Wednesday, April 26, 2006

First Tanooma Progress Report

We are having great traction in our development effort. The application is shaping up and we are still on plan to launch "Closed BETA" on May 18th. It is amazing to watch how fast development can be done these days by using smart tools. Creating a virtual economy isn’t easy. No place to look and see how others do it. No technology to read about and no processes to learn from other than abstracting how the physical economies were built – like in the US 250 years ago or Germany after complete distraction post WWII. But creating a whole new thing is such a rare challenge - it is a blessing.

The biggest challenge we were facing was the fact that users in Tanooma have by default multiple “lives”. There is the desire to manage personal applications like online bank accounts, access to financial services, online tax and other services. But there is also a need to mix that with the business applications such as CRM, accounting, marketing, research, HR applications and so forth. So for the first time the personal world and the business world has no longer clear boundaries. We needed to develop an architecture that ensures a single point of view but at the same time administrative separation for business and personal data. Even more difficult: if a user leaves a company. Business assets need to be cut while personal assets shall remain – and soon new business assets (applications and services) will be acquired. That new degree of complexity how ever should be completely transparent to the user – we promised simplicity! By looking into nature we began to copy genetic and motoric mechanisms and learned how to keep all that in the background. Like we don’t “think” we have to breathe and contract our heart mussels, a Tanooma user will not worry about the complexity of a virtually connected world.

The key focus of the Tanooma development is on its "Human Interaction Model" (HIM). Making it easy to search, find, identify, decide, relate, contact, connect, disconnect, communicate, learn, build and grow. The Tanooma world tries to eliminate boring tabulated data and get more interactive than any business application today. Even so we are far away from our vision – we will be able to show the path.

May 18th companies such as SaaS vendors, consultants, investors, enablers and other industry contributors will get access to the system and start configuring their outlet – so that June 20th when we allow users to beta test the new world, will find not only company names but details about their products and services.

We aggregated about 360 SaaS vendors, 85 SaaS focused VCs, 40+ Industry Analysts who track the SaaS space, a few new SaaS Enablers (companies like OpSource) and over 100 SaaS experienced consulting forms. All in all close to 700 companies dealing within the SaaS industry. The industry is not only slowly maturing – it is becoming VERY big – already.

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