ISV Kaizen

Thank you Microsoft for the MSDN Subscription. Now we have a New Year & Christmas Tree in the office.

This is a meaningless emotional post about a great achievement of our small development team - Indigo Byte Systems in partnership with True BoxShot Software.

Our application, TBS Cover Editor was selected by Embarcadero ( owner and producer of Delphi and C++ Builder) for their Delphi application showcase: http://embarcadero.com/application-showcase

Without any hesitation our team is very proud of this fact.

It proves that even an application made by a relatively small workshop of several developers can be a high quality product that meets the highest standards.

That’s very inspiring for our team and I hope for all ISV teams!

Being a software vendor is a fantastic job. Meeting interesting people with out-of-the-box vision is one of the most attractive sides of my job.

Today, I’m happy to introduce you an interview with Balam J. Abello. Balam is a talented engineer, futurist, writer, and IT consultant with many years of extensive experience in such revolutionary corporations like IBM and American Express. Currently, Balam is researching a concept of Collective Intelligence in a modern society. I convince you to visit his site www.balam.org to read more about Balam’s works and ideas. Let’s speak about how the concept of Collective Intelligence may affect the information technologies.

Balam, could you please explain a key idea of Collective Intelligence concept in several words?
At the crux of CI is the idea that under certain circumstances a “diverse” and preferably large of group people are often more accurate than a single individual; even if this individual is an expert. This is particularly true in the case of complex systems.

In a nutshell, Collective Intelligence uses the aggregate opinions from groups of diverse and independent people to apply it to several types of problems, one of which is the decision making process.

Did this concept exist earlier or it’s a product of the modern technological society?
This concept has existed before. In fact, one could even say that it has been around since the beginning of cellular organisms which is about 3.5 billion years. As a scientific discipline CI became of age in the 20th century. But in the past couple of decades, CI has come into view. This means that a lot of the theoretical postulates have come true on the Internet.

What convinces people to participate in collaborative projects which are mostly non commercial? This is hardly an opportunity to get paid.
Perhaps idea that all human activities should seek financial rewards as its main raison d’être is a distortion from past human history. This perception has reached unprecedented proportions during the past 300 years and especially during that last 50 years with the advent in some cases, of unbridle depredatory capitalism.

Collaboration is at the heart of human behavior. Mathematics, language, music, farming and culture, to name a few, are huge collaborative efforts. Let’s not forget that the Internet is proof positive of daunting and massive collaborative efforts.

This question has been asked a lot in regards not just to CI but more importantly about the Open Source movement. People derive all kinds of altruistic and non-altruistic benefits from collaboration which are not necessarily monetarily driven. Although, this does not preclude that for many people their motives are driven by a monetary reward and this is fine too.
Lastly, I content that as people become more educated, e.g. acquire more knowledge, there will be a tendency to work for the common good which is counter to traditional predatory practices, which in many case have been responsible for the “tragedy of the commons.”
But let me make it clear that I don’t argue against making a profit. After all my IT consultancy practice has a lot to do with this. Additionally, major corporations throughout the world are looking into CI as a means to further their enterprises in an ever more complex world.

You believe in the society that relies on Collective Intelligent, not on leaders, elite or governors. What about moderators, administrators and super users who significantly affect the work of almost any existent collaborative project? Isn’t it the same untrue Democracy?
Let me say that I look forward to a society that relies more onto itself with a lot less blind obedience to a leadership hierarchy. But my position is not black and white which means that I don’t see an absolute necessity of leaderless groups. What I think could or might happen is that these power hierarchies are going to be flatten significantly, thus reducing, but not eliminating the need for “command-and-control.”

It is quite clear that there will continue to exist an ever increasing need for moderators which I prefer to call “mentors” as well as administrators and a great number of other functions too. My thesis is that these “leaders” people should not have extreme power to decide the group’s agenda. These people should act more as consultants to their organizations thus creating a little more separation between self-interests and desired outcomes. If we talk about teamwork we should try, in as much as possible to create an atmosphere where members all are encouraged to have a voice and prevent the group from falling prey to “groupthink.”

