Incredible India - a PHP adventure - Part1
As you might know (at least the ones who know me personally) I do work with outsourced IT since more then 10 years. During the .com bubble I’ve created a company in prague together with my friend Matthew. There we had around 20 developer working for us. Later Matthew decided to focus on XML and browser related tools so I decided to move on and landed in lithuania. There we do have now (together with Wolfgang) around 60 developers working for various clients including the ones I’ve cofounded like OXID eSales and for sure my latest project swoodoo - a really good and impressiv flight search engine. During these years I’ve also tried to work with indian companies.
The results where not so promising for two reasons:
- we were doing project business in a quite agile way so there was no clear project description from beginning, therefore the communication overhead was tremeandous.
- second the cultural differences really disturbed a lot. Nobody of us was ready to move to india so the project did not work out.
But this is nearly 10 years ago and now we do have different times - and different technologies. I don’t know if there are any other companies trying to get PHP skills in india - for me for sure it’s the first time. n’uff said let’s fly to india. Finding the cheapest flight was easy with swoodoo - no dumb advertising here, it really helped me a lot.
Long distance flights are not the most comfortable thing the world. Especially when you have to fly economy. But this is live 
Lufthansa Flight FRA-MAA (Frankfurt-Chennai) was much better then expected. Nice On-Seat Entertainment with many good movies (I’ve always planned to watch ‘the bucket list’ but never managed), and really friendly personell. 10 hours later and 3.30 hours difference we arrived in Chennai.
Local time is around 0:00 and the temperature is still 30 degress plus. Customs was not a problem actually many things changed since I’ve visited India the last time. Still the people behave the same. The company we are visiting sent us a driver to pick as up at the airport and bring us to the hotel. After driving for 10 minutes he stopped and proudly presented his DVD Entertainment so we had the ‘pleasure’ to watch the brand new second part of Narnia while driving. A lof of talking and laughing follows and finally we continue the journey. After 10 more minutes we figure out that the driver is a really nice guy but he has no clue where he should bring us to. Funny thing as the transport was ordered. So he called his company and guess what? They also had no clue where we should go. Booting up the laptop, and checking the hotel reservation helped a bit, but just a bit - the driver had to call the hotel and ask for the directions. Nearly there he again lost track and quite interesting - he stopped and asked the police for the directions. Can you imagine a german taxi driver doing this? I can’t. Finally we arrived in the hotel - it’s 2 in the night, damn hot and no cold beer available (from what I could understand they don’t have a licence for alcohol.) What a pity. I need to sleep. Sunday we will have the day off to adopt. Monday then the work starts. I will keep you updated.
Unexpected Performance
I really do like this ad. Why don’t we have such ad’s in german TV ?
I would also be quite surprised
Swoodoo - one year of Beta?
So today is the final day - we will exchange our logo into the final one and remove the “beta” tag.
Actually I planned to remove this already quite a while ago - but as always, I did not find the time.
Swoodoo started nearly one year ago on ITB 2007 - and in the last year the progress we made was dramatically. We did reach all our planned business metrics what is a great success. Actually I have seen a lot of companies and also many business plans in the past, and not a single one kept so tight to the plan. Even now - one year after writing the business plan - we are even ahead of what was planned.
Speaking about technics - creating and maintaining a database with many millions of records which change nearly every day is not an easy task. But we managed it - as usual. PHP did well as usual and Java also fit’s perfectly into our system.
So far, so good - so what will be interesting to see what will happen till next ITB. I expect interesting things to happen.
Zanox Expert Day Travel in Berlin / Puro Sky Lounge
Ok it’s been already a while ago - but only now I find some time to write about this fabulous event. ITB Berlin was - as usual - a lot of work, many nice people and good business. But the zanox expert day - was for me personal more or less the crowing event.They managed somehow to bring together all relevant people in online travel area - and only these. Perfect networking, good deals and maybe a bit too much alcohol - at least for me
Thank you!
The location was also quite impressive - Puro Sky Lounge
