I'm off (Riel that is) to see my family in the "Great State of Maine".

For those of you who haven't been, I highly recommend a visit, it's the sort of tranquil that you can't find anywhere else.

I will be meeting up with Francois, our first physical meeting in almost a year of working together.

Feels a little like a blind date or something.

I'm happy to say that our projects have been funded and we are once again on the path to building up the components for XLsuite. Rick has generously upped our budget and is now very serious about migrating his application to a commercial offering. Watch for RealtorXL.com coming to the web hopefully by January 2007.

smRty is still working out it's kinks, we've had to work some more on the invoicing module, I'll let Francois do the details on that one, we're also working on implementing the iclock.in SMS trigger, so you can use your mobile phone to turn on and off your timer. That'll be cool I must say, each project will have it's own email address that will start whatever item you've set as the default. Watch for this feature in the coming weeks, it's in production now.

Hope you all have a wonderful summer, I'll see you in a few weeks.

Riel

Anyone ever do any of these things?



These guys claim to hook you up with companies that will pay you $4 to $25 "or more" to do surveys in your underwear (don't think that's a pre-requisite... But it always sounds nice.)

As we sit and analyze what has become a much bigger project than the one we started, (GO smRty) I can't help but wonder.... What else could I be doing to make a buck on the net?

Not that I'm only in this to make a buck... Don't get me wrong, I love what I do... But hey, we could all use a little more cabbage in our pocket right?

We've discovered that we need to do more work on the "empty state" - (thank you 37signals for that term, it's very appropriate). New users are having trouble figuring out how to navigate the application. I guess when it's something you've evolved in house, it just seems to make sense. I wrote a detailed description today of the "work flow" which should make it's way into the site in the next few days.

We also plan to put more "WHAT'S THIS" buttons around the interface to help explain some of the more intricate details (see francois quick key post from a couple of days ago, it's very informative.

Another week raps up and we've finally started to get some user response. While it may not have been the best response (some was very good, but enough confused letters tells us we need more design work on the explanation side of things).

Have a nice weekend everyone, we'll be back at it on Monday.

(switch) (a little smRty humour)

I surrender!
Originally uploaded by varf.

We seem to do this more often than I'd like, but we're migrating servers again.

We've upgraded ourselves to a dedicated box as smrty, we put up lights and Rick site were starting to suffer on the shared hosting we had.

Would like to make a move to the engineyard, but we're not there yet ($wise$) where we can let someone else handle the headaches of running and more importantly scaling our server setup.

Oh well, as long as we don't get dug for a few more weeks, we should be fine.

Anywho... If you're trying to get into smrty right now, the only thing you'll find is a page that says "it works"... Which is ironic programmer humor I'm guessing, since really it doesn't work...

I digress.... Should be up by this afternoon, I trust that you'll excuse the necessary down time.

----

On a completely unrelated note... I just want to give the boys at SHOPIFY.COM a big shout out for a very easy to use, simple yet powerful shopping site. Anyone (including non coder me) can have a site up in an afternoon. As an example, I put up stuckers.com (new venture with my good buddy and vinyl sign guru Gord) in about 4 hours, including finding and registering what I think is a killer name.

Anyway.... If you need to do some ecommerce and want a painless way to set up a ready to go shop... I'd definitely give them a look... Great model too, costs NOTHING to set up and they take a very reasonable 3% off the top of your sales... I think that's a great model, let people see if there is a market for their product before committing to big development / integration costs.

Well, took longer than I'd have liked ... and like so many of these projects, every door we opened seemed to open 3 more.

However, I feel like we've built something useful and I hope others find so too.

May I present officially the launch of smRty.com

It's now almost midnight pacific time and even later where Francois has been busy updating the server.

There are still a couple of minor things to patch (don't forget your password, you'll find getting it back a little out of reach right now :) but overall it looks pretty good.

I just billed my clients for my time.... ah! finally no more exporting to excel

Please give it a try and send us any feedback to xl (at) ixld.com

(we'll get off our asses and set up some smrty address's soon... won't we Francois :)

NEW YORK – The U.S. Department of Justice on Wednesday announced three people have been arrested for allegedly attempting to sell Coca-Cola company secrets to Pepsi. According to the Department of Justice the three people were caught stealing confidential information, including a sample of a new drink, from The Coca-Cola Co. and trying to sell it to rival PepsiCo Inc. “in a sting operation.” Ibrahim Dimson of New York and Edmund Duhaney and Joya Williams of Georgia were arrested and charged with wire fraud and unlawfully stealing and selling trade secrets. Williams was an executive assistant at Coca-Cola. In May 2006, PepsiCo informed Coke that the company had received a letter from a person calling himself “Dirk” offering detailed and confidential information about Coke's products for a fee. Immediately, the FBI became involved in the case and within the following weeks gave the alleged con-men manila envelopes with money in exchange for Coke secrets. “Information is the lifeblood of the company. As the health of our enterprise continues to strengthen and the breadth of our innovation pipeline continues to grow, our ideas and our competitive data carry increasing interest to those outside our business,” said Coke CEO Neville Isdell.



Boy.... and here I am telling the world what our plans are :)

Check out our new design job, garanteed not to be a trade secret, on smRty.com

Just felt like sharing this view of Vancouver with you. It's Saturday and I'm thinking about smRty and the frustrating details (what do they say? The Devil is in the Details?) that need to be ironed out before it's ready for public consumption.

Billing is not an easy business. While the "Punch Clock" functionality is worked out for the issues that you're dealing with... it's the "extras" that are holding us up.

Of course you're going to have expenses beyond the time billing. Things like external licensing, books, gas costs, buying your client a new laptop.... It immediately became apparent that we were going to have to add the ability to put "NON TIME RELATED" items on the invoice.

That raises all sorts of questions of course. Do you simply add the ability to add a section to the invoice for line items? Do you integrate a database for inventory? If you're selling it once, good chance it'll happen again? Isn't it easier to simply add items to your catalog as you go? Or is that adding an extra step that ultimately isn't desirable. Which one will take longer to implement? Do you add it later or delay launch to ensure a stronger product?

I'm not entirely sure what the answers are, like every step in business it comes down to polling your peers, asking questions, and ultimately going with your instincts.

Do we need to have a product catalog as part of the billing solution? Or do we simply go with the add a line item to the invoice model? Only time will tell (I'm guessing the catalog model, but hey, let's wait for Francois to weigh in shall we?)