However, when it comes to democracy, it is quite apparent that throughout history the will of the people, which is usually less drastic or extreme than that of individuals, is hardly ever really taken into account. Many campaigning politicians pay only “lip-service” to the people during election cycles. As soon as the “leaders” are elected they go ahead and do precisely what they want and this is sometimes the opposite of what the people, who voted for them, wanted in the first place. And, this seems to be a universal phenomenon. So I don’t criticize any given country or institutions for this behavior. Instead I look at it from the “systemic” point of view and realize that if any changes are to take place then these should occur at the “systems” level. In this case, practical approaches toward CI implementations might really help.

Do you believe in Web 3.0? What could it be?

Yes I believe that WEB 3.0 will be a major contributor to change. In fact we are in the middle of implementing WEB 3.0 environments but this will:

• Take anywhere from 5 to 10 years to implement
• Will not be readily visible to the standard user
• Will generated huge benefits bringing a higher order of Artificial Intelligence to the masses.

You could think of WEB 3.0 as the plumbing necessary for the water (intelligent information and knowledge) to flow. In other words, getting most of the billions of web sites to start adding the necessary tags (taxonomies) necessary for computer-programs-and-sites to automatically talk to each other creating the possibility for personalized intelligent avatars or agents, will take some time.

What kind of software applications or IT systems are worth developing while awaiting for Collective Intelligence to get hold?
Now, this is a very difficult question to answer. But my suspicion is that there is a huge universe of possibilities. What is interesting is that as I answer these questions there are probably thousands upon thousands of people experimenting new ideas for such applications. This creative-ecosystem is thriving.

Nevertheless, one trend is for IT applications to be more and more custom oriented versus massively standardized applications. Niche markets seem to be one strong trend.

What will be the main trends in technological and informational progress for humanity?
Once again this is a very difficult question to answer. Personally, I feel that all possibilities are open for expression. I try to think not so much linearly e.g. cause-and-effect when it comes to future trends. This makes any kind of prediction so much more difficult and consequently prone to error.

I will say that I believe that from the information / knowledge point of view, we are creating a “global-super-brain” which is already having profound effects upon all peoples in the planet. Furthermore, I also believe that the future will be extremely transparent. Secrets will tend to disappear on the web. And we see this already happening.

For example, when it comes to political candidacies, with just a few mouse clicks we can find out just about anything about prospective candidates; including such things as their voting records and all kinds of personal information which would allow us, to make informed decisions.

A special final question for our audience: What advantages and techniques of Collective Intelligence concept can be adopted and applied by a one-man shop software vendor (microISV) or by a small software development team?

The increased power of technological tools allows small groups of individuals or even single individuals to achieve great projects. A case in point is the history of Linux. Let’s remember that a single individual created the kernel for Linux and the first thing that he did was to released to the general public for it to do as it pleased and as a byproduct for people to help him fix Linux’s bugs. This was the case of a single individual taking advantage of the “Collective Intelligence” of large numbers of people. The end result has been a whole new multibillion dollar industry.

Therefore, a microISV could organize his or her software project to leverage the power of the people, which in computer science could equate to massive parallelism. Additionally, the techniques of WEB 2.0 collaboration are very well defined and have proven to work successfully. These techniques are also available to the microISV, today.

Thank you, Balam!

I invite everyone to visit Balam’s site www.balam.org to learn how to collaborate for a better World.

A professional friend of mine, technical writer Keith Johnson, offered me an opportunity to write a guest post for his excellent Great Documents - technical writing blog. During several chat sessions with Keith we were discussing various questions of collaboration, social networking, information exchange and sharing. This discussion convinced me to summarize my thoughts about e-book writing in a single post. Recently, Keith has kindly published my post in his blog.

Check it out:

Going to Write Another E-book?

… almost everyone finally arrives to the idea of summarizing the whole knowledge on a certain topic in a single document or informational product …

Thanks for the opportunity to share my ideas in your great blog, Keith!

P.S.: Also, if you’re going to promote your e-book via a website or a blog then consider creating a 3D image to increase visit\buy|download conversion ratio.

Here are several sample 3D e-book cover images to illustrate what I mean.

People may worry about buying virtual things. A realistic looking virtual 3d cover of your e-book will make people to feel like they are buying a real thing, not a file.

