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.

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.

Yep! It’s exactly what you think! We’ve spent a few quid and got some T shirts printed for the team. We’ve been working hard over the winter months. Summer is here so why not do a little “unconventional marketing” while we’re sat in the beer garden celebrating our upcoming second phase of Beta trials.

So, if you spot us out and about, please come over and say ‘Hi’… and just incase you’re feeling extra nice, mine’s a ‘Brains SA’!

Guess what! We’re even thinking of getting some T’s in for our friends. So if you fancy ‘being our friend’, drop a line to hello(at)woosabi.com or even sign-up to our Beta user list. Limited number of spots available.

Walking over for a coffee this morning I spotted an opportunity to stake out the first Smart fortwo BRABUS. Not only is this car green with its micro hybrid drive (mhd) but it also packs a mighty 98bhp.

I’m a big fan of the Fiat 500 but it struck me how cool the Woosabi brand would look pasted on the side of a crystal white painted fortwo, and while you’re testing out the performance of 98bhp from the lights, those left in your dust trail would read “mind your own business” printed on the rear

Woosabi has something in common with the fortwo… small but mighty, simple to use and designed to get the job done with ease and fun.

“Web 2.0 is set to be embraced by Enterprise 2.0 as businesses prepare to spend nearly $5 billion by 2013 on social networking tools.”

BBC News Story Here

I needed to pick a new graphics card and take Emilia (now 7 weeks old) out so I nipped into PC world. Turns out their graphics cards are literally 100% more expensive than they are online - though they have a new Mac section with internet connections so I could compare the price instore & online

Anyway, as I was wondering around I noticed a point of sale featuring the mugshot of Peter Jones along with 3 different versions of his ‘online business builder’ - each version is really a different subscription amount, 1, 3 and 12 months. The DVD case I assume contains a subscription code to be entered online. Which is how Woosabi would be sold via VARs.

What’s interesting is that the product ‘looks’ like it’s competiting with Woosabi but on closer inspection it seems it’s an online ’support’ system with some payroll and business plan makers. Here’s the website

There are two things that struck me:

Firstly, considering how much of a bully Peter Jones is on TV with regard to people ‘not having thought things through’ and how he’s constantly reminding us that he’s got a team of techies that can build websites and apps, his website’s presentation is terrible; absolutely awful. He might be ‘good TV’ but if he signed off on that site and box art I wouldn’t let him near Woosabi in a million years.

Secondly, it’s reminded me that there is great scope to provide a ‘Professional Services’ module via Woosabi to allow startups to access local accountants, legal help and HR advice.

Thirdly, we are going to release something very special that will be very big. Really!

I’ve always seen the inbox area of Woosabi as being key to the product and key to where the product will be driven. This is probably because I’m an engineer and communicate with my clients almost 100% through email - we do face to face meets too which are vital but once we’re working email is the main link really.

Which means my user experience of Woosabi is focused almost totally around the inbox (using jobs and invoices to make sure i get paid ) . Where Woosabi already has a leg up  on solving the ‘overloaded inbox’ problem, is that email (in the Woosabi world) is either connected to a contact or it isn’t (in which case it’s a new contact and Woosabi will ask to create an association or do something with it spamwise).

 What this boils down to is with Woosabi that your inbox is usually only a 10 or 20 messages deep, and messages are either marked with reminders to reply (important) or not (not important) - sounds simplistic? It is and it works really well!

 At the moment I believe Woosabi email is at least as good as the current webmail offerings (gmail, hotmail, etc) but our architecture means we can do so much more and in particular aggresively attack the problem of spam, volume and response times to email.

The problems and perceptions of which are neatly summed up in this techCruch post

2,433 Unread Emails Is An Opportunity For An Entrepreneur 

As we’re now in beta, we’re also doing a little ’spring’ cleaning - and this is what Woosabi looks like when it’s style sheets are removed

Living up to my social trend of ‘lowering the tone’…..

“With New York Gov. Elliot Spitzer allegedly caught nibbling the fruits of a high-class, tech-savvy prostitution ring, it’s clearer than ever the world’s oldest profession is doing a fine job of harnessing the latest technology.

The red light site at the center of the Spitzer scandal is EmperorsClubVIP.com. Now offline, it’s described in FBI files as a professional online storefront offering conveniences like e-mail confirmation of appointments, and linking clients and prostitutes across the United States and Europe.”

 http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/03/worlds-oldest-p.html