Last week we launched our second annual Enterprise Inner Circle program, aimed at bringing on pre-order customers in order to fund the development of the Copper 4.0 product. We had some great responses, and now having completed our v4.0 specification (including 165 improvements) we need a certain number of participants in order to get started.

The magic number is 30-40. “Hey, that’s two numbers Ben”, I hear you say. “Well spotted old pal”, I retort, “thats because we like to stay zen with our development, and you know this!”. But certainly 30 is the target, and 40 will result in the ultimate awesomeness for Copper.

Here is the offer:

You purchase a Copper Enterprise license ($2999) and receive:

1. A complementary hosted v3.5 Enterprise account (normally $199/mth) during development (or current server license).
2. Unlimited users, Unlimited projects. Boom!
3. Involvement in our v4.0 development (ready to kick off this month)
4. A guaranteed feature inclusion (you ’sponsor’ a feature from our spec)
5. The v4.0 Enterprise version when it is released (Est 4-6 months)
6. Two years of free updates and support
7. Inclusion in our East/West coast gatherings (June 2008)
8. One Inner Circle participant will receive an iPhone/iPod Touch. ($500 Value)

As mentioned above, we have a clear cut specification for v4.0, that closely mirrors the key changes requested over the last 3 years, and is going to take Copper another 5 steps forward in terms of efficiency/project visibility.

This offer represents a great opportunity, in fact you could add a zero to the price and still not approach the approximate value here, but ultimately you need to ask yourself; What price the love of a good software?

If you’d like to be part of the next Copper chapter, please click here to get in touch for more details about the offer or click here to purchase an Enterprise license and secure your spot in the circle.

– Ben Prendergast

Just kidding, it’s still a little preachy, but read on if you’d like to know more about how we’re steering our little ship toward the big seas and how we’d like you on board (paddling, or bailing water, or as ballast. OK, enough with that metaphor).

We’ve been through some significant changes in the last three months, we’ve restructured our team, systemized parts of our business that required too much administration effort, introduced some new partners to the business to improve our marketing and PR efforts, and have otherwise spent the better part of this quarter getting ready for the next round of developments.

Namely, Copper version 4.0. Wow. Version 4.0. It sounds so mature doesn’t it? And it’s only taken us six years to get to this point! Biting wit aside, I truly believe that this next version will be something special, especially as it will require a greater collaborative effort between us, our partners, and you the customers/supporters/cheersquad. However, I can tell you the 4.0 specification is in place, and to borrow an Anglo-Australian colloquialism, it’s a ripper! It will be the best Project Management Software tool available, period.

But I thought I’d share with you our manifesto, a half decade in the making, so here it is:

We’ve spent years working on building the best product we possibly can, years refining our marketing and sales model, casting the nets each month (you thought I was done with the nautical angle right?) and connecting with those who best suit our product. We’ve got our support systems to where we want them, we proudly have one of the best response rates and solution rates in the business. We have our development methodology down cold, we ask our customers what they want, and filter this through a philosophy to arrive at both great features and a compelling product. The question remains: Where to from here?

Well, we believe we can be the best in the world at building efficiency products for creative teams. After years of refining this idea, I recently read Good to Great by Jim Collins and I had an “A-Ha!” (not the band) moment. You know the kind of moment? Anyway, it crystallized my thinking of the previous six years. If you haven’t read the above book and you’re in business, make it the next book you read.

In order to build a great company, the kind of company that matters, you need to synthesize three things:

1. Be passionate about what you do
2. Be the best in the world at something
3. Discover your economic engine.

It’s called the Hedgehog principle, and in your corporate heart you become fanatical about doing one thing really really well. Suffice to say, we were well on the way to this principle anyway, we’d just never put a name or model to it.

We continue to be amazed at the organizations enquiring and purchasing Copper. From multi-national Film & TV organizations, leading Ad Agencies, technology product marketers, medical & legal teams, the list is long and broad, but there is a common focus. All of these teams want to be the best in the world at what they do.

