If you’re not on facebook you might miss out on a huge market!

We can help you get your company started on facebook but not only that, we will start marketing your facebook site so that you can get a head start.

At Leván Media we can help you to:

- create a facebook account for your company
- personalize it with your logo and company info
- connect your facebook site to your homepage (of course we can help you get a new homepage as well)
- ongoing marketing of your facebook site until you have reached at least 250 “likes” (it’s not so much fun displaying your followers on your homepage if the number is around zero)
- tips and consultation

In short, this is all you need to get started! So contact us today to order or discuss your facebook campaign in detail.

P.S. Of course we can create custom made applications as well.

A new year is alwyas filled with expectancy, goals and dreams that we want to achieve. It’s like a blank page with endless opportunities. Who will become our customers and partners this year? What online based business idea will be launched and take the market by storm?

Have you considered how you will reach your goals this brand new year? If done right, a well planned and well maintained website can be very helpful when it comes to lead generation and increasing your company’s sales figures.

A good website is more than just a nice looking design (although that’s VERY important). You have to think through every step in the process in order to reach your target group AND convert visitors to purchasing customers. There are many factors to consider.

If you are ready to make 2012 the best year ever when it comes to using your website as an effective marketing channel, don’t hesitate to contact us and see what ideas can be born from our meeting.

I’m thankful to the company that they chose Leván Media to be their partner in making that idea come true.

If you haven’t checked out www.myfriendposter.com already I urge you to do so. Play around with the functions and have fun creating your own collage – a memory for life and a perfect gift to anyone who uses facebook!

NOTE: Right now you can also create a FREE digital image to publish on facebook.

Why would you invest in a good QA process? First of all you want to make sure that your web application runs smoothly upon launch. Secondly, you won’t have a head ache going through the entire application yourself since it takes DAYS (not hours) to do a good QA.

The developers who work on the production always check the application themselves but you know how it is when you yourself work on something for a long time… you get kind of blinded and can’t see the errors in what you yourself have made.

That’s where our QA team steps in! A team consists of one or several people and none of them have previously participated in creating the product. The team gets an introduction of the product that has been created and a copy of the requirement specification. With this on hand, the testing starts. We check the applications behaviour in various browsers and carefully document each bug with screenshots, URL’s, when and how it happened.

When I started Leván Media I didnt’ work with QA teams. Sometimes it meant long nights of frustration, doing QA’s myself on client projects. Over the years I have found out that it’s not just recommended to setup a QA team on custom made web applications, it’s a REQUIREMENT for success!

So, take my advice and make sure that your budget allows a good QA team to take on your project next time you’re investing in a web application. It’s not “finished” just because the developer says it’s finished. Trust me, QA teams are a great ROI and a good pillow!!!

Martin Leván
Director and Founder

So, in order to make our lives a bit easier, here’s a great video that shows you the benefits of Microsoft Exchange.

If you’re ready to order your own hassle free email solution after watching this video, contact us at +46 8 55 00 27 30 or drop us an email.

We also changed our news section to a somwhat more awesome Blog where we will be posting whatever we find interresting.

So, enjoy and send us some comments if you like.

Download Swedish Pricelists 110801C

All but the simplest software projects are flying cars. No one has invented one yet, so no one can reliably tell you how long it would take to make and definitely not how much it will cost, unless time and money aren’t important. And, time and money are important to everyone.

I can define the problem, and I have a solution.

Every Software Project Is a Flying Car
I picked flying cars because, unlike a transporter, a flying car sounds possible. We know how to build cars already and we know how to make things fly already. How hard could it be?Software projects are like that. We know what software is, and we know how to create software (sort of). The problem is that the nature of software is, if it already exists we use it. If the software doesn’t exist, no matter how much it seems similar to software we have seen or heard about, it’s a new invention. No one can reliably tell you how long it takes to invent something that never existed before. (If an entity meets a fixed date and price, they have built thousands just like it—as in home building—or there was some serious padding going on.)

Building software is not building cars, homes, or widgets. A chunk of software is a brand new invention. Worse, tools change frequently, methodologies come and go, and team compositions are as flaky as ever. This means that for all intents and purposes every piece of software is different and every dynamic in the equation is different almost every time.

