Give us a call or send us an email. We love hearing about new concepts and how we can help and we love telling people what we do to better educate about what technology can do.
Want to know more about what cloud computing is? Check out this great post from our SkyLedger Team. They did a great job of simply explaining the basic concepts behind cloud based computing.
http://blog.skyledger.com/2010/09/does-that-cloud-look-like-the-internet-to-you/
When we say “The Cloud” – we mean web-based systems that exist on the forefront of user-friendly technology in a way that rivals standard downloaded applications.
The Cloud is already responsible for three of the most widely used applications in the world: Gmail, Facebook, and YouTube. Each of these revolutionary platforms exist not as a program on your device, where the bulk of the content is stored in a limited fashion, but instead, these three platforms take advantage of the near-limitless capacity of the web.
No matter how much physical hard-drive storage you have, you will always find a way to fill it to capacity with data. And while nanotechnology is making great gains in the way we store data, those advancements come at a cost no small-to-mid size business can afford, certainly out of range for almost any individual.
Think about if your computer or mobile device had to store every email, every photo, and every video you ever viewed. Impossible, right? We’re already past the point of thinking that our content must be stored completely on our physical device.
But that’s not the only advantage to working within The Cloud.
24 hour service, available anywhere. As long as the Internet is available, your service is working, and if for a brief moment it isn’t, your aren’t paying for its recovery, unlike shackled systems that usually require in-house professionals.
The benefits don’t end there. Cloud-based systems are almost always cheaper, easier to access, and simplify user experience.
I’d be willing to wager that Google Docs, Calendars, and its Content Management are universally better than the narrow-focused programs your employer is currently using. And not only are they easier to learn and use, but they’re incredibly cheap when compared to the software licensing rights for standards programs that offer the exact same service, often with less features.
Aren’t convinced working in The Cloud is just as good as using standard applications? Then check out this video, showing how a web-based system mimics an application perfectly for iPhone:
With all that said, why are mobile apps the craze? Why are we writing sexy maintainable code for our web applications and writing unsexy hard to maintain compiled code for our mobile devices. Apple attempted to make the apps boom a web based boom when the iPhone first launched but the time was not right. With the growth of html5 we really hope more web apps pop up on mobile devices than compiled hard to maintain apps.
We are really excited about projects like jqtouch that are helping to bring web delivered applications to mobile devices easier, faster, and better than the compiled alternative. Take a look at the project here http://www.jqtouch.com/
The benefits, it seems, are almost endless. Don’t be afraid, embrace the change.
Wow, 2009 was such an amazing and energetic year for us. This year was all about doing things. The time for talking, dreaming, and fantasizing ended January 1st 2009. For years Cloudmanic Labs, formerly known as Matthews Etc. Internet Services, has been working towards the idea of just building our own web based services and transforming from a for hire firm to a product based firm. Well, I am very pleased to announce, we did it!!!
Over the course of 2009 we have been working tirelessly to develop a handful of products. While these products seem sort of all over the board in similarities they are all very much connected “under the hood”. 2009 was a year about building “stuff” and 2010 will be a year about taking this amazing product to the market and getting them in the hands of our customers. With two products, Elevation Fitness, and Mealstub both launching mid to late January and the rest of our products launching shortly after we are really excited to show the world our robust products engineered by one of the top web teams in our markets.
Elevation Fitness – Our web-based management system for personal trainers and wellness professional is currently in active beta testing. We have been getting great feedback and should be launching on time in January. We are just putting the finishing touches on. Checkout more at Elevationfit.com
Mealstub – Our a soon-to-be-live online promotion site, that offers our members valuable discounts on local cuisine is going to be ready very very soon. The development is complete and tested. We are just wrapping up the process of getting our restaurant partners on board. We are truly excited about the quality of the restaurants signing up, and about the interest we have already received from our online signup form at www.mealstub.com, where we are giving away a $5.00 credit. Mealstub will be launching in late January.
