Introducing Itteco Community Manager
Posted on 09. Mar, 2010 by Ivan Paramonau in blog
On behalf of Team Itteco, I am happy to introduce and welcome our new hire – Sasha Kovaliov has just become our community manager.
Sasha is long time geek and shares our passion on starting something new. We trust Sasha will bring in vibes and energize our community as we are preparing for opening up the curtain on our platform.
Here is the first message of Sasha as our community manager:
Hi guys,
My name is Sasha Kovaliov and I’ve just started working with Itteco as a community manager and social media marketer. I’m glad to join the team of such an innovative company and I’ll sure try to make Itteco shine and stand out (kudos to Ivan Paramonau 
.
A bit about myself: I’ve been working in software outsourcing domain for the last 3 years at a sales and marketing department, so I know how the gears rotate. Being constantly hooked up to the Internet I’ve became a social media obsessed freak, but it did me good at the end. Social Internet has become a major destination point for all demographic and cultural groups out there and new skills and connections suddenly became useful. Little by little I’ve started doing some social media marketing and could never look back.
So, why do we need a community manger, you might ask. To be on the Internet today doesn’t mean you have to be on Google (however, this one is intact as well) – rather you have to listen and participate in conversation with your customers and partners. Brands are becoming social, they are creating communities of like-minded people and receive innovation feedback, praises and insults, just like in real world. Internet is shifting to social, relations-driven paradigm. If you are not here to listen and comfort your clients – they’ll go to some other better place, where they can be heard. That’s why it’s essential for Itteco to listen and engage with customers, developers networks and build a strong inside community to achieve tangible results faster.
I’d like to ask you for a favor. Some of you might already have twitter accounts – please leave your twitter nicknames in the comments so we can all follow each other and strengthen our twitter network considerably. If you still haven’t joined the bird, no worries – it’s never late I would also recommend a great book for a easy start. If you ever have any questions regarding twitter – just let me know and I’ll help.
Itteco has a sophisticated social engine to back up its community. Information sharing is essential in today’s rapidly changing world so let’s start blogging! Each of us has something to say once in a while, don’t hold your thoughts to yourself, don’t be greedy , share with us your ideas, news, vision, best practices, tips, etc. E.g. recently Pavel shared with us his email management tips (link). For a quick start on how to blog come here.
That’s it for now. I’ll be glad to answer any of your questions and if you ever need my help – i’m always here. Please, don’t forget to let me know your @nicknames (or register) and think of something you’ve been waiting to write about (when done thinking don’t forget to blog!).
Welcome to the team, Sasha!
Itteco is turning 2!
Posted on 08. Mar, 2010 by Sasha K. in blog
Can you feel spring in the air? Winter is finally yielding and we are about to plunge into new exciting blooming season! It gets even better as Itteco is turning two years old this week! What is more, one of our co-founders is hitting his 30th anniversary and all the Ittecans are congratulating him!
We are excited about our little birthday and have prepared an interview with our founders (Ivan Paramonau and Pavel Kartautsau) so you can grasp last year events and see what direction we are moving to. Read what our leaders think about next major technology, discuss Itteco’s development and share most memorable events of 2009.
What’s been the most memorable event for Itteco?
Ivan:
Startup is like a child. You remember any single ‘first’ thing on the way. After this time scale gets less detailed . To mention a few, here are some of our steps this year:
First release deployment (was pretty a hassle);
First feedback from users (read ‘First failures’). By the way, I keep remembering every single failure for some reason;
The birth of our 3rd logo:
The final few first steps we did this year is hiring The First Community Manager and the first support engineers.
Pavel:
It’s true what Ivan says regarding every small thing you remember. During this year there were several interesting releases of our platform, and I personally remember that I was very happy when we’ve increased the project starting speed from 2 minutes to 20 seconds.
What are the company’s plans for the near and distant future?
Pavel:
The nearest plans are improving our internal processes, involving more development and testing practices.
After that I would expect 20 teams will join us
Ivan:
A bit more details on platform development: we are now in preparation for the Usability release. The next step would be automation of all financial and resource management processes.
We also expect to put a major effort towards growing the community this year. We know it will be hard not to maintain our quality level during the growth period, and therefore we are doing some preparations before we take off.
