The past several months have been unbelievable. This picture is of our neighbors home. Our house survived but was severely damaged. We are living in temporary housing while repairs are made to our home.

An event like this puts things in perspective - grounds you. Four of our neighbors homes burned down. They lost everything in several hours. Our hearts go out to them.

2008 will be about rebuilding in so many ways. We are planning many changes over the next month or so - stay tuned for many exciting updates on Marvelit in Q1 2008. Have a great holiday season and happy new year!

I am a fan of Seth Goodin. I bought his latest book “Small is the New Big” several months ago - and just got around to reading it. I’m motivated to begin a new series of posts applying snippets from that book to Marvelit. I know that I may be “opening myself up” having potential customers know more about Marvelit than what they should - but am willing to take the risk.

So look for several posts a week from me - discussing a principal from the book and applying it to Marvelit. Should be interesting.

Have created a category - called “Small is the New Big” to group these posts.

Seems like there is a pervasive trend on people not being able to make a decision. I remember a time not too long ago - where executives, companies, the government (well maybe not the government) could look at options, do a quick assessment and make a decision.

What happened? Seems like people talk - talk - look - demo - try - talk - demo - delay - delay - delay. I see this everywhere - not just with my business.

As an entrepreneur we have to make quick assessments - decide - assess - modify - until we get where we want. In dealing with organizations of all sizes - I’m not seeing that same process occurring.

I recently had a large project start - was working on for 1 month - than got delayed for no apparent reason. I was told - “We need to re-examine our priorities”. Two weeks later - they are still re-examining - still can not decide.

Perhaps is is a sign of the times we are living in right now. Just seems things have changed - and not for the better

Business needs the right data to operate profitably, but as business generates more and more data the problem of organizing and digesting the information created is daunting.

Then there’s the expense of needing an IT department or expanding the one already there. A new server, extra people and resources taken away from current operations to implement a Business Intelligence (BI) system keeps many companies from utilizing the thing that keeps them competitive, knowing the state of their business, their customers and their market.

Hosted dashboards solve these problems. With no equipment to buy or people to hire, the turnkey approach of a hosted dashboard allows warehoused data to easily and simply be utilized for better decision making and resource utilization.

The hardest part of the process is to define what is wanted, but this is easily accomplished if a business has defined goals and objectives. Data is moved via secure methods used by thousands of companies today.

The hosting is done on a subscription basis; this gives great flexibility when to turn the BI system on or off as needed. All maintenance of the system is done by the hosting company and security is provided to keep prying eyes from seeing sensitive information.

There is simply no need to have all applications on-premises and in fact some applications are best run by specialists. The best example of this concept is Salesforce.com which has been phenomenally successful in simplifying the CRM world.

This trend will inevitably migrate to other business applications - it is only a matter of time. In the end simplicity will always win.

Just kidding -

Oracle Eyes Business Objects

I read the 37 signals weblog and they have so much good stuff to say - I particularly liked this post - Fear Shark Attacks and Will it Scale

Allocate your fear properly
When it comes to building a web app, some things create more fear than they should…

Fear: It won’t scale
Truth: You’re not going to be Google overnight.

Fear: Too many bugs
Truth: As long as they don’t wipe the database, you can live with most bugs for a while.

Fear: Too few features
Truth: You can always add features later.

Fear: Never go down
Truth: Once-in-a-while downtime won’t scare people away.

Fear: It’s too simple
Truth: Simple solutions are fine if they get the job done.

Fear: They’ll copy us
Truth: It’s about the execution, not the idea.

Fear: We must sound serious
Truth: Trying to sound serious all the time makes you bland and unremarkable. It’s ok to be playful and have personality.

I have been thinking a lot about these issues lately - nice too see that I’m not the only one

Merging Bi and Google - creates a new word Biggle???

Biggle me This

Nice word - Beautiful Concept - too bad is not the norm. I wonder if it will be added to the dictionary soon

There is a good blog post on BI for business people about using Collaboration tools with BI. See the post here

Instant Messaging gets into BI

I believe that there is a huge opportunity to create a Knowledge Management Revolution Part 2 by merging BI and Web 2.0 technology.

So much of a company’s knowledge is embedded in people’s minds. By making it easier for knowledge workers to share information around a BI framework only makes sense.

At one of my clients - they have livelink - sharepoint - intranets up the ying yang. No one can fine anything as it is so complicated.

I use a wiki to document my requirements - and it is simple - focused - and costs nothing.

We are going to embed this into our dashboard product this year - seems like a no brainer to me.

I can’t believe that this year is almost gone. 2006 has been a memorable but trying year for us. 2007 is shaping up to be better. It has been difficult lately to find the time to write something meaningful here on this blog. I promise to post more frequently in 2007.

Some thoughts I have as the new year approaches:

1. Still trying to figure out the Search Engine Marketing thing. We have had a huge increase in traffic to our site since the summer. I have tried to add content that provides meaningful information for our existing and potential customers. I seem to still have hiccups now and then - but am generally pleased with our progress.

2. We are going to make a big push for webinars next year. GoToWebinar makes it really economical to do them frequently. We have two scheduled for January with decent enrollment considering it is the holidays.

3. I would really like to start a series of podcasts on a wide range of topics. Look for them next year as well.

4. We have some really cool ideas for DASH that we hope to complete early next year. We plan to have at least 3 releases of product by June.

5. We will be making a big push next year on deploying information communities - dashboards + wikis + blogs for SMBs and workgroups. We plan on rolling these out early next year as well.

To all of our customers and those of you that frequent this blog - we wish you a joyful and peaceful holiday season.

Here is another link to a post by Seth Goodin about being cheaper -

Cheaper (Via Seth’s Blog.)

It got me to thinking about the subject of Cheaper in relation to our business and open source in general. It seems to me that potential customers always compare you to free. I have no problem with this as we are almost free ($500 is pretty damn close) but the perception is that if you are low cost or free - there must not be a real product or value will be difficult to achieve. They do not believe that you have a business unless it costs in the thousands of dollars.

Have you ever tried to install an open-source product? Sure you get it for free - but 2-3 days of bashing your head against the wall getting it installed - or finding an answer is not free. Your value is that you did not have to spend $10k-$50k for the product. But does that make the experience any better?

That is why we have opened up our wiki on our web site - It allows you access to how the product works without paying us anything. Installation - while multiple steps - is documented - with screen shots - instead of a read me file. Want to know how to use the Meter Portlet - it’s there. All Free! - I do not see Business Objects, Cognos - or even Jasper or Pentaho doing this. This provide real value to our customers.

We need to start talking about - VALUE - not free.