What is Element passionate about? We’re passionate about helping those that make a difference be more efficient at it! In other words, any leading team that is out to make their environment better. No matter if it’s Apple, WWF, Greenpeace, Wilco (the band), Nissan. No matter if it’s product development, solving world hunger, shaping a cultural response, selling a family their dream home, cancer research, educating the population, or touring the world connecting with those that need a lttle soul therapy. We want to help creative teams take the myriad information and shape their response more efficiently than ever, do what they were born to do, and ultimately reduce their administrative footprint.

We’ve worked with/in/around creative teams for years, and are passionate about what it means to push new boundaries. We know we’re not uber-Geeks creating a new search engine algorythm or the next web 2.0 phenomenon, but we ARE a company that understands, values, and is committed to producing a software that helps creative professionals make a difference.

Can we do it without making a profit ourselves? No! Which leads me to the economic engine. This is the one metric that great companies instinctively know as the most important metric for maintaining that passion, being the best in the world, and continuing the evolution. I won’t go into our metric, but it involves our Advertising and Development budget (or lack thereof!).

So combining these thoughts, we’re again inviting you to become involved in our next Copper development. We have an Inner Circle program that we are offering, as well as an industry-specific stream that will allow us to further refine Copper toward these verticals. It’s a great program that is effectively a customer-sponsored feature-fest that everyone benefits from. It’s what you do when you want to be great, want to maintain and drive the vision, but you don’t have Valley funding.

If you’d like to get involved see the next post, or click here to get in touch.

– Ben Prendergast

Apologies in advance for the long winded rant, but heres an update for the first quarter of 2008!

This year has already started strongly for us, we’ve been steadily working on new minor features and bug fixes, and the latest version is our best to date. I just wanted to post here and let you all know that we’re looking to move ahead with a few special initiatives this year, in order to further bolster our customer base and continue to be a step ahead of the competition, and if you can be involved that would be great.

We’re underway with the specification of the new Copper version (Likely to be our 4.0 release), and quite surprisingly the spec doc is down to only two pages. Admittedly this is two pages of bullet-point features (not the War and Peace specs you might expect) however normally we’d have 20 or so pages of requests/spec for each new version. This tells me the product and our philosophy for ultra simple project management is maturing nicely.

We’re also going to be introducing a new ‘Inner Circle’ program, whereby we call on customers who’ve expressed interest in industry-specific versions of Copper to pre-order a license and become involved in that development process. This model of customer-investors has worked really well for us in the past, and is responsible for some of the best features in the Corporate and Enterprise products we currently offer. This time around we have 5-6 industries or verticals that we’re keen to build custom Copper Enterprise products. At this stage these include: Product Development, Film/TV/Music Production, Worship, Architecture, Design, and Event Management.

In exchange for the pre-purchase of a license (POA) we work with the Inner Circle to specify and build out new features. Its a share the wealth type deal that works really well. If you have a desire to participate on this level please email me at ben@copperproject.com

That’s all for now, but thanks again for all your support, 2008 is the year we really push Copper out into the stratosphere.

– Ben Prendergast

Facebook Apologises
Facebook’s Beacon advertising model has drawn the ire of privacy campaigners since its announcement last month. The controversial Ad model, which effectively enables facebook users to share their web activities with friends and thereby give advertisers another viral marketing angle, was not able to be switched off by users until today. Via a blog posting from CEO Mark Zuckerberg he today apologised saying “About a month ago, we released a new feature called Beacon to try to help people share information with their friends about things they do on the web. We’ve made a lot of mistakes building this feature, but we’ve made even more with how we’ve handled them. We simply did a bad job with this release, and I apologize for it.”

Hulu the future of online video?
Still in Beta, invite-only stage, the joint venture between NBC and News Corp has offered high definition full-screen (H.264) video to its beta testers for the first time, without the need for standalone viewers (e.g. Joost) and using compression that is suitable for broadband speeds. With this kind of backing we might be peeking at not only the future of online video, but of home entertainment in general.

