Reflections on 2007 and looking forward to 2008
Well it’s the morning of the 24th December 2007 as I type this. The Clement Clarke Moore poem “Twas the Night before Christmas” springs to mind. Not much is stirring. A half hearted amount of spam ‘graces’ the email and very little else. With some music playing gently in the background, it’s a time to reflect on 2007 and look forward to 2008.
PleaseTech has had a ‘cracking’ year. I do, of course, mean cracking in the sense of very good. WordNet tells me that the adjective ‘cracking’ is also ‘bang-up’, ‘bully’, ‘corking’, ‘dandy’, ‘great’, ‘groovy’, ‘keen’, ‘neat’, ‘nifty’, ‘not bad’, ‘peachy’, ‘slap-up’, ‘swell’, ‘smashing’ all of which mean ‘very good’. I’m not sure I’d claim that we had a neat or nifty year. To my mind those adjectives both imply some degree of tidiness which I'm not sure we can claim. I think I can say with certainty that it wasn’t a particularly groovy, swell or dandy year. I’m not sure what those adjectives imply but saying we had a groovy year would impart all sorts of messages I’d rather avoid.
Of course, if I was communicating solely to a British audience I’d run with ‘not bad’. Although I can’t immediately find a reference to it on Google, I’ve always understood that ‘not bad’ is the highest form of compliment one Englishman can give another without embarrassing the recipient. Other classics of British understatement are “I say old man, well done” and “The boy done good”. Not for us the exuberant adjectives of ‘awesome’, ‘fantastic’, spectacular’ and so on. George Bernard Shaw made a very pertinent observation when he noted that "England and America are two countries separated by a common language”.
Anyway enough rambling – lets have a brief catch-up and then look forward to 2008.
When I last blogged I was in the middle of a mad trip around the USA and Canada in late October. In fact, I was on my way to the DIA Canada conference in Ottawa. Well I think I can safely say that we won’t be going back to that one again. It was a complete waste of time from our perspective.
Of course, the good news is that since John Wanaker (1838-1922) uttered his now famous line “Half my advertising is wasted, I just don't know which half", things have moved on. We can track the performance of our Google adwords and we can tell not only which pages an individual visited on our website but also how long they spent reading them. However, with shows it’s not an exact science and sometimes you just have to take a punt and attend. So that’s one more on our ‘lets not do that again’ list.
In November, I was at the DIA’s eCTD conference in San Diego, then at the Gilbane conference in Boston followed swiftly but the DIA EDM conference in Prague. That completed an eight conference marathon in twelve weeks. It involved twenty flights including ten transatlantic flights!
Shortly after returning from Prague I had rashly agreed to give a presentation on “Establishing an Entrepreneurial Culture” to the management team of a large insurance company. The off-site location of the meeting would normally be a swift one and a half hour journey. As luck would have it I was listening to the radio which reported an accident on the Motorway so I set off across country. Arriving ½ hour late (but 40 minutes prior to my scheduled presentation time of 9:45am), I was greeted, mic’d up and, almost before I could utter a word, was led into the morning kick-off session just in time to be asked to give the person to my left a shoulder massage!
Yes it was a corporate “lets get the morning off to an active start” session. This involved shoulder massages (giving and receiving) and a Boomwacker symphony (which was actually quite fun) all led by a guy who was far too hyped up for that time of the morning. As I commented during my presentation which followed: “It never fails to amaze me how many ways there are to make a living in the world. Who would have thought that there was a market for someone to get top insurance industry executives playing music with what essentially are highly coloured plastic tubes at 9:00am on a Thursday morning. I’d love to have seen the business plan and, more importantly the look on his bank manager’s face when he explained it!”.
Being ‘landed in it’ like that did, however, rather neatly emphasise one of the key criteria of an entrepreneurial culture which is flexibility. With that firmly in mind let us consider 2008.
PleaseReview v3.4 is not more or less completely released. We are still testing (and finding issues with) running some of the client components on Vista but we will work our way through and eventually succeed. We have started v3.5 and are internally testing the alpha of the key functionality so progress is good.
2007 delivered over 20 new corporate clients (the largest a 1,000 user license) and saw our year-on-year revenue jump by over 400%. Clients came predominantly from Life Sciences but also from Law, Defence, IT and Financial Services. As exciting as that is, perhaps most gratifying is the existing clients purchasing more licenses and rolling out PleaseReview. As the old proverb states “the proof of the pudding is in the eating”. We like it when clients come back and say “more please”!
2007 has also seen new partnerships, integrations and OEM clients. These are vital to extend our reach and allow us to cover the bases. I’m very hopeful that these new relationships will start delivering significant volumes of business in 2008.
So, 2008 is essentially ‘more of the same’. Our aim is to continue the growth curve and make PleaseReview the de facto way to review documents. We will continue to proactively market into the Life Sciences industry but will also start to explore other industries on a more proactive basis.
From a product perspective PleaseReview v4.0 is earmarked for a release towards the end of the year. However, we would also like to get around to completing PleaseApprove. PleaseApprove has been sitting in an early Beta state for about 18 months. We just have to get it finished. That is easier said than done as we it diverts resource from PleaseReview. So we will have to take some tough priority decisions.
Taking, as we were, about priorities and flexibility, we have taken a decision to stop the PleaseReview subscription service. It is just not paying its bills. So, while the subscription service will no longer be available, we will keep it going for existing clients and will look at re-launching it is as a SaaS (Software as a Service) offering.
With the economic outlook not great and talk of a recession in the air, the only two things two things we know for certain going into 2008 are “the only constant is change” (Heraclitus of Ephesus, Greek philosopher) and “no plan survives the first encounter with the enemy” (Helmuth Karl Bernhard Graf von Moltke, Prussian General). Having said that we believe that we are well positioned to go on and have a ‘not bad’ 2008.
