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We’ll be in Barcelona next week for the Mobile World Congress! Last year, more than 67,000 attendees participated in the event.
We will use this opportunity to launch our new website along with a brand new offer… Algolia for FREE! Stay tuned!
If you happen to be attending MWC too, ping me if you’d like to discuss over a coffee 
(@dessaigne on twitter, or nicolas at algolia dot com).
I had the pleasure to be invited by David Catuhe to participate in a round table about Windows8 development during Microsoft TechDays 2013! I was joined by Christopher Maneu from Deezer and Guillaume Leborgne from MCNext, both deeply involved in Windows development. David (cropped from the photo) led the discussion with Jean Ferré, who leads the developers, platform and ecosystem division at Microsoft France.
The discussion was very interesting and openly addressed the late start of Microsoft on mobile. They seem to have spared no effort to ease the work of developers, for example by opening the platform to development in HTML5/Javascript. I confess I initially thought it was a strange choice for native apps but it seems to have attracted quite a few web developers.
This round table was a great opportunity to meet smart people and gain insight into the Microsoft platform! Thanks also to the journalists in attendance who covered Algolia in the IT press.
Start In Paris is a monthly event where 5 startups have the opportunity to pitch their service to the Paris startup community. After a first selection and then a public vote, we were selected as one of 5 finalists of the #22 edition that took place yesterday, January the 28th!
Algolia has greatly evolved over the last few months, so it was an excellent occasion for us to test a new pitch! And the response has truly exceeded our expectations. After a 5 minute pitch we received a rush of questions, displaying interest and insight from the 400-strong audience!
Demonstrating how Algolia Search functions in the wild, in this post we will discuss a recent integration with sharypic, another Paris-based startup focussed on photo sharing at events.
Sharypic is a web and mobile app dedicated to collaborative photo sharing, focussed on enabling users to easily gather photos from attendees during and after an event. The platform allows users to collect and share photos from all devices, including mobiles (via Twitter and Instagram), cameras, and computers, and from already existing albums on Facebook, Picassa, and Flickr. One of their killer features is the ability to stream photos to a live PhotoWall at the venue and to an embeddable slideshow widget. This increases engagement both with event attendees and with an online audience. On sharypic one of the primary ways that users discover events is via a search bar, in addition to pages highlighting recent and popular events.
Continue reading…
When I started to develop for Android it appeared to me that an APK file was just an archive, a simple approach that you can find in many systems today. Files are extracted from the archive at installation and you can access them via the file-system.
This seemed even more reasonable since Android uses Linux which is very good in respect to POSIX standards.
But I was completely wrong! An APK is not a mere archive: the application starts from and uses the APK at runtime! This is a horrible decision that will probably hurt Android for a long time…
[Edit 28-Jan-2013] The goal of this post was to express my point of view about the bad properties of using directly the APK file at runtime versus relying on the file system. I used memory-mapped file to illustrate this but the post is incorrect on that topic. There is in fact a way to memory-map a file directly from the APK: you can use an extension for which files are stored uncompressed inside the APK (mp3, jpg, …) and use the AssetManager.openFD() or Resources.openRawResourceFD() to have offset/length inside the APK file.
All my thanks to Jay Freeman for his excellent feedback. His comments helped me to understand my mistake and to improve our Android integration!
[/Edit]
Continue reading…
About one month ago, we were given the opportunity to participate in Seedcamp Paris 2012. In this post I’ll try to think back to that time and provide feedback, along with some advice if you’re considering going in that direction. In short, I can already say that this experience has revolutionized the way we drive the company!
Everything starts with a good application… or a rushed one in our case! At that time (end of October) we were fully focused on product development and finishing everything needed for our launch (documentation, video, etc.). While we knew about Seedcamp coming to Paris in early December, we initially saw it as a potential distraction from more important stuff… we could not have been more wrong!
Continue reading…
When we started Algolia Development for Android, binary size optimization was not one of our main concerns. In fact we even started to develop in JAVA before switching to C/C++ for reasons of performance.
We were reminded of the importance of binary size by Cyril Mottier who informed us that it would be difficult to integrate our lib in AVelov Android Application because its size. AVelov is 638KB and Algolia was 850KB, which would mean that AVelov would more than double in size with Algolia Search embedded.
To address this problem we managed to reduce Algolia binary size from 850KB to 307KB. In this post we share how we did it.
Continue reading…
After the launch of our Windows 8 beta (desktop and tablets), I’m pleased to start the year with still new platforms support! And this time it’s directly two new platforms that we launch: Mac OSX and Windows Phone 8.
Following the mobile trend, “app” stores are becoming more and more popular on desktops. OS X started first with its App Store in January 2011 (already 2 years ago) while Windows joined the trend only recently.
With the release of this beta, we now support both environments! Get ready to build fantastic search in your apps! Continue reading…
I’ve been convinced for a long time that simplicity is the most important property of a product. Long-gone are the 90s when a product was admired for its complexity. But I am also convinced that this is the most complex property to achieve and maintain as time passes by.
A good example of an over-complex product is Atlassian JIRA, a bug tracker that also do scrum management and plenty of other things via dozens of plugins. It’s basically a toolbox to create the bug tracker adapted to your company.
In my previous job, I faced an uncomfortable situation with JIRA because of its complexity. We used it for bug tracking and scrum management and I tried to upgrade our old version to the latest one. After some long hours to upgrade our setup on a test server, I finally got the latest version working but most of our installed plugins were not available anymore because the authors did not port their plugins to the new plugin API. Of course each plugin was there for a reason and I was in a tricky situation: keep the old version with security issues or upgrade to a new version without our plugins. Continue reading…
One of the worst user experience I had with a software is with the Sony PS3. I kind of like this product, I found the user interface very nice and well organized… but they are much too agressive on upgrades! They simply block features until the upgrade is done!
A few weeks ago I wanted to watch a VOD movie with my wife. I launched the Playstation Store that asked me to upgrade the OS to the latest version. That’s 45 minutes before to be able to access the Playstation again! But wait! Once the new OS was installed, I tried to launch the Playstation Store again… This time this was the Playstation Application that was not up to date ! Continue reading…
