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.

it’s been a while since i’ve updated the blog from an engineering point of view. the main reason being that, yup you’ve guessed it, we’ve been engineering. we released the first 20 beta accounts this week and so far so good.

 it’s always a little strange when the project you’ve had total control over enters the public domain and out of your hands but it’s also exciting.

 i’ll keep posting here in small chunks as we move through the process and describe how the feedback comes in and gets sorted, tagged and becomes part of the refinement process and then back out into the wild.

stay tuned.

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.

I met with a great guy today, Mark Deloura who’s VP of Technology at GreenScreen Interactice. I told him a little about Woosabi and he mentioned that they use basec4mp a little, so it was great to get his feedback from a different industry. I said we’d get Mark a Woosabi beta account and see how we compare - eek!

We also talked a lot about my pet subject; development methodologies (I know, yawn yawn!) I mentioned that there’s a ton of methodologies andcase studies specific to application development but not a lot it seems for game development. I have a bunch of theories as to why this is the case and so does Mark. More interestingly it turns out that Mark is co-ordinating a conference later in the year where there will be a series of presentations by game developers comparing different methodologies - which obviously I find intensely exciting, YMMV!

So, we proposed a bi-partisan venture between game and application development to blog each week on a particular aspect of development and see how it differs between the two sub-disciplines which will appear each Friday.

This week’s topic: TBC

Aside from a few small visual improvements, Woosabi version 1.0b is very much code complete. Although, version o.1a has been used successfully for the past year by pretty demanding (and with quite rightly high expectations) beta client - who has used the product to run an art business split over several galleries. They use Woosabi to do all of the following from one simple interface: sell artwork, invoice customers and pay their artists, create and publish new exhibitions including hi-resolution images of all artwork on their public website, create and send marketing campaigns announcing new exhibtions and to massively reduce their dependence on IT support people.

The long and short of it after 12 months is that we’ve only spoken around 3 or 4 times with regard help or problems, which in my 12 years of development experience is nothing short of a miracle!

They’ve not had a single moment of downtime, and even if they did Woosabi’s offline tool Kimosabi is on hand to provide access to any important data in the event of their web connection being unavailable.

So as we move into our public beta phase next week (we’ll be issuing accounts to the many people who’ve signed up to our beta programme here) we’re all very excited and rightly confident of the wonderful product we’ve built. Why don’t you sign up and tell us what you think too.

Equally exciting for me, will be my forthcoming trip to San Francisco to meet up with an old friend and assess what the venture capital landscape is like in one of the great cities of the world!

As we always want to share “what’s occuring” (Gavin & Stacey inside joke) here at camp woosabi. All you Facebook fanatics (you know who you are!) will be pleased to hear that you can now join the official Woosabi Group on facebook and get all the new and insider goss.

Head over there now to join up and get involved with our discussion boards. This weeks topic is: ‘If you could to start your own dream business on Monday, what would it be?’.

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 

Shooting Stars

Be it the Fab Four or the Dirty Dozen, the group has combined talents so the business is starting to take off and could be aiming for the stars. Time is precious, the right moves are crucial and wise decisions will rely on accurate visibility of the entire business.

With personal user accounts each member can tailor woosabi to fit their own working style and unique business responsibilities. Personal productivity is one thing, but woosabi captures, organises and keeps everything coming in and moving out of your business in sync - making sure that everyone has access to the same, up-to-date information at all times. Woosabi presents everything you need, and nothing you don’t.

One Man Band

No, not a street musician with a ukulele, large bass drum and cymbals strapped to the knees. That sounds like fun, but we’re actually referring to those talented people out there who simultaneously juggle every role their businesses needs to make it a success.

Sales, marketing, accounts… the list can be endless and the work involved in managing all these roles can itself hinder the work you really prefer and enjoy doing each day. We have a better idea that will change all that and free up more time for what’s really important both in your work and your life. Woosabi is simple and easy to use, building all the essential business tools in to a prescriptive system that is organised, accessible and allways working for you.

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