As I wrote before, we want to keep the ISV Kaizen Blog free from hard selling and don’t write much about our own products except occasional references where appropriate. In every post I try to give some useful information that can help you improve a certain aspect of your own business. Through this blog we aim to build strong and long-term relationships with our colleagues: ISV, software developers, architects and marketers, technical writers, editors and journalists, designers, and other IT professionals.

Nevertheless, every 4-6 months I post a digest of the most important news about our company, Indigo Byte Systems LLC. This allows you to know more about us and to see that the blog’s topics were taken from real practice and experience, not from books or universities only.

So, here it is - the summer news from Indigo Byte Systems.

The Time Limited Special Offer:
Only this summer, the Dr.Explain will help you reinforce your IT business after recession.

Our recent market research proves that many IT companies who have survived in the recent financial recession, nowadays are working hard to release new products by the upcoming Fall 2009 to save their businesses and to get sales back.

They are working on a tight budget and with limited resources trying to cut the development and release costs as much as possible. They gave up bonuses, expensive offices and cars, and even free coffee for developers.
The software documentation is an obligatory part of any IT project and it also cannot be scrapped… but we can help you with it!

To support our colleagues we’ve dropped the price of our best-selling small business bundle “Dr.Explain Advanced License - Office Package” that allows you to install up to 5 copies of the Dr.Explain documentation tool in your company.

If your company deals much with software documentation writing then don’t miss this unique chance to get professional tools for special prices

Joint partner news :
TBS Cover Editor 1.7 released

Our fellow partner, True BoxShot Software, has recently released a new version of its amazing TBS Cover Editor - a full-cycle tool for creating 3D boxshots and virtual cover images from scratch.

What’s New in Version 1.7

Specular highlight
A specular highlight is a bright reflection from a light source and it provides a strong visual cue for the shape of an object and its location with respect to light sources in the scene. Now, in the TBS Cover Editor it is possible to specify the intensity of a specular highlight shining on a 3D object.

Reflection Effect
Now, you can use the new reflection effect for every layer in your design with possibility to adjust the offset of reflection, the opacity, and the length.

Bent 3D Screenshot
It is clearly self explanatory.

Printing the cover
In the new version it is possible to print a designed cover on printer with basic mark ups on edges, thus you can even theoretically make a sort of real software box with scissors and glue.

Download the new version and give it a try!

Make us your friend

If you use social bookmarks or networks then I’ll be happy to join your network. Feel free to add me as a friend on the following networks:

LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/zhuravlev

StumbleUpon: denniscrane.stumbleupon.com
Digg: digg.com/users/cognitiveforce/
Reddit: reddit.com/user/cognitive/
Delicious: del.icio.us/cognitive

If you use Dr.Explain software, please add it to your social bookmarks. Thank you!

Have a good summer!

This is just a few facts from the history of our product, Dr.Explain. I feel a bit nostalgic for that time of big dreams and hopes. Now it’s just a business.
I think these facts could inspire the new rising startups.

Initial design specification for the first version of the Dr.Explain was made in two hours and fit in just two pages: several screen prototypes and a paragraph of text explaining the conception.
The pilot name of the Dr.Explain project was ‘Catch&Doc’, like ‘Cats-n-Dogs’ :-).
Development of the first version took 7 months in part-time mode (nights and weekends).
Most of code was taken from CodeProject.com. In the next years it was overwritten almost completely :-).
Development of the first version delayed my Ph.D. work defending for about a year.
The first version of the Dr.Explain was released July 23, 2005.
The price of the first version was $50 (US).
The first order arrived on 7′th day after official release.
Most of first users came from Clarion developers community.
I left my day job to start the company after 4 months since initial release of Dr.Explain.

Could you disclose something interesting from your product’s history?

If you are serious about writing a good documentation for your software either with our help authoring tool - Dr.Explain, or with another one, then you definitely should subscribe to the following blogs on technical writing, software help and documentation authoring. To be honest I even included links to blogs of our direct competitors.

I say “Thank you!” to our fellow customer and partner Craig Prichard, a technical communicator, who gave me many new links for this list.

Cherryleaf Technical Authors’ Blog
A blog site from Cherryleaf, a technical communication UK company by Ellis Pratt. Ellis regularly gives comprehensive review of the industry news as well as practical articles on technical writing.

