Ryan Storgaard's Blog : Emerging Business

seewindowsvista.com and congrats to CDN ISV 90 degree software for being highlighted on the site!

stoey — Fri, 02 Jun 2006 01:48:00 GMT

Man I'm stoked about this - this is so cool... Check out www.seewindowsvista.com (very innovative look and feel to this site and features a walking talking Tom Skerrit highlighting various solutions on Vista/WinFX).

So yes, the site is cool. However, the reason I'm so excited is the fact that one of the Canadian ISV's I've been working with this year, 90 degree software, is featured on the site! What a huge opportunity to get some exposure, and very well deserved I might add as these guys have been heads down, and very deep into WinFX since last fall and it's starting to pay off now. The 90degree guys are going to absolutely change the world of reporting and I'm proud to say that their entire solution is built on WinFX! In particular, they've dug really deep into WPF and WCF in order to build out their product that leverages SQL 2005 Reporting Services (and our Report Definition Language). I'll leave the description at that for now as I'll get into more details in a future post as I'm meeting with them in a few weeks to do a channel9 style interview with them on various pieces of their product (ie. I think it would be interesting to get them, and some other ISV's I've been working with, to share what WinFX/WPF/WCF/WF etc. mean from an ISV perspective).In the meantime, check them out on www.seewindowsvista.com (click on "turning information into action").

Congrats to everyone at 90 degree software! Well done (and thanks for the invite to your Beta 1 release party. Had a great time there...)

Guy & the "Art of Partnering"

stoey — Wed, 08 Feb 2006 09:17:00 GMT

Man, Guy Kawasaki has been absolutely rippin' up the blogging world over the last month. Check out this post on the Art of Partnering. My two favorite snippets:

"Partner for Spreadsheet reasons... Here's a quick test: Will you recalculate the spreadsheet model of your financial projections if the partnership happens? If not, then the partnership is doomed. You can wave your hands all you like about “visibility,” “credibility,” and “acceptability,” but if you can't quantify the partnership, then you don't have one. ""

and this one regarding involving lawyers in the partnering process:

"...If you start the drafting process too early, you're asking for nit-picking delays and blowups. Incidentally, if you ask for legal advice too early, you'll kill the process. The best way to deal with lawyers is to simply say to them: “This is what I want to do. Now keep us out of jail as we do it.”

Just awesome.

"Ready to Rocket" 2006 list is out

stoey — Thu, 19 Jan 2006 19:25:00 GMT

I see my friends over at Rocket Builders have released their annual "Ready to Rocket" 2006 list. There's some great companies on the list. I've had the pleasure of knowing a few of them very well and they are doing some very innovative things.

Colligo Networks Inc. www.colligo.com

- Colligo has a very cool collaboration product you can check out here. In addition, they've got a killer new product they are releasing that enables offline Sharepoint access! This product was recently featured in an InfoWorld article. (I'll have more on this in a future post as I'm going to be using this tool myself)

Flowfinity Wireless Inc. www.flowfinity.com

- The FlowFinity guys are definitely one of the most innovative companies I've had the pleasure to work with. They really get wireless and have several wireless based products. In particular, my favorite (as it's integrated into Visual Studio 2005 [:)]) is their "BlackBird" product that allows you to develop solutions for the BlackBerry in Visual Studio and .NET! This is awesome as it allows developers to leverage VS2005 to rapidly build powerful mobile solutions with the keyword their being "rapidly". You get the IDE productivity gains but coupled with that they've abstracted away a lot of the low level API's you would normally have to deal with when building these solutions and present you with a web service instead. It's pretty sweet! They've also partnered with one of the other companies on the Ready To Rocket list, TenDigits, and have a product that enables access to MSCRM from a BlackBerry device.

GaleForce Solutions Inc. www.galeforcesolutions.com

- GaleForce has a financial services focused CRM product that has some really cool modules for things like integration, presence detection, analytics, real time market feeds, mobility etc.