Archive for July, 2008

“Communication made easy - Come to my cave!”

Thursday, July 3rd, 2008

How far has the simplicity of delivering a simple message come? Following on from Eds blog re Riding the Bucking Browser Bronco………….boy oh boy, what complications there are today regarding the WWW (what to use - Fire Fox, flock, ie6, ie7 etc etc depends on the message being sent and on quality of receipt of message ) when all we want is carefree, simple and interchangeable communication….Maybe, just maybe, the www fraternity can learn from history…

> Mobile Phone (multitude of suppliers - all interchangeable) > Fax (BT, AT&T etc - all interchangeable) >  Land Line Phones (BT, AT&T etc ..all interchangeable) > Telegraph (hundreds of suppliers in different countries…guess what..all worked fine + well together) > Letters - Mail (Royal Mail, Poste Italia, Pony Express and 100s more in different countries…all worked fine + well together) > Egyptian-style hieroglyphics (gets a bit more iffy here, but as most people didn’t travel too far from their own areas - worked well - as long as you had a chisel + mallet) > Caveman Drawings - possibly the start of the boy/girl chat up line “would you like to see my etchings?”…drawings understood by cave dwellers (biggish assumption made here, dear Reader)…however, slight drawback with our Cave People - they couldn’t communicate all that well verbally (occasional Uggh and so on) so, when one not-so-enlightened cave dweller, asks of the cave artist, when pointing to a cave drawing, (have to imagine this) uggh, ugh, aahh, ugg? (what’s the weight and wing span of the terradactyl my dear artist?) …the cave artist responds in cavelingo “can’t give you the exact detail until someone invents the www….when all information access and communication systems will be really simple!”

Riding the Bucking Browser Bronco!

Thursday, July 3rd, 2008

Just to reiterate on a comment made in Dan’s recent post “the past few weeks have been typically eventful and interesting in the life of our little start-up Woosabi” - It sure has! Our great little product is now in Public Beta which effectively means its in the hands of ‘real people’.

My biggest concern as a designer is not the expected “Don’t break it!”, some may be surprised to learn that a good creative education teaches you not to be sentimental about your work. Great product design be it software or hardwrae is not about carving into a static block but about shaping a moving object. (If it helps just think how many generations of iPod we’ve seen, and still to come) And this is why we need this Public Beta so we can properly test and scale all aspect of the product so we get it as perfect as possible for each stage of it’s development.

“yeeHa!”

The largest hurdle for us as now is making sure our product is accessible to users with out asking them to migrate from their prefered web browser or install anything new. In a perfect world, yes, we’d all be using one browser and said browser would work with all the sites that we browse. The real world, however, is diametrically opposed to the perfect world. Divergent Web standards create compatibility problems with many site/browser combinations and it’s utterly frustrating to say the least.

browsers.jpg

We built Woosabi to work with what we consider to be one of the safest and more functional browsers; Firefox. However we don’t want to dictate anything to our users, it’s just not how we want to do things. So, we’re busy trying to make sure ‘browser preference’ doesn’t get in the way of you getting to experience and help shape Woosabi.

We’re not going to make a big ’song and dance’ about supporting a new browser but what we would “love” is forpeople to signup for their FREE Woosabi account and just tell us how they are getting on using their account with their chosen browser.

New Business Start Ups Wales + UK

Thursday, July 3rd, 2008

source: Western Mail 24th June 2008 - Business in Wales section -Sion Barry (artcile on Barclay’s Bank ResearchQ1 2008)

S Barry writes- “Despite the economic gloom - 4,300 new businesses launched Q1 2008 in Wales and 98,200 for UK in total.”

In S Barry’s article, the figures show that Wales differs from the UK in New Start Up (NSU) business types: with 21% of Welsh NSUs in Business and financial services versus 27% for the UK in total. Using Q1 08 figures, it shows that once again, the number of NSUs for 2008 in Wales should be around 17,000 and for the UK about 400,000

Woosabi’s focus of NSUs continues, while not ignoring established small and medium businesses (SMEs). In my “humble and very unbiased!!???” opinion, Woosabi is ideal for SMEs and essential for NSUs.

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Wednesday, July 2nd, 2008

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