Everybody’s talking about the recession. What needs to be done to survive, who will get killed, how to fire personnel in style and how to focus.

I’ve also been talking to some people who are smarter than me about this during the previous week. There’s been recurrent themes such as:

* FOCUS

* GET TO BREAK EVEN QUICKLY

* GET AS MUCH MONEY FROM INVESTORS AS YOU CAN

* CUT COSTS

Apart from these ones, there’s been a few that I find very interesting and that are interrelated.

The first one is this:

FOLLOW THE MONEY, NOT THE CROWD
This is interesting because most people tend to cut costs everywhere and anywhere. People also tend to try to do what’s popular because they think that’s going to get them through the recession.

What I make of this advice is this: FIND OUT WHAT PART OF YOUR SERVICE PEOPLE ARE WILLING TO PAY FOR AND DO THAT. DON’T ASSUME THAT IF SOMETHING IS POPULAR, PEOPLE WILL PAY FOR IT (see Facebook). EXPERIMENT QUICKLY AND STICK TO WHAT STICKS.

Also, DON’T CUT COSTS THAT ARE REVENUE GENERATING. Cut the company Christmas Party maybe, don’t cut the ads or the sales person that’s actually making you money. Cost-cutting in good, but don’t cut what’s popular to cut. Cut what does not help you survive.

The second one is:

MEDIOCRITY DOES NOT SURVIVE RECESSIONS
This is kind of in your face, but it’s probably the most important piece of advice. If you’re plain excellent, you’ll thrive no matter what. So indeed FOCUS, but focus on what you think you can be the best at and forget the rest.

So out of all the discussions I’ve been following recently about the recession, I’ve taken these two pieces of advice to heart and that’s what I think I’ll act on. The rest is common sense.

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As you probably know (or not) last summer we organized a ’semantic web’ course at the Computer Science Faculty in Bucharest. We consider it a success story so we decided to take it to the next level. This means a full semester course. And this time we are not alone. We teamed up with two great companies: Adobe and Yahoo, to create one of the hippest courses in the world. We named it Poli 2.0.

What’s so new about this course? It is all about building a usable product. If during the other courses the students learn a lot of abstract notions and programming languages, here they will have to deal with building a real life product. A product that people (us, their colleagues ) will use on a daily basis.

Last week we had an introductory course and this week we started in force with a course on “Web apps architectures”. It was a rather detailed description on the way a web app works, why layers are important, what are the bottlenecks in a modern web app etc. Vladimir had the pleasure to present basic concepts while Mircea took the task to go deeper and explore different scaling solutions. Next week topic: API’s.

The slides:

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Here’s Mircea, the newest member of our team. Awesome software engineer, product guy and an all-round cool dude

Some of his accomplishments:

* 2007, November - 8th place at TopCoder Collegiate Challenge, Orlando, USA
* 2007, March - Finalist at ACM world finals in Tokyo
* 2006, November - Finalist TopCoder Collegiate Challenge, San Diego, USA
* 2006, Octomber - 2nd at ACM South-Eastern Regional Contest, Bucharest, Romania
* 2006, August - Gold Medal at International Informatics Olympics, Merida, Mexico
* 2006, July - Silver Medal at CEOI, Vrsar, Croatia
* 2006, June - Invited to USAICO, Colorado Springs, USA
* 2005, August - Silver Medal at International Informatics Olympics, Nowy Sacz, Polonia

Mircea is up to great things and we hope to provide him with an environment where he can change the world with uberVU. He’s in charge of building the highly scalable distributed back-end, but we’ll throw lots of new challenges at him once the first task is over

Since Twitter is the new Thing, here’s some startup advice in just 140 chars. Very interesting.

We’ve just launched the uberVU Private Beta. Hooray!

I know what you’re thinking. Isn’t this like, the third Beta or something? What’s so special about this one? And how many more Private Betas will there be?

We have some explaining to do.

This is the Private Beta for the uberVU that won Seedcamp in September. uberVU is about finding out what people are saying all over the web around stories. These stories might be something you came across while surfing the Web or something that you published to your blog, your Twitter account, etc.

uberVU is now trying to map the conversational graph on the Web. In the past, uberVU was a multi-service publishing platform. Two totally different things, hence the new Beta.

So how does this work?

1. You either click a bookmarklet while you’re browsing a story you’re interested in and we start mapping the conversation around it

2. You tell us where you publish stuff and every time you publish something new, we automatically track the conversation around it. You don’t have to do anything else.

Interesting, you might say, but why this change?

We started building a publishing platform because that’s what we felt we needed at the time. In the mean time, we thought

“why not also get comments for what you published? That’s time consuming to track”.

It was a good idea, but then we noticed that a certain story got comments everywhere on the Web, not just where it was published. We thought:

“This is actually the tricky part. Getting distributed conversations together. This is really difficult to do right now and very time consuming”

We started working on the technology, it worked for people’s blogs, YouTube accounts, etc. But it kind of made sense to use the technology for any story, not just the stories you publishes, but any story you might find interesting. So it was time to get back to work. Fast forward to a few months later and we’re here, launching the uberVU Private Beta.

We’ll be sending about 200 invites/day so in a few days everybody on the list will get to use uberVU.

We’re sorry for the long wait guys, we changed the product 3 times and we had a lot of work to do to get it to this stage.

We built uberVU for you guys, so you know the drill: FEEDBACK PLEASE. You can tell us what you think here:

* hello@ubervu.com
* getsatisfaction.com/ubervu
* @ubervu on Twitter

Thanks and looking forward to hearing your thoughts.