Posts Tagged Apture

5 Tips for Successful Quality Assurance in a Startup

Sep 8

Posted by Andrew Machado in Technology | 9,648 Comments

At Apture we keep an extremely small team. Like most startups you do this for a number of reasons from keeping your burn low to maximizing efficiency. One of the hardest parts of working within a small team especially in a software company is the testing of your software. We try and roll code as often as possible at the office to not only test new features but improve performance and squash bugs. Over the last year of doing this I’ve found a few tricks I thought I’d share with the community.

1. Get Yourself VMWare Fusion or Parallels if on a Mac

A lot of startups primarily buy Macs nowadays to save on the “IT” costs of keeping other types of machines running. Personally I’m indifferent about Mac or Windows or Linux, but if you do run a Mac be sure to get an emulator so you can install Windows XP or a newer version of Windows to test compatible software.

2. Never trust IE Tester…and instead install Windows XP multiple times

People seem to swear by IETester to ensure their website or software is compatible with Internet Explorer browsers. I’m from the old school I want to see it in action with my own eyes to ensure its compatible. To do this within your emulator install multiple copies of the same install of Windows. What I mean buy that is pickup a copy of Windows XP and install it twice within your emulator. That way you can keep one on IE 6 and upgrade the other to IE 7 or IE 8. This way you do compatibility testing with the worst supported browser on the planet and a slightly improved one in IE 7 or IE 8.

3. Test the same browser on both Mac and Windows

We’ve been battling a bug where Flash videos bleed into the Apture Magic Search Bar. Oddly this does not happen in every browser in every operating system. Without testing the same product in Chrome Mac and Chrome Windows we probably wouldn’t have caught the problem before launch. Always test across Operating Systems even if the browser number is the same.

4. Run beta builds of browsers, but rename them to keep them seperate

If you distribute an extension or web product be sure to run beta builds of software. Be sure to rename them though so you can have the current public version and beta version coexisting on your machine. This ensures when the beta version of the software becomes public release your product is already compatible. This ensures you don’t get deemed incompatible in the FireFox Extensions gallery and your users remain happy

5. Load up your machine with 4 to 8 gigs of RAM

Even laptops nowadays support 8 gigs of ram. In fact you can get 8 gigs of ram off Amazon for $199 or less. Having this much ram ensures you can run multiple operating systems and browsers quickly and efficiently. When you start opening multiple tabs your machine will run out of ram very quickly. Just writing this blog post right now you will see I already have over half my RAM full. If I open up VMWare Fusion I may run out of ram causing my machine to slow down dramatically. You want to avoid this at all costs when testing.

Tags: Apture, QA, Quality Assurance, RAM

5 Commandments for Community Management

Aug 28

Posted by Andrew Machado in Personal, Technology | 9,572 Comments

1. Be Fast
Google, Facebook and others often write about how important being fast is. Speed in any business is important. In community management responding to any support emails, questions or quickly letting the community know you are aware of the problem is imperative. The reason speed is so important above everything else is my eyes is it leaves people with an impression about how serious you treat them. Constantly I hear “Wow amazingly fast response!” or tweets like this.

2. Know Your Product

This may seem simple. It isn’t. When I say know your product, I mean know it better than anyone at the company. In the case with Apture I pride myself on attempting to know more than @tristanharris (he has an insane ability to find things) when it comes down to bugs, general usage and workarounds to common problems. The reason this is so important is it plays into commandment one, but it also frees up your engineers to keep working on larger problems. When you know your product well a great majority of gripes users have can be solved without an engineer. When you run a small shop engineering time is imperative, slowing them down should be avoided at all costs. One issue I’ve seen pop up since the launch of Apture Search is where users may install our javascript twice on a page. When you know the entire installation process, how to read html, etc you can quickly walk the user through a solution to this problem quickly. They’ll love you for this.

3. Always Be Closing

As a Community Manager your job is to “manage the community” well a big part of this is growing the community. You can only grow the community so much by being quick and knowing your product. Start looking for potential new customers who you think would love it. A quick tip for this is find a target on Twitter send them an @ message about how you have an awesome product for their site and you’d love to send them a demo. They’ll usually reply. Who doesnt want to see a demo? You can do contests and things to drive participation, but I’m a firm believer especially in new companies you need to use brute force to grow your business.

4. Be Yourself

You probably spend a great majority of your day inside GetSatisfaction or inside your mail program replying to customers. When communicating with people who are having problems be yourself, feel more like a real person than an automated reply. If I’m talking with someone who runs a sports site, I’ll mention something about an article I read on their site or a player from a sports they like. These types of things I believe break the ice with someone and give them comfort in knowing a capable person is on the other end, but they are also cool

5. Connect on Twitter or Facebook with your customers

If someone has a great experience with getting help from you find them on Twitter or Facebook and connect with them. You should not only build your community for your company, but increase your circle of connections. Now when I go to SXSW or BWE I can say hi to Kate Buck Jr, simply because after talking with her a few times over Twitter about Apture we are now friends. Relationships with people are not only beneficial personally, but if I need help promoting something for Apture I’m always going to reach out to her. Just don’t post crazy pictures of yourself on Facebook or they may see them

I hope these tips help you become a better community manager. If you have any questions or comments do not be afraid to reach out on Twitter or leave a note below.

Tags: Apture, community managment

Quora, Faithless and Stats Reports

May 19

Posted by Andrew Machado in Personal, Technology | 8,606 Comments

As I mentioned last week I’m going to try and do one of these posts every week.

1. Quora

I’ve covered Quora before. I think their search is fantastic. This week I’ve found myself late at night asking questions and getting answers to things I’ve always wondered from Search Engine Optimization to debating Instrumental Groups. Well this week I asked a question to the community if Firefox would have Double Digit Marketshare in 3 to 5 years. Within a day I had received countless replies from the current CEO of Mozilla John Lilly to the Co-Founder Blake Ross. It was a pretty “magical” experience to have people directly related to the product responding, but was even crazier was TechCrunch found the question and wrote a story about it…sadly not giving me credit

2. Faithless

The new Faithless CD dropped yesterday titled “The Dance“. It’s pretty terrible. I’m really dissapointed how a group can make so many epic songs then release something as derivative as this. Luckily the lead single is great.

3. We are finally mailing stats reports to user of the Apture Search Bar.

What is cool about this is delivered to our customers every week is a detailed report showing them pageviews, popular queries, share numbers and engagement provided from Apture. We’ve gotten lots of praise and only one complaint…make it less wide

If you haven’t signed up your site for the Apture Search Bar what are you waiting for?

Tags: Apture, faithless, Quora

The Game, Keane and Apture Extends it’s reach

May 13

Posted by Andrew Machado in Personal | 10,253 Comments

I’m going to try and do one of these every week I’ll be covering everything from technology to music from around the internet.

1. Dewey’s interviews with The Game

My buddy Dewey interviewed the rapper Game and its a fantastic piece covering everything from making music to beating Brandon Jennings at basketball.

2. Got the new Keane album

Always been a big fan of Keane and their latest album Night Train is a bit of change for the band adding guest appearances and the sound shifting. You can watch the latest video Stop for a Minute below.

3. Apture going live on a wealth of new sites

We recently launched the Apture Search Bar on Macnn, iPodnn, Electronista and CyclingTips. I’ve pasted shots of their bars below and man are they pretty.