Harry Miller’s Technical Writing Blog
Harry’s blog contains not only written content about documentation, technical writing, and technical editing, but many podcasts as well.

HelpStuff Blog
A famous blog by Char James-Tanny (JTF Associates) about all aspects of helping software end-users.

I Came, I Saw, I Learned…
A blog by Kevin A. Siegel who has written more than 100 step-by-step computer training books and has been a software trainer for more than 15 years.

E-Learning, Moodle, Technical Writing, and Training
William Rice is an educator, trainer, and writer. Most of his posts are either articles or tutorials about his professional pursuits: e-learning, Moodle, technical writing, and training.

I’d Rather Be Writing
A blog about technical communication by Tom Johnson. Tom covers many topics from any kind of user guides and design documentation, to audiovisual tutorials and drawings, or other explanatory content that is of a technical nature.

Gryphon Mountain Journals
Ben Minson is a technical communicator. He creates documentation and training on applications that are produced in-house. Writing is what Ben does. He thinks that when he die, the mortician will have to pry the keyboard loose from his cold, dead clutches.

OneManWrites
That OneMan is Gordon McLean, a technical author with a passion for good communicative information products. Another Gordon’s passion is web design. In his posts Gordon keeps balance between practical issues and theory of technical writing.

Charles Jeter Blog
Charles writes mainly about technical communication aspects in Web 2.0 world, e.g. work-flow collaboration and e-learning.

User Assistance
An exploration of issues pertaining to online help by Michael Hughes, PhD. As you can see from the blog’s title Michael focuses mainly on embedded user assistance, usability issues and user behaviour.

Just Write Click
A blog by Anne Gentle, a senior technical writer who is blogging about technical writing, information architecture, topic authoring, social media, and other communication technologies.

Mike’s Web Log
In this blog Mike Pope, a technical writer, covers various topics from writing and editing, to teaching and movies, and to politics and musics.

monkeyPi
An interesting point of view on usability, visual & technical communication, and software design.

Great Documents
In this blog Keith Johnson, a technical writing & software documentation specialist, gives many useful tips not only about documentation writing but on successful blogging, SEO, and social networking.

Scott on Writing
Scott Mitchell is a freelance writer, trainer, and consultant. In his technology-related blog Scott talks about technical writing, technology, and ASP.NET

Sharon’s MadCap Blog and Mike’s MadCap Blog
The two blogs by Sharon Burton and Mike Hamilton from MadCap Software. It’s always interesting to know what your competitors do

Technically Speaking
Paul Pehrson is another technical writer who blogs about various aspects of his job: writing tools, software, grammar, technologies and other important topics.

The Content Wrangler
A great resource for everyone who deals with technical content writing, editing, publishing and delivering. There is a lot of practical articles and industry news.

Communications from DMN
Aaron Davis and Scott Nesbitt, two experienced technical communicators, post their ideas and opinions, as well as links to information that they find interesting and hope that you will too. As you will see from their posts, Aaron and Scott have a wide range of interests when it comes to technical communications.

HelpScribe
A pretty young but very interesting blog by Craig Haiss, a technical writer. Craig started his blog to share his professional knowledge with colleagues. That’s great!

Usable Help
A blog of Gordon Meyer, an interaction and instructional designer. Gordon is a professional author and speaker on the topics of help system design. His posts on software help, usability and testing are always very practical and focused.

Of course there are many other blogs on help authoring, technical writing, e-learning and technical communication. I listed only the most popular and active, i.e. with new posts in 2008. If you know other good blogs on these topics, please add them through comments. Thank you!

This post is a brief digest of most important events in our company for the past several weeks. In order to keep this blog mostly self-hype free I summarized all our news in a single short post.

Dr.Explain 3.1 release

We’ve recently released the new version of our software help-authoring tool, Dr.Explain 3.1.

This update is a great step in the product history. Until the version 3.1, many software developers and vendors have been using the Dr.Explain to document their Windows software, HTML pages, or Flash (SWF) applications.
Now, the Dr.Explain 3.1 enters the Java world. Java developers can benefit from the same technology, and automatically generate professional documentation for their Java applications made with Swing components.

