> 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!”

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.

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.

And also on the subject of saying ‘No’ we also turned down the incredibly generous offer of some ‘free’ office space from Matt Burge of Communications Direct (http://www.commsdirect.net/). Great guy, great location and great space but it was too noisy for our precious developer ears (yep, we’re total princesses!). Seriously though, it was a very tough offer to turn down but we’re at such an important phase in our development - we’re now beta testing with 25 clients and we need total control over our space and environment.

Which is why I decided to convert my garage to the new Woosabi HQ!

Here’s some pics of the work in progress:

Outside

inside pre-whitewash (the more observant of you might notice the Woosabi entertainment system)

inside post-whitewash

 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’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.

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

The Car! (yuk!)

outside

inside