As you probably have read in our company blog and at Lars' weblog, we are sorry to inform you about the ending of Mindquarry's business operations. In detail this means that Mindquarry will stop provision of any commercial services and activities regarding Mindquarry Collaboration Suite and its hosted version Mindquarry GO. Unfortunately we were not able to ensure the financial backup for these services.
But the need for good open source collaboration products, the vision of Mindquarry and its collaboration suite will survive. We will move the project to Sourceforge (real project location will follow) and the project will be continued there. If you need any further support like customization or extensions, don't hesitate to contact one of the team, because as long as Mindquarry has an active community we will continue our commitment to the vision and product.
I would like to thank everybody who has participated in the vision and progress of Mindquarry!! Without you this vision will never become true!
A few weeks ago I was able to install the Mindquarry Desktop Client on a Mobility Office platform that runs on a memory stick. If you don't know Mobility Office, this is a very cool company that provides portable memory devices like memory sticks, mobile phones or iPods with a special software that allows starting applications directly from the device. This means you can not only have you documents and data with you on the road, but also all the applications you need for your daily work.
Below you can find a few pics of the stick itself and a screenshot of Mindquarry running from it. Using the desktop client from that stick allows you to sync your files directly to the stick and take it with you whereever you go.
Yesterday our UCD task force presented the final results of our first design phase. It was very impressive what they achieved in such a short time and with such limited resources. First I was a bit sceptical about the application of UCD in a small open source company like ours, but finally I was convinced by the results.
So, my opinion after this first design iteration is: UCD rocks, if you know how to handle it. You should really read about the experiences of our UCD team in the blog of Alexander Klimetschek. I think everbody can benefit from that experience if it comes to the improvement of user interfaces.
Last friday Lars and I received our master grade in software systems engineering at the public graduation ceremony of the HPI. It was very impressive to see all those young and highly skilled software engineers that will start working now. You may ask: What, those guys didn't finish their studies up to now? Yes, that's true. In the beginning of 2006 we saw that it was the right time to start development of a product like the Mindquarry Collaboration Server. Therefore we decided to start Mindquarry even if our studies were not finished.
During the last months it was very hard to work for Mindquarry full time and write my master thesis at the weekend. But finally all this hard work was rewarded with the promising start of Mindquarry and a very good master grade. Below you can see a picture of me with robe, cap and sash that was made by a professional photographer after the ceremony.
At the graduation ceremony, Prof Scheer former member of the SAP supervisory board and founder of IDS Scheer gave a talk about transfering knowledge from university to the real world. While his presentation was more a kind of story telling about the way of IDS Scheer towards business process management consulting, there was one slide which was really impressive. On this slide Prof. Scheer showed his opinion about the ideal mixture for an entreprenerial team. The main characters you need in your team are:
- Albert Einstein for analytical and visionary thinking,
- James Bond for flexibility and fighting spirit,
- Willi Brand for showing that you are serous and believable, and finally
- Daniel Düsentrieb for getting things done on the technical side.
If you know us, I let it up to you to decide which one of us fits into which category...