At the most basic level we envisage offering managed infrastructure and HR services – you find the people, and we do the rest. Although we expect very much that this is the low end of the scale, and we will focus more on providing recruitment services, contract negotiation, placement, training and management of your off-shore staff. At the high end of the service, we will provide contract developers, including a development environment and support structure (expert technical staff on-demand for assistance, troubleshooting and management).

Our customer commitment is that we will always maintain our pricing at a level  lower than you would be able to achieve by doing this yourself. Obviously this means as your business grows, your CPG (Cost-Per-Geek) goes down, as we remain competitive and build on economies of scale.

Here is a breakdown of the Level 1 Basic GeekSpace service:

Features
Office Space – Desk, Lockable Pedestal.
Financial Management – Payroll, Social and Other Taxes
Employee Management – Contracts, Attendance.
Internet Connection – 6mb DSL, unlimited usage
Shared Resources – Kitchen, Fax, Printer, Stationary.
Includes – Power, Light, Hear, Security, Rates, Liability Insurance

Extras
Laptop – fully supported & software licensed – 89.95 per month
Secure, off-site, on-line backup – 49.95 per month (10 gb)
GeekCODE – 89.95 per month (12% discount)
Meeting Room – 159.95 per day

Pricing
1 – 5 employees €995 per month per employee
Additional employees (up to 15) €665 per month per employee

The breakdown we are working on is as follows, and hopefully we can start a discussion around this:

Infrastructure

- Storage
– 10gb accessible (post-RAID and other redundancy setups)
– Running on a Fibre-Attached HP EVA-8000 SAN (read more)
- Virtual Machine
– FreeBSD powered by VMWare
– Blade Chassis, SAN and VMotion configured for auto load balancing across grid, and auto-failover
– Running on HP BL460c Blade (read more: blade / chassis)
– 512MB RAM
– Intel Xeon 5110, 4mb cache
- Connectivity
– 1gb internet uplink
– 100gb monthly transfer
- Access
– Remote Reboot
– Full KVM over IP
– Full Root Access
- Service Level Agreements
– 100% Power
– 100% Network
– 100% Data Availability
– 30 min auto fail-over and replication
– 24×7 Technical Support : 30 min initial response time

Software

– Base Install
– Operating System: FreeBSD
– Web Server: Apache & lighttpd
– Database Application: MySQL and PostgreSQL
– Programming Language: Ruby (w/RoR)
– Code Management
– Code Versioning System: Subversion
– Project Management: TRAC
– Documentation: TRAC – Wiki
– Deployment Management: Capistrano
– Monitoring
- Application Monitoring: Monit

The Cost: 99.95 euro per month

• SaaS Provider : That’s ‘Software-as-a-Service’ – aka SalesForce.com; MySpace; Flickr; Facebook; Microsoft Live; Plaxo; Basecamp; and many more. We see two major trends here – the first is the explosion in SaaS startups (software companies delivering their applications over the internet) and the second is the mass of software business converting their legacy-local-software into a web-based application.
• HaaS Platform : I think we invented this phrase in another blog (google it – we have ties with hosting365). Essential Hardware-as-a-Service we believe will drive the next generation of web-based applications (which from the point above really means the next set of applications, period) and there are two fundamental skill sets here – one is the creating and product management of the application, and the second is the delivery of this to users – 100% of the time, securely, with redundancy, and fitting the Web2.0 model of being ‘brilliantly affordable’.
• Webbers : Anyone involved in web development, design, marketing or business, is a webber of some guise. All webbers have one thing in common – the challenge of finding good, reliable, affordable and available (on-demand) resources to deliver on their plans or promises. And voila, Geekmines is here for you!
• Web 3.o : Okay I’ve no idea what this buzzword will end up standing for – but once it’s not ‘Web 3.UhOhh’ then I don’t really care.

What areas are we missing? Have we any glaring holes in our perceived target market?

Without going into too many details, Geekmines is being created to fulfill the needs of the many entrepreneurs, businesses and hobbyists that are playing in the Web 2.0 field. So many wonderful new business ideas are being created, that we feel there is a need to provide resources for bringing these ideas to fruition.

Geekmines will provide technical support, development and infrastructure expertise for Web2.0 ideas.