tola - krellian

Introducing Krellian, Webian's New Sponsor

tola — Sat, 29 Oct 2011 00:34:08 +0100

Reposted from webian.org

Firstly, thanks for the incredible continued contributions from the Webian community and for all the work you've done on Webian Shell, which has now had more than 95,000 downloads!

Introducing Krellian

This week I left my job as Product Manager of Clinked at Rabbitsoft to start a software consultancy called Krellian.

Through Krellian I will be able to continue to lead the Webian project, and I will also be taking up a new contract with the Mozilla Corporation to work with them on Boot to Gecko (B2G).

Like me and the other members of the Webian community, Mozilla believes that the open web can displace proprietary, single-vendor stacks for application development. The B2G project will include prototype APIs for exposing device and OS capabilities to web content, a privilege model to safely expose these new capabilities, a complete "low-level substrate" for Android-compatible devices and a collection of web apps to prioritise and prove the power of the platform.

Benefits to Webian

The potential benefits for Webian are enormous. Webian Shell was already hitting limitations of what is currently possible with Mozilla Chromeless and this new work on the core Mozilla platform promises to make many more of Webian's goals possible. While B2G initially focuses on the mobile space, Webian can focus on nettop and netbook form factors and perhaps eventually the two projects could even converge.

Sponsorship from Krellian will provide the ongoing resources necessary for running the Webian project and ensure that it remains free and open source.

I'm excited about this new chapter in Webian's story and believe more strongly than ever in the future of the open web.

A Graphical Shell for the Web

tola — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 22:08:00 +0100

I'd like to ask for feedback on a draft of a design concept I've been working on since 2006. The idea is "a graphical shell for the web" and it is intended to act as a replacement for a desktop environment for devices dedicated to accessing the web. Target hardware platforms might include netbook and nettop computers, mobile internet devices, set top boxes and internet kiosks.

I would appreciate comments either here on my blog, on the krellian-webtop mailing list or by contacting me personally if you prefer.

Work towards implementing this design concept has already started at krellian.org. In addition I am thinking of creating an interactive mockup of the user interface using SVG because, as Jef Raskin eloquently put, existing UI building tools "enshrine current paradigms and thus unduly limit the scope of what you can do".

Please let me know what you think.

Krellian Web Site Launch

tola — Sat, 07 Jul 2007 01:00:00 +0100

As I announced in April, this summer I'm starting a business called Krellian.

Since April I have written an outline business plan and given a presentation in front of a Dragon's Den style panel of judges. The judges were impressed and awarded me a £4500 grant on the SPEED Programme. SPEED is a project led by Wolverhampton University with the involvement of many other universities to support Entrepreneurship in students.

On the SPEED programme I've attended a 3 day training course on running a business and am now developing the business idea further.

Well, it's 07/07/07 and as promised I'm launching my company web site(s) today. They're a little light on information at the moment but they're enough to point people towards, bearing in mind I'm working to a five year plan here.

Products - krellian.com

This is the main company web site where products will appear, products being Web Appliances. If that doesn't quite tell you exactly what the products will be then that's partly intentional. I've not decided what the first product is going to be yet, I'm working through a shortlist. The software projects at krellian.org might give some clues.

Services - krellian.net

This will eventually be the home of a suite of web services, but for now it's serving as a bit of an experiment in natural language command.

Community - krellian.org

Now this is the bit where I'm going to need some help. Once I've kicked off development of some software projects, I'm hoping to get developers interested and build a community around the projects. I don't expect this to happen overnight and I think I really need to get a release out first. I'll be working towards a release of something over the next three months.

Webtop will carry on where Webscope left off. It's a suped-up web browser for devices that don't need a desktop.

How I start on the Webdoors project will depend on what I choose to be my first product, but the long term vision is a Webtop Linux Distribution, much like the Desktop Linux distributions we have today. Essentially a collection of libre web applications given a consistent look and feel.

The vision that Krellian is working towards is a Ubiquitous Web facilitating the free sharing of information and ideas. The Ubiquitous Web is device independent. That means you can access information in a format suited to the device you're using, be that plain text, html, vector graphics, voice or even a 3d virtual world. This gives you an idea of the direction of the Webdoors project.

W3C Compliance

All three web sites are fully W3C compliant XHTML and CSS and are tested in IE6, Firefox and Safari (if anyone could test them in IE7 it would be helpful).

Balancing W3C compliance with the web page actually looking OK in the most widespread but worst standards supporting browser is a bit of a pain. My advice is keep it simple!

Hosting

It wasn't the original plan but the websites (apart from the software projects) are currently temporarily hosted in my bedroom. That's very bad because out here in the sticks we have a very unreliable power supply and I've recently had a lot of problems with PlusNet, my Internet provider.

I'm looking at hosting options at the moment, trying to get my head around Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud and weighing up the advantages and disadvantages of renting a dedicated server from day one.

VoIP

Thanks to ALUG for the advice on VoIP service providers, I now have an 0845 number for my business provided by sipgate which points at wherever I happen to be on the Internet.

Business Cards

I've ordered 250 double sided business cards from VistaPrint for about £15 including a completely custom design and delivery etc.

LugRadio Live 2007

See you at LugRadio Live!

Starting a Business

tola — Sun, 01 Apr 2007 12:19:00 +0100

My plans for this summer have changed many times now. Due to my exam timetable I have a four month summer break and I've been trying to think of ways to use this valuable time.

I've had interesting conversations with IBM, a chat with someone from Sun, three interviews with Google, missed the deadline for the Google Summer of Code while waiting to hear about a summer placement. But still, I have nothing to fill my summer.

I've decided that I'm going to take the opportunity to start implementing some ideas I've been working on for three years, I'm going to start a business.

OK, so I've done this kind of thing a few times before. I've even ended up as part of a limited liability company building web applications and doing installations in London. But it's always just been moonlighting, a job on the side. This time it's all my own ideas, it's ambitious and I'm doing it my way.

I'm currently working on a business plan and cash flow forecast so that I can apply for some funding from my university.

Introducing Krellian. Watch this space.