You may remember the old, chunky Wacom Tablets, designers and illustrators were using with their Apple PowerPC G4 in the late 90s. Then the iPad came and some years later Bamboo Paper, a digital Notebook, made by Wacom (or acquired?!)
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You can buy a pen as well (I got the solo), which really makes sense, though you can use it with your fingers also quite well.
Bamboo really changed the way I keep notes and even make concepts or presentations and use my iPad in a productive way. As I am into Keynote for presentation stuff, hand-drawn illustrations really give them a personal and individual touch – and it’s super simple.
You can organize your work into different notebooks with different paper styles – there is no OCR but I don’mind because I haven’t seen that working anywhere in a useful way yet.
You can share either single sheets or a whole notebook directly in your Dropbox in a Bamboo native format or as PDF.
Whoppa you think, they’ve launched in Feb 2012 – isn’t this going crazy? Well, in a way maybe, tough others – lets have a look at the figures (data provided by Slack):
Table: Prediction for the year 2015, by me
They say, they do have 135.000 paying customers paying $6,67 per month making an average revenue of $900k a month.
In the table above I put in their prediction, to add $1 mio in ARR every 11 days (which is roughly $3 mio. per month) – though I am not quite sure about them using the term „ARR“ which is defined as Accounting Revenue Rate and is more a Return on Investment figure than a figure average revenue return, which would be my interpretation.
That translates to roughly 4,65 mio paying customers and $704k revenue per employe – not that bad.
Given a continous growth, that might even justify the valuation of $2.8 billion as the multiple of 16 would fall throughout the next 4-5 years.
How did they do it? They have no fuckin idea, as Stewart said in munich this year, but let’s have guess:
– they serve a very fast growing segment of business apps: that is, in contrast to the big payers like yammer etc. small and mid-sized companies . These customers typically use other „semi-professional“ apps like Dropbox, Google Apps, Skype and so on. they are in a segment between the typical freelancer and the big corporations. This segment in general, will explode in the upcoming years adding more and more developers and freelancers in always changing (project-wise changing) combinations in the „services-industry“. Btw: all „old-economy“ industries are being disrupted and becoming service industries.
– these customers are the real cloud customers: they want to move fast and flexibel – and they are willing to pay for stable solutions.
– Slack has integrated with the most important other cloud services, and with one click, they are fully integrated.
– Their native clients are fast, stable and of a very nice and intuitive interface – the hashtag style channeling is known by every private twitter user.
– add to that the upcoming „internet of things“ where you want to have ONE system to control them all, and you can guess, why the bet on slack might be a good one
So, slack is doing many things right – and I am really looking forward to see them moving in the future.
Seit der Gründung der motionet AG in 2007 haben wir verschiedene Frameworks und collaboration software tools erst für die B2C Kommunikation (facebook hat uns dann irgendwie überholt) und dann für die B2B Kommunikation entwickelt: hubber.it ist eine der beiden Plattformen, die wir sowohl selber hosten, bei Partnern hosten als auch auf dem Telekom Business Marketplace. Doch tools sind nicht das Einzige: die Frage ist doch: wer braucht collaboration tools wirklich und isses dann eher ein Slack oder so etwas wie ein facebook-nahes hubber.it wie von uns gebaut. Mit dieser Präse gehen wir manchmal auf Kundenfang: viel zu viele Buzzwords, aber: was drin steht is nicht ganz blöd und wenn man genau hinschaut sieht man, dass es nicht nur um die Tools geht-die sind im Zweifelsfall nämlich eher unwichtig.
Ich selber finde das Thema collaboration im Unternehmenskontext wirklich spannend, gerade wenn man es nicht nur als „was gibts heute in der Kantine“ Austauschtool integriert sondern mit anderer Software über API’s verzahnt: „Weil Maschine XY gerade das Produkt fertig gestellt hat, kannst Du jetzt mit einem Klick hier den Versand triggern und die Kollegen informieren“. Dafür muss man aber verstehen, wie das eigene Unternehmen funktioniert und tickt. Das immer wieder herauszufinden und die wirklichen Mehrwerte zu finden macht mir dann in einem Beratungsprojekt Spaß.
Disclaimer: ich bin Vorstand und Gründer der motionet AG
This might be one of the best Dropbox Settings: if you make a screenshot, it is automatically uploaded into the Dropbox/Screenshots directory and the direct link is being copied to your clipboard. Ideal to share Screenshots with others instantly over #slack #skype or other messengers. Thanks, Alex, for the hint
Been a vivid user of watchever since the very beginning – but cancelled the subscription now. Netflix DE just got the default streamer, along with Amazon Instant Video Prime and (and you didn’t read that here) http://www.couchtuner.eu/tv-lists/
Maybe I am not the only one, switching to netflix:
Google Trend: watchever.de / netflix.de
Its mostly about the interface, I really like with Netflix, though search is a pain…
Over at Okanda you can now book meeting rooms online – they have a quite big portfolio in germany and UK currently and fastly expanding. And now they even have an image movie – in german 🙂
There are other movements like api.ai as well, but of course: with the massive installed userbase, Siri is the big mama everybody is waiting for.
It is not quite sure yet, if Apple integrates Siri Api’s into HomeKit, other than e.g. with AppleTV
The most important role for Siri will be with the Apple Watch of course.
I’ve been using Siri here and there, but other than to set the alarmclock for the next morning, there was not much of a use for it.
Only one part, and I am noticing using it on a regular if not daily basis is now: speech-to-text. That works so well, that it writes better and faster emails and messages for me (with less typos 🙂 ) I use it on the iPhone as well as on the Mac: you can activate it in the system settings for the most languages.
As one could see in Tim’s Demo lastw eek, spoken text on the iWatch can be either send as text or as voice-message, which then makes perfectly sense. As you dictate you see, how Siri „understands“ and brings the text in context and corrects it. If they open their API together with TouchID, Apple really changed they way of interacting with digital devices once again.
Update: Google just announced to open its „now“ Apis…
Having revived my blog, I indeed found one of my first osx blogging clients I was using firstly with movabletype, then typepad and later wordpress – and it was still sitting in my applications.
A quicksilverish ctrl-space -> „ect“ brought back „ecto“ – and I still love it – though the last news from there „active developers“ is from 2008 (they have been acquired) 🙂
The design hasn’t changed much since the original iMac from around, and the first „glossy“ buttons from osX
From time to time the SSD of my late 2011 MB Pro grasps for space – and DiskWave is a nice and free tool to find out, where the big badass files are hidden.
I now had it once or twice, that my enthernet network did not come up again, after suspendig the notebook to sleep-mode. A ifdown && ifup didn’t do the trick either, so that I now came up with this solution:
sudo service network-manager restart
That does the trick quite well and brings back the network interface.
