Archive for April, 2008
This week we put some new training video clips on the Resources page of our website. Each video is less than 2 minutes and provides a quick how-to on performing certain tasks. We will be adding more videos to the library over time, but the current selections include:
- Upload an Agreement
- Storing Templates
- Download a Template
- Adding Contacts
- Adding Tasks
- Creating Events
If you are a registered Mumboe user, you also have access to the Mumboe Support site where you will find Customer Forums, our Knowledge Base and the online Help documentation. We hope you will find this information useful and as always if you have comments or suggestions, don’t be shy, let’s us know what you think.
As an aside, yes, that is my voice on the videos and I am available for voice over work.
April 28th, 2008
Author: James
Continuing on with the Web 2.0 Expo Launch Pad event in San Francisco today. Launch Pad consists of six companies presenting to a panel of VCs. They only have 5 minutes to pitch.
Acquia is first up. They are an open source software company providing products and services to the Drupal community. The judges don’t seem thrilled. I really don’t know enough about them or Drupal to have an opinion.
Triggit says they make it quick and easy for web publishers to monetize their sites with advertising across pretty much all platforms. The presenter does a cool demo that gets a round of applause from the audience. Pretty slick. They’ve got something there. The judges seem mildly impressed. Triggit scores as the early favorite.
Chirp presents their desktop viewer/screen saver called ChirpScreen. The judges don’t like it. Looks cool but not sure what their monetization plan would be. Why would people use it?
Oortle: love the name. It’s like a live version of flickr called photophlow. Again, visually catchy but is it a must have?
JobScore “empowers employers to recruit cooperatively”. Looks interesting, I wonder how they will get critical mass? Not sure the judges like it. If they get some momentum, this would be a cool service. And they are charging for it, so at least they have a monetization plan.
TradeVibes presents its community site for ”researching hot new startups”. Not sure about this one. Judges and audience seem unimpressed.
There is a quick text-in vote at the end of the presentations, and Triggit wins with 45% of the vote. Nobody else is close. I’m not crazy about text voting as a way to determine the winner of these events, especially when the companies are only given 5 minutes to present. I’ve seen a few of these this year and the product that can show a slick visual demo quickly always wins. I do think Triggit has a very clever application. I was surprised by how few people there were in the room for the presentations. It was held in the main keynote area, which is HUGE, but only a few hundred people showed up. I guess at the end of the day, it’s good press for the companies involved.
That’s all for today. We’ve got to catch a plane back to Austin.
April 24th, 2008
Author: Bill
This is our first day at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco. They have nine tracks going simultaneously, so there’s plenty to choose from, but you certainly can’t see everything you’d like. Scott D and I split up to cover as many sessions as possible.
First up is a panel discussion on Community Building: Good, Bad, and Ugly featuring speakers from Jive Software, Forrester Research, Intel and PC World/Macworld. Nothing earth shattering here, maybe a bad first choice. I’m 0 for 1.
Next up is a session titled Creating a Coherent Social Strategy for Business, presented by two Forrester analysts who wrote the book Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies. Some interesting slides which they have available online. Pretty good.
Things start to get more interesting in Consumer 2.0: How Web 2.0 is Changing Moods, Metrics, & Monetization. Some good data from Erin Hunter at comScore, including some pretty scary thoughts on how cookie deletions and other factors can really skew your web site analytics.
Wow, Stephan Spencer, the SEO guru from Netconcepts, is great. Very impressive presentation. I’m 3 for 4 and gaining momentum heading into the final preso: Emerging Ad Exchanges. Swing and a miss. Ended the day 3 for 5. I hope Scott had better luck.
The morning sessions are followed by a couple hours of keynotes. First up is Tim O’Reilly of O’Reilly Media. Wow, he’s good. Tough act to follow, but next up is Max Levchin (formerly of PayPal and now the force behind Slide). He seems like a genius and the interview by Forrester analyst Charlene Li is very well done. She asked why he is still involved with startups, since he obviously made a killing on PayPal. He says that’s just what he does, he enjoys launching small companies and expanding clever ideas. Slide just got an investment that put their valuation at $500 million. Not bad for 2.5 years of work. Another interesting story from Max: he went through four failed startups before hitting the jackpot with PayPal. I’d say he’s on a hot streak lately.
Clay Shirky, the guy who wrote Here Comes Everybody, is presenting now. I saw him on the Colbert Report. He’s funny and interesting. I like the rapid-fire format – they have people presenting for no more than 20 minutes. Keeps it lively. Shirky was very good, but Levchin was the highlight for me.
Overall, it’s been a pretty good conference so far. Lots to choose from and plenty of good speakers. Now it’s off to a pub crawl in South Park.
April 23rd, 2008
Author: Bill
Our very own James Walley, Mumboe’s director of customer service, isn’t just a nice guy to our customers. As an alumni of Mississippi State University, he also volunteers his time to cheer up homesick Bulldogs here in Austin, Texas. This month, the MSU Alumni Association honored James as its volunteer of the month on the orgnanization’s web site. What we’d like to know: why no link in the article back to Mumboe.com, James? Where’s the love?
