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.

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.

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 

In between developing the Woosabi product and building practice placement systems for Universities (www.inpractice.org) I’m trying to finish this book Dreaming in Code (this is why I’m doing my blogs at 6am in an attempt to claw some of my day back). The book documents the development of an Open Source Calendering/Personal Information Manager (PIM)/Email project that’s been in development for the past 5 years. It’s interesing in that it has quite a few functional similarities to Woosabi - I should stress that the similarities are quite generic and are shared by a whole slew of Web2.0 projects

One Vision

The main part we share is this vision (Vision):

Chandler - “Our goal is to serve the way people actually work, independently and together, particularly in small groups, a market segment we believe is underserved. Our belief is that personal and collaborative information work is by nature iterative and that the existing binary Done/Not-Done, Read/Unread, Flagged/Unflagged paradigm in productivity software poorly accommodates the reality of how people work.”

That could quite easily describe Woosabi, if we had sat down and articulated it that consicely!  But we never did and I’m hoping that where we succeed will be down to all the things we “didn’t do”. I’m not sure if that sounds dumb, belligerent or both as it’s 6am and my vocabulary is still sleeping downstairs (I’m in the attic) but bare with me and I’ll explain that bit of triteness (that’s the word I was searching for!)

God is in the (right) detail

The part of our little project that sets us free from the pitfalls of other large-ish development projects is we’ve thus far kept ourselves largely free from bureaucracy and the meeting moth syndrome - aka the overwhelming desire to plan and attend meetings, usually to discuss what you could be doing if you weren’t currently at a meeting and then to plan the next one, to usually co-incide with some large project milestone.

What we do have is a great development team that understand the product we are building. We didn’t spend months writing white papers and technical specification documents because we never had the luxury of time to waste on something that is superceded by working code and a usable product. Is that a chicken and egg situation? In my opinion, and I could be proved wrong if our product sucks, it’s not. If you have a development team that fully understand the goal (and it could be as simple as ‘to build a login screen” or as complicated as “build an email client”), you use your code as your project plan with the build’s usable functionaility as a meaure of progress.

Teamwork or no work

The one major document we do have is the product’s “Style Guide” which is totally indespensible and almost entirely visual (i.e.without text). This is pretty much the only document that the developers refer to (on a daily basis). Woosabi is lucky in that we’ve a very talented Product Designer who’s able to visualise with the developers the entire product before it’s built.

Which means the other thing your team needs is ‘trust’ which comes not from a creaking shelf of documents that people are pushed toward (”hmmm, it’s all in version 1.2 of the MRS+TFS, now go away I’m trying to look busy”) but from outward, visible signs of work.

Successful IT projects come from having the right people and a good product that is visibly improving. Getting there isn’t easy but in my opinion you need to trust in your idea and build your product.  Not just a dream of one.

So we’re just two days shy of March 1st - our target date for launching the product for beta testing (insert pun of choice using the word beta here). And using the immortal refrain of backseat drivers and children everywhere:

“Are we there yet?”

Before I answer that I just want to have a word about deadlines and whether they are helpful or not. Personally, I believe they are vital. They help focus everyone in a team. They also help you make difficult decisions, such as ‘will this bit of functionality make the cut’ aka ‘does the product really need this?’. If there’s not enough time, there’s not enough time - unless it’s a core part of your product. Deadlines also tell you an awful lot about the people in your team, their abilities and their thinking under pressure.

“Tea cups and tantrums”

The World Cup winning coach Clive Woodward hilariously and without any embarrassment calls this T-CUP, “Thinking correctly under pressure”. People under pressure will always fall in to two groups when confonted with a problem: one type will find a way to solve it and the other type will find a way not to solve it. The more important part is to realise that both types will try to ’spread’ their viewpoint throughout the team. One is positive, one is negative and pressure will show this up everytime.

I once inherited a development team (not as fortuitous as it sounds) which had a particularly lazy developer within it; when it came to Crunch Time he was totally unable (unwilling might be more accurate) to estimate any of his work and rather than aim for something and miss he completly froze. Instead, when asked how long a certain job would take, he replied with the following gem that has stayed with me ever since:

“It will be ready, when it’s ready. I work by the ID credo”

Which I suppose is fine if you are in fact working for ID, the developer of, at one point, the definitive First Person Shooters (Doom & Quake). Not suprisingly I met with the CEO and we made the decision that the programmer should contact ID games to see if they had any work for him. Even with a deadline looming, I felt it better to jettison deadweight and keep the team positive, if overworked! Negativity is a deadly cancer in a development team and must be cut out immediately.

“I love deadlines. I love the wooshing noise they make as they go by” - Douglas Adams

The other reason deadlines are important is that they a vital piece of external communication. They tell your customer when something will be ready. It also forces you to communicate with your customer during development if the date looks like it’s going to slip. Better to talk to them, get their feedback as something that is pushing the deadline back could be cut if they deem getting the product more vital than having function x working. Of course, by doing that you put pressure on yourself to deliver and that’s the nature of deadlines (the Etymology of that word is quite stark). Without being too glib, if you don’t like deadlines then product development is definately the wrong job for you.

So are we there yet?

Yes. Actually, after that massive preamble, ‘Yes’ doesn’t feel a big enough statement of euphoria really so feel free to insert the profanity of your choice here: #$%*** Yes!

It feels really amazing to say this. We’ve a few little glitches to sort (well, that’s what beta testing is for) and some polishing to do but amazingly we’ve hit our March 1st deadline. Which considering we only have two engineers on the project, one of whom is a recent graduate and the other has a full-time job, this is phenomenal. In fact, I’ll go further than that, it’s nothing short of miraculous and proves you do not need big budget development teams for startups. No, what you need are these two things (assuming you’ve the ability): Positivity and Dedication.

Okay, better crack on, I’ve got another project whose deadline is next week! Where’s that coffee!?

This afternoon’s development update brings you a nice little movie so grab a drink and see Woosabi:Email in action.

Wouldn’t it be nice if you could…

See and fetch attachments without having to click into an email

Automatically link your email to your contacts

Automatically update your contacts ‘activity’ details when you receive email

Welcome to Woosabi.

Full size movie here

This is what I’m sure Eds think engineers wear as we sit coding:

But in actual fact, we look more like this:

Yahoo have just releases the following statement (well, it was in all the papers and blogs on the weekend first I sense Yahoo are playing hard to get!

Sunnyvale, Calif., February 11, 2008 — Yahoo! Inc. (Nasdaq: YHOO), a leading global Internet company, today said the Yahoo! Board of Directors has carefully reviewed Microsoft’s unsolicited proposal with Yahoo!’s management team and financial and legal advisors and has unanimously concluded that the proposal is not in the best interests of Yahoo! and our stockholders.

After careful evaluation, the Board believes that Microsoft’s proposal substantially undervalues Yahoo! including our global brand, large worldwide audience, significant recent investments in advertising platforms and future growth prospects, free cash flow and earnings potential, as well as our substantial unconsolidated investments. The Board of Directors is continually evaluating all of its strategic options in the context of the rapidly evolving industry environment and we remain committed to pursuing initiatives that maximize value for all stockholders.

Goldman, Sachs & Co., Lehman Brothers and Moelis & Company are acting as financial advisors to Yahoo!. Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP is acting as legal advisor to Yahoo!, and Munger Tolles & Olson LLP is acting as counsel to the outside directors of Yahoo!.