Pedro Carvalho

You and your customers

“Act in the best interests of your customers. This does not mean to obey, but to listen, learn and lead.” by Dharmesh

You know that feeling when someone puts in words something you absolutely agree and live by it? I got that feeling reading that tweet. I think I’m going to make a t-shirt or write that in my business cards.

My new business cards

Aren’t my new business cards really cool? Inspired by my profile on the i2devlabs website

The photo quality isn’t that good. I will have to take another one.

Good times

I can never get myself to post frequently… damn it! Ok, so 4 months after my last post, about my beloved standing desk (back pain is no more), here I am writing about good times and happiness. What? Happiness in Portugal in these days, with the crisis and tax raises and whatnot. Yes, good, old fashioned, kinda silly happiness! And why I’m happy? Because all of this:

My daughter, Maria Inês, is growing like crazy and she’s the best 6 month old baby you can imagine. It takes a lot to make her cry and her default state is smiling. The kind of smile that makes you also smile even after the longest, toughest day. The thing with babies is that they get cuter by the day, even if the day before you thought they cannot be any cuter.

My company, i2devlabs is going strong. We’re making a new project for a very big client. It’s an enterprise software project, for managing shipping containers in real time around a gigantic chemical plant. It’s our biggest project to date and the type of project a very small company like i2 doesn’t usually do. I love to be in a position where I can prove that a couple of motivated, smart guys can do what most people believe that can only be done by a big ass team, with some 20 developers and project managers and the like. This project is the second of this type for this client and I’m starting to feel that theres potential for this to become a product or, at least, to be able to replicate for other clients, or for more projects for the same client. We need to put in place a solid business strategy and maybe get some partners with a strong position in enterprise software to help us grow this product.

Mobilastic, our inbreed of a website builder with a cloud CMS, in spite the promotion being on slow side, because of all the work in the project I mentioned above, it’s close to be out of beta. We had an issue with the licensing of some components, and this as delayed our launch of new features, but all is solved or on it’s way to be solved. i2devlabs.com has a new website and it’s made with Mobilastic. The funny thing is we made the desktop version of it in Mobilastic and still didn’t make the mobile design! What? desktop websites in Mobilastic? Yes! Mobilastic is just like any CMS, but with a lot of tools to adapt and develop to mobile devices.

This year I was able to take a couple of weeks of vacation and went to the beach!

Oh, and I’m back to the gym and working out every morning before work.

Yes, good times, really good times.

My company has a new name

i2mobile.pt is now i2devlabs.com. Read more about it here http://blog.i2devlabs.com/i2mobile-is-now-i2devlabs

The proudest of fathers

My little girl Maria Inês was born on the 16th Feb, and she has been an absolute delight, letting her father and mother sleep most of the time. When she doesn’t let us sleep, she makes it up by being really, really cute.

Eva and I are in a state of absolute joy and keep asking ourselves why didn’t we had any babies sooner.

For me, personally, Maria being born is giving me even more drive to make my projects successful and make i2DevLabs (the new name for i2Mobile) the kind of software development shop that I dream of. One of the measures of my success is by being present and helpful in every aspect of Maria upbringing. A measure of success more important than money.

Life is unfair and there is no balance or justice

This post is on a more personal tone, but I need to share my anger and frustration.

Some months ago, when Eva and I told our families that we were expecting a baby, my 82 year old grandfather jumped of his chair with joy and gave us a heartfelt hug. Our daughter was going to be his very first great-grandchild and he was more than happy. He told us that sometimes he thought that he would die before getting to know a great-grandchild. He was healthy and full of strength.

My grandfather died last week, just after one and a half month of being diagnosed with a lung cancer, and our daughter is expected to be born in the next two weeks. My heart, our hearts, are broken and I am angry, very angry.

So, if you come to me saying something about the balance of life, how everything finds its way, think positive or something like that, go fuck yourself!

Exclusive Interview: Mobilastic Founder, Pedro Carvalho

Here is the interview I gave to the Startupli.st about Mobilastic

startuplistinterviews:

We had the opportunity to learn more about Mobilastic, founded by Pedro Carvalho, and we received some good insight, tips, and a fresh outlook on the way mobile web apps and landing pages should be built. If you’re in the mobile market as an advertiser, marketer, developer, designer, or simply have a cell phone, you can benefit from Mobilastic.

Read More

Giving Facebook a chance, again

I use Twitter as the main social network for myself and for Mobilastic, mainly because I never liked Facebook. I honestly can say that I don’t know how to use it. I find the UI complicated and cluttered. Every time I open a FB page I feel lost and don’t know what to do. But, from time to time, I say to myself that I can’t ignore it and got to try to use it more. So today, after taking a look at the Mobilastic page in Facebook http://facebook.com/Mobilastic I saw that there were some comments in the wall that I didn’t know about, because I rarely check it. So, I thought to myself, the obvious thing to do is to enable email notifications for comments posted on the wall, right? Wrong! Facebook doesn’t have this feature for Pages. Now, that I actually know what I want to do, it doesn’t have it.

I’m trying http://fanpagenotifier.com to see if it can solve this for me, but the whole thing doesn’t make me start to like Facebook. Quite the opposite.

I don’t know why I keep trying.