April 21st, 2008
Author: admin
Ruby on Rails is all the rage among web application developers, and Mumboe is no exception. Created by David Heinemeier Hansson of 37signals, Rails is the framework of choice for a growing number of web apps such as Basecamp, Backpack and Twitter. Austin-based FiveRuns, a company that offers management tools for Rails applications, recently interviewed Mumboe’s Director of Development, Scott Diedrick, in its TakeFive blog series about his team’s experience developing in Rails. Read Scott’s interview here.
April 18th, 2008
Author: admin
We are excited that so many companies have been taking advantage of the Mumboe Express offer to try our product for free with no commitments. To keep our customers (and other interested friends) up to date on new Mumboe application features and enhancements, we’ve introduced the Mumboe Newsletter. For quick tips and advice on how to get more out of Mumboe, sign up here.
April 17th, 2008
Author: admin
We reported Mumboe’s move to Amazon S3 in our newsletter this month (sign up here for latest updates), but I wanted to take the time here to do this move a little more justice.
The ease and scalability of S3 make this a good move for Mumboe and for our customers. Our customer base is growing rapidly (thanks in part to our free account offer), and Amazon’s infrastructure makes it much easier for us to scale our file storage capabilities very quickly.
Another factor in our decision was S3’s reliability in relation to its cost. One of Mumboe’s key benefits is our affordability, and S3 allows us to keep our costs low and pass that savings on to our customers.
The gravy on top of this decision? You should have seen the dazzle in Marketing’s eye when we announced this move internally. They were thrilled that Mumboe was moving another piece of our application into the “cloud“. I don’t think the marketing aspect of this crossed our minds during the decision-making process, but it sounds like this move makes everyone happy.
I like that services like this are putting a new spin on the old “build vs. buy” comparison. Now, there is a third option (in some cases) that is beginning to make a lot more sense to an increasingly long list of companies.
April 17th, 2008
Author: James
Did you know that all of Mumboe’s product tiers (including the free Mumboe Express account) feature full-text indexing and searching capabilities? That means that, from within the Mumboe application, you can search the text of all of your agreements for documents containing a specific keyword.
How is this accomplished? When you upload agreement documents into Mumboe, several things happen:
- If the file is not already in PDF format, Mumboe creates a PDF of your MS Word or scanned TIF file (your original version is always still available).
- The text contained in the document is read into the system. If no text is present, the document is processed by our OCR engine and a text representation is created.
- The document’s text is then indexed to make it searchable.
Using Mumboe’s full-text search feature, you can quickly find an agreement, or at least narrow the set of potential agreements, by simply typing in a keyword (such as “NDA” or “lease”). Of course, full-text searching is not without flaws (for example, the results read from the OCR are not always perfect), but it is a powerful tool that can help you quickly find the right agreement.
April 14th, 2008
Author: James
I stopped by the Salesforce.com Roadshow in Austin on Tuesday afternoon at the Hilton downtown. Nothing earth shattering to report, but the folks from SFDC, like Pat Morrisey, gave some great demos/presentations. They continue to promote their platform as a service (Force.com), and talked about the continued growth of AppExchange. For companies like Mumboe, AppExchange is a great marketplace. There seem to be a lot of SaaS application marketplaces popping up lately, like WebEx Connect and Google Solutions Marketplace. I think all of those are great news for ISVs. More channels make distribution easier, more affordable and more scalable. The trick with all of these platforms and marketplaces will be the integration of the individual applications.
I was hoping for a repeat performance of the great free food served up at the OpSource Breakfast that morning (that I blogged about in my previous post), but it was not to be, just box lunches (soggy sandwiches). I guess you get what you pay for.
April 10th, 2008
Author: Bill
OpSource and OnDemand Solutions/Scio Consulting hosted a breakfast on Tuesday in Austin to discuss the challenges and opportunities in the SaaS community. First of all, I have to mention the breakfast spread at the Omni. I thought I had entered Valhalla when I opened the silver serving tray and found about 15 lbs. of bacon. Not the flimsy Denny’s/Waffle House kind; but the thick cut, goodness from the magical pig. I almost skipped the meeting to nap afterwords, but glad I didn’t.
There were a few behind-the-firewall companies in attendance that were either attempting to make the transition to SaaS, or to offer both solutions at the same time. The second option seems to be the trickiest, although I’m sure there’s a marketing/positioning answer to it. Cannibalization seems to be a major concern, since customers are asking providers for SaaS solutions that offer a significant reduction in costs compared to their ‘enterprisey’ counterparts. However, many of the participants were SaaS only and they were mostly focused on best practices, cloud computing/hosting, pricing, billing & metering, etc. Greg Spicer from OpSource had a lot of good suggestions throughout the meeting. I think the consensus was that SaaS is inevitably going to gain acceptance in the enterprise community, although there will always be those holdouts who will not accept an on-demand solution or multi-tenant architecture (and that’s OK). Speaking as an Austin-based company, we need more get-togethers like this to help drive the discussion. I’m sure they have dozens of events like this every week in Silicon Valley, but here in Austin we could use more.
April 9th, 2008
Author: Bill
