For want of a better place, I thought it would be prude to outline our ".COM" business activities on the ".ORG" blog.
Please let me welcome Mike Kaply in Austin Texas to our sales list. Since Patrick and I are based in Singapore, we have honestly found supporting US customers difficult due to the time differences. Mike has been helping out with the Webconverger Firefox addon and an amazing outside contributor to the Mozilla Enterprise list. Mike has helped a LOT of businesses roll out Firefox to their users and by being a part of Webconverger, I hope he help people even further.
Ultimately our business activities make this body of free software better and help spread it. We do offer educational / non-profit discounts and recently we are working with Techsoup to help spread Webconverger for use in libraries. We are still under trial though we hope to ramp up our distribution in February.
Previously our "business communication" was solely done by our email newsletter (with no Web archive) subscribed upon at http://webconverger.com/. You can now think of the newsletter as an abbreviated edition of this blog in your inbox. So you don't have to employ a RSS feedreader, hawkishly watch our Twitter stream or visit this page all the time. We've written our own newsletter software to basically turn these blogs into email newsletters for your convenience.
So what's happening technically? We are upgrading the base of Webconverger to wheezy/baureo-backports based on work by Progress Linux. This should help us better support newer video hardware. We are also working on migrating our boot process to systemd. This should simplify our init process and make it faster. We also expect to employ a newer kernel shortly. Hopefully within a week from now we will be open for testing.
Our objective is to support the Intel NUCperfectly. Including Linux/Web hardware acceleration.
In parallel we are working on some Web signage demos and contributing to the W3C Web signage forum, advocating Web technologies. We have had several meetings with Media Owners, who are very keen to move to a networked signage solution though there are a few things stopping them. For example:
In Singapore it can cost as much as 100SGD a month to keep a single device connected to an Internet connection per month. That's roughly 3 times as much as we charge for our more expensive Neon Web signage software, since it has monitoring.
There is a lot of embedded Android devices being advertised for signage use case. For basic things they do a good job on the face of it. However the Android solutions are not Web based and the typical Android hardware is not yet powerful enough to drive a large Web rendering. Explaining this subtle differences to "Media Owners" is surprisingly difficult. Our approach for the short term is to encourage Media Owners to become versed with small deployments in Web Signage using our Neon software and Intel NUC PC hardware, which is a much more affordable option than a year ago.
In other news you might be thinking, where is the faster Firefox 18.0? It has a bug that makes the langpacks fail to load and we are waiting for Mozilla to fix this.
Many of our customers have asked for a "one off" payment, since they don't find the subscriptions attractive. We are about to introduce a new price offering of double the annual fee, 200USD, which will give said PC unlimited upgrades for as long as this project survives. I hope you find that interesting. We will be implementing it in the near future via Paypal.