Weekly Release

We’ve pushed out our weekly release this week which sets our our product for it’s public launch very soon. Here’s a breakdown of what’s in this release:

In the Web Application:

• We had a lot of beta users asking for the ability to update account information. We just hadn’t added it yet. Well today it is now there. You can now update Basecamp, Dropbox and FTP account information. Access it from the main console as seen in this screenshot.
• Part of allowing editing meant we needed to have more information available on the Console so we rolled out some console UI changes that we had been working on. Now there is an accordion view of all of your jobs. Clicking on one of them opens up the detailed information about the job.

• In response to our beta users requests we have added an additional plan that allows retrieving files and data for Basecamp plans with up to 30GB of files stored. This is our Gold plan. We’re testing against the 75GB Basecamp plan as well and should have that available soon.

In the Core Engine:

• The reason we don’t just support all of the files and data that you want to have retrieved is that it is actually somewhat difficult and error prone to retrieve huge data sets across the internet. There are so many network issues that can go wrong and we are dealing with lots of different networks. In order to retrieve your files from Basecamp and deliver them to you, we have to access your Basecamp account to get the information about your files, access Amazon where your Basecamp files are stored, and then access your FTP server or Dropbox to store your files. We have been doing extensive testing to capture all of the corner cases of transmission errors, access errors, FTP server intricacies, and whatever else can happen. As part of rolling out our Gold plan we have also rolled out support for the in our Core Engine. This includes a lot more error handling and retry mechanisms to make sure that we get the files and data that we need.

Board of Advisors

Our Advisory Board consists of a few, carefully selected individuals with a vast amount of experiences, and coming from diverse backgrounds. Our advisors are there to provide us with a personal, confidential, trusted sounding board and to help guide our company as we navigate the waters of being a software startup.

We are pleased to welcome 3 new members to our Advisory Board:

Cordell Baanhofman

Vice President of Technology and Corporate Development
Patient Education Systems

Tyler Morgan

Nonprofit Finance and Operations Treasurer
Reality Carpinteria

Joseph Rehfeld

General Partner
Noble Investments

Check out our Advisory Board page on our website for more information about each advisor.

Weekly Release

Happy New Year! One of the big items that we’ve been hearing from our beta participants is that FTP is a nice way to get their files to them, or at least it would be if they had an FTP server…. FTP is sort of an antiquated technology that is still around and used all over the place, but not everyone just has access to a FTP server to store hordes of files on whenever they want to. They have FTP servers for their websites or some other specific purpose, but they don’t want their backups going there. We knew it was going to have limited appeal, but we felt strongly that it was most important to be able to give your data and files to you as opposed to storing them somewhere else in the cloud. Many people have questioned the value of storing their backups on yet another cloud storage system and we wanted to make sure that you get what you want.

So we’ve spent quite a bit of time investigating other options that meet the criteria of giving you your data in a way that doesn’t require custom FTP servers to be setup. There are surprisingly a ton of options out there. We’ll be building out many of them in the near future, and with this weeks release we have already implemented one of them. The current  release that is at https://beta.centripetalsoftware.com now provides you with the choice of having your Basecamp files and data delivered to you via Dropbox using your own Dropbox account. We still provide the ability to use FTP if you still want to. We love this feature for our own backups! When the backup is running you actually see the files getting synced to your computer via the Dropbox client and you can also access all of the files through the Dropbox website using your account. We then add our Dropbox folder to the formal backup process we have running and all of our Basecamp files and data are stored on secure backups! Give it a try and let us know what you think.

That was the main feature we worked on, but there was other stuff in this release. Here’s a quick run down of the changes we pushed out today:

In the Web Application:

• We did another test run with UTest which found a number of bugs in the validations on our data entry screens. These all got fixed.
• There were a number of broken links that got fixed. These were due to the new website we rolled out last week.
• We added in the new Dropbox choice and configuration screens so that you can get going with Dropbox.