PleaseTech has had a ‘cracking’ year. I do, of course, mean cracking in the sense of very good. WordNet tells me that the adjective ‘cracking’ is also ‘bang-up’, ‘bully’, ‘corking’, ‘dandy’, ‘great’, ‘groovy’, ‘keen’, ‘neat’, ‘nifty’, ‘not bad’, ‘peachy’, ‘slap-up’, ‘swell’, ‘smashing’ all of which mean ‘very good’. I’m not sure I’d claim that we had a neat or nifty year. To my mind those adjectives both imply some degree of tidiness which I'm not sure we can claim. I think I can say with certainty that it wasn’t a particularly groovy, swell or dandy year. I’m not sure what those adjectives imply but saying we had a groovy year would impart all sorts of messages I’d rather avoid.
Of course, if I was communicating solely to a British audience I’d run with ‘not bad’. Although I can’t immediately find a reference to it on Google, I’ve always understood that ‘not bad’ is the highest form of compliment one Englishman can give another without embarrassing the recipient. Other classics of British understatement are “I say old man, well done” and “The boy done good”. Not for us the exuberant adjectives of ‘awesome’, ‘fantastic’, spectacular’ and so on. George Bernard Shaw made a very pertinent observation when he noted that "England and America are two countries separated by a common language”.
Anyway enough rambling – lets have a brief catch-up and then look forward to 2008.
When I last blogged I was in the middle of a mad trip around the USA and Canada in late October. In fact, I was on my way to the DIA Canada conference in Ottawa. Well I think I can safely say that we won’t be going back to that one again. It was a complete waste of time from our perspective.
Of course, the good news is that since John Wanaker (1838-1922) uttered his now famous line “Half my advertising is wasted, I just don't know which half", things have moved on. We can track the performance of our Google adwords and we can tell not only which pages an individual visited on our website but also how long they spent reading them. However, with shows it’s not an exact science and sometimes you just have to take a punt and attend. So that’s one more on our ‘lets not do that again’ list.
In November, I was at the DIA’s eCTD conference in San Diego, then at the Gilbane conference in Boston followed swiftly but the DIA EDM conference in Prague. That completed an eight conference marathon in twelve weeks. It involved twenty flights including ten transatlantic flights!
Shortly after returning from Prague I had rashly agreed to give a presentation on “Establishing an Entrepreneurial Culture” to the management team of a large insurance company. The off-site location of the meeting would normally be a swift one and a half hour journey. As luck would have it I was listening to the radio which reported an accident on the Motorway so I set off across country. Arriving ½ hour late (but 40 minutes prior to my scheduled presentation time of 9:45am), I was greeted, mic’d up and, almost before I could utter a word, was led into the morning kick-off session just in time to be asked to give the person to my left a shoulder massage!
Yes it was a corporate “lets get the morning off to an active start” session. This involved shoulder massages (giving and receiving) and a Boomwacker symphony (which was actually quite fun) all led by a guy who was far too hyped up for that time of the morning. As I commented during my presentation which followed: “It never fails to amaze me how many ways there are to make a living in the world. Who would have thought that there was a market for someone to get top insurance industry executives playing music with what essentially are highly coloured plastic tubes at 9:00am on a Thursday morning. I’d love to have seen the business plan and, more importantly the look on his bank manager’s face when he explained it!”.
Being ‘landed in it’ like that did, however, rather neatly emphasise one of the key criteria of an entrepreneurial culture which is flexibility. With that firmly in mind let us consider 2008.
PleaseReview v3.4 is not more or less completely released. We are still testing (and finding issues with) running some of the client components on Vista but we will work our way through and eventually succeed. We have started v3.5 and are internally testing the alpha of the key functionality so progress is good.
2007 delivered over 20 new corporate clients (the largest a 1,000 user license) and saw our year-on-year revenue jump by over 400%. Clients came predominantly from Life Sciences but also from Law, Defence, IT and Financial Services. As exciting as that is, perhaps most gratifying is the existing clients purchasing more licenses and rolling out PleaseReview. As the old proverb states “the proof of the pudding is in the eating”. We like it when clients come back and say “more please”!
2007 has also seen new partnerships, integrations and OEM clients. These are vital to extend our reach and allow us to cover the bases. I’m very hopeful that these new relationships will start delivering significant volumes of business in 2008.
So, 2008 is essentially ‘more of the same’. Our aim is to continue the growth curve and make PleaseReview the de facto way to review documents. We will continue to proactively market into the Life Sciences industry but will also start to explore other industries on a more proactive basis.
From a product perspective PleaseReview v4.0 is earmarked for a release towards the end of the year. However, we would also like to get around to completing PleaseApprove. PleaseApprove has been sitting in an early Beta state for about 18 months. We just have to get it finished. That is easier said than done as we it diverts resource from PleaseReview. So we will have to take some tough priority decisions.
Taking, as we were, about priorities and flexibility, we have taken a decision to stop the PleaseReview subscription service. It is just not paying its bills. So, while the subscription service will no longer be available, we will keep it going for existing clients and will look at re-launching it is as a SaaS (Software as a Service) offering.
With the economic outlook not great and talk of a recession in the air, the only two things two things we know for certain going into 2008 are “the only constant is change” (Heraclitus of Ephesus, Greek philosopher) and “no plan survives the first encounter with the enemy” (Helmuth Karl Bernhard Graf von Moltke, Prussian General). Having said that we believe that we are well positioned to go on and have a ‘not bad’ 2008.
posted by David Cornwell, PleaseTech Ltd at 11:12 AM
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