Once of the main reasons to date that free software has not become mainstream amongst average computer users is that the free stuff is generally written by open source techies, and no one really focuses on design and usability. So generally, free = open source = unusable by the common man.

Matthew Paul Thomas wrote a great post today in his blog about free software usability – and this one of the best pieces on the topic that I’ve seen written to date. He describes 15 points as to why free software has poor usability, and how to fix it.

Now that you’ve done that (or not, you don’t have to, but I hope I make sense!), I’d like to briefly speak to the headings of the 15 points he mentioned, and discuss how we (SynthaSite) as a company are trying to push the envelope with high quality free software, and pioneer a new way to build businesses and income around free software with alternative revenue streams, rather than charging the end user. We hope to inspire other software companies to be creative in the way, that they also try to build out their business models.

Certainly the thoughts of Chris Anderson follows what leaders on the web have been doing for many years, but usability is going to take the front seat, if you want to be successful in this space.

I’m going to make some points against each of Matthew’s – probably best read after reading his post. Remember though, SynthaSite, although free, is a commercial piece of software, so we do have a different approach to it than traditional free and open source products. Now, I’m not going to do what most bloggers do, and reiterate his fantastic piece of work by cut and pasting – so I highly advise you to read it first before continuing – it’s the best 5 minutes of your life that you will spend on this topic.

Matt’s problems with developing free software and how SynthaSite deals with it:

Weak incentives for usability – The more usable a product, the quicker it goes viral. In the current paradigm of large user bases, usability is key if you want to keep users coming back and spreading the word about your web application.

Few good designers – So true. Typically, open source & free software doesn’t get much attention on the design side, after all, it’s free – right? Wrong. Interface design is one of the most important areas of the software development phase and if done incorrectly, will certainly bamboozle most users (who probably won’t try your product again)

Design suggestions often aren’t invited or welcomed – Matt’s point says it all.

Usability is hard to measure – Not at all, we utilize a number of methods, including metric which are unique to each business. Figure out what goals you want your users to achieve, and test how changes to your interface affect those outcomes. If you’re trying to encourage users to build a blog, then see what percentage of users do that, before and after you make changes. It’s not rocket science.

Coding before design – Most startups can’t afford a user interface specialist – understandably, and we didn’t have one when started, but since getting funding, changed that quickly by hiring UI people – design first, then code.

Too many cooks – Like anything in life, too many opinions won’t help. Someone needs to take charge. We have a dedicated UX team that deals with usability issues, and within that team, the roles are clearly defined.

Chasing tail-lights – what works for Apple won’t necessarily work for you. Understanding YOUR users, and design accordingly.

Scratching their own itch –

remember this if nothing else

– 9/10 times, you are probably NOT the target customer and your needs are definitely not representative of the masses, especially if you’re an engineer building a consumer app

Leaving little things broken – this is a difficult one that all software companies will face. How do you deal with the small stuff and the big stuff at the same time. We try our best and over time, we get better at it. Things are never going to slow down, deal with the small stuff on an ongoing basis.

Placating people with options – Here is a nugget: “Less is more, if more is hidden”. Hide complex functionality – power users will find it, beginners won’t need to!

Fifteen pixels of fame – This is where good UI people come in. They want what’s best for the user, not the engineer and his or her ego. Incidentally, I think this point is more prominent in open source community projects where people feel the need to stand out in forums of thousands of people, rather than companies I have worked in of less than 20 engineers, so I don’t think I have personally experienced this problem.

Design is high-bandwidth, the Net is low-bandwidth – Some of the most amazing bits of innovation has been in a room with a white board and some markers. As great as the Internet is, it can’t take away that fresh smell of a marker, and the innovation it brings

Release early, release often, get stuck – SynthaSite has put out over a half dozen releases this year already – with more to come. We are an agile organization and our ability to get high quality work out regularly proves that, in my opinion. I seriously recommend that everyone read “Getting Real” and modify as required for your environment. It’s not absolute, but a good guide nevertheless. We work on 3 week iterations, 2 weeks of coding and 1 week of QA & debugging. My CTO, Brent Viljoen, is a whiz at gearing the company into an agile organization and aligning different departments with engineering to deliver the goods as promised. Many CTO’s still live in the past with their long term outlooks and development processes – in the current paradigm, it’s technically retarded. The key really is to incrementally improve your processes – you won’t get it 100% done from day one, but over time, it will definitely become a way of life, and create order from chaos.

