BLOGNAME: LOUDER THAN WORDSAn informal, stream-of-consciousness reflection on business ideas, events and issues in modern business, modern life and with some specifics to the web-software industry by Paul Tomori, Internet Entrepreneur
The ACTION Incubator
Some Insight On Our R&D Process
By Paul Tomori
Monday, September 08, 2008 at 12:09:05 (EDT)
It's that time of year AGAIN. About half of our clientbase is in the Tourism Sector... and when their High Season trails off, ours gets a break too. That gives us a few months to be reflective and to indulge some new applications. We call this our "Incubation Period". Our main software applications will get a few tweaks here and there in response to client requests over the last few months, but primarily, we shall be working from the drawing board to introduce completely new applications. What better way to keep our programmers happy... and new clients rolling up over the horizon.
Particularly, it gives us a chance to put some focus on projects that in recent months have been relegated to that most elusive of animals: spare time.
From our incubator in the past emerged some of our best-loved programs including Ripplemail, Merlin Metrics and ESyndicater (our RSS Delivery Tool). It is our incubation process that has traditionally given us our edge over the competition, though of course, that has just been a happy by-product and not our primary objective.
So, what eggs are warming in the incubator this season?
1. Content Management System We have a content management system that is going to ROCK. Others have done this before, but we are taking it all to the next level... and we have a good 4 or 5 months to focus on this. We are sure this will stir up a large number of new client prospects who are sick of waiting for their webmasters to get an update done that was requested 3 weeks ago. We look forward to winning a large number of new clients for our already extensive roster. And, the best part about supplying such a valuable service will be that we can cross-sell from our existing product line... win a client over with a great new product and they will generally love so many other things that we do. Our CMS is going to be a massive project and we are dedicating significant resources to it. We are confident it will pave the way particularly for our GuestServe spin-off reservation platform. Exciting!
2. Collaboration By Web This one is top-secret. We have committed the next 6 months to the development of a state-of-the-art collaboration tool that, like the rest of our applications, will allow folks to use all of the benefits of the web to collaborate on a wide range of projects. More on this in the Spring of '09
3. News Management System We have received some interest in providing news management systems and we have mapped out our development plan. This project will also bring a new software application to our reservation clients who are looking for new SEO opportunities. You can't embrace new SEO implementations without addressing the development of a current information source. We plan to take this a few steps further than traditional blogging or press releases. Stay tuned. Our programmers are busy.
So, there you have it. Incubation begins. Innovation happens. In January/February we intend to research some new target markets and will be in hot pursuit of prospects by March... just in time for the next big season in the hospitality industry.... and just in time to continue to diversify the other half of our client roster outside of hospitality with some of our great new inventions.
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