Do you think it’s possible for a single company to be a dominant player in such a manifold cloudsourcing domain? What are the plans to become one?
Ivan:
Time of single-company niches has passed. Though we haven’t heard of that many companies working on cloudsourcing solutions, there will surely be enough players soon.
Pavel:
Come on! I do believe in our business idea and we are first, so don’t take our chances down so fast.
Ivan: Right We do not intend to become a dominant player. We look forward to working on great projects with amazing people. Plus, it’s our intention to get the job done right.
In your opinion, what will be the most disruptive technology of the new decade, like search has become for the 2000’s?
Pavel:
Cloud computing, of course. With cloud computing you are able to do the things that you were unable to do before. “The power of the cloud…” Now you can build a highly reliable and scalable SOA-based application or use the power of the distributed databases and many other things. The agility of the CC-model provides you with a possibility to enter and discover new markets. It was only possible for enterprise level companies before.
Furthermore, it changes relationship between the developers and integrators. Support team is happy that they have everything in one place, and so are developers! As a result we have a very nice symbiosis.
Ivan:
If Open Standard / Open Data may be considered a technology, we will definitely see APIs as the key technology of the decade.
Being an innovative company, what platform would you bid on? Do you agree that future is mobile?
Ivan:
I believe we are marching towards ‘No Predominant Platform’ future. Means that the most interesting projects would be those, which integrate various platforms. Such as mobile and web, desktop app and community site, browser plugin and a webservice. Though, web would perhaps still hold its market share.
Pavel:
Personally, I would like to be on the side of web based application because I think that’s the future.
Please name some of the most interesting projects Itteco has worked on during last year.
Ivan:
The one that gives the most of sleepless nights is certainly Itteco’s own platform. I appreciate the efforts of all of the folks working on it. We use number of technologies, and it is really pleasure to see how all comes together.
Pavel:
Agree! Our infrastructure project has been a tough one. A lot of people were involved into the development and we are expecting big success after the release.
Ivan:
I also enjoyed our Android project over the past year. Partly because now Google offered me a Nexus One as part of their Device Seeding Program for top Android developers, of course 
.
Seriously speaking, we do not disclose our customers’ projects as we are working in a sensitive domain of startups. We encourage customers to get their voice heard at our shout-box http://launchpad.itteco.org.
Your favorite tweet/video/presentation of the last year? Why?
Pavel:
It is very difficult to pick up the most interesting tweet or presentation, as countless hundreds passed during last year. I enjoyed the google wave and Sun/Oracle OLTP Database machine presentations immensely.
Ivan:
My favorite is this one: http://twitter.com/stephenfry/status/9926651184. But I guess there were loads of many others. With real-time web my memory isn’t that good anymore.
As you see we are moving fast-fast and ready to conquer new exciting projects with our soon-to-be-unveiled platform. Please, share your ideas about the next-gen technology, cloudsourcing future or your favorite startups of last year with us in the comments! As we’ve mentioned, “accidently”, Itteco’s birthday falls on the same exact day as the Pavel’s birthday . Here is the short vid we prepared as our present. It is our past year in video conferencing snapshots carousel. Happy Birthday, Pavel!
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FTW DoGood!
Posted on 18. Feb, 2010 by Sasha K. in blog
We are both excited and humbled to learn that DoGood Headquarters is making major progress with the application developed with Itteco. DoGooders have won 3 awards at Exploriem Bootstrap Awards and was nominated for 2010 SXSW!
It’s been a wonderful ride and we are glad that our team helped DoGood to achieve magnificent results. It’s flattering that the part Itteco was responsible for has earned DoGood Exploriem’s Best ‘Pixie Dust’ Technique of the Year award award (which is “presented to the company that best demonstrates the magic behind their success”) and nomination in Technical Achievement category for 2010 SXSW.
DoGood is truly fun to work with – their innovative business model and ideas were a challenge in technical implementation, which we have passed with flying colors. We wish best of luck to DoGood team and will have our fingers crossed during SXSW voting.
Give DoGood a try by installing a plugin to your browser and check out the magic yourself.
After this, go to SXSW Peoples Choice voting page and cast your ballot for DoGood. Don’t be shy to make yourself heard every other day.
