ScreditCrunch

TechCrunch Europe has nominated Scred as ‘Best Bootstrapped Startup’ for their Europas awards. The category is definitely appropriate. With no external funding and tight revenues we have managed to keep the company alive and developing. Being an entrepreneur is never easy, but we feel we must push on. MiniCorps are still in closed beta and there are so many things yet to be done before we can think of the service as even close to what we want it to be. So believe me, work is still being done, as much as possible … and nope, there will be no summer holidays for the Scred team!

Anyway, you can support our efforts by voting for us! And many thanks to everyone who already has.

We’re happy to announce another of our cool Night of Codes on Thursday starting at 18:00. The idea is for people to get together and talk about techie ideas they have (or pitch, if they want) and then also to work on their own projects. They can present if they want, or just listen. It will take place at the Scred office, at the Cable Factory in Helsinki, Door E, Room 565. Bring your laptop if you fancy working on stuff.

The guys from MahShelf have promised to announce something they call ‘amazing’. We’re definitely looking forwards to that.

I also have some interesting tech ideas I would like to run by my peers.

Some beer & refreshments will be provided. Do let us know if you’re planning to come (either by commenting here, to @Screditor on Twitter, or by emailing us). Remember: Thursday 18:00.

We’ve been talking to a good number of groups about how they would like to use Scred in a wide range activities. We have long held the belief that Scred would be great for managing the money for bands, code crews, indie film producers, indie developers, trip organisers and various other loosely formed groups. Indeed that is really the core idea at Scred: that there is nothing good available for communities and groups which are less formal than a business, but still actively deal with money issues. The groups which aren’t interesting to stiff and less flexible banks or accounting companies. We’ve been involved with several of those groups ourselves, and more and more are signing up every day.

Last week we got one more confirmation that this our assumption is true. I decided to repost part of it on or blog because the feedback hit the nail on the head for us:

I wanted to submit a request for a beta code for a Scred Minicorp. I recently switched all finance tracking for my band, Flaming Tusk, over to Scred. It’s worked great; not only can we track who paid for a van or the latest run of shirts—which we had previously been doing with Billmonk—but we can also track who got paid for last night’s gig or who sold a shirt, which Billmonk couldn’t do in the slightest.

So now we’ve got these shirts and these CDs, but selling them outside of gigs is still a huge pain. We have tried to insert a Google Checkout widget into our website, but it’s more trouble than it’s worth. Given that we’re already using Scred to manage all our finances, I think it would be a great bit of integration if we could participate in your beta program.

This is exactly the kind of use we have had in mind and so naturally they got their beta code!

You can check out their music from their website. Our local metalhead at the Scred office gave his thumbs up.

Kristoffer, one of Scred’s founders, will be talking about alternative economies and peer-funding in relation to Scred at this year’s Pixelache festival (a large event on digital cultures). Feel free to come by and check it out!

A week or so ago the last remnants of our old Perl version were banished from Scred. Last year, during summer, we spent quite some time porting Scred completely from Perl to Python and Django. Users did not really notice anything: the new version looked and acted identically to the old one. The reason for this switch was simple: our old self-baked framework was beginning to fray at at the edges and development was slow and painful.

We did evaluate moving Scred to Catalyst. However, Perl is a language which definitely splits opinions, both within Scred and beyond, and we needed to find something everyone would be at least semi-comfortable with. Now, as many know, my own personal favourite language is Tcl, for its wonderful simplicity and ultimate power. In fact it’s probably the most underrated language out there. For that reason we took a look at OpenACS which is reckoned to be extremely mature and scalable, but the learning curve at the time also felt very severe. It would also require running AOLWebServer. This has been built to be an extremely scalable web server, with Tcl at its scripting core, but everyone in the team had had at least some experience with Apache. Moving away from that did not feel appealing at all. There are Apache modules for Tcl on Apache, but nothing in the way of a full web framework (something for a summer project, perhaps?).

So Django it was, despite the pre-1.0 status, and overall it has mostly managed to do the job.

Everything was then ported, except one crucial part: the internal API used by the mobile Scred client. This was working perfectly well as it was so was never high up on the priority list to port. More importantly, Django/WSGI/mod_python have frankly no support for chunked HTTP encoding. This is an utterly inexplicable oversight as the HTTP standard quite clearly says chunked encoding MUST be supported, and one that has still not be satisfactorily remedied. Often browsers do not use chunked encoding but our friends the mobile platforms commonly do (both MIDP and the iPhone). Finally in January it was decided that this port really had to be done, as it was slowing the pace of our development to have to keep checking that the Perl based API would continue to work with new database changes.

After some amount of Googling we found a solution that was based on using Apache’s mod_proxy for dechunking. It was a hack, no doubt about it, but it seemed to be working right up until we tested with the MIDP emulator (ancient 1.0.3 as there’s nothing later for Macs and MIDP 1 was our target platform). API calls would regularly end up in an explicable “Network error” on the client. After some amount of debugging we could not find any reason for this. Once more the update to Python was put on the back burner to make way for several other important features which had to be pushed out.