Rentalbook – Our online property management solution has been a pet project for us for over 8 years. We have used it, and partners have used it as a private project. Until 2009 we never had any plans to bring this product to market. After a great deal of market research we have realized there is a great need, and we have been working our tails off to bring this product to market. We have no official release schedule but we are shooting for the first half of 2010. Checkout more at rentalbooks.net
CloudCrm – Our customer relationship management system designed from the ground up for website operators with many great features for other industries is coming along smoothly. All our products are integrated into CloudCrm currently and is helping us manage our customers in more robust and powerful ways. While we have no schedule for this release it is a work in progress and we will release it as soon as the feature sets are as polished as they should be. Stay tune and keep an eye on mycloudcrm.com
I would like to take this opportunity to thank all our partners, employees, investors, friends, and our understanding family members for making 2009 such a productive year for us. In fact the most productive year we have had over the course of the last 10 years. Without these people we would be no where. From the bottom of my heart thanks so much for everything people have done for us to help in the success for Cloudmanic Labs and our products.
Lastly, a very special happy New Years wish to our customers and supporters. I hope your 2009 was as exciting as ours and I hope your 2010 is an amazing year as well!!
After about two years of planning and development we are very close to releasing our Elevation Fitness Product (www.elevationfit.com). Elevation is a web based / software as a service offering for fitness professionals.
The Product will be sold to fitness and wellness professionals to help manage their clients. The product will assign, monitor, and report on a person’s over all wellness. Upon release the product is targeting the fitness industry, but will be moving into other wellness industries quickly. We are scheduled to launch in early November. Keep an eye on your blog for updates.
This is something we here at Cloudmanic Labs talk about all the time. This is something we see a lot of chatter about on the Internet. If you have a super useful web 2.0/software as a service application should you charge for it? How much should you charge? I feel like we are back in the late 90′s where you purchased your copy of windows and then you had to purchase all the software to go with it. People were use to adding software costs to their computing life. Nowadays, people are paying for software but they do not realize they are. If you run down to Best Buy and purchase the latest HP super desktop or even better you run over to Apple and pick up the latest super sexy iMac you are going to get a machine loaded with software. You just take it home or back to your office plug it in and away you go. You might have some old software that your office buddy gave you a copy of or you purchased a while back that you have to install but in most cases you turn on your computer and away you go no extra expenses.
This is the question we have been struggling with at Cloudmanic as more and more apps are finding their way to the cloud this mean more and more monthly licensing fees. If you are a big corporation software as a service really makes sense because those annoying monthly fees 100% out weigh the cost of an IT staff. If you are a small business, (which most of our software is targeted towards), you might not have an IT staff; which means the more and more fee based cloud software the company purchases the more and more the costs are going to start out weighing the pros.
Easy make your software as a service solution free. Everyone loves free. Just get it up there somebody will come along and buy you out and you will get your paycheck then. Maybe, don’t count on it. If I write a desktop application and someone steals it from their buddy. While that is not good for my profit machine it does not hurt me at all. Now if I give out a free account to my software as a service application that does hurt. I am now paying for hosting, IT, and bandwidth overhead. This means I can not just give away the farm.
We feel that you have to give away at least a basic free account. So many people will just sign up for a service just to check it out. Once you get them in there they might think the service is cool and want to pay for an upgrade. As we are figuring out what services are free and what services are not we look at our costs, how much is it going to cost us to service this free account? We want to give away features that are not costly to us. An example of a costly feature is a feature where a person could upload many files to our database. That is going to add extra hardware and backup costs to our bottom line.
How should you price the paid portion of your web app? Beats me 
. It really depends on your industry and how much of a sales team you are going to need to sell it. If you have an application that all you have to do is put it on the web and get tech crunched you might get away with not charging very much. If you have to have a sales team hit the streets and give education and what not about your product you are going to have to charge more to cover the overhead. However, if your costs to spread the buzz and to educate customers on what your product does are high you might have a problem with your product or how you are conveying it.
We feel your pricing does not matter. It is all about the web crack. Get the customer in with maybe a free account. Get them loving your product so much they want to pay you for your premium service. Price it in such a way that when the charge hits their credit card every month they are do not question their needs for your product. What the price is depends on the industry (how wealthy it is) and how useful your product is.
Lastly, we are strong believers in paying up front for a year. This way the account is paid and the customer is not constantly being reminded of the fee they are giving you each month. Pay and forget is a great model in our minds. The discount you might have to give up to get them to pay might pay for its self by keeping the customer happy by not reminding them each month of your fees. Just remember monthly software costs are not very common for small businesses (well many of them). It is a new concept that is slowly be understood.
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