We quietly released the third and final Alpha version of our code last week and have been banging away on usability issues ever since. If you already have a login ID you would have seen the changes and if you don’t, I ask you hang in with us for just a couple of weeks.

We are in the process of moving to an expanded datacenter and when that is done we will be able to send out a few hundred beta invitations, which of course will signal that we have entered a new phase. Up until last week we were more or less proving concepts and hanging the frame together, from here on out we are building out the finish work which includes more components, more applications, and more usability improvements. The goal is simple, we want people to use Teqlo from here on out, not just try it.

As is always the case, we have a lot of work to do ahead of us and will continue to roll out more features and fixes. We are also moving to a predictable upgrade cycle that will mean new stuff will come online at a predictable rate, and of course we will be looking for your feedback on how we are doing and what we should be doing.

On a somewhat related note, look for a brand new website to launch sometime in the beginning of feb (really the beginning, I just don’t have a date pinned down yet). Our new site will of course have a lot of information about Teqlo but also will strive to be a resource center for business mashups and related technologies.

Thanks for your support - Jeff

Jevon MacDonald just wrote a 12 page paper on enterprise 2.0 and IT. We’re a featured company so go download it and send it to 100 of your closest friends (actually, just send the link so Jevon gets the traffic!).

socialwrite.com » How can Enterprise 2.0 work right now?:
I have just finished writing a reasonably large (12 page) report on how to get started in the enterprise with Office 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 toolkits. I am aiming to help people in Sr. Management positions start to understand what is possible now that wasn’t possible 2 years ago. I originally started writing this to help some of my old consulting clients, who have been asking for help, but I have not been able to shift my focus away from Firestoker to work with.

It contains 2 case studies examining Teqlo as a low cost IT tool and a real-life firestoker.com case study. I have altered the company name and some information in the Firestoker case study until a proper release is in place.

Technorati Tags: Firestoker, Teqlo

I pulled the attached article out of a magazine, and I don’t even remember what magazine it was from, and stuffed it in my notebook a while back, only discovering it again today. It’s a great one pager that sums up much of what we intuitively know but need to be reminded of from time to time.

My favorite quotes are:

“Moments of truth. Great customer experiences are full of surprising ‘wow’ moments.”

“Co-creation. Allow your customers to help create their own experience… To cope with the modern world, people want more control.”

“An ecosystem approach. Focus on a constellation of products and services that deliver a seamless, wonderful experience to people.”

Taken in total, this nicely sums up what Teqlo is striving for.

Technorati Tags: Teqlo

I’ve been a little quiet on this blog through the holidays for no other reason than we ended up slowing down more than expected during that time. Having said that, we have made a couple of breakthroughs and will be rolling a new alpha release in short order.

As we enter 2007 there are a couple of things we are focusing on, the first being a dedicated effort to deploy some prebuilt applications in anticipation of a real beta release. It’s tempting for companies like us to take our sample applications, the ones that we build to demonstrate concepts, and call them end user applications in an effort to bulk up the catalog of deliverables. We could do that but I’m not convinced that is something that we derive much value from, so what we are in the process of doing is building a handful (3-6) of actual applications that people can be productive with almost immediately, at least as soon as they do a small amount of personalization.

Our next big goal is to move to a colocation facility in order to accommodate more users. Our backlog of requests for accounts is huge but our datacenter capacity is limited.

Lastly, we’re looking to hire more engineers so that we can increase the pace of our development and hit an increased number of milestones sooner. There is no magic on this one, it simply requires an increased investment on our part, which we will do.

One area that we will stay pretty light on for the next couple of months is marketing but we will have a new website online the first part of February, The current website was something that was only intended to fill some space on the domain name and channel signups, but as a consequence of limited bandwidth it has stayed online far longer than I would have liked. The new site will be based on Drupal and because we are investing the extra effort in a CMS system the intent is to have a dynamic site with a broad array of resources about not just Teqlo but about all the relevant technology and market forces we are interested in.

Best wishes to you for 2007, may it be both prosperous and rewarding.

It gives me great pleasure to announce that Rod Boothby has joined Teqlo to lead our solution marketing efforts.

Shortly after I joined the company it became very apparent to me that we had a big hole in our capabilities to define product. We could run circles around product definition for the core technology but building an application catalog demands more than we had. Rod came up as an obvious first choice for this role, primarily because I already knew so well about him through his blog.

The product management role in technology companies is well defined, but the limiter in my view for us was the fact that we aren’t building products from scratch, we are building applications from other people’s stuff with the “stuff” being their web services. With that in mind it was necessary for me to find someone who could first ask the “why should we do this” question followed up with a detailed specification of what “it” is and then organize the partner offerings to deliver it. No small task.

Rod brings to our table a level of enthusiasm that is without equal combined with the respect of his peers that will no doubt be essential for pulling off what we are trying to deliver. Rod’s technical abilities are also essential for the part of his role that is developer facing.

I am really excited that Rod has joined the company.

Technorati Tags: Rod Boothby