Ashvil D'Costa

QuikChannel – Build your own News Channels

QuikChannel was my second product concept. It was conceived in 1997 during the IE 4.0 beta, which came up with the concept of channels using a format called CDF.

The problem I had with the Microsoft channel concept was that publishers control what you see and I wanted to transfer that control to the end user. The idea was to create aggregate channels from all the different news sources. Channels customized around my niche needs.

For example, If I was interested in Microsoft, then all the news items from different CDF sources (Cnet, MSNBC, etc. ) was presented on one page in a Microsoft channel.

The second part of the idea was to use collaborative filtering techniques to decide what news items the user would like to see. So if I am interested in unit testing, I create a Unit Testing channel that aggregates all the Unit Testing Information news items on one page like a Newspaper.

QuikChannel made it to version 1.0 but other priorities took over. CDF never took off and it was years before RSS became popular.

Fast forward to now. Nik from Speerio created a module for DNN that made me reminisce about QuikChannel.

Google News aggregates the News but not at a personal level or drill downs to create Niche topics. I cannot have a personal News page created from the News Sources I choose.

The online aggregators like Feedster, Bloglines are still are oriented around the publisher’s view, expect me to search for content or publish my own content.

Weird. I thought someone would have solved this problem by now. Give me a simple way to view Channels the way I want them, not the way the channel publisher wants them.

.NET 3.0 on Windows XP

Looks like Som and his team finally heard Developers and .NET 3.0 will ship on XP with Avalon and Indigo support. Linux Desktops must be doing really well for MS seems to feel the pressure to ship Longhorn without WinFS.

This is a good decision for .NET developers as it gives them a wider market for Avalon and Indigo. Now that this decision is made, they can work on the next one.

BTW, Does anyone know how to use the .Text web services to post here.

Software Pricing with Eric

Eric Sink has a good article on product pricing strategies on MSDN. It is a must read for anyone in the software business. If you are developer and don’t understand software pricing you will have no idea how commercially viable that widget you are developing is. Pricing is a complex issues and this article covers that all the main points that drive it.

One of the issues I have with the article is his example of setting a price point for a commercial version of Firebird. His argument of pricing it higher is not in line with his company’s pricing of Vault compared to VSS, Perforce, etc. Actually Perforce adopts his model but it’s pricing is out of reach for many developers.

One of the stupidest things to do is to price higher than lower. If you price lower you will lose money but gain customers and market share. You will find that customers want to spend money with you after they trust you. Take a leaf out of the Component software vendors – Sell cheap then you can charge for Enterprise support, Source Code, Subscriptions, Training, etc. Enterprise customers love to spend money with companies they trust.

The other thing I disagree with is to raise prices till the whining is just right. Whining customers don’t evangelize; they don’t act like sales people for your product. There are better ways to charge people who want to pay more and still include people who want to pay less.

Eric’s article is a good start but the best place for you to get your pricing strategy is talking to your customers.

Introductory Post

Just wanted to thank Donny for creating this weblog here. I consider myself a software craftsman and am actively interested in the .NET technology space.

Right now, I am focusing on how to create reusable software artifacts in both Horizontal and Vertical domains.