So here we are at the other side - it looks like we safely made it into 2008. From the looks of our website and blog, it seems as if 2007 never happened, however quite the contrary is true. In 2007, we delivered another two fresh Daisy releases, three medium to large customer projects, and we started ramping up our organisation to accomodate the growing success of Daisy (and Outerthought). Self-funded as we are, and still very much a startup, 2007 was again a profitable year. Thanks to the trust of our customers, we are able to continue the exploration of how to run a successful business while giving away stuff for free.
2008 already proves to be pretty interesting as well. On the commercial side, we have established a small yet important circle of Daisy customers who require the level of professional support and continued improvement that will allow us to have an extra Outerthinker work full-time on Daisy. For people who have been tracking our efforts around Daisy in the past four years, it should be clear that this is of tremendous importance. Yes, we're hiring.
Next to that and even more important, we successfully negotiated a large-scale contract that will allow us "to pull another Daisy". It's been a long-term dream of us to radically improve our own daily toolchest: the tools, libraries and frameworks we use to build web applications (such as the Daisy frontend). By fall 2008, we will be able to present to the world codename Zebra: our own webapplication development framework. Zebra will be a joint project of us and long-standing customer Schaubroeck.
Zebra will be the first webappdev framework with a holistic view on the entire development process for Java-based webapps. Unlike most other frameworks, we will not only focus on technology, but will take into account team development and a correct separation and integration of concerns as well. Zebra will allow development teams to build web applications from scratch, helped and guided by a solid framework and tools. Zebra's target audience is the Java web application developer, not the Java guru.
This year as well, we will work with the Canadian Coast Guard to deliver an e-Learning and Course Management System, that will be used to manage training material and competencies, of which the source code -again- will be provided under the Apache license.
Adding to that, we are planning for another Daisy release, which will include comprehensive translation management, kindly funded by long-standing Outerthought customer and Daisy investor QAD. Daisy TM includes new frontend functionality to manage and synchronize different language versions of documents, together with an export/import tool that allows translation batches to be sent off to translation bureaus or translation memory systems.
We're in for an interesting new year, hopefully you'll enjoy the ride together with us.