Archive for June, 2008

A Company Help Center In A Few Clicks

June 27th, 2008 by Yves | Posted in General | 1 Comment »
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Back in April, I wrote a post about how important user feedbacks were to us. I mentioned the discovery of the Get Satisfaction service, which is in its own terms ‘a place where people can get the most from the products they use, and where companies are encouraged to get real with their customers.’ (See how it looks when applied to BeeBole).

The service is also a real open debate since companies cannot hide comments from customers nor censor them.

The Get Satisfaction team has recently added a ‘Help Center‘ functionality. It is an open-source PHP application that pushes the integration of their service in your company environment a little bit further, maximizing your possibilities to customize the look and feel.

All this made me very enthusiastic even more so because everything was free.  Apparently this will however change and I have been told the pricing should become public in a month or so. This raises a question: ‘Why should a company pay for a tool that is not under its control?’.

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Free Collaboration Tools

June 20th, 2008 by Yves | Posted in General | 7 Comments »
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Collaboration is a key element in the success of a project. In certain cases, at BeeBole for example, it is even vital; Mic and Hughes live in Belgium and I live in India.

While distance and time zone difference might seem an issue, we found that with a set of good collaboration tools, the problems were rapidly disappearing.

Time zone difference even became an advantage since we can’t talk to each others during certain period of the day, which obliges us to focus on our work instead of chatting and recreating the world constantly.

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Future of Web Apps – London 2008

June 11th, 2008 by Yves | Posted in General | No Comments »
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In the new flourishing market of Web 2.0 events, we decided to attend the Future of Web Apps event.

It will happen in October (8-10 October) in London at the Excel (in the docks area).

Future of Web Apps

Just like its US equivalent in Miami last March, big names from well known companies are coming: Kevin Rose from Digg, Erick Schonfeld from Techcrunch, etc., …

We will attend the conferences on the 9th and the 10th of October.

If you plan to attend the event and look for company while there, just post a comment.

Can everyone be a software developer?

June 6th, 2008 by Yves | Posted in General | 3 Comments »
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I came across this article this morning. Iceberg comes with an interesting platform allowing everyone to create web applications with “zero code”. Looking at the market, you can find other competitors such as Coghead, Longjump, BungeeLabs, WyaWorks or Zoho.

There is something striking me in all the video presentations I have seen on those web sites, it is the complexity for any normal user. There is indeed the “zero code” approach but you still need to understand what is a web service, that those web services have variables or that you can link those with workflows.

There are a lot of good ideas but I don’t see the point for the following reasons…

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