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Musings on UTR 2008

Started by manalang · 9 months ago

Every year I attend the Under The Radar conference held at the Microsoft Silicon Valley location. The organization is flawless, the companies interesting, and the facilities are wonderful.
If you don’t know, UTR is a showcase for start-ups that are not (yet) in the limelight ... Continue reading »

5 comments

  • Hi Paul - Thanks for noting LiquidPlanner. It's tough to describe a concept like revolutionizing the Gantt chart and building a product around it a 6 minute demo. It's not your standard consumer software which is what is mostly seen at UTR. The LiquidPlanner schedule is designed to look familiar, but it functions in a dramatically different way than a typical Gantt. I would be happy to setup a web conference with you if you'd like a briefing. Key things you'll see include: capturing uncertainty, seeing effects of uncertainty on dependant and independant chains, automatic tracking, and how (by capturing every change) the system builds up a data warehouse of project information that can be leveraged to help organizations learn how to be better estimators.

    Best Regards, Charles, CEO | LiquidPlanner.
  • Hi Charles, I am sure your approach yields a much improved result vis a vis something like MS Project. I do not doubt that. To be fair, the problem I am looking to solve is more for the casual projects that mire my existence more than the structured, long term, projects. The ones where no one wants or needs a full project plan is where I see the most pain. Obviously you are not tackling that market, but I do see some others taking a stab at it (sadly using the same old models, but now on the web).

    I tend to think that for the ad hoc projects we need something outside the standard task, owner, deliverable mindset. I even think that a zero UI might be the answer.

    Of course I don't have a solution either, but I keep looking...

    Thanks for the comment!

    Paul
  • Thanks for the kind words, Paul.

    Rest assured that we're working on reskinning the UI as we speak. It'll take a little while longer than we'd like, but we wanted to get the "innards" right first. Not very Web 2.0, I know, but the right priority given our stewardship of customers' data.

    Best,

    --Ridge
  • Ridgely, I am sure you have the right priorities. In fact, I even wonder how slick the UI needs to be for your audience - your bare bones approach may be just fine. eBay made it with a terrible user experience and I used to think Excite would crush Google, so it's more of a personal preference for me.

    That said, more and more UI is a differentiator. It is the first thing you see after all and a big message of quality (or lack therof) sent to potential users. I certainly wouldn't buy from a website that looked like a FrontPage template. I look forward to the refresh!

    Thanks for the comment.
  • Thanks for mentioning blist - basically we have a window of opportunity to do much needed rapid feature development before we release a premium version of blist and charge actual, real money for it - at which point, it obviously won't be okay to be 'very beta'.

    Mat

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