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.

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.

The Tag Team

We agree two heads can be better than one, so we’ve made it easy for partners to collaborate without geographic limitations or the headache of choosing who gets to wrestle with day-to-day admin and planning.

Delegate the burden of your everyday business management to Woosabi, the system can make decisions based on settings options and will notify you only if a task needs your attention, as and when it’s needed. Operate your business worldwide all you or your partner need is access to the web. Be it home office or hotel lobby, regardless of where you are working or what time of day it is where you are, woosabi gives access to real-time view of customer, supplier and new lead interactions with your business.

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