April 22, 2007 – 11:35 pm
In our other guise as a web design company – one of the industries we specialise in is in the world of fine art. And the art world, with the exception of our clients of course, has been slow to embrace the medium of the internet. Until now. Finally sites are starting to emerge that utilise the power that the internet affords.
A site that is particularly interesting is the new (a couple of days old) Art Flock site. It’s a bit like a MySpace for the art world. Very web 2.0 in feel and operation, it show’s great promise.
It is a new site so we’ll allow it some time to rid itself of a few bugs and we think this could be a taste of things to come.
A fresh looking design, some interesting stuff on sale - take a look.
April 19, 2007 – 11:08 am
There’s a good article over on Wired whereby the author, Michael Calore, tried spending a month replacing some of his desktop applications with Google Apps.
He replaced some of his trusty desktop applications with their online Google equivalent, and tried to carry as normal.
His feedback was interesting; “Tellingly, my transition to Google’s suite of apps felt the most seamless when managing my own personal flow of data. It was only when I tried to match my web-powered ambitions with my desktop-centric workplace that I was forced to go back to using desktop apps for specific tasks. Had I conquered these workplace integration problems, my experiment would have come closer to total success.”
The point that I was most interested in, however, was that he began to suffer from browser claustrophobia: “While I grew more and more accustomed to my new digital home as the days and weeks wore on, I initially found working exclusively in a web browser to be, for lack of a better word, weird.”
This is interesting - as we like to move around a room, shift position, move offices and change the dynamics of the workplace around us, so it is the same with a computer desktop and applications. We prepare our copy in word, shift to Outlook for email. Perhaps we might go online and do a little bit of Basecamp.
Whatever your setup you are doing it in different applications. Different environments.
But to do everything within one application, one browser - could this lead to browser tedium? Perhaps browser developers should be looking to offer greater levels of personalization - better colorsets, more versatility, more scope to personalize the experience.
April 14, 2007 – 10:51 pm
Whilst 37 Signal’s Highrise launches as a CRM in a its most simplistic form (and I mean that as a compliment), Salesforce, arguably one of the best known and fully featured CRM system out there has acquired a start-up firm that has been established for less than a year: Koral.
Koral was a company specialising in content collaboration – and Salesforce will build upon the acquisition by launching two new standalone products in the near future: Apex Content and ContentExchange.
No financial details were available.
Its a promising sign of a company when they recognise they got something wrong and act quickly upon it.
Take for example, the case of 37 Signals new contact manager Highrise. Their initial pricing was just slightly on the high side. To get any value out of Highrise (and in particular to use their interesting Cases function) you needed to cough up $49 a month. $588 a year. Now that’s too much for most small companies, especially when you think you can own a piece of software that does a similar job for less than $100 on average.
After a bit of an outcry, they were very quick to address the issue - within days they rejigged their programs, and now you can get a “personal” account (enough for a one/two man band) for $12 dollars a month ($144 pa) which lets you try out the “cases” functionality.
For those of us coughing $49 a month for their brilliant Basecamp, $12 a month is a lot more palatable.
