I am pleased to announce that fixx, our bug tracking system, has been finally released to the general public.
In keeping with our ideology of simple licensing structures, we have 2 different paid-for licenses available; a Commercial license that allows unlimited users and unlimited projects per instance of fixx, at $799, and an Academic license that is just a Commercial license for academic organisations, at $399.
As stated before, fixx is free to download and use for a single user, under the default Single User license. Try it out.
I would also like to thank everyone who participated in the beta program and provided their valuable feedback to help shape the first release of fixx.
We have more exciting updates to come, and an excellent road-map, so make sure you keep an eye on our blog.
As we rapidly approach the release of fixx, our bug tracking solution (I have heard hushed voices in the Labplex that this might be as soon as Monday), I wanted to take the opportunity to announce the development of our next product.
solomon is a web-based contact manager and simplified CRM solution for small and medium businesses, who want to break free of Neolithic desktop solutions that don't play well with information sharing. It will be a web application you can run on your own hardware, like fixx.
solomon is still brewing at this stage but you are welcome to take a peek and sign-up to be notified when the beta goes out.
Before someone starts the "clone wars", solomon is indeed inspired by Highrise from 37Signals. However, we plan to bring our own unique take to interaction, functionality and purpose to the small business CRM space and fill a gap many existing, over-priced and non-user friendly enterprise web/desktop products have left.
Lately I have been focusing on the marketing and sales strategy for the lab, especially with the impending release of fixx, our bug tracking product for software teams. When I joined the lab I mentioned in my first post, that I was spear-heading the social computing and networking efforts and recently, this has expanded to a more marketing and sales focused role. As you're all aware we already have profiles on facebook, linkedin, twitter, etc, but we get to communicate with our followers, we don't get to interact with them.
This is why I attended the FUEL conference held by Carsonified in London last Friday, to listen to key speakers talk about how businesses interact with their audience using the latest web tools.
There were some great presentations and I must admit that at the start of the day I was wary that my ridiculously early alarm clock call and 3 hour train journey would leave me somewhat exhausted and not very attentive. However, to my surprise, I had no reason to be concerned because I was fully engaged with each presentation throughout the day.
The key message of the conference was to discuss the different ways which you can interact with your audience and I think that they demonstrated this very well by keeping all of the conference audience engaged throughout the day.
Some of the highlighted speakers of FUEL included:
Carsonified's co-founder Ryan Carson discussed how you can interact with customers
Tara Hunt explained whuffie and how it works to build a community around your brand
Virgin's Alex Hunter discussed how customers played a big role in Virgin America...
Ted Hunt from Innocent discussing branding and interacting with customers
and dont hassle the hoff with soocial (Stefan Fountain and Daniel Spronk)
This does not include other great presentations by Keir Whitaker (Carsonified), Nic Halstead (Fav.or.it), Stewart Townsend (Sun), Clive Howard (Howard/Baines), Andrew Scott (Rummble), Paul Boag (Headscape), who discussed some interesting concepts on working with clients, Steve Pearce (Poke), who had a very cool presentation with excellent drawings about how to get the best out of your business as well as a very informative presentation about branding from Richard Moross (Moo).
The overall message which I received from the conference, is that it is essential for any business to interact with their audience using the best tools which the web can offer. Some of the tools which were demonstrated were Seesmic (an online video questions and answers site, useful for interaction between a business and its customers), UserVoice (collecting user votes, ratings on products, etc) and there are many others.
All of these tools were discussed because they can play such a key part in the success of a business' future. Many of the presentations showed how being proactive, creative and interacting with their customers or followers has proved to be very successful for their business. This is something we will be considering in great detail at the lab so watch this space...
A year or so ago, I met with a then-potential client, who we pitched our software development process to. I went through our usual routine of explaining the various techniques and methods involved, when the client stopped me on 1 specific slide.
"Requirements workshops? Prototype? User Experience?", he said. "Frankly, I am not sure we can justify the spend on that. We are fairly confident of what we need!" With that, he pushed a well-bound booklet called "System Requirements Specification", which some poor analyst had spent months preparing in an isolated cubicle.
Usability or User Experience (or whatever else you choose to call it), is a fledgling concept (in the larger field of Human Computer Interaction), that is all too often considered a "cost" on software projects. Things are certainly changing, with trend-setters like Google and Apple championing both the practical and aesthetic aspects of usability. However, there is still a distinct problem in how organisations (especially in the software industry) deal with usability.
Organisations that have a high focus on usability separate this function away from the core development team, usually employing people in specialist usability roles or worse, an isolated department. There are, of course, great advantages to having specialists in usability and user experience (as with any other discipline), but the problem lies in most developers taking the "not our problem" stance.
Although advanced usability skills require specialist learning and experience, there is no excuse for developers to not be familiar with basic usability concepts and apply them in their every-day role. The expansive literature that is available on usability makes it a breeze even for a novice to learn the basics.
At hedgehog lab, we expect every developer to be involved in the usability process, both at a design and implementation stage. We have no secret-sauce for training them. Just an open-mind, a constant thirst to learn, and some great usability books like the following,
It is high-time that software developers listed usability and user experience design as a key-skill in their arsenal. Let's face it; very soon "usable" will cease to be a benefit or a USP and become the norm, and those software developers who do not embrace this concept will be left behind.
We, here at the lab, appreciate the value of letting the user hack out their own solutions to problems that they may have stumbled upon that don't fit our vision. There's barely a day goes by that you won't hear Mark suggest a rubbish new feature, get instantly shot down, and then insist that he'll write a Greasemonkey script for that functionality anyway.
With this in mind, the fixx team have always maintained that there will be a fixx API, so that developers may adapt fixx to meet their bug tracking needs. While still in relatively early stages, that API is coming together and you can check out the progress in the beta by going to any issues screen and appending .xml or .json to the URI (/issues.json, for example). This was still mostly unusable (unless you want to jump through some pretty hefty hoops), until recently when Sarat committed a change to allow basic HTTP authentication. This change is not available to the masses yet, however, to show off its potential usefulness, I've put together a quick shell one-liner to get the number of issues assigned to me:
curl -u user:password http://SERVER/issues.xml?qAssignedTo=19 | xmlstarlet sel -t -v "count(//issue)"
Which when fed into conky, an ace Linux desktop text rendering app, leaves you with a widget that looks a bit like this:
Useless? yes. Limited? Of course. But if this divvy can use it, you won't have any trouble whatsoever.
Okay this is a bit delayed but its been in the pipeline for a while.
I recently attended the first ever BarCampNorthEast, held at the Art Work Galleries in Newcastle.
Now if you dont know what BarCamp is, it's described as ad-hoc gathering born from the desire for people to share and learn in an open environment. Basically at BarCamp you can:
give a presentation on anything you like
attend the many presentations held by others
have an all together jolly time meeting talented/cool kids
Personally, i love BarCamp because of its informal participatory nature, for example, Tara Hunt's discussion on mind hacks found everybody in a circle 'splaining their own personal hacks; Bon's hack involved setting his clock fifteen minutes fast which allowed him a combination of getting from A to B early or on time. Good hack!
The night time saw a rather tasty barbecue, mojito's (made by yours truely!) and an on-the-fly DJ set by none other than Ian Forrester using his amazing Pacemaker.
So yeah, BarCampNorthEast rocked! Roll on BarCampNorthEast2!
