In order to create a successful product you have to be acutely aware of how you will gain competitive advantage within the market. Competitive advantage creates opportunity for new products to disrupt incumbent industries and it helps create a moat of defence against the onslaught of competition. However, it seems that the differentiation strategy of [...]
Last week I looked at what are Models in MVC applications, what are the characteristics of a Model and how to make your first Model in Laravel 4. An integral part of writing high quality web applications is having automated tests that can ensure that your entire application is functioning correctly. In a Continuous Integration [...]
Design Inspiration from Sipp, Playground Inc, Involvio, Mariusz Cieśla and Starmatic! Design Inspiration is a weekly post that showcases examples of some of the best new web design from around the internet. To submit to Design Inspiration, click the “submit” link at the bottom of the page and follow the instructions for submitting your site [...]
For the last 100 hundred years, our culture has been obsessed with the big hits, the top selling songs and the highest grossing films. But in the last 15 years, despite the world’s population growing, these hits aren’t increasing in numbers. The Internet has now opened the door to a proliferation of on demand content. [...]
Model-View-Controller (MVC) is a very common design pattern in modern web applications. The wide usage and acceptance of the design pattern means that many of the most popular web frameworks are built around this architecture. Laravel 4 is one such framework that uses the MVC design pattern to cleanly separate the various aspects of a [...]
Design Inspiration from AppFog, Thinglist, Archer, Wistia and Splitsecnd! Design Inspiration is a weekly post that showcases examples of some of the best new web design from around the internet. To submit to Design Inspiration, click the “submit” link at the bottom of the page and follow the instructions for submitting your site or a [...]
Marketplace businesses are notoriously difficult to get off the ground. When you have a two sided marketplace, it can feel like you are in a chicken and egg situation. Without buyers, you can’t attract sellers and without sellers it’s almost impossible to attract buyers. However if you can engineer your way to a flourishing two [...]
If you have ever worked on a big project with multiple developers, you will probably have found that keeping everyone’s database structure consistent can be a nightmare. For example, say one of your colleagues adds a new feature, and in doing so, is required to add a new column to the database. They commit their [...]
Design Inspiration from Ghost, Taasky, Flinto, Hammer and Spendee! Design Inspiration is a weekly post that showcases examples of some of the best new web design from around the internet. To submit to Design Inspiration, click the “submit” link at the bottom of the page and follow the instructions for submitting your site or a [...]
Two side marketplace businesses are possibly one of the holy grails of online business models. In a two sided marketplace, buyers and sellers conduct transactions through a centralised platform. Both sides of the marketplace are self organised and so, the platform owner is able to take a transactional “rake”. These types of businesses are extremely [...]