Congrats, Faisal & team!
Itteco to unveil its platform for the first time at Demo Night in Canada
Posted on 04. Dec, 2009 by admin in blog
So, it’s been fun to be in the development cave for the last 8 months. But now its time to come into the spotlight.
Itteco will unveil its cloudsourcing platform at Demo Night in Canada on December 9th.
We are happy to show what we’ve got so far to get as much feedback as possible. We built the platform for ourselves and people around us, and thus listening to what other people have to say is very crucial at this point.
The platform is in preview mode at the moment. We are eating our own dog food, while working on awesome custom projects for our clients. Come see our demo, or, if you do not have chance to attend, we will always be happy to set up an individual demos for great people.
Event’s page is here. We also blog about Itteco’s platform features, which you are very welcome to visit.
#askitteco – We Are Listening
Posted on 14. Apr, 2009 by admin in blog
Thanks for looking us up. If you are onto this page, you are either following our RSS feed or got back from Twitter. So, let us explain what is going on.
Itteco is the software development outsourcing house, focusing its collaborative effort to help technological startups and entrepreneurs to succeed with their ventures. As such, we are bringing our wide expertise into the loop. The expertise covers multiple technological and business domains, not to mention the software development processes and outsourcing best practices itself.
We advocate open and transparent engagements and collaborations, and also love the brainstorming part of our job a lot. We therefore started to listen the Twitter sphere (obviously, as the source of new technology information, but also) to occasionally join the conversations on topics of our interest so to contribute our vision and share bits of our knowledge. We would often jump into architectural/conceptual conversations versus the specific programming issues.
You will be able to pick our experts in the crowd easily as they should have #askitteco in their Bio on Twitter and also should link to this disclaimer page from their profiles.
If you enjoy our contribution – you might keep on asking your questions by tagging them with #askitteco. We will give our best advice back in no time (well, some questions may still require a bit of research and investigation delay – and, frankly, we would appreciate all of the questions to be challenging like that).
If you find our interference abusive, please, reply to @itteco and we’ll do our best to make you comfy again. But, well, why should you? Twitter is meant for the public discussions anyway. So, let’s keep it rolling! FTW
Itteco goes bizarre: our doors are wide open
Posted on 16. Mar, 2009 by admin in blog
Our website has been surprisingly silent about the projects that we were working on. It is not only because we intended to be stealth for a while, but also because we did not have a clue on how to be open with this regard without violating our NDAs and also not to get in trap of boring traditional ‘case studies’, that are everything but lacking the actual studies in a sense of useful lessons for the future. We now believe we have figured out the right approach.
Pursuing our policy of being 100% transparent and open, and also as a first step of our community engagement plan, herewith we announce and make the following commitment:
From now on, every Itteco client will be opted-in as the not moderated author of our blog. The only thing we would ask is that posts go into Project Tales category.
Not only we expect to hear fun stories of projects’ day-to-day life, and not only we give clients additional opportunity to promote their products in their own words, but we are also well prepared that any complaint will go directly to our public website too.
We know this is odd, unusual and sounds crazy, however we rolled the first stone here – and it confirmed that we are on the same page with our clients. We also need to disclaim that this approach is inspired by ‘Mercury Rising Naked Development’ blog by Mercury Grove, which we find an awesome (yet risky) idea. By the end of the day, this is what Itteco is about – we like challenges.
We trust implementation of this approach will bring our entrepreneurial clients’ community closer together and will facilitate the conversation and support among these outstanding people, which is the side yet very important objective of our initiative.
The current Itteco clients will receive their personal authoring access to our blog within the next week. You may obviously try to opt-out, and, with some persistence, you actually have some chance to be successful in your attempt. We do hope, however, that there is always something to say – and we and others are keen to listen indeed.
At the very least, you may think of it as if Itteco folks are just too lazy busy to write the project case studies up themselves. Well, you may still be supportive in helping us out here…
Happy Birthday, Itteco!
Posted on 05. Mar, 2009 by admin in blog
Hey, it is our birthday today!
Check it out what we’ve been up to:
Note: If you wish to stay tuned, may we advise that you subscribe to this blog as we plan to roll out a few new community initiatives soon.