Rails - Internet Marketing News and Blogs

Mindmeister is an excellent online mind-mapping tool which allows users to brainstorm and organise plans and ideas.

Ruby on Rails creator David Heinemeier Hansson - named Hacker of the Year in 2005 - talks about the web development framework's growing popularity among businesses (including E-consultancy - we have a new Rails-powered site under development) and the problems of managing an open source community. 

OpenStreetMap (OSM), the open source mapping project, has secured its first commercial partner by linking up with property search engine Nestoria.

The move will see Nestoria displaying OSM’s user generated maps alongside its property listings – a boost for the project as it seeks to gain popularity among third-party developers.

I’ve just returned from holiday where I did my best to stay completely away from any technology other than my camera (for good reason), and am getting back into the swing of things nicely.

One of the pleasant not-so surprises on returning was the recent launch of a UK TechCrunch site which is focused on UK Web 2.0 and mobile startups.

This week Web 2.0 startup Kiko put itself up for sale on eBay, after its founders seemingly became bored or disillusioned.

Kiko, which is priced at $49,999 (it has yet to attract a bid), is an online calendar built using Ruby on the Rails and claims about 40,000 users per month. Which, in case you are wondering, is a cost to the ‘business’. Kiko doesn’t appear to have any notable revenue streams.

I nearly fell of my chair this morning when I read that 37Signals have taken on outside funding, but after reading a bit further I’ve come to the conclusion that they’re actually in a very, very sweet spot…

If you’re interested in what’s happening on the Web at the moment (driven by open source technologies), then taking a moment to listen to Tim talk about the challenges to the Open Source model will probably be useful.