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!

tola - SPEED