The remedy to fixed price bids: Don’t promise a fixed price for the whole shooting match if you are a software builder, and get another set of bids if you are the customer.

How Do I Build a Flying Car?
If you are a provider, you sell time and materials. Then, who cares how long it takes, you’re making money. If you are a customer, insist on time and a fixed price because you know when the check writing stops. The problem with either of these alternatives is that either the vendor doesn’t make any money or the customer doesn’t get shiny features they forgot to ask for up front. However, if both sides are negotiating in good faith and both want to be satisfied, there is a better way.

The better way is to agree on fixed time and materials—a de facto fixed price—for both sides for every aspect of the project. Suppose you really want to build a flying car. Then, vendor and provider can agree on a specific amount of time and materials to define all of the requirements of the car, vertical takeoff, hovering, top speed, stop distance, color, sound system, and so forth. The vendor gets paid for every hour worked and the customer only pays for the duration agreed upon. This is easy, right?

To ensure that both vendor and customer have a real chance of flying high over traffic is that the agreement must include a decision point at the end of requirements: a) You have enough to go on or b) You need more time. If the answer is that there is enough to go on, proceed to the next phase; otherwise, both parties must agree on a fixed amount of time and materials to sustain a continuance. The problem is, of course, that the customer will get some information wrong, change their minds, or just omit something important. That’s okay. Every one of these changes is a time and materials fixed requirements session.

By fixing time and materials—cost—the vendor makes money and the customer is motivated to compromise, focusing on things they are willing to and can afford to pay for.

Next, do some project planning, but before you start make sure you and the customer agree on the amount of time and materials and the level of detail and conditions for a) a continuance or b) proceeding. Again, the vendor makes a fair wage and the customer has a pre-established total cost. (Also, consider incentivizing vendors for finishing early.)

Before you proceed to design and construction, throw out everything that isn’t very valuable and very useful. Now, proceed to design. Complete the process with construction, testing, and deployment.

You say, “Paul, this is a waterfall process you are describing.” You’re right, but here is the difference. You already know a single waterfall doesn’t work. Nobody gets all the requirements, analysis, design, construction right the first time; otherwise, you would never have to test and debug code. So, in your process include a phased plan with a fixed price for every phase and plan to repeat the entire cycle as many times as it takes. In between cycles, include a decision point: a) Do you have the criteria met to proceed or should you have a continuance, or b) Do we pull the plug on the whole thing?

Finally, I can’t say this enough: Throw out useless frills, focus on the hardest, most complicated and valuable things first, and (vendor and customer) spend your time on constructing those things. If you tackle the tackle high value high priority things up front—those things that make the system worth having—even after the first cycle you have the makings of a valuable system for the customer. Hence, the customer will won’t to proceed and the vendor makes a tidy profit. If the customer isn’t interested in permitting a fair profit, seek ye elsewhere, vendor.

What Could Possibly Go Wrong?
It all sounds very reasonable and rational, right?! You have very smart people building software, but even Microsoft is perpetually late—how do they make money? Well, Dr. Forsythe from Michigan State’s Computer Science department said it best: “building software is the hardest thing that people do.”

Software is purely brain stuff. The mind can imagine (and has imagined) almost anything. And, things are often simpler in your heads than they ever can be in the physical, tangible world. Plus, software engineers are very bright (sometimes cocky) and overestimate their own abilities. (So does everybody else, for that matter.) So, what can go wrong? Everything, and everything just about always does. The way you fix this is to offer continual training and on-going education, allow people to specialize and work on team formulations that are more static and not so fluid. The same 10 or 20 people doing the same thing project after project will get better at it.

Because you know things will go wrong, build in schedule tolerances. Perhaps vendor and customer splits overages 50-50. There are few projects where the customer’s constipated inadequacies and at least as much at fault as left-brained over-imagineering.

The End
I said I had a solution. I didn’t say it would be easy. The truth is that customers goof and engineers goof, but everyone knows that vendors have to make a profit to keep being vendors and customers have to manage their money to continue consuming. The answer is that both sides have to negotiate in good faith and build in tolerances and decision points for all the things that you have learned can and will go awry.