Wow. 5 days no post, BUT, I have used that time really well. I had a nice christmas as my wife’s and my family was visiting us. I have setup a 3 meter high christmas tree with real candles which is bringing in the right christmas feeling :)

But, besides partying I have been really busy, especially for the last two days since christmas has been over. I have finally made the first steps towards starting a project that I wanted to start for a bit over a year ago. Back then, I believed I would have to spend something like 5 Mio. € to get it started but by now, after what I have learned during the previous month, I have changed my mind. I think now, that any project has to prove itself on the internet, which means, that you should rather have a lean but swift start instead of spending too much time on development if you do not know yet whether the community will grasp and accept that business idea of yours at all.

So, instead of spending a fortune on development of the functionality that the project needs to have in phase 3 or 4, I will have a shot at getting it up and running in a month time.

The project itself is simple to explain: To establish a portal, that allows for joint stock trading. Today, you still have to be a lone warrior when it comes to investment activities. But tomorrow, you can share the experience and knowledge with thousand of other users and even engage in joint portfolio management activities. Ok, that is the whole idea in a nutshell, but there are of course some more twists to it, that would first of all make things too complex at the moment being and are secondly better to be kept secret for the time being ;)

However, as I said before, I aim for a lean start. So, the platform will basically be:

  • vBulletin v3.6.4
  • vbadvanced CMS for vBulletin,
  • zoints and
  • quotemedia.com’s suite of financial applications

I am a big fan of opensource products, but when it came to deciding which products would be the best to handle and especially the best to outsource, I finally came to those commercial products.

I have setup a development environment locally and ported that one today to the net. I will reveal the domain name at a later stage, probably in a week’s time, when I have setup the first prototype.

Besides that, I have brought online the 100th adsense site, so hopefully the cashstream to finance my activities is online as well :) I will start adsense optimization by the end of next week, when the first reliable datasets are available.

Have a good night!