Sunday, November 12, 2006

During the Knowledge Management World / Streaming Media West trade show ….

I have to admin that I was surprised to see so many people attending the event. The booth we had was “assembled” the very last moment and the really black point that we put on the organizers was that they were selling us everything - the carpet, the table, the chairs, most importantly – the electrical power point at the back (as I can go without power on an event like that). Anyway, we wrote them a letter and put our concerns on the evaluation sheet we were asked to fill out the last day… Nickel and dime is not the best policy I think …..

We had a lot of visitors and we made some great contacts. I have to really thank my colleagues for the wonderful job they did accommodating visitors and presenting how we lead in functionality and usability over any similar product in the corporate blogging, Enterprise Knowledge Management and Collaboration Software market.

I had two meetings with guys that are getting a Trial already and what they told me was an interesting comment regarding their offshore software development offices in India. That really made a mark on me.. - the first guy told me that he is pulling his development off India and sending it to Eastern Europe for two reasons – the guys there were not able to apply or show any creativity on their own plus they eventually stole the source code and released a similar product on their own. Another guy came the next day of the event and told us a similar but even worse story – everything was going perfectly even the deadline was met and he tried to patent the product when he found out that 3 months before his application a company from India already submitted same product with a slightly different name and he got really screwed. Not to mention how his partners and investors felt … I do not know whether those guys made mistakes on the legal front and did or did not do something properly but the identical problems by two completely different companies telling us same stories just made us wonder – Is the Offshore Software Development in India starting to be pointless any more …. ?

I also wanted to thank all the visitors at our booth at the event that spent time with us discussing what and how we can really help them grow …

My comment to Jerry Bowles regarding the SuiteTwo and Blogtronix

This was my comment to Jerry Bowles in regards to his article about SuiteTwo and Blogtronix

I do not think there is a class war nor are we aiming for one. What Vassil and I will do is just let time tell who is right. What I will aim now (and this is what I have been doing for the last 13 years) is to produce the best possible software, best possible solution and service for our customers (and for the customers of our competitors :):) ). We, at ConsultCommerce have been doing Enterprise software since 1995. Blogtronix was started last year in February and we released our first version 0.5 in November 05, 1 year later we have version 1.5 which I think is a killer.

What I want to show everybody is that web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 are not just elaborate terms but a way and method of presentation and explanation about where online services and products are going. Blogtronix is one of the examples. It is great that Intel gathered so many nice companies and plans to produce something that was in our heads for 2 years already. We already have super enterprise and social blogging modules, data mining, dashboard and corporate compliance tools (we recently did a demo for a company dealing with statistics and they were amazed by the functionality available and the statistical regression analysis already built in based on the data in the system available in the WIKIs, articles, comments, personal and corporate user profiles, and the docs in the document management system). I will be more than happy to make a demo or give a demo account for anybody interested to see what we have done and where we are going. We have incorporated Blogging and Knowledge management tools, rating systems, WIKI and Document management, Social and Business Network, Internal messaging system and Extensive RSS server and RSS Aggregator. We have developed a very profound personal and corporate profiling system allowing the users to instantly identify who and how eligible the person you are discussing or linking to is. One of the unique functions is the creation of groups and subgroups that can be public or private, internal or external for the system, as well as the ability to join groups and subgroups (societies and sub societies) of external systems easily. But enough advertising .. :):)

I really wonder about the media guys though – they did not even do any research to see what the other companies on the market (our competitors and friends at Atlassian (Confluence) were doing collaboration software years before anyone calls it a WIKI, for example) are already doing and rushed to inform the world about that “big deal” that Intel is doing. Well, I do not think it is a big deal but I do thank Intel for that as we needed the outside validation a bit. We have it now, not in six or whatever months – one platform, one solution and you can trust me on this one – for the next six months we will not just sit and watch, guys, we have some news and tricks in our sleeves and hats that will be popping out at least three times for the next upcoming 6 months, some of the news and services we are releasing very soon will really be very surprising …

Rod Boothby called us “a true Web Office solution” months ago, and we have not stopped working and implementing new functionality for a single minute. We put everything that our customers request and we are implementing everything that we have planned and planning for the future… and that will be the case. We will not stop working because we have customers and partners that trust us.

SuiteTwo vs. Blogtronix Smackdown - another great article by Jerry Bowles mentioning Blogtronix

this is the text of Jerry Bowles' article:

For those of you keeping score at home, here’s a recap of this week’s exciting action in the battle of the enterprise wikis. On Tuesday, Socialtext announced that it was the wiki part of an bundle of social software called SuiteTwo–packaged by Intel Capital, the chipmaker’s venture arm–to be sold through Intel channels. The other pieces of the suite are a wiki (Six Apart), a news reader (NewsGator), and an RSS news feeder (SimpleFeed), with SpikeSource supplying the support.

Some grizzled veterans of past software wars reacted with skepticism based on Intel’s well-documented inability to get out of its own way when it tries things not related to his core business. Others questioned the pricing, which is a considerable premium over the cost of each of components alone.

Not suprisingly, among those pronouncing SuiteTwo “no big deal” was Vassil, CEO and co-founder of rival Blogtronix, which unveiled the new version of Blogtronix 1.5 on Wednesday which has integrated blogging, wiki, RSS feeds and an online RSS reader, as well as social networking capability.

“We at Blogtronix had all of this functionality more than a year ago under one platform and it was all integrated,” Mladjov wrote, in a comment on TechCrunch. “Not to mention that we did this without millions of dollars from VC’s (you need to combine the total of funding all the Suite2 companies) and with a fraction of the developers or the time it took them. In fact, we showed this to Intel Capital last year and they turned us down. Intel was not impressed that we were not from Stanford or Harvard and that we were only two guys (and 10 + developers).”

Do I detect a hint of class warfare in Silicon Valley?