Besides the support of Java applications, Dr.Explain 3.1 brings more new functions that will help software vendors produce astonishing documentation even faster. The customizable capturing scenarios allow to precisely specify which window element or HTML tag to analyze or to skip, how to handle its child elements, and how to name and to annotate it. Other gems of the new version are new graphical effects and image rendering technology. All screenshot images, callout lines, text label fonts, shadow and blending effects are drawn with high precision which leaves no chance for fuzzy edges, making documentation illustrations look clean, realistic and nice (beautifully clear).

More info: www.drexplain.com

New Dr.Explain forum

If you have questions, concerns or ideas regarding the Dr.Explain software and if you want to discuss it with other users or with Dr.Explain team publicly then I invite you to join our forum at: http://www.drexplain.com/forum

ISDEF 2008

This week I, Dennis Zhuravlev (a.k.a. Dennis Crane), the CEO of Indigo Byte Systems, will attend the ISDEF 2008 conference in Moscow, Russia. If you attend this event also then I will be happy to meet you there.
There are lots of possible reasons to meet me there:

• To ask questions about our products (Dr.Explain and TBS Cover Editor (on behalf of TrueBox Shot software)), our company, or me.
• To receive a discount coupon
• To know what new projects we’re going to launch shortly
• To tell about your products or services
• To discuss a possible venture or partnership
• To offer a topic for this blog
• To trade something
• To give or to take an interview
• To chat about software, business, sport, politics, or large hadron collider
• To take a shot of beer, brandy, vodka, rum, whiskey, tequila, juice, tea or coffee
• … or just to say: ‘Hello, Dennis!’

If you’re going to ISDEF, please let me know via e-mail or comment. I’m looking forward to meet you on ISDEF 2008.

During the last weeks I saw several posts on various ISV and shareware forums where people complained that their sales had decreased and that summer is the worse period for software business.

Overall, I have to agree that in summer the business activity goes down. Nevertheless, summer offers a good chance to boost your software business in the long run. Let me explain …

This is not only the number of orders that is decreased in summer. The volume of support requests usually goes down also.
While you have less support job you may focus on your projects solely. Devote this time to planing, software development and improvement, market research and trends analysis. Summer is a good time to leisurely prepare and test a new product or a new release of your existing product to launch it in September or October when the business activity rises again.

Like Christmas, summer is a time for savings
As many businesses (And what about you?) try to keep their falling sales on a certain level they often setup special discount offers for summer months. Thus, it’s a good chance to buy business tools (software, SDKs, scripts, libraries, etc.) or to order some professional services (design, testing, copy writing) with significant discounts. Think about tools that you will need in future but it might be cheaper to buy them now.

Your news seem more significant against the summer lull.
If you have a news that might be interesting to your potential customers then don’t wait till Fall. Send your press release now. Because the flow of corporate news is not so big in summer your press release will more likely get in front of an editor than in any other period. Even a message about a minor version release may appear in the top news section of a huge portal or a magazine.

Announce in summer to reach your market on the peak.
Big paper magazines have a long publishing cycle. If editor picks your news for publishing or for a featured article writing then it will be printed in several months, usually 3-6. Therefore, if your send your press release in summer then it may appear in October or December issue of the magazine. Your message will reach the market right in the most active period. That will be great.

These are just a few evidences for the idea that summer is not a bad time for software business. Try to use the summer slack with the most possible effectiveness for your ISV business but don’t forget about the rest :-).

Recently I’ve read a couple of books by Masaaki Imai about Kaizen, the philosophy of ongoing improvement without spending much money. I think the Kaizen model perfectly describes the business of small independent software vendor.

Due to lack of resources a small ISV is usually unable to make big investments into innovations to quickly expand its business. It’s a long way to go by small steps. This blog is about these small steps. There are lots of areas for continuous improvement: software development, sales and support processes, product web site maintenance, SEO, dealing with affiliates and resellers, product marketing and promotion, etc.

You must improve something in your business every day. Each improvement will enhance your business by just a tiny factor, but when multiplied those tiny factors will give the impressive growth results.

You can’t do kaizen just once or twice and expect immediate results. You have to be in it for the long haul.

Masaaki Imai