In the Core Engine:

• FTP is a little frustrating on our side as well, there are a million different FTP servers out there that all seem to have little nuances that cause problems with our system. We discovered some issues with the DriveHQ FTP servers, we got that fixed up so that you can use the free and paid accounts with DriveHQ.
• Then the big feature mentioned above, most of the work happened in the core engine to store the data to Dropbox. Check it out.

Stay tuned for more big changes up in the next week or so.

How to get useful feedback for your product or website

Running a Micro ISV software startup is a lonely job. It's not like I don't have friends to have coffee with or go surf with, but there just isn't anyone who cares about my product that I can chat with on a daily basis and bounce ideas off of. That's a tough thing, because it is so important to be able to have a feedback loop. I've been a developer for 15 years building back end servers, services, reusable components, compilers and languages and lots of other lower level computing stuff. I feel like I can certainly build software. However, running my own company also requires me to be able to make things look pretty and get my messaging crisp so that I can sell my products. This is where my company needs that feedback loop.

Why friends and family feedback sucks....

I initially tried to go to the people I already knew, friends, family, friends of friends, etc. This generally doesn't pan out for me too well. People seem to fall into one of three groups: First is the group of people that just plain have no idea what I do. These people wouldn't be able to tell the difference between my product and an IPhone, let alone understand how to help craft a message that will help sell my products or give me relevant feedback on pricing plans and UI layouts. It's nice to hear their encouragement at times if for no other reason than to hear that someone out there thinks I am smart (thanks great aunt Mildred...);

The second group that I've run into seems to fall into the camp of people that certainly have the aptitude to understand what it is I do, and likely have the ability to provide detailed, relevant feedback on everything I am doing. Many of these people could certainly be in my shoes running this company, building this software if they wanted to. Sure they like to hear about my experiences using .Net 4.0 and the new Parallel Extensions, or they are interested in hearing how the Quartz scheduler is working out for me. These people will even help me out by answering technical questions when I am in a pinch and would probably even write code for me if I begged hard enough. But they truly, just aren't all that interested in what I am doing. Sort of the same way that I could care less about Ruby on Rails or Adobe Air, but still talk tech with my friends who live and breath those things. For this group, I keep on plugging my product and hope that one day some of them will care enough to take an interest, but the best I get for now is a half hearted, short winded answer;

The final group that I'll put people in for the purposes of this conversation is people who think I'm just absolutely crazy for leaving a posh, high paying, "secure" job at Microsoft to follow some hair brained idea I have and spend all my savings for what they see as sure failure and financial disaster. Of course they are way too nice to say any of that, and also way to nice to provide any critical feedback so everything I ask of them is met with a polite answer of how good it looks or how well I am doing. The best I get out of them is a cup of coffee because they can't stand to see me spend my child's college fund at Starbucks. I guess that is worth something.

So where do I get useful feedback?

So in order to get good, constructive criticism on what I am doing and what I should be doing, I've taken to paying people for it. My company has become quite dependent on services like usertesting.com and utest.com for getting feedback on how things work and what people's impressions are of my products and marketing. It's nice to get this feedback from these places because it is unfiltered. These are people I never meet, likely never will meet, and all of their feedback is offline, meaning that they record it or write it up and send it to me. I've learned a lot and made a ton of changes based on the feedback I've received from these services. Someday soon I'll write up a separate review of those services. The one thing that the feedback I received from these services lacked for me was credibility. I find myself still wondering if a suggestion is the best thing to do and still have no one to bounce the ideas off. So I went in search of something more.

There are plenty of blogs, sites, podcasts, books, etc out there on software startups, and I read my fair share of them. There are a few however that played a part in helping me to take the plunge of quitting a high paying, "secure" job at Microsoft and spending my savings on running my own company. One book in particular is "The Web Startup Success Guide" by Bob Walsh. He has a great podcast and blog as well. Bob's writings really gave me a lot of the confidence that I could be successful and helped me to take the plunge. So when I found out that Bob has some consulting services where he provides website reviews and marketing type feedback and advice, I naturally decided to give it a try. For the money I don't think there is any better option out there. Bob provided me with candid feedback that was highly critical but was backed up with advice and thoughtful options for getting on the right track. Our working relationship started out on a Thursday morning as I sent Bob an email asking for a review. Within an hour Bob called me and we set the whole thing up. By the following morning I had a detailed, written review of my website and marketing message. We then had an almost 2 hour phone conversation the same day to follow that up during which he walked me through his comments, and went into much deeper detail as well as answered my questions and brainstormed some ideas. The time spent was well worth it and I came away with tons of actionable work items for improving my message as well as my overall site. If you're in need of some seriously constructive criticism of you product site and your message, you need to talk with Bob Walsh.

