Find your identity

Yes, that’s pretty hard. At least for me. What is the purpose of my company? Whom will I server? What products or services do I want to create? During the last couple of weeks and even month we (we are 3) were looking for that identity. We’ve tried a whole lot of things. We’ve tried hardware, multimedia, hardware services. All kinds of stuff. And nothing really worked. I didn’t feel comfortable entering these fields. I tell you (I don’t even know you name! Or are there two of you out there reading this?) it hurts when you go through these processes. But I guess I have to. It cleanses. In the end you know what you’re capable of and what not. You learn how to lead. Also it helps building up a real team. Not just a bunch of people. But devoted fellowes who know their part and their responsibilities and will do everything to make this adventure a success! I feel it comes to an end now. We’ve tried ourselves in different areas and found out the places we would not want to be. And also the places we want to be. I’m a software developer. I love creating applications that help people be more effective. I’m not a game programmer. I’m also not you’re low level system driver specialist. My current focus is cross platform, database backed client server applications. We’ve done migration tools and other things that require a strong backend based functionality. Our current product, Net-Herald is a Java based, client server application (Eclipse RCP) that allows the monitoring of computer attached sensors in their display in a nice customizable graphical view (Eclipse GEF). But this product is still in its infancy. We are currently looking for a market for this product. I know- this is much too late. But you don’t know how much you learn about business once you’ve started. But only after a while. And a lot you learn from your failures. So I admit it was definetly a failure to start development (I sums up to mabye 9 month by now) of a full blown application without proper investigation of the market! Learn from my mistakes! Don’t do this! Well, at least we have one customer with which we develop the application (more or less), but of course that’s not enough. So we are now looking for hardware vendors that develop monitoring hardware and try to partner with them to enlarge our market this way. So we found that vendor who is producing gsm terminals that can be triggered by either a phone call (which costs no money because only the phone number is used, no call is established) or from contacts that (triggered by an opening door for instance) cause the device to send a SMS. Our application receives the SMS, maps it to the monitored devices and displays it. It might send an alarm if something is wrong. So please tell me, dear reader, what else can be monitored. How can we change our product to make it of interest for more people. Or put it this way: Where do we find the market niche where our product fit’s in? As you see, our quest for our own identity is not over yet. But I do believe that we will find our answers pretty soon. We have to find them pretty soon!