Back to the calculator

* Well, it's been an eventful week. Although the prototype has gone down well, I had a meeting with the other directors and they weren't too happy to hear that we needed a map server that cost about 2m yen to install as a server to the outside world. Without this technology we can't serve users a map, so there's no point going any further so-to-speak.
* As I was saying, they weren't happy about this and I had a good long think and realised that maybe we didn't need a server AT ALL. That's right, all we're doing is cutting up a map to show the user's immediate surroundings and sending it back to the user. We are not doing anything else. So although I looked around and finally did find a few free map server software, I thought we could do this by 'simply' writing a program to cut up pictures and serve these as temporary pictures. Well, it's actually going to be pretty tough, but the logic is really simple. Conclusion: no paying 2m yen for a map server.
* With that in mind, I went off and chopped the budget off everything else. That's right, the proprietary application server technology - chop, the proprietary database technology - chop, proprietary development software that comes with the above server tech - chop, any additional add-ons necessary to run the things above - chop. So chopping all this saves an additional 1.1m yen. Instead, replaced all the above with open-source FREE software. It's free but all the equivalent technologies are ranked either no. 3 or 4 in numbers in each of the areas above worldwide (except that Japan likes to pay the price of "safety", even though worldwide people see this much less as "safety" and more as "cost" as quality has improved phenomenally over the last ten years and there isn't really any technical differential anymore).
* So that's how things are looking right now. The technologies here are actually MORE advanced, so hope I can switch those bells off unless I need them. Of course, will need to pay for maintenance support, but the cost for minimal support is, let's say, trivial (as in $300 for a year...).