New Website and Open Public Beta

I've already finished implementing many of the suggestions that Bob gave me in this review, there are certainly more coming. The culmination of the majority of his guidance and critique can be seen now in the new Centripetal Software website that was recently published. There are still more items that will be done over time, but I'd really appreciate any feedback on the new site. In addition to publishing the new site, I've also been slaving away at new features within the Centripetal Retrieve™ application. The current release that was published a few days ago, opens up our beta to anyone wishing to participate, it is no longer a closed beta. If you are interested in controlling your data and files that you store in 37Signals Basecamp™ product then check out the Centripetal Retrieve™ for Basecamp™ product. While in beta we are not charging for the service. There are lots of new features getting added on a weekly basis also.

Weekly Release: Incremental File Retrieval

Well it was a nice Christmas with family and friends, and there was a bit of work getting done as well. I’ve come to realize that starting a company is pretty demanding. This week’s release was a big one, we’ve been saving up all of the features that required database changes for a larger release, and that was this one! Although things didn’t go as smoothly as hoped with the data migration, we got things cleaned up and we’re back in business. With this release we’ll be opening up our beta to a wider audience to give it a try. Here’s a quick run down of the changes we pushed out today:

In the Web Application:

• We’ve begun integrating in the plans and pricing into the overall application. You’ll now need to choose a plan that you want to use for your Basecamp data and file retrieval.
• There are quite a few UI changes that went into this release. It tightens up the overall UI and hopefully makes it more clear as to what is happening.
• By request from some of our beta participants, we added in a detailed status log view. You can access this from the main console page by clicking on the icon to the right of the most recent status message for each job. This will give you all status messages grouped by Job run.
• There is a new status message available in the logs as well that shows a count of the number of files retrieved as well as the total size in bytes of all files retrieved. It was an internal monitor we had that we decided to expose through the status messages. It may be a bit cryptic right now, but we’ll clean it up. It currently reads something like “FileCount=49:TotalSize=208823384”.
• One consistent feedback message we got from our beta users was that there was no way to complete a job if it got partially done and then they had to go get some coffee or something. We knew that going in to the initial release, but chose to cut that feature in favor of releasing. Well, we’ve now added it in. If you have a job that is partially configured it will show a Configure icon next to the status message on the main console. Clicking on this will take you to the next step in the wizard that needs to be configured.
• We added in a number of small security related assertions to better ensure that our applications remains secure.
• Finally, we added in a page that gives details about how your job will be scheduled and when you can expect your first retrieval to happen.

In the Core Engine:

• Of course the big feature that we released today is the ability to do incremental file retrievals from Basecamp. This is a feature we’ve been working on for some time. Now all jobs will run a full retrieval on a limited schedule and an incremental retrieval on the runs in between.

There’s still more coming as we ramp up to our initial public release in the beginning of the new year.

Amazon EC2 Downtime reminds us of the need for managing IT even for online applications

A lot of startups and even medium sized businesses that run online, subscription applications would not have been viable just 10 years ago. This is because the cost of computer hardware and network hardware and infrastructure personnel to run a large online business was cost prohibitive even a few years ago. Cloud computing has changed much of that and Amazon has really led the way in implementing the vision (After Sun came up with the idea). Now it's possible for a company to build a highly complex application and deploy it to Amazon's cloud infrastructure and pay a minimal amount to start off, but have virtually unlimited resources to scale up as they grow. Having a company like Amazon or Google, or Microsoft run the data center should be comforting for customers of these online applications. It means that there are specialized security experts figuring out how to secure things, specialized storage experts figuring out how to back thins up and keep data online, specialized performance experts worrying about how to keep things fast, and specialized operations people keeping things running and available. This is something that most online companies would not be able to do anywhere close to as well as these bigger, specialized companies could do. Amazon has lots of experience running a huge data center for their own applications and they are able to use that expertise to run other company's applications as well.

