I saw a documentary a while back that identifies many major countries that have dedicated groups of people who monitors online activities to capture and snoop on online traffic on a daily basis. The documentary suggest that they not only track and monitor their own citizens but steals industrial information to help their own local companies to give them the added advantage.

I am not really surprised to know that but it came to my mind that there are many entities throughout the world that requires secure communications on the Internet. These sensitive groups include the military, government bodies, privacy groups, research labs and etc. In general, the online needs for these groups must meet a few basic requirements:

• Prevent easy ears dropping
• Identify the real identity of the server they are connecting to
• Able to host their own server hardware in secure data centers
• Software used cannot be dominated by a particular group, organization, country or company

I guess there are a lot more requirements but these are the common ones. The critical question then is how do you easily implement such a set of secure online communication tools for them without spending major time and effort? Well, if you do have such a need, why not try Hiitch out! Hiitch have build in features that solves those basic requirements out of the box. Plus it is open source so it allows you to customize your own solution under the GPL v3.

Depending on how your Hiitch setup is like, it can be customised to manage a small group of people to a reasonably sized organization of a few hundred or more. Happy making the lives of “Big Brother” a little harder.

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Have you ever dream of becoming an entrepreneur? Sure most of us have. I guess we are all thinking about becoming successful entrepreneurs when we think about doing our own start ups. However, while in the excitement of our plans, we are often overly optimistic. The road taken by any true entrepreneur can only be described as “crazy”. My entrepreneur journey started four years ago. My life has been in constant struggle since then with the ups and downs of two start ups.

My first start up company was one based on Linux services. I have strong roots with open source software and development. So when the opportunity came for me to stretch out my entrepreneurial wings, I decided to venture into the arena that I am most familiar with; open source. As it turns out, Singapore was not ready for open source. Majority of all Singaporean companies use Microsoft products. Many choose the risk of using illegal software then try to use something new and legal like open source software. I finally admitted defeat when I was unable to sell any of my services. There is really nothing bad about failures but the need to manage ones own emotion and self image while spiraling into despair is indeed a real challenge. I fell into a deep depression soon after. Perhaps my strategy was wrong or because I was too inexperienced. The bottom line was that I failed!

The year that followed, I swear I will never do a start up again. I got myself a proper job like everyone else. A year later, a good friend of mine suggested that we band together to build a new product named Hiitch. They needed a technical geek to oversee the development and I was the chosen one. This time round I thought perhaps I had a better chance of success because the guys I was working with were very talented in their own fields of work. More importantly, I was well rested from my last defeat both emotionally and financially. This time round, I made sure that I prayed about it and got God on my side first.

We spend a year building the product and along the way, I had some pretty good job offers. But like any other true breed entrepreneur, I rejected them and stay on course. By the way, some people called that being stupid, which I feel is somewhat correct. Anyway, when the product was finally about to be released, we had exhausted our motivation and finance. Hiitch had lots of potential but the risks were high and the pressure is in learning to sell it or the value added services on top of it. We had done some pretty stupid things along the way, like refusing opportunities for funding and instead opt for another more painful strategy. Our current strategy is to self fund ourselves through the slow and painful steps of taking in external development projects. We hope to be financially viable while still staying focused on developing our own products for the technology market. This strategy helps us cover the short term financial needs of cash flow while also ensuring that our company has a long term future through our own products. The cycle for this strategy is probably slower and less spectacular but fits us well for now.

Technically, we are still not out of the woods yet but by God’s grace, we are finally growing financially. If there is anything in this company, it is talent. Talent doesn’t always put bread on the table but it sure helps our customer see our value. A typical work day in the office consist of product brain storming sessions, project developments, financial forecast, planning and projection, loud music, complaining about our poor internet connections, lots of jokes and plenty of meal breaks. It might not seem like it for now but we hope to be a commercial force to be reckon with in the near future. Make sure you watch out for us!

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