Finally we dug up some time to continue to solve this issue. The confusing thing was that it worked on an actual device, but we could not be sure if that was just luck without pulling out tcpdump, netcat and similar tools. To cut a long story short we found that mod_proxy was closing the connection right after sending a response to each HTTP request. Now, this is perfectly fine, although usually web servers today keep connections open, at least for a time. Disconnecting after response was the HTTP 1.0 way. Unfortunately it seems like there is a bug in the 1.0.3 MIDP runtime. It did not react to this disconnect by then reconnecting with the next request. Instead it would just cause an IOException once a new request was sent (the details of the actual underlying socket are somewhat hidden in J2ME). That means that every other request works fine, every other one not.

At the end of the day we decided to push the update out. We tested on some phones and did not detect any problems so, with any luck, it’s only the emulator environment which does not handle this correctly. If you stumble across problems, do let us know!

Moral of the story: if you want to handle chunked encoding with Django, set up mod_proxy and be aware that the 1.0.3 MIDP environment has a potential bug in it!

We have just released a feature which many of our users have been pleading
to get: a calculated settlement path. Before it was more of a running
balance and any settlement had to be worked out by manually matching the
negative balances with the positive. We have now improved that. This means
that now in a pool, if you want to know how much people should pay, and to
whom, just take a look at the ‘Members’ tab. It includes a helpful
suggestion!

Additionally, due to popular demand, we have added support for the Indian
rupee. Old exchange rates will be somewhat inaccurate, but all new
transactions made against the rupee are based on current rates.

Log into Scred to start using the new features!

Now usually our release names advance alphabetically, but in honour of one of our all time favourite episodes, Backwards from Red Dwarf, we are doing it a bit different. That particular episode also brings back memories to some of the people working at Scred. One of our previous startups went by the project name of ‘Nodnol’. This was a geo location and browsing platform for mobile devices, not unlike Google Maps today (but done in 2001). Unfortunately it was way ahead of its time.

Anyway, back to the release. We’ve got loads of great feedback and are busy working night and day to get things done. In response to some of that, today we launched:

• A simple way to manage inventory for MiniCorps. Scred also works out the value of it.

• A setting for MiniCorp shop items to control how many can be purchased at
  once.

• Pools can now have their own personal picture shown in the pool page and
  pool list. It is also shown in their shop, if they have one.

• The ‘Revenue’ tab for MiniCorps has now been renamed ‘Our Shop’. The
  profit calculation now appears in the top section about the pool. More
  revenue related functionality will appear elsewhere later.

• A fix to how profit was calculated in MiniCorps has been made. Now only
  orders which have been processed will be included (as was the case for
  revenue calculation).

• The user who paid for an item is now listed in a MiniCorp’s order list in
  addition to the detailed view. Makes going through list easier.

• Negative values may no longer be entered into pool transactions on the
  web. This used to be the way to add shared income but with the new UI is no
  longer necessary (for cancellation, use the cancel button).

• A fix to remove MiniCorp shops from the listing if the MiniCorps no longer
  have a PayPal account or if they have no members.

• A “No picture” is shown in MiniCorp shop if item has no image. Layout is
  better, but best is to add an image!

Go to Scred to check this out.

Want to use Scred MiniCorps?

While MiniCorps are still in closed beta, if you have something planned or
an idea in mind which could use a Scred MiniCorp, get in touch with us using
the feedback form to request to become a beta user. We’re generally pretty
friendly and keen to hear about cool projects.

We’d like to thank all the users who have been sending us feedback and comments. We are working hard to implement some of those requests. Meanwhile we have released support for creating pools directly with the mobile website, so you can easily build a pool when you are on the road and forgot to do it at home.

Additionally, on the normal website, we made the user’s own currency the default when creating a pool (as it used to be) and smartened up both the registration form and the pool creation. Various other bug fixes have also been rolled out.

Hopefully this small update (dubbed ‘BehindTheLines‘) will be useful to you. Expect something more in the not too far future.

Log into Scred to start using the new features.

For anyone interested, I just uploaded Scred’s slides from the Arctic Evening in Tallinn, organised by ArcticStartup. It was a 3 minute pitch which, for us, mostly focused on the new MiniCorp functionality.

The slides also include some screenshots about setting up a MiniCorp with a shop (as it looked when the slides were made).

The slides are available on Slideshare. Enjoy.

We fully understand that some people are impatient. So we put in some work and made registration to Scred easier than it has ever been before. Now there are only three fields to fill in! Even the currency field has been pre-selected with the currency you will most likely want, based on the country you are visiting from. If you’re not happy with what it chose, simply select the currency you’re happiest with (it can also be changed in your profile). Now your friends will have no excuse for not signing up.

Additionally we made some other small fixes here and there, including growing the size of the MiniCorp shop item description, to make addition and editing easier.

Edited to add that our release is called The Begotten.

Pop over to Scred to take a look.

Finally, take a glance at one of our mascots, the Scredidog!