New Airline Tech
Courtesy of Engadget, Continental airlines will trial Mobile phone boarding passes from next month.

10 Rules for Startup Success

Courtesy of TechCrunch and the Financial Times, Loic Le Meur has released his Ten Rules for Startup Success. I couldn’t agree with them more, and they are:

1. Don’t wait for a revolutionary idea. It will never happen. Just focus on a simple, exciting, empty space and execute as fast as possible
2. Share your idea. The more you share, the more you get advice and the more you learn. Meet and talk to your competitors.
3. Build a community. Use blogging and social software to make sure people hear about you.
4. Listen to your community. Answer questions and build your product with their feedback.
5. Gather a great team. Select those with very different skills from you. Look for people who are better than you.
6. Be the first to recognise a problem. Everyone makes mistakes. Address the issue in public, learn about and correct it.
7. Don’t spend time on market research. Launch test versions as early as possible. Keep improving the product in the open.
8. Don’t obsess over spreadsheet business plans. They are not going to turn out as you predict, in any case.
9. Don’t plan a big marketing effort. It’s much more important and powerful that your community loves the product.
10. Don’t focus on getting rich. Focus on your users. Money is a consequence of success, not a goal.

Tetris iMaxMaxMax
This is genius. Those wacky Finnish students are at it again, converting an entire university dorm building into a giant Tetris game.

– Ben Prendergast

News from the IT world doesn’t come any bigger this week, here are some of the top stories:

Apple Launches Leopard, no kitten!
I won’t review the new features here, other than to say the new version at $150 bux is well worth the coin, in terms of personal efficiency you can’t beat Time machine for keeping your info safe, Quick Look for speeding up review of files, Mail improvements for bringing your to-dos into line, Spaces for keeping your various work roles split neatly, Boot Camp for running those pesky Windows apps. But in addition its the little things like having wikipedia entries linked to your dictorianary (apple click any word anywhere to gain clarity) or being able to quickly google map an address book entry. While some criticize the update as being a service pack, I’m here to say Apple are still the leaders in inspired software development.

NY Times says: More readers trading Newspapers for Web Sites
That’s right, treehuggers should be happy to note that newspaper sales are on the decline while online readership is on the up. Now if only I can get a raise.

Facebook Ads - Having your cake and feed your friends too.
Big news on the Facebook front, with the social media company announcing an ambitious new ad infrastructure that will allow advertisers to target specific demographics whilst presumably (it will be launched tomorrow morning our time) allowing a brand-based referral network. While social referral isn’t new, the notion that the estimated 25 million daily users of facebook be presented by brand messages from their trusted friends offers a new and potentially highly profitable revenue stream, akin to Google Adwords or YouTube’s embedded ads. This morning, there’s already a backlash

Digg, the online news ranking site close to sale
One of the internet’s more popular blog ranking site is close to a US$300-$400m sale to a ‘major media player”. Rupert? Is that you?

– Ben Prendergast

A menagerie of musings this week, if you’ll indulge me:

1. Things heat up in the war on Piracy, Oink in a Sty.

Aurgh me matey, or should I say Oink! In certain circles the Oink online file sharing service was a well known source for pirated record releases, often pre-release albums that were available to invited users only. According to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry some 60 albums were provided this year alone. Given the closed nature of the service, it was difficult to pinpoint any wrongdoing, however after being infiltrated by Dutch/UK officials (seemingly by performing a Whois query on the domain name to determine the proprietors address, funny that!) a 24 year old has been taken into custody and the site has been suspended.

2. Holiday Shopping heats up, according to Hitwise, but which are the more popular online categories?

I love the Hitwise guys (an Aussie entrepreneurial success story in its own right) and in this analysis they look at the popular online shopping categories leading up to the holiday season, with some predictions for 2007.

