What Good Consulting Looks Like in 2025
A lot of consulting still looks the same on the surface: discovery workshops, slide decks, a roadmap, and a promise that things will move faster afterwards. The problem is that modern teams are dealing with a very different reality now. AI is reshaping workflows, cloud costs are under scrutiny, reliability is directly tied to revenue, and product teams are under pressure to ship without creating a bigger mess underneath.
That changes what good consulting should look like.
Read more →BICA* - Best Instant Coffee Attendant
Bica is a typical portuguese expression for a small cup of coffee.
It all began with a need to drink coffee! Over spring, every day, after having lunch in the galley, there was a widespread urge to drink coffee… without having to climb all the way up to the 3rd floor, where the coffee machine was in our old office.
Through some volunteering, or lot drawing, process, someone would climb the steps, bring back the coffee and happiness would ensue.
Read more →Migrate from KissMetrics to Customer.io
Limetree, like a lot of companies out there, relied on KissMetrics to get insights on users. We tracked lots of events and tried to make sense of them.
With all this data there was still one flaw. We could easily segment customers and create useful charts, but we could not reach them. KissMetrics did not help here; the data was fairly closed and there was no API available.
I wanted to email customers who had used the service for a few weeks and then stopped. Or those who only sent pictures but no videos. I wanted to tell them that video was an important part of the product.
Read more →ChillOut Everyday Player
Last night I launched a new player for the ChillOut Everyday page. It is very simple and stylish and you can find there dozens of good music non-stop. More players with other genres will be launched soon.
Read more →I won the Hackafone
Last weekend I went to OPorto, Portugal, to participate in the Hackafone: a mobile application contest where participants have to brainstorm, create an idea and produce it in 18 hours. The two winners would win a **Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 **and, above all, the app will be marketed by Vodafone in their app store and communication channels.
The event was hosted in the Geeks Lab of muchBeta, a web creative saas power house, located in Afurada, near the Douro River; p.s. great view! The app was created with @ricardjorg and @luismvaz. We are going to finish it until the end of January 2012 and you can expect it in an Android, iPhone and iPad near you. Following is a sneak preview of the splash page;
Read more →Analytics with Redis
This is my experience using Redis.io as a datastore to support an analytics system. I originally used MySQL for the job but for some reasons it did not correspond to my expectations.
The objective for this system is to give hourly social metrics like page fans, page views, posts shares, from Facebook, but also how much likes, shares and tweets the posts from several websites received. This would enable, later, the visualization how page posts, that link to the website content, influence the ecosystem.
Read more →Working in Sanoma Media
Since May 2011 I am working on Sanoma Media, a subsidiary of Sanoma which operates in 20 european countries and employed over 15k last year.
I will be producing web applications mainly in Facebook and other social networks. More updates in the future.
Read more →Video Conferencing with HTML5
Did you know that work is being done to enable videoconferencing from HTML5 applications? Ian Hickson has been doing work on the element in a separate draft to make this possible.
Read more →Live video streaming with PHP
Picture this. We want to stream live video. In fact don’t need PHP. We only need a flash player (or HTML5) and our live feed. The problem appear when we need to offer some kind of security.
Read more →Sync Gmail Contacts and Google Calendar with Outlook
There are many tutorials out there but they are all too complicated or/and give you paid, complicated tools to do the job.
Both tools on this post are free, will sit on your tray and won’t bother you, while maintaining your contacts and calendar synced. I’m gonna show you the easiest way to do it.
Google Calendar Sync
Download page: https://web.archive.org/web/20090522185324/https://www.google.com/support/calendar/bin/answer.py?answer=89955 (Direct link to download)
Installation
1. Read through the Google Calendar Sync Terms of Service, and click **I Agree**.
2. Follow through the Installation Options and click **Install** to finish the set-up process.
3. Once Google Calendar Sync is installed on your computer, the Google Calendar Sync Settings window will appear:
Just enter your email/password and click Save. If you don’t want to sync back to Google Calendar choose “1 way: Google Calendar to Microsoft Outlook”
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