Quez Tech Report

With a new platform for business wars being research and talent we caught up with Ivaylo Danev who is Chif Research & development at Gurron to tell us a little about the area and the new project that the company is working on.

Here is our interview with Chief of Research & Development at Gurron (a startup company in the heart of London's tech scene).

Can you tell us a brief description of what it is like to work at Gurron, what is the ethos that drives company and how does everyone handle the obstacles of startup life?

To describe the working environment I will have to compare it to an opensource forum. Everyone has so different and at the same time similar ideas that after the discussion that breaks off, a great idea is always born. And then follows a LAN strategy game. When we don't feel like working, we just do something else until we feel like working again. I would say we always have the Yin and Yang in synch. To handle the obstacles that we meet when we are developing or brainstorming, we would change the way we look at things, consult a Greek philosopher, or do some more research on recent great projects and startups.

Can you describe the team at Gurron and yourself, what made you a programmer?

The team consists of Ulpian Morina the CEO of Gurron, Molos Morina our art and design prodigy and me, the little vanguard of development. I would say that is the best team I can think of, because before all we are really close friends. They way I went into programming was from high school really. Me and a great friend of mine Nikolay Stoitsev used to participate in web programming competitions with various educational projects, and at the meantime testing the laws of magnetism and inventing simple circuit boards. I never stopped thinking about things that could be changed or created to aid everyone is some way. Since then I kept drafting ideas about my new project. When we joined forces with Ulpian, everything came in the right place. I would say that having a creative mind led me to being a programmer.

What does getr bring into the world that is new, do you think it embodies the Gurron company right?

In one sentence,  it puts notifications on web pages. With the web getting bigger and broader every day, every user finds everything that he is interested in. Getr will allow you to keep track of all the things that u mostly use and follow. It's like RSS feeds combined with bookmarks with sensitivity settings and history of what happened. On top of that it allows you to share it with all your friends or team members for a certain project. It fits perfectly with the character of Gurron, because it socialises your interests with your friends and vice versa.

Getr is described as "saving the internet", can you explain what this defines and we expect to see from Getr?

Getr allows you to put "your web" in a personal library, which will always be up-to-date in its subjects. You will be able to categorise, customise and order it anyway you like, so you know how to find every corner of it. You no longer have to keep remembering everything you wanted to check often or when you do, just to find there is nothing new there. Furthermore, you will be able to see the history of the things that changed. It's something for every subject, every TV show or every web page you want to never loose track of.

Can you describe the CEO, Ulpian Morina and his relationship with the rest of the team? (Ulpian has told me that you are his closest friend and you know him this is why I ask)

I would say he is not easy to be described as a CEO, or a programmer, or an artist, or a physician...he is the equivalent  of a whole team. Every time we've started a discussion about a fresh idea from the morning, it will start from human psychology and end with mythology. He is the best partner I could think of because every project is like an expedition in the unknown with him. He is familiar with everyone in the team and would always pick the perfect tasks for everyone. He helps you find your strengths and do the best you can.

You work in R&D(Research & Development), can you tell me if the company will be going into gaming? (the last interview Ulpian stated that the company may go down this path so I wanted to know if you can update us in this)

This could be the guy that changes the way we say things online.

For months now Ulpian Morina, programmer and CEO of Gurrop has had news and rumors spinning around the London tech scene among all sorts of people involved in the tech community with a game-changing startups and a controversial library called efpa. Reason for the talks is because of Gurrop. There have been some serious investors involved and there is talk that social media wizard/investor and #140 conf founder; Jeff Pulver,  interested in the startup, is now part of it yet we cannot confirm, Ulpian's response was "I cannot make a statement on Jeff's involvement in this right now".

So why talk about it? I hear you ask. Well because the startup, Gurrop, is in the social communications space and is said to have the potential to disrupt the space entirely. With big players such as facebook, twitter, Google and nearly all the Silicon Valley giants involved one way or the other it makes Gurrop one exciting startup to look out for because of the implications that could arise.

Another reason is because of a new php-based library recently released called efpa which aims to make the facebook api simpler and faster in production especially for first time developers. The problem is that there are rumours that Glenn Mangham(who was imprisoned for hacking the facebook source code) had given Ulpian the source code which was used to build efpa.

Ulpian himself has come into the London tech scene pretty quickly. He is only 20 years old but has some serious people talking to him about Gurrop and some of his other ideas which include a new startup called "getr" and a php library called efpa. He runs a team stating they are "close friends that are as addicted to work as I am", in London and hates to use the word company describing his organisation, he prefers "hacker space". Meeting him in London we had a chance to put some questions forward; Can you tell us a little about your background? Where are you from and how did you get into tech and why do you call your team a hacker space? Sure, I was born in Prizren, Albania* yet I have spent nearly all my life in London. I have always been interested in things like computers I think there are certain moments I can handpick as instrumental in getting me interested in computing.

However the person most instrumental, by far, was my father and he still is, most of the difficult ideas that I have, I discuss with him and most often the primary factor for starting a project or solving a problem derives directly from my discussions with him, they are not "lightweight" discussions, they are really deep and detailed and this is a real catalyst for being able to break from the single angle of approaching problems.

I am not a fan of traditional business at all, never been. When I started thinking about setting up a team I thought about how I would organise this "company" and I wanted to really create a "close hub" of smart guys that worked on solving problems and inventing new ideas, the selling came second. So for me; I'm really running a "hacker space" just one that creates products that we release on markets and people sometimes pay for.

Can you better define Gurrop, what does it do? When will you launch it? Gurrop is in the social communications space. It's all about how we communicate and how other people perceive what you have communicated. Now we are starting to build a good "calculator-of-data-communication" aka the "computer" yet we are really behind in terms of the software to organize and better understand this communication.

So the project was really about making communication as easy and fast as possible. We have changed the visual way that we see communication(updates, posts, images, video) so you can totally expect that it will not be a list of updates like you see on facebook or twitter. There is an enormous amount of work going on in the background to make communication as natural to us as possible. Gurrop's current state is such that I cannot discuss it further but it will be available quite soon, I cannot however give a precise launch date. What can you tell us about the efpa library? There are rumours stating that you are in some way involved with the hacking of the facebook source code which you used to build efpa. At the current moment I cannot make any statements towards this. Reasons for this are the legal issues firstly and that there are a lot of rumors right now and I will not try to go around and respond to every rumour that springs forth. All I can state is that I do not hold the facebook source code, I never met Glenn Mangham and certainly never used facebook source code to build efpa, I simply wouldn't need the source code to build it.

I am willing to work with facebook on this because efpa's sole purpose is to simplify the facebook api so that development of facebook web apps is faster and easier. You can find efpa at (http://labs.gurron.com/projects.php?proj=efpa) What projects are you currently working on and what is there set for the future? I am currently working on "getr" for which I am really excited about, I really think it is going to make a whole load of people's life much easier and interesting online. It will be launching really really soon which is why I do not want to explain what it does but there are facebook and G+ pages you can find.

Ivaljo Danev, a really close friend and a core part of the team in all projects, is doing an amazing job on the interface; fleshing out the look and feel of getr, he is a really smart and talented guy. I am currently testing the getrEngine which is the engine that runs the processes. There is a whole team working on this right now.