From Crawling to Walking
December 4th, 2007Okay, so maybe we’re not even crawling, we’re just barely holding our head up *grin*. ShuffleText has been live only a few weeks, and we’ve had some amazing support from the Micro ISV community. I’m astonished - these guys know how to make newcomers feel welcome - so thanks everyone who dropped us mail, or left a comment - much appreciated.
The feedback we got was great. We’ve adjusted appropriately, changing the licensing, the cost, and strategy of our Highlight Product. There’s now a "free as in beer" version of Highlight Express for non commercial use - totally feature unrestricted. We’ve also done away with the 10,000 searchable row limit, instead we’re now saying "your performance mileage will vary", which is another way of saying "if it’s slow, be sure to sign up to the Enterprise Beta!".
We’re hoping that stimulates interest in leveraging fuzzy search in applications. And speaking of which, Joseph Cooney has jumped on the non-commercial bandwagon and delivered a brilliant SQL Management Studio Express add-in that leverages Highlight Express for quick and efficient table/stored proc search. Great for those massive db schemas you see in the enterprise. We’re hoping to see more of these kinds of add-ins built using Express - they’re great examples of brilliant user experiences.
CloudSeed Released
Yesterday marked ShuffleTexts second product release, called CloudSeed. It’s an automatic tag cloud generator library for the .NET framework - it slurps up one to millions of documents and figures out what words are highly relevant within that context and displays them as a tagcloud. Sure, you can find any old code on the Interweb to do that right? Well, our’s does it super fast (we scale across multiple cores) - processing thousands of documents per second. It’s also got a pretty smooth levelling algorithm, meaning the distribution of tag sizes will always be "interesting". And most importantly, it’s automatic - meaning you don’t have to do any pre-tagging - it’ll just figure out what words make the best sense!
We’ve pushed that up on the site for $49 USD, slapped some Google Ads on there, and we’re now waiting for the first customer.
What’s Next?
We’re still busy hacking away on Highlight Enterprise, and we’ve got a bunch of other code lying around "in the labs" which we’re hoping to integrate with a partner to test out the various new user experiences it enables. We’ve got text clustering code, "short text fuzzy search" (think Lucene, but with a fuzzy auto-correction that doesn’t rely on a spell checker), and data-deduplification code (which seems like a pretty nice little market) - we’re just trying to figure out the marketing and product opportunities for each of these technologies first, instead of repeating our last mistake. If you think you can help us out with any of these ideas, drop us a line!
And of course, we’ll give you an update on how the business is going (sales, traffic rates, click-throughs and bounce rates) soon.
Stay tuned.