Mediocrity through modularity – this point really speaks to building a product from user requirements back into engineering, and not the other way round. We are using GetSatisfaction to constantly get feedback from our users – their wish is our command…

Gated development communities – API’s are changing this field rapidly. Web apps are now integrating 3rd party apps seamless. We recently deployed a Widgetbox integration into SynthaSite, which now gives our users instant access to over 60,000 widgets – from a simple drag and drop interface. The power of API’s and partnerships are only beginning.

If you read this far, thanks – it’s one of my longer posts, and certainly more engineering and usability focused, but highly applicable to any industry that develops any type of product for consumers.

I’ve bought a car, shoes, groceries, electronics and just about anything else you can imagine online. With my car, I selected the vehicle through Edmunds – received 4 quotes, selected one and the dealer delivered my car to my front door (literally!), without me even meeting him – within 48 hours – complete with insurance. And I bought it on a Sunday!

Shopping online also resulted in the most savings for products that I’ve been purchasing. I’ve been using FatWallet to take advantage of affiliate discounts and coupons, without having to go through the hassle of applying to each merchant program, etc.

I met with a recruiter on Friday to start getting resumes in for the positions that we have to fill in San Fran – and this morning I received 8 resumes for highly technical positions as well – it’s amazing how large the skills pool here is!

We’ve met with about 3 PR agencies here, and all 3 were impressive – some very tough choices ahead in this category. I’ve also had the time to mingle with a couple of valley CEO’s – and the network effect is already starting to happen as I get introductions to new people.

That’s probably the single biggest value that you get out of living and working in San Francisco – the tech circle is humongous and the ability to network with fellow tech startups is probably second to none. I’m also struggling to keep track of all the various activities around here, but it seems that Yelp is very popular!

My apartment is across the road from our offices, and down the road from AT&T park – in South Beach – it’s really a great place to be and I even get to walk to work for like 2 whole minutes .

We have a total of 8 people now working out of San Francisco and trying to hire aggressively, so check out the SynthaSite Careers page. We also recently made the following local San Francisco hires:

Chief Financial Officer: Trevor Harries-Jones (Joining us from OpenTV, previously PWC)
Vice President of Marketing: Randy Almond (Joining us from Walmart.com, previously Accenture)
Vice President of Product Development: Sean Crotty (Joining us from Mpire, previously eBay)

And here is a pic of our new offices (yup – looks like a startup office!)

Things are really beginning to move over here – we just got Internet access installed at the office – that was probably the most frustrating thing – AT&T have proved to be utterly useless – it’s taken 3 weeks and we don’t have a T1 line installed yet – and we are using a DSL. Comcast took me one phone call and 48 hours to have it installed – 16mb line – blistering!

One of the nicest services I discovered by OpenDNS – which doesn’t really work well outside the USA or Europe. OpenDNS basically gives the public a very quick DNS lookup server (the server that allows you to find a website on the Internet) – and anyone can use it – it’s very easy to setup. I HIGHLY recommend it for people living in EU & North America.

All in all, living here has been great so far and aside from missing family & friends, I’m loving it!

The MIT folks are really helping us optimize the usability aspects within SynthaSite, along with other great insights across our business. These are skills extremely difficult to find in our local market, and as we open up offices in the USA, it’s making it a lot easier to identify what our future recruiting needs will be (please keep an eye on our website if you’re in the job market!).

Here is a great video from Endeavor at the 10 Year Gala held in New York in November that I had the pleasure of attending (Michael Buble entertained us!):

SynthaSite launched our Alpha on Amazon’s EC2 cloud, and it held up perfectly – although it was not easy to scale the application architecture and we’re going to work on that – so in the interim we’re using some standard servers while we build out our virtualization infrastructure.

The future of the software is certainly in the cloud and delivered through the browser – Microsoft is not arguing about that – but they would prefer to ensure that it’s tied to the desktop in some way (and obviously IE). With the fragmentation that’s occurring as a desktop level (Linux, Mac, Ubuntu, etc), I doubt that this is a good long term strategy (in fact, they’re actually missing the plot totally) – especially given what a flop Vista is. That said, the article above is a great read!

