Here’s my post from the Servicebird Product Blog.

Recently we launched the second major build of our beta period. Here’s a list of changes we’ve made:

Instant Search for Profession
Instead of having to know what industry your profession is in and then try to find your exact position, we figured we would use the same technology that makes our homepage so unique in the “Add Business” process. Now when you want to add a business, simply type in your best guess at what type of business you have and the instant search will generate the closest matches, instantly. Easy!

Improved SEO Performance
This is a very high priority for us and the latest build brings in some additional modifications to our SEO strategy for listings. We’re monitoring how these changes effect listing rankings and so far the search engine response has been good. Of course, we have even bigger plans yet to improve in this area.

Homepage Changes
We now tell visitors upfront what Servicebird does. No need to click off to another page to figure out what we’re doing here. Of course, one click away and more information is available for those who are interested.

Right now we are patiently marketing and gathering new business listings. Taking it slowly gives us time to adjust and optimize the site for a growing number of users and businesses.

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We are about to launch Servicebird Beta v1.10! If you have been keeping track of our progress, you should see a number of important additions and fixes in this release. Please take special note of our new Add Business process. We have converted the traditional, eBay-style page to a much more dynamic Servicebird-esque process. Thanks to all our great feedback providers!

We will be releasing Servicebird Beta v1.10 to the public in the next few weeks, so stick around!

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That’s right! We are around ten days away from releasing our beta launch! This will be an important step toward our hard launch. Make sure you add yourself to our Servicebird mailing list for important information like progress reports, investor information, and more.

Servicebird represents a huge leap in local business advertising. A listing on Servicebird gives a business a huge amount of online exposure for a very small financial commitment. In fact, we are so sure you will love using Servicebird that during our beta period, we are giving away FREE one year subscriptions ($199.95 value.) Make sure you don’t miss the opportunity to be the first business in your area on our impressive new site!

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This is just a quick post to let all of our users and subscribers know that Friends Of Wifi is now populated! Check it out, add your favorite hotspot and let us know what you think.

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Sometimes when building a new application, a team can easily lose focus. Fortunately, our team has not suffered from this problem. In fact, I’d say it’s safe to say that we are moving toward our beta release in a most excellent fashion. We are all very, very excited about Servicebird and what it will mean for small businesses all over the US (eventually the world but we need to start somewhere, right?)

It’s easy to keep yourself up to date on our progress. If you haven’t already done so, head on over to http://www.servicebird.com and add yourself to our mailing list. You’ll get release updates, investor information, and other important news. You won’t get ads, popups, or anything else of that sort - we never sell or trade contact information. Thanks for checking in, and plan on hearing from us very soon!

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Over the past few weeks I’ve been thinking about what the future holds for our products and at what point we’ll consider them a success. Up until now, we’ve had the thought that lots of companies like us have: we must be number one and dominate our competitors! This is a good way to think in some ways… it definitely motivates you to get all of your ideas in a row and plan for a focused, powerful application. But, in other ways this mindset is bad for both your morale and your business.

Building a successful business is quite often not about crushing competitors with new features and whatever else special you can bring to the market. It’s about doing something well and having a good way to make money (and a profit) from it. It really doesn’t matter what the competition is doing as long as you know that your company will make money. For us, getting into massively growing industries with great products is our plan for success. Yes, we think we have new features and tricks up our sleeves, but any moment someone else could launch a killer app that has all of our features and more. I think a common reaction would be to back away, rethink and perhaps even close up shop. What a waste! You owe it to yourself to not be so shallow in your endeavor.

So, now that we’re thinking this way, we aren’t worried about competitors as much. The only thing that will determine our success is our own drive and determination to make it there.

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This YouTube video is spreading like wildfire, but it’s still post worthy.

Someone told me the other day that your ability to predict the future will determine your level of success. I don’t know if there is a “bubble” or not, but there is certainly a cyclical pattern to economics and industries. Could there be a downturn in this industry? Definitely! Will the need for good software that helps people diminish? That doesn’t seem too likely.

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Most people know Amazon.com as the web-based book, movie, and music selling powerhouse. It turns out they also have a suite of developer tools called Amazon Web Services that expose some of the technology that Amazon.com is built on and provide simple interfaces for use by small to large independent software developers.

There are two technologies in the suite that particularly interest me: Simple Storage Service (S3), and the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). S3 is essentially scalable web based data storage hosted on one of Amazon’s data server farms. Files up to 5 GB each can be uploaded and downloaded from S3 using either REST or SOAP interfaces, both of which operate through the HTTP protocol. The true beauty of the system, however, is that you as the user only has to pay for the storage and bandwidth you actually use, so if you know your business’s needs are going to grow in the future this is a great system to use.

EC2 is similar in concept to S3, except that instead of providing scalable data storage it provides scalable computing resources. The user, or a piece of software, can request any number of compute units (virtualized servers, essentially) on which any unix/linux based software can be run. Like with S3, you only pay for what you use.

Why does this interest me? Well, it means that I can operate test servers only when I actually need them, and instead of paying a few thousand dollars for server equipment I can just requisition a few compute units from EC2 at 10 cents an hour and just run my servers while I’m testing. It also means that when I get to doing load testing I can run thousands of test clients on a hundred compute units for a couple hours with very little expense. On an actual production server I can dynamically and automatically start new application server instances to handle more load during peak operating hours and automatically stop them when they are not needed.

If I had needed all those servers all the time it would be more cost effective to just buy them myself, but because of the ability to scale the number of servers up and down dynamically and store all of my data to S3 I can run at much lower cost. Amazon still makes money off of this deal because they can charge more than it costs them to run the servers, and then they just distribute the computing power out to the users as needed.

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Since we’re currently a pretty small company, it’s easy to look at all the things we don’t have working for us. However, doing this would get all of us quite depressed. It’s much more comforting to look at the things we do have working in our favor because of our small, nimble size. One of these is in the area of a company voice.

Company voices have been talked about a great deal in the marketing world. Customers enjoy doing business with companies that have a voice because it seems like the company is a living, breathing entity, not just some monolithic building that issues sterile, homogenized press releases every few weeks and forces marketing efforts down your throat when they really want to sell something to you. It’s easy to understand why this is the case though. Stepping out of the ordinary and having a voice would be dangerous for that marketing person or that PR person because the voice might not work. In fact, it will not work if only one person is pushing the voice. The only thing worse than no voice is a mixed one. Customers really have no idea of who your company is if the receive differing messages for you. So for big companies, this is a hard thing to do.

Some companies have broken the mold though and have achieved a great amount of customer loyalty because of it. Google and Apple are the most obvious examples. I used to work for Gateway and they certainly had a strong voice at one point in time and could be considered pioneers of this concept. The cowboxes, personalized letters that came with every new computer and the ever-present celeb-CEO, Ted Waitt set Gateway apart from the blandness of Compaq, HP and Dell. Somewhere along the way the voice was lost as was the only significant advantage they had over their competition.

Fortunately for us and all other small companies out there, a voice is easy to develop and the most simple way to do it is to put your own voice in for the company. Keep with it, instill it in your culture, and your customers will love you and want to see you succeed.

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There has been a lot of press about the new eBook reader over the past few days and a good amount of it has been negative. People continue to hate eBooks, despite the advancements they have made and the amazing convenience of carrying an eBook reader instead of an actual book. The facts that these products are continuing to come out with better and better features (the Kindle allows you to download eBooks anywhere you have cell reception for no extra cost) means to me that it is only time before what happened to the music and movie industry happens to the publishing industry.

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