3. Microsoft and Facebook get cosy

This week penultimate social networking site Facebook expands its advertising deal with Microsoft to cover international markets. In addition, Microsoft will take an equity stake in Facebook (now valued at US$15b) and in doing so will gain access to Facebook’s nearly 50 million users. Do you have a facebook account? I must admit I’ve found it more valuable than I would have thought, perhaps not professionally (LinkedIn is my preferred choice there) but certainly in reconnection with old friends.

4. Can Google Track TV Audiences like never before?

Google and Nielsen Company will strike a deal this week to create a ‘vivid and more accurate snapshot’ of how many people are viewing commercials in real time, along with who those people are. A marketers dream, a libertarian’s nightmare, the natural progression in my mind might be to screen a Holden Ute commercial during Renevation Rescue and if the viewer is a tradesman book them in for a test drive. Or something. Oh I know, how about canceling shows like Viva Laughin BEFORE the first adbreak? Now theres some viewing democracy right there!

5. NASA Sat Pictures of the Southern Californian Fires

Courtesy of Treehugger blog and NASA, The National Interagency Fire Center reports that 12 large, uncontained fires have burned over 335,000 acres in Southern California.

6. A little design sexiness, Aaron Tang’s “Wall Stairs”

You know I’m a sucker for a well thought out idea, and here Aaron has created a simple pull out stair case. I want one! It doesn’t even have to go anywhere.

– Ben Prendergast

In Rainbows: Hows it doing?
Radiohead this week released their online-only record “In Rainbows”, pricing it at US$as-much-as-you-want-to-pay, and subsequently took in an estimated US$9m in sales (average of 4 GBP per download) in its first few days. This might not sound like much, but it is, when you consider that most major artists only make around $1-3 per record. I love these guys, just a really great band, kicking it with a really great album, representing a cause (record industry reform) just as vehemently as their rock-and-roll forefathers might have. It does beg the question though, was the album named for an available domain name? Life imitating art imitating domain name registration.

iPhone to be opened for third party apps.
Chalk one up for the customer today, with Apple announcing they will offer a Software Development Kit for the iPhone by February. After months of negative feedback on the closed-system, its great to see another step toward an open mobile computing infrastructure.

Skype hits 10m concurrent users, partners with MySpace
Global IP-Phone giant Skype this week announced a partnership with MySpace, allowing 110 million active users to make free calls. Also this week I hear mention of Naked ADSL plans. The decline of the home phone? I know I recently canceled my home phone line in favour of a Melbourne-based Skype number ($12 per year sounds like a good phone plan?).

Facebook all set to take on LinkedIn
Facebook this week announced it will be targeting commercial users looking to network, which represents a fair challenge on the commercial networking site LinkedIn.com

Wooster Collective - This week represents Melbourne Street Art
I thought I’d also add some light-hearted street-art culture to this here tech blog, courtesy of the fantastic Wooster Collective blog.
This week they bring us two Melbourne corporate crate-people attempting to go AWOL (Liberal Party Front benchers?). Also checkout the drain-people piece, inspired!

– Ben Prendergast

This week let us laugh heartily at the misfortune of others, and ask ourselves, cautionary tale or useful spin?Firstly Mattel, who last week famously recalled a number of products, saving our children (and fetishists) from the horrors of lead poisoning. While the Mattel share price took a 2.4% hit, according to Hitwise the websites of both Mattel and Barbie.com recorded their highest hit rates in over a year, AND have remained above average since. Verdict: Useful Spin.

Secondly VOIP provider Skype this week suffered some serious downtime across their entire network, due to the Windows software update causing a large number of Skype users to sign on at the same time (a self-inflicted denial of service attack if you will). By way of apology (delivered via email no less) all skype users were today given 7 days of free service. Verdict: Useful Spin.

Finally Atlas Co, producers of the arcade arm wrestling game, recalled their machines after reports of over-zealous gamephiles breaking their arms. To add salt to the wound the comments posted to the above blog suggest it won’t be long before the machines are recycled for use in Shinjuku’s red light district. Verdict: Cautionary Tale.