The thing that really concerns me, is that if Microsoft really believes that applications should live in the browser – then why do they build IE only applications (such as Office Live). It’s really frustrating to not have cross browser compatibility – the browser is the new operating system, believe it or not…

The Endeavor network is really a great network for entrepreneurs from “Emerging Markets”, although arguably, some of these markets have already emerged! I can only highly recommend the support we’ve received from Endeavor, which is a non-profit organisation.

Synthasite was fortunate enough to be one of the companies selected by MIT (Massachusetts Institute for Technology) to host a team of MBA interns who will work closely with us for the next 3 months and fly down to Cape Town in January to assist us with post-Beta testing. I had dinner with the team on Monday night, and I can honestly say that I’m thoroughly impressed by the calibre – but would you expect any less from MIT? I might add that there were more companies applying than interns available – so getting selected was seriously something special!

I was also privileged to speak to a class of students at MIT in Boston as well – and it was great to be able to share my experiences as an entrepreneur with them.

Also, through Endeavor, we also received an eMBA from Harvard who spent 3 months with us earlier this year, and he did a great job! Now I get 4 MBA’s – it’s going to be great having some extra resources – we’re very excited!

The bottom line is:

I can really encourage any and all emerging market entrepreneurs to at least apply to join Endeavor – the benefits are fantastic and it’s great being part of a support network. You need to be operating primarily in an emerging market – but check their website for more details.

(Please view the full post to see the slideshow)

His opening post is titled “The Impact of Network Effects on Online Technology Plays… Part 1″, and is a great prelude of many good things to come!

I have a bit of a rough week ahead, and will be spending 3 days attending (and presenting) at a University of Cape Town Course on what is in effect, Web 2.0, called Nomadic Markets. I’ll try to blog some of the material, if I can get permission.

Social Media is becoming the dominant topic, other than FaceBook, which is a subset. Last night, I found out about two of my best friends finally getting engaged – through my newsfeed on Facebook, about 30 minutes after they posted it. They didn’t even have a chance to call me and I knew about it… how our world is changing!

One of South Africa’s social media experts, Mike Stopforth, discussed the impact of Social Media on South Africa, with CNBC last month. Here is the YouTube clip:

As many of you know, Synthasite is launching soon (final confirmed date for the Technology Preview / Pre-Alpha is 4th June 07). We are looking forward to showing the world what we’ve been up to. Just to set expectations, we’re not releasing a fully functional application, but instead we’re trying to get feedback from our users in the early stages of development, in order to ensure that Synthasite will ultimately meet expectations by the time we get into Beta. In my previous blog post on Synthasite, I explained that I will be taking over Synthasite as CEO and spinning it out of incuBeta as a separate company, with incuBeta still retaining a small stake. I also indicated that we were going to attempt to move it to Silicon Valley in order to be closer to the action.

To this end, I’ve spent the better part of the past two months chatting with a few of the VC players in the space, both in London & Silicon Valley in order to get feedback, and potentially, Series A funding. The feedback we got just from the meetings were excellent, but most importantly, after speaking with VC’s in London, the view is that if development work can be done in a lower cost marketplace, such as Cape Town and the business development team is based in the business area’s that really meets the requirements of most startups.

So, in order to cut a long story short, I, along with the Synthasite team, will be basing ourselves in Cape Town permanently to develop Synthasite, and instead of moving the entire team across (disruptions and all), we’ll instead look to setup a Biz Dev office when the time is right, in key markets. The best part is, if we keep Synthasite in Cape Town, then there is really no need for a Series A type round of funding.

In order to focus on Synthasite, it was announced internally, and now to the rest of the world, that I will be leaving incuBeta on a full time basis, and moving directly into Synthasite, effective 1 August. It’s been really great growing a startup into an award winning company, but my passion has always been startups and I’m finally able to move into a full time role doing that in Synthasite. I’m lucky that there is a strong management team in place at incuBeta to drive the company forward, and the people on the ground are very capable of delivering. In order to ensure that the company can operate independently of me, there will be a full operational and relationship handover before 1 August.

In many ways, this has been a lifestyle decision, and I’m going to also try to cut down on the tremendous amount of air miles that I continue to rack up! As many of you may understand, the disruptive nature that flying around the world has on a person, on an almost monthly basis will eventually wear you down! I would like to spend at least the next few months firmly grounded in Cape Town, enjoying the life there (and I’m in Johannesburg right now!). Charlene, my wife & co-founder, will also be leaving the company to pursue her studies further and we’re planning on taking some much needed time off and we’re going to spend those airmiles going to places that we haven’t yet seen over the next year.

