petsicon blogOur blog about petsicon, the pet health lexicon

Ok,ok I know, we’ve been been lazy with blogging, but there was just
sooo much other stuff that we had to do AND we are now in super-focus-mode,
wanting to get our baby out into the world as fast as possible.
So this is what we’ve been doing:

First of all, I’ll not do the bold words anymore. This was meant
as optimization for speedreaders, but I don’t think that the majority
of the readers of this blog are actually speed readers, so let’s
try “normal”.

We are in the process of modifying our system so that we can have
more user engagement and interaction, meaning that people will be able
to share their knowledge with other users in a new and exciting way.
We’re particularly excited about this new idea and our vets are now
creating hundreds of new great information bits, or qnobits (short
for knowledge bits) for our users.
Those cover all areas of pet knowledge ranging from questions like
‘What things do I have to buy for my puppy?’ or ‘What can I feed my dog?’
to more medical questions like ‘How do I measure my dog’s temperature’
or ‘What do I have to do if my dog has flatulence?’.
Luckily our system is designed to be easily extendable and the new
module is fitting in greatly!

Furthermore our design crew, namely Mick and Vera, are redesigning
our site so expect more elegance and beauty coming soon!
We’re also getting more customized dog figures, i.e. breed specific
figures, we think you don’t want to be clicking on some generic dog
but rather on a graphic of your dog, so look out for your own clickable
dog breed figure soon, but we might need some time since there are over
800 dog breeds and there’s only so many figures we can make.

On another note we are very excited to announce that we have two new
additions to our Japanese team, a Japanese professor and veterinarian,
Ken Hayashida, and a practicing Japanese veterinarian, Toshiro Kaneko.
Their work has already greatly improved our Japanese content and
I hope that the Japanese team will keep the momentum going.
GO JAPANESE PETSIES!!!

We hope to start closed alpha-testing within the next month and are
excited to show our “knowledge machine” to everyone!
(That is everyone in the closed-alpha test

Oh, I almost forgot, you can now sign-up for news updates on
our site so if you don’t want to miss any of the exciting stuff that’s
about to happen, sign up here !!!

Although from today it’s supposed to be rainy for a couple of days
we’ve had sunshine till now which made us buy a barbecue and actually
barbecue a lot for lunch since it’s a) tasty b) fast c) easy d) fun!!

So our one-week-Atkinson-diet gave us super-coding-energy and
we’ve made great progress on our new system:

The backend now is what we call our elegant potential giant in the
embryo stadium meaning we’ve constructed the framework and
some of the logic and structures, but that it still needs to be filled
with AI and data.
But still I am very satisfied with it, when I look and think about it, it
gives me the same sensation as when I discover or read a very elegant
mathematical proof, one of those that Paul Erdős would have called
“one from His Book”, the idea of god having a book with the best and
most beautiful mathematical proofs.
When I think about Erdős, this one thing that his friend said to him
always comes to mind: “a mathematician is a machine for turning coffee
into theorems”, so analogous to that you could say that
“a petsi is machine for turning bbq-ed meat into code”

The frontend is also coming along well, we’re programming in the new
Flex 4 beta, a great new framework which is much more ingenious than
the previous Flex 3 but not really finished, I guess it’s a transitional
version and the finished new framework will be Flex 5.
Anyways it’s much fun to program our new interface as well as some
really good new communication mechanisms between back- and frontend
that we have thought up.

So let’s hope that our progress will not slow down despite the weather
preventing us from bbq-ing