But, that doesn't mean that even the big boys are immune from downtime, data loss or security issues. Just this week, in the prime Christmas shopping season, Amazon's Ec2 cloud went down for a short time. This mainly probably impacted a number of online applications of startups that were trying to make things happen at this prime time of year. Even though users can get some relief from knowing that applications they use online are being managed by a large, specialized company, there are still concerns that need to be thought through. Core IT principles still need to be followed. It's not enough to trust your service provider to keep your data secure, or back it up consistently. You need to make sure that you are caring for the IT assets that run your business.

Windows 7 Giveaway Winner

We recently ran a giveaway in an attempt to do a little bit of market research about how people are using online project management software. You can still fill out the survey here. We chose one of the survey participants randomly as the winner of our giveaway. Our winner is Kim Vigsbo of Vigsbo Solutions. We sent off a copy of Microsoft Windows 7 Professional to her the other day. Kim uses Basecamp to manage her design projects with her clients. Thanks to all who participated in our short survey.

Weekly Release: Beta feedback enhancements

Still slaving away here on the product this week, getting ready for the holidays at home as well with lots of cookies and parties going on. We've been getting some great feedback from our beta program and we're rolling out some quick fixes of things that we're hearing about a lot. There are a couple bigger features about done that should be rolling out shortly as well. Stay Tuned! Here's the bag of changes we added today:

In the Web Application:

• Added the ability for users to give their own names to tasks so that they can be differentiated in the Management Console.
• We made the overall application larger, it was sort of constrained before to a pretty small window so we grew it a lot, this makes it easier to see stuff and will allow us to add in some more features without over crowding the console.
• We've added some more help topics as well as additional help related information into error messages that better help users understand how to correct data input that may be incorrect.
• We also built out some additional monitoring capabilities into the overall application so that we can have a better handle on the application as it is plugging away day after day!

In the Core Engine:

• A new feature we added in the FTP Storage logic is to name the project directories after the name that you give the project in Basecamp instead of using the project ID we get from Basecamp.
• We added in a retry mechanism to the Basecamp file retrieval logic. We were seeing occasional requests to Basecamp's Amazon Storage for a file were timing out or getting some other error back that was network related. So now if we get that back we'll wait for a bit and then try the file again. This has decreased the missed files that we were seeing. There is lots of error handling required when dealing with such a network dependent application.
• Along those lines, we also added in some additional error handling on the FTP storage logic. There are tons of FTP servers and they all have little nuances that we have to handle. We're getting a lot more robust in handling them as well as the related network issues that come with securely transporting GB's of files and data across the Internet.
• We fixed a bug we discovered around the handling of Basecamp Projects that are archived state.

We have a lot more features coming down the pipe soon. Have a blessed Christmas and a great holiday season. Thanks to all of our beta program participants and a special thanks to those that have actively been providing feedback.

Rackspace Outage impacts SaaS companies

Rackspace is one of the largest hosted data centers and many leading SaaS business applications are hosted in their datacenters. On Friday their datacenters had an outage that caused all hosted sites that they manage to be unavailable.

Read the full story from PC Magazine - http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2357366,00.asp

The Data Liberation Front

Looking to retrieve your data out of Google's tools and applications? They have a great site that gives detailed directions on how to get all of your data out of many of their most popular applications. The idea they are touting is that this is your data so you should be able to get at it, they want to provide services so good that you won't want to leave with your data, but if you do want to then you can. The interesting aspect to this is that this gives you a way to keep your own copy of your data. If you are a business then you want to have data backup and archival policies in place, that is getting difficult as you move to SaaS basec applications. But if you are using Google's tools, you are one step closer to making that a reality.

Check it out at http://www.dataliberation.org/