a startup from an established company. Pivots are the essence of entrepreneurship and the key to startup success. If you can’t pivot or pivot quickly, chances are you will fail.

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#7 Quick-MI Worksheet: Spreadsheet to Sustained Online Success

Over the past few years I’ve been discussing Quick-MI. Now, through the help of Google Docs, I’m sharing the Quick MI Worksheet to make it even easier for you to apply Quick-MI to your products, track progress, and share the results with your team. The Quick-MI Worksheet automatically performs all the necessary calculations and summarizes the product for you.

#6 Modular Innovation 201

The products and concepts that constitute Modular Innovation are those that connect, enable, produce, enhance, extend, and make use of these relationships and, in turn, users’ online experiences with them. Let’s get to understand them better.

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#5 Facebook PDQ

In answering the question of Usability, "Can I use it?" the sub-category of Page Load plays an instrumental part. Facebook is one such excellent example of a web product with Prompt Page Load Time.

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#4 Automating the Path to a Better User Experience

Quick-UX evaluates the degree to which a product successfully addresses the following 3 questions: Can I use it? (Usability), Should I use it? (Usefulness), and Do I want to use it? (Desirability). Now, through the help of Google Docs, as I did the other week with the release of the Quick-MI Worksheet, I’m sharing the Quick-UX Worksheet to make it even easier and faster …

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#3 jQuery ThreeDots: yayQuery Plugin of the Week!

I’ve been a fan of yayQuery since shortly after their initial podcast episode. Therefore, you can imagine my surprise and elation when I heard them announce that my ThreeDots plugin was this week’s jQuery Plugin of the Week… almost falling down the stairs as I listened this past Friday while entering the subway here in NYC.

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#2 jQuery Plugin: CuteTime, C’est Magnifique! (v 1.1) [UPDATE]

I am very pleased to announce the latest major update to the CuteTime jQuery plugin. CuteTime provides the ability to easily: convert timestamps to ‘cuter’ language-styled forms (e.g. yesterday, 2 hours ago, last year, in the future!), customize the time scales and output formatting, and update automatically and/or manually the displayed CuteTime(s).

In addition to the inclusion of French CuteTime in this latest release, version 1.1 features: ISO8601 date timestamp compliance, insertions using the %CT% pattern of computed numbers within the CuteTime cuteness, support for all foreign language characters and HTML, Spanish CuteTime translations, courtesy of Alex Hernandez, richer demos and test, improved settings flexibility of the CuteTime function, documentation updates (corrections and clarifications).

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#1 jQuery Plugin: Give Your Characters a NobleCount

In my quest I have been on the lookout for a jQuery plugin that would provide the ability to: (1) provide real-time character counts, (2) enable easy to customize visual behaviors, and … While there are other similar tools out there, none adequately met these goals. Therefore, I created the jQuery NobleCount plugin.

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This year The Product Group grew beyond all possible expectations! Now with 600+ active members in NYC we Product People of all sorts and levels of experience to meet, interact, and network, in a laid-back, conversational environment on first Thursday of each month. Thank you to our sponsors, Balsamiq Studios, RYMA Technology, and Sunshine Suites, and to every one of you who attend, engage and help make The Product Group the astonishin’ success it has become!

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Happy New Year!

Jeremy Horn 
The Product Guy