This weekend has been our slack-off weekend. On saturday we worked
only half the day and then went to see a soccer game in a pub around the
corner. And as with everything at the moment, this game also miraculously
turned out in our favour, the small team we were rooting for, Mainz 05,
the club of the city in which Christoph grew up and we finished high-school
together, a club that just ascended to the first league this summer and has
the smallest budget of all teams in the Bundesliga, beat the biggest, most
famous, most successful and of course wealthiest club of the league,
Bayern Muenchen.
This once again shows that David CAN BEAT Goliath.
And at the moment we feel like little Davids and we’re looking for our Goliath!
We’re just not sure who it is. Is it Microsoft or is it Google? Or is it some
pet-site-Goliath?
Anyway that’s what makes soccer fascinating. Soccer teams can basically
be seen as complex system, a field that I was and am very interested in
over the past years. It basically means that in a complex system such as a
soccer team, the whole is more than the sum of its parts. I’ve read
studies that say that in a match between two soccer teams of different
strengths, the probability of the stronger team winning is approximately
at 60% whereas in individual sports such as tennis, the probability of the
stronger player winning is at 90% (that’s why R.Federer has won everything
in the past years but Real Madrid couldn’t win the Champions League)
I believe that the same can be said about companies and the market.
If the right components (in this case people) find themselves than
they’re able to create stuff that transcends their individual and
collective capabilities. And applied to the market it in turn means
that the biggest companies with the most capable people will not always
win (Or in the case of Microsoft over the past years, never win

Other than that, I also got my RFID set from touchatag on saturday
and spent sunday afternoon playing around with it. Since they have
a cool API and it is a possibility for petsicon to enter the vet market
later, meaning to provide online medical documentation software
to vets, I programmed a little app that automatically logs the pet into
the petsicon system (and some more stuff that’s secret
Basically later the pet can walk into a vets office, a RFID reader would
read the RFID chip of the pet and if that office or veterinarian was authorized
before to have access to the pet’s data by the owner, the vet would
automatically get the medical history and all relevant data on his
screen instantly.

Pretty cool, huh?

The miracles of technology obviously don’t protect us from human
stupidity, in this case my stupidity, as I wrote a world-changing,
potentially literature-nobel-prize-winning blog-entry the day before
yesterday but stupidly copied some other mail correspondence in the
file and so this cute blog entry will be lost forever, and I don’t
remember what I wrote exactly.

PetsiAttack!!

Probably I was still raving about our first petsicon core team
photoshoot with our new friend Daisuke Nikaido, a Japanese
photographer who put up his tents here in Berlin recently to get a fresh
perspective and refine his super-photographing-skills as you can see on
our team pictures. Here a small sample:


It was a lot of fun for the four of us, especially with our Duisburg-
petsi Calle, who we can only meet every couple of weeks but who’s in
constant skype-conference reach and,as I mentioned in the last post,
still manages to do a great job.

Later we went to the best pizza place in town (some in the team say
second best) Il casolare, the rustic italian pizzeria run and founded
by Italian punk-musicians, to have our first petsicon company dinner!
(The three-star-michelin restaurants will have to wait until we
actually MAKE some money )
Furthermore our long lost brother, Andreas Mertin, our UK vet who we
had lost contact to for a few months while he explored the UK
veterinarian wilderness, must have smelled our reunion and surprisingly
also showed up in Berlin and joined our first petsicon party which
(unfortunately?) didn’t last as long as those parties that we had
when we young (that means when we started studying)
I could never have imagined that I would rather go to bed not too late
to be able to get up the next morning and work, but I’m happy to have
found something that is worth it.

We were also asked recently who we later want to sell our business to.
The answer of course is: “To NOONE!!!” (Yes, we know, that’s not
something potential investors and venture capitalists want to hear)
At least that’s our wish, what the harsh reality might bring we don’t
know and we’re also pragmatic and don’t see that as a dogma.
So I guess the core team is of the same opinion about petsicon
as Alfred Lord Tennyson who said in his famous lost-love-quote:
“‘Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.”
We love you petsicon and we’ll make sure never to lose you

Over the past few weeks, to be exact since we published large parts of
the content of the iDiDi in html-form, the little traffic that we had from
Google, i.e. users who wanted to try out the iDiDi-component of petsicon,
had unfortunately halved and it seems to have taken Google quite some
time to send its crawling army back to us.
This is all because we have a much more maschine-readable
/understandable structure of the html-part of the site now and
therefore deleted all that old stuff.
Now the traffic is slowly picking up again and we see good progress
in our rankings in the searches for relevant search terms (yippiee)

We felt that this step was necessary to increase our relevancy
to search engines so this shows that sometimes you have to
take a step back in order to jump three steps forward.

