LibraryThing the useful book cataloguing service by Tim Spalding (see previous post), just got a nice deal with Abebooks. Congratulations to Tim (and the new team)!

DBxtra is a general reporting software, able to connect to just about any database. DBxtra for FogBugz is a customized version of DBxtra that only connects to FogBugz databases and comes with many preloaded reports (which you can edit).

Now, that’s probably a smart move although I wonder if the market for customized FogBugz reports is large enough to support a 2nd solution (Case Detective being the other one).

I guess if things go good with DBxtra for FogBugz we will soon see some new “DBxtra for xyz” variants.

Fluxiom, a digital asset management web application, has been released today. I’ll certainly try it and the reason is an incredible video they had released some months ago.

It’s amazing how I still remember that video. I wish I had the same skills in video making. I’ve tried making an introductory video for Magna CRM and discovered it’s harder than it seems. Things like Wink make the process easier, but real-time video with voice is tough.

PlanHack is a task management tool created by fellow mISV Jesse Kim (his blog is here).

Jesse is currently looking for beta testers, so if you’re interested download the beta and give it a try.

PlanHack is a downloadable web application, the same way Magna CRM is, so you need a Web Server with PHP to run it.

BRK Studio released their Authorize.net PHP component. It looks very helpful and I wish best of luck to Ben. See also the relative post on his blog.

Ben is also working on isvManage a solution for Micro ISVs to offer their product for sale. I guess the Authorize.net component will be good for testing isvManage for real!

Axosoft is doing a “social marketing experiment”, which basically consists of them giving 5 licenses of their software (bug tracking, helpdesk, todo management) for $5 instead of $495. The point being bloggers may write about it ;-)

The software looks pretty good, so I bought it even though I already have such tools. The nice thing is it includes Windows, Web and VS.NET clients.

If you’re interested check out the offer page. The offer will be valid until February 24th.

So Borland is selling it’s development products.

Although I consider myself a web developer, I use Borland tools when I need to develop desktop applications (Cheez for example). I’ve been a fun of Borland products since 1994, using Turbo Pascal and later Delphi (I also tried VB from 1998-2001 and hated it).

I guess this isn’t necessarily a bad thing, it all depends on who the buyer will be. I hope not some mega corporation, where these products will be abandoned and forgotten.

I just noticed Wordpress 2.0 is out. I thought of upgrading until I read the docs on upgrading. Doesn’t seem that hard but some plugins may stop working, so I’ll probably do it when I have more free time.

Now I don’t really have any real business experience of this kind, but it buffles me why Joyent bought TextDrive and not the other way around.

I understand the two companies share founders / owners /executives, so I make the assumption that this was a strategic decision, not a financial one. But TextDrive has a well known brand while no one knows Joyent (at least for now). It seems more logical to me for a hosting company to offer software products (Joyent’s products, Strongspace etc) than the other way around. Moreover Joyent’s products are still untried, so what happens if they don’t do well? Wouldn’t that hurt TextDrive’s name?

Anyway I guess these people know what they are doing, but I would like to read a better analysis on this.

Another mISV released their product! CaseDetective is a desktop reporting tool for FogBugz, Fog Creek’s bug tracker.

CaseDetective was developed by Ian and you can read more about it’s development process on his blog.

Congratulations!

Ian Landsman just released HelpSpot, a web based help desk application.

Ian has a very interesting blog, where he writes about his efforts creating HelpSpot and launching UserScape (his company).

The Flock team released a Developer Preview of the Flock browser. Flock is based in Firefox but adds some interesting features. The most notable ones are:

• Integration with del.icio.us
• Tagging
• Blogging from inside the browser (integrates with WordPress, Movable Type, Typepad, Blogger)
• Inserting images from Flickr to your posts

These days all I read about is acquisitions. I mean Yahoo! bought upcoming.org, AOL bought weblogsinc (Engadget etc), Verisign bought weblogs.com and Newsgator bought Netnewswire.

I feel like I entered a time machine and travelled some 5+ years in the past. I really hope the outcome is better this time.

Just saw that NewsGator has released a public API. It’s far more complete than the Bloglines API. You can add / remove / edit subscriptions, mark items as read etc. It seems possible to completely synchronize a desktop feed reader with it. I guess this is a result of FeedDemon’s need to sync with NewsGator. I wonder if FeedDemon uses the exact same API or if it has access to any hidden API calls ;-)

Update: When I wrote this last sentence, I had no intention to imply that FeedDemon uses an hidden calls or anything! It was meant as a joke and my only intention was to praise NewsGator for releasing the full API to their service! I hope no-one misread that.

37signals released their e-commerce search report from 2003 reviewing the search engines behind 25 online shops.

It’s an interesting read for two reasons: a) it exposes a good methodology for performing such reviews b) it includes an excellent “Best practices” section highlighting what a good search engine should offer. Although the best practices are written with e-commerce sites in mind, there are a lot of ideas to improve search engines used by web applications / services.

Finally I should note that the layout of the report is excellent.