On a final note, in addition to Synthasite, I have setup a small Venture Capital fund for Cape Town based startups, called Lingham Capital (no site just yet), and I will aim to assist them with small amounts of seed capital and expertise in building their businesses, all of which will need to be globally focused in the medium term. I do not intend on investing in more than 5 startups at any one time, including Synthasite. My only other investment so far is SkyRove, which is a Social WiFi business based in Cape Town and after 1 August, I will be assisting Henk (the CEO) with taking his business to a global audience.

It’s really sad to be leaving incuBeta, but I know that all my relationships both internally and externally are all intact – so it’s not really a goodbye! I’ll probably post more reflections on this, and a slideshow later this week – but this was just a relatively quick heads up.

For the record – the numbers in there currently are just proxy and no indication of what our financial plan for Synthasite is

We’re launching Synthasite Version 2.0 on 1 June 2007 and in terms of the rebuild it will have taken us a total of 6 months from concept to deployment, using a core team of 3 full time engineers, 1 QA/Server infrastructure resource & some very agile methodologies (utilizing Basebamp & Rally) to launch Version 2.0. By comparison, Version 1.0 took the inputs of over a dozen people and about 2 years of development to complete. Couple that, in addition to the fact that we were building an AJAX application way before it was even called AJAX, means that there was a large amount of R&D that went into evolving the product, none of which was wasted, and ultimately led us down the new path that we are walking.

We aim to relocate the Synthasite team (6 people in total) to Silicon Valley in the next few months and run Synthasite from there, spinning it off as a separate entity to incuBeta – which as a Group is growing quickly in many areas, hence the reason to apply a more dedicated and focused team to grow Synthasite. I will be leading the company from there and I have effectively taken over as CEO of Synthasite.

Update: Here is the video embedded for your convenience.

Why are we doing the move? Paul Graham’s article on “Why Startups Condense in America” somehow struck a chord with me. Synthasite is South African homegrown technology, but in order for us to grow the business and stay ahead, it seems like the most obvious move is to base ourselves at the center of the the tech world. That’s not to say that you can’t grow a tech business elsewhere, but for most techies & geeks, at some point in your life, you want to be in a startup in Silicon Valley! Also, I had a meeting with Reid Hoffman, CEO of LinkedIn back in January and he basically said to me that (admittedly biased), it’s no coincidence that global companies such as eBay, Yahoo, Google & YouTube are all within a few miles from each other – good point!
Why have we done the rebuild? In short, when we started building Synthasite – Internet Explorer had a 90% market share and Firefox was a 1980′s movie starring Clint Eastwood. That was then and this is now – the new version of Synthasite will be cross browser compatible and have a host of other great features. Bear in mind that we’re only going with an Alpha launch in June, with Beta expected sometime around Q3, not everything will be in the first build.

Another good reason for the relaunch was that the market has evolved considerably since the original planning and build phase, and it was good to take a step back and create a vision for Version 2.0 before jumping straight in. Much of what has been done up to now has been trial and error – with great feedback from our Version 1.0 Beta testers. We now know where we are going, and in the spirit of all things “Web 2.0″ we’ve gone back into Stealth mode until June 1st.

So, a bit of advice to other Internet startup entrepreneurs that I have either learnt the easy way, or the hard way (not going to say which!):

1. Read Jason Fried’s Getting Real
2. Bootstrap Version 1.0 and get it out there ASAP – user feedback is imperative
3. Talk to other entrepreneurs who have been there, done that
4. Don’t bother the VC’s until you’re really ready with a focused offering – you only really get one shot to do a solid pitch.
5. Just do it! Stop planning and start prioritizing. It’s amazing what we can achieve when we focus and take action.

Here are some of the VC blogs that I read regularly – I don’t necessarily know these guys, but trust me, judging from their content, they know what they are talking about – and it’s worth taking a page out of their book, err… blog.

• FirstRound Capital’s Josh Kopelman – RedEye VC – Most notably, his most recent post.
• Crosslink Capital’s Peter Rip – EarlyStageVC
• Hummer Winblad’s Will Price – Particularly this slideshow/powerpoint that he produced.
• August Capital’s David Hornik – VentureBlog
• Guy Kawasaki’s – How to Change The World
• Union Square Ventures’ Fed Wilson – A VC – I particularly liked this post on widgets.
• YCombinator’s Paul Graham