We are tremendously thankful to all you people who at the
moment are helping us with your advice and your experience.
It is a huge boost to the team that so many people believe
in our concept and in us.

We are currently finishing the fully translated Japanese
version and are at the moment actively looking for
“petsicon ambassadors” or “petsibassadors“ as we call
them:
We want win the most active and enthusiastic members
of the pet community to make our product even better! As “petsicon ambassadors/ petsibassadors” users will get free premium accounts (once we have those) and will
be able to test and review our newest unreleased
features that are still in development and therefore actively
contribute to and possibly change the direction petsicon
is heading.
So if you are actively engaged in your pet community and
want to get this exciting opportunity to get access to the
newest features our team came up with and therefore
help us shape this site, by all means send us a message
and get in touch with the petsies at petsibassy (a t) petsicon.de .

In other news we recently consulted with some really
helpful people who advised us on how to scale our service
and gave us an insight into the online advertising business.
Other people gave us hints on how to get users to our site
and what kind of questions potential investors will ask us
(Luckily we’ve already prepared that but will be able to convince
even more with even better answers and ideas)

So I’ll conclude this post with a famous quote from the movie
“Wayne’s world”:
“Petsi on, Garth!”- “Petsi on, Wayne!”
(ok, it’s slightly altered )

This week we had the pleasure to welcome two new
members to our petsifamily! A new veterinarian
and a new marketing specialist/lobbyist.

It is overwhelming and I am very proud about how our
petsies are willing to put their free time and effort
into our project, so I guess we are like Berlin,
the city petsicon is located at the moment, whose
motto is “poor but sexy” .

Further refinements to the flex-frontend have been
made, that means it now is with English content and has
a beauti- and simplified interface, and we’ve switched our
server from tomcat to jboss to prepare for the masses that
we expect (or hope for) someday

We went to the Mini-Seedcamp in Berlin because we were looking
for funding but what we found was much more valuable:

inspiration and ideas

And that is exactly what we needed! We met some smart people with
great ideas and open minds and I think they woke up the real entrepreneurs
in us. I came up with a plan which only requires a small amount of
money right now. At the moment we are buzzing with ideas and energy,
one of the VCs, Ivan Farneti, said something at the panel discussion
about startups in Silicon Valley, how they work harder than startups in Europe
–and probably that’s true, but this comment inspired us to shift gears
into what our team calls “petsicon gear 2.0“!

Personally, I am so enthusiastic about some of our new ideas I
had the night after Seedcamp that as of now I can’t sleep because
of excitement and use that extra time to come up with new ideas.
My girlfriend is little bit worried because I am forgetting to eat
but I’m never hungry and when I eat I want to get back to work.
(My theory is that I’m naturally high on endorphins which prevent
me from feeling hungry)

I use a moleskine notebook to write down all my ideas and in the
past week I have filled up almost one whole book which makes
about 150 pages of ideas

On a technical note, we decided to implement our product in html
and have some great ideas for which we are making plans on how to
implement — the bad thing is that our next milestone, the launching
of cat and dog in English and German, has to be postponed until the
middle of August, then it will come online first with dogs in English
and German, and for now only the German site will get cats as well.

We also decided to put our complete content in a nice and
organized html-form on our website and integrated bookmarking
and recommendation tools so you can bookmark and recommend
us to your friends and colleagues. These are steps that we think are
pretty easy to implement so expect this to happen within the next 10 days!

We also took Inma Martinez’s really good advice to do customized
graphics for the individual dog breeds which we are now doing,
the first step is to make graphics for the 5 most popular dog breeds.
The other races will be made after that little by little because our
graphics department is notoriously understaffed. (Meaning our two
friends, Vera and Mick, who helped us so much and did a lot of the
graphics, have to earn money and are busy with their jobs right now )

So please be patient with those customizations, they will come.

We also now have a twitter account so for the latest news follow
us at twitter.com/petsicon or check (and track-) back to this blog!