After several months in development, Thomas Multimedia is excited to announce the launch of Studiotime.
Studiotime is the culmination of several years of juggling projects at Thomas Multimedia.
We had problems:
How do we keep on top of all the tasks (to-do items) that we had to do for each client?
How do we track the amount of time we spend on each client in an integrated way?
How do we cut down on needless back and forth communication and give a centralised interface to talk with our clients, staff and contractors?
You guessed it, Studiotime is the answer to all these problems! It is a place where any business can organise their time, tasks and invoices in a single secure, central place, accessible from any web-enabled device.
Perfect for web designers, web developers, programmers, recording studios, clinics, appointment-centric businesses – any business that needs to manage their time, allocate tasks to their staff and contractors, and at the end, send an invoice.
The entry level account is free, the premium top-of-the-line account is just $99 a month.
It’s like “Fight Club.” You should only consider features if they’re willing to stand on the porch for three days waiting to be let in.
One of my favourite pieces of advise I have heard in the last year or so is that when someone wants you to change something about your product, start with no.
Just because one person asks for a feature, and even if it sounds in theory like a sound idea, it doesn’t make it a worthwhile idea to implement.
Instead you listen for the most frequently suggested features, and apply a filter culling off or modifying anything that deviates from your core product purpose. In other words, you make a feature work hard to be implemented.
This not only works for the frontend design that your clients interact with, but applies all the way down the line to programming and server administration.
A great example of this rule in action is to consider how a firewall should operate – start by allowing nothing, and allow access on a case by case basis, and only when absolutely necessary, allow something through.
As far as programming is concerned, don’t require everything just because you can’t be bothered building a decent function/class loading methodology. Start with nothing, and require additional code pieces as they are needed. It will pay big dividends when your load and application size increases.
I think we can all agree that there is way too much crap “out there” and that making aspects of our projects work hard for implementation ultimately results in a more clear, more simple end product.
It’s such a simple idea its almost stupid, and yet in the software industry at least, adding bloat is easy – producing something truly simple is infinitely harder.
Credit to the authors of Getting Real for this practical way of dealing with your audience.
A new product is brewing at Thomas Multimedia HQ… while we work feverishly on re-developing our booking software to accommodate lots of things learned in the past few years, here is a little teaser…
Thomas Multimedia is participating in the Mashup Australia competition which invites professionals from around Australia to create new and interesting web applications utilizing data made available by Federal and State Governments.
After only finding out about the competition a week before the deadline (3 weeks after the competition commenced) the pressure was on to create something unique and most importantly functional in a very short time frame on top of normal business.
Where to Live (www.WheretoLive.com.au) is a search engine that enables Australians to select the criteria that is most important to them in finding the perfect place to live.
The technology behind the site includes a typical LAMP (Linux-Apache-MySQL-PHP) backend and a javascript (mostly jQuery) driven frontend.
In keeping things interesting and challenging, I opted to experiment with a layout that has no submit buttons and no page refreshes. This layout is reminiscent of Mac OSX which typically does not require pressing any form of “save” button when changing system / application settings.
Overall I am very pleased with the result and the learning experience, it is definitely a formidable starting point for a wider ranging site.
Please direct any questions or comments to the comment form below or via our contact us page.
Using mobiles for just calls and texting is a thing of the past, as a third of Australians now check emails on their handsets and more than 70 per cent access mobile entertainment and information services.
After only getting on the “smart phone” bandwagon recently, I am already starting to get excited about the future potential for mobile internet. This is a relatively new market in Australia and I think is about to blossom.
Think of all the niche opportunities – combining your standard web sites with mobile optimized interfaces, allowing employees / general public to access and change information from anywhere.
Published on August 24, 2009 by steve in TM Auctions
Over the previous couple of months our TM Auctions application has improved in many areas.
More backups, more regularly
Even though our entire systems including all auction account data is securely backed up every night, it still left the possibility of losing a partial days activities. Now new pictures are backed up every hour, and all pictures are stored in the massively stable and reliable Amazon Simple Storage Service at no additional cost. Not only does this virtually guarantee that the pictures will never be lost, but also provides exciting scaling opportunities should your auction site make it Big Time. This is far and beyond what you would get from an average web hosting service.
The site administrator can now add, edit and delete seller plans, including options such as monthly fees, maximum no reserve items, front page exposure, maximum live auctions and more.
4 Tier Categories
Category depth has doubled from 2 to 4, allowing improved categorisation of items. An example of 4 tiers may be:
/cars/used/holden/station-wagons/.
Picture Rotation
All pictures can now be rotated clockwise or counter-clockwise from the gallery management page in the event that the seller has listed an image that is the wrong way around.
Really great insights here from the 37 Signals founder Jason Fried.
“Inspirations are like fresh fruit, like milk – they have an expiration date – they don’t last very long”
If you want to do something, you have to do it now, because the motivation will inevitably fade.
The other comments I really enjoyed from this video are about building your audience. Most businesses are terrified to reveal their inner workings through fear of giving their secrets away to the competition.
Yet this theory is flawed – compare it to famous chefs, who give away their recipes and business secrets on TV and in books. They are telling everyone (competition included) exactly how they are successful and providing the recipe to reproduce that success.
Are they worried about the competition? No – because they have established an audience who trust them, who buys their merchandise and who will come back for more.
In the internet era replicating their success is as easy as writing a blog – the overheads are virtually nill, and the customer comes to you!
I came across an interesting read today about how traditional media companies (mostly newspapers) are adapting to capture and monotenize the web audience.
The concept of a newspaper subscription will change completely.
Instead of throwing a paper over your fence we will offer you:
- a much more sophisticated package of print and electronic content
- incentives for loyalty
- and tools that allow you to conduct transactions with our advertisers.
We will make our content suitable for the next generation of smart phones devices that are still in their infancy with potential to deliver news, information, entertainment and shopping in HD with full interactivity.
The old parish pump reporting on local news will be reinvented as hyperlocal coverage of real time events such as
- Where to find the cheapest petrol
- How to avoid roadworks and traffic jams and
- The best retail offers available in your suburb that day
You will even be able to evaluate the performance of local schools
I can’t help but get the feeling they have been terribly slow to embrace the internet, and adapt their model to tap into the vast audience at hand. Internet audiences will pay (or learn to pay) for unique quality content that is of specific interest to them.
I myself would be happy to pay a subscription for a service whereby a team of IT journalists provided quality original content that far exceeds in terms of depth, the information freely available on blogs and via other sources. I don’t think online journalism is about giving away news for free – its about embracing the internet as a medium to target niche markets.