So there you have it, an overwhelming 66% result in favour of bad publicity. When your next crisis hits, how are you going to spin it?

– Ben Prendergast

Woah! In the last week we’ve seen a plethora (a PLETHORA!!) of online activity around the iPhone release, which occurs Saturday morning (our time) in the US. Let’s take a look at some of the more interesting tidbits.
1. Apple released its official guided tour this week, complete with faux turtle-necked Steve Jobs.

2. This slovenly chap was (unfortunately for Apple) the first in line for an iPhone (four days before release), and further reports suggest that professional queue-sitters have been employed for up to $1000. Around the blogosphere, the Apple detractors are still out in force, some calling the iPhone the “greatest failure of all time”…

3. Which is vehemently contradicted by the actual reviews, available now that the review embargo has been lifted. My favourite is the hilarious “My iPhone Diary” by New York Times columnist David Pogue. New features uncovered like the fake GPS and real time traffic reports right on the Google map suggest we’re only scratching the surface as to what kind of new features we’ll see in this breakthrough device.

Walt Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal, provides a more austere review, yet interestingly vindicates the controversial virtual keyboard: “Three days in I wanted to throw it out the window, five days in I was typing faster than my Treo QWERTY keyboard.” However Walt also provides that the greatest drawback at this point seems to be that it is only available on one carrier (AT&T, the USA’s largest).

4. The competition responds with the Nokia E65. However, I get the feeling Nokia is to iPhone what PC is to Mac, and right now there would be frantic activity in both the marketing and development labs of said competition. By contrast, Apple are probably readying their “Hi, I’m an iPhone, and I’m a Nokia” ads.

5. What about the plans? US mobile phone plans are somewhat different to Australian plans (they’re mainly based on bundled minutes), however here is a really great breakdown of the TCO (total cost of ownership) for the iPhone.

Interestingly, there are myriad plans, which is somewhat at odds with the Apple simplicity ethos, but perhaps the most interesting story in all of this is how other carriers will be brought on as it has a bearing on what networks the iPhone will support in the medium term, and of course how the Australian market will in turn be serviced.

– Ben Prendergast

When I was a kid I was called the Little Scientist. I suppose I just liked tinkering with things, making them that little bit better/faster or just more appropriate for my requirements.

More than a handful of broken Christmas presents can attest to this (hi Mum, and belated apologies).

Progressing through my teen years my friends arrived at a similar moniker, “Cousin Midas” (a reference to the famed golden-touch king, however I was the bizarro cousin who’s inferior touch just rendered things inoperable).

They say that one’s core personality traits are formed by the age of eight, and indeed this obsession with tinkering continues to this day.

My businesses, marketing initiatives, products, music, car, fish tank, toddlers (!), are all subjected to my eternal Little Scientist. While I break far fewer things these days (the stakes are clearly higher, lest I render a toddler mute … or worse), any entrepreneur will attest that strong business growth is often the product of short-term audacious changes that can be tested and indeed kept should they produce favourable results.

‘But wait!’ I hear you say, ‘this is a tech blog! Get out of here with your existentialist-quasi-entrepreneurial rant!’ [ed: he’s conversing with himself again!]. However, the rules equally apply to the technology you apply in your business. The tools and systems you use are just as susceptible to improvement as any other part of your business.

Example? Every business receives frequently asked questions around a particular customer requirement. Conventional wisdom is to create a FAQ page on your website, but why not try a YouTube instructional video, a CEO blog, a Google AdWords campaign, website wiki, product forum?

Each of these options will create interesting side-effects: they might endear you to your customers, increase sales by attracting more customers with the same issue, or just simply reduce the net support costs around that issue.

The beauty is that these are low-cost options, and if they don’t work in the short term you can pull them down! Technology can be such an enabler for creating new efficiencies in any organisation.

If your tech department, website developer, online marketing agency aren’t pushing these kinds of ideas, then I’d say you’re better off finding a Little Scientist.

– Ben Prendergast