...for small businesses

The Internet is a potent communications medium for everyday use by businesses. But expanding your infrastructure also leads to moremaintenance effort. For this reason, it is quite common for small businesses to use some sort of cloud-based solutions. The problem being that it is very hard to do this with proper attention for business security and customer privacy.

What we are offering

Everyone can offer solid infrastructure for web and email. Getting a solid infrastructure for chat and telephony is already more problematic, especially when it has to be open to the World. Things like "call us now" buttons on your website, chat boxes connecting to your helpdesk, calendaring solutions that crossover to other companies' domain names, permitting customers constrained access to your planning boards... it is all possible, but not today.

Being active developers in the Internet community, we have seen these solutions ready to be deployed, but not actively put to good use. We wish to implement these technologies for you, your customers and your partners in an open fashion -- so they could either use our solutions or someone else's -- by a strong and demanding emphasis on internet standards. There are over 6,000 of them, so chances are you're not using all that is available to you yet.

Internet standards are devised in a highly practical process, requiring compatibility with the rest of the world, with other existing standards, and across versions of those standards. The drive for developing them is usually that a need arises, rather than a potential for making money with a walledgarden, lock-in service.

We are making it possible for current-day hosting parties to attach extra services to the domain names that you are probably using with them now. Meaning, you will get facilities such as chat and telephony, cross-domain calendaring, an internal and cross-domain security and encryption, and many more facilities that you can plugin under your current domain name.

What we are asking

Think pro-actively. There are always trendy services, that are used by a majority of users. Companies someties use such services, but often run into difficulties with them -- their personell holds the credentials, rather than an administrator. The information is shared over a mechanism that cannot be controlled or retracted. You might not even be able to stop one disgruntled customer from posting negatively about you.

Act wisely. Problems of this nature generally occur on the Internet when you cannot control them. This eventually boils down to the question whether they reside under your own domain name, or under their own. Having a domain name is the ultimate control knob for your Internet presence, and you should aim for everything being @yourcompany.com instead of http://somewhere.else/#!/ youcompany or http://yourcompany.somehwhere.else

Broaden your horizon. Do not limit yourself to web and email. Do not see the web as an interactive flyer. Instead, aim to provide interactive services that help your customers as much with automation as they are helping you. Things like presence could be ideal for your helpdesk; things like SIP over IPv6 can reduce expenses and bypass governmental eavesdropping; being part of the Global Directory can greatly help you spread contact information and credentials. There are many ways of expanding your communicative skills that you are not currently aware of.

Experiment. If anything is refreshing about Internet technology, then at least that businesses are getting more transparant, and less like a carved-in-granite unchanging part of society. This gives you room to experiment. By simply adding a "beta" warning to an experimental communications facility, you are sending a clear signal that you are provisioning it on a best-effort basis, and users will understand that. It means that you can try out new things, deploying them rapidly and learning as you go. A very practical approach for small businesses.

Put your money where your mouth is. Assuming that you want to take this leap together with us, we ask that you contact your hosting provider and ask for a package extension with our current and future developments. This will be a modest donation that ends up with us, and we will subsequently enable your use of our technology as we roll it out. Not all hosting providers have come on board, but they are welcome to contact us how they can get on board. To help you if your provider does not support you yet, we have a direct customer program where you donate directly to us, and we will add services to your domain by hosting your DNS for you -- most hosting providers support at least that facility.