[Company] Weekly Update 6/2010

Wolfgang Spraul wolfgang at sharism.cc
Mon Feb 8 08:54:26 EST 2010


Hi,
no FOSDEM write-up yet, I'm eagerly awaiting David's pictures and videos
as everybody else does :-)
Speaking about pictures and videos:

---1 pictures & videos into the wiki, not downloads anymore

MediaWiki supports scaling of pictures when they are put into a page.
So we can upload pictures into the wiki at the full resolution they were
taken at. MediaWiki also provides much better functionality to organize,
annotate and scale pictures than our current downloads server. We can
keep track of author, source, license, etc.
All old pictures from the downloads server have been copied into the wiki
(need to collect some metadata about them over time). We left the
old pictures on downloads so we don't break links.

For videos, MediaWiki currently does not support scaling of videos, so I
suggest if the full resolution they were taken at is too high, we can
upload two versions: One in full resolution, the other one scaled down
for today's screens and Internet speeds. Videos need to be converted to
Ogg Theora (I use ffmpeg2theora) before they can be uploaded into our wiki.

All new pics & videos into the wiki please! :-)
Thanks!

---2 financials

Soon more people will be able to buy Ben NanoNotes, and since we ask others
to trust us with their money, I think we should report about the state of
our finances as well.

Our project is self-funded, we don't have venture capital, we don't take
pre-orders (neither from individuals nor distributors), we have no parent
company.
Until today we spent about 180,000 USD in cash, about 80K of that into
one-time engineering and corporate expenses. About 100K into the production
of the first 1000 Ben NanoNotes. Next step is to sell those 1000 NanoNotes
so we make about 100K back, hopefully. Let's say 90K.
After that the following 2000 NanoNotes would cost us about 90K to buy, and
if we can sell those as well we would make some money back for the initial
costs we had, as well as provide cash to allow us to produce other copyleft
hardware (Ya, SAKC, Milkymist One, and more :-))
For even more NanoNotes, the price would go back up to 62 USD, but we
haven't really thought that far yet (the up-down-and-back-up pricing is how
manufacturers protect their one-time costs).

If we cannot sell the first 1000 NanoNotes, things don't look so good.
But that's a challenge we set ourselves. I believe if we focus on software
and with a little luck and help from the OpenWrt side we have a chance.
We do want to take our business much further, sell millions of NanoNotes :-)
But we also know the road there is long, and a lot of hard work is in front
of us still. Please wish us luck, buy a few NanoNotes, tell your friends
or co-hackers about them, and most importantly after buying a NanoNote
keep us honest with critical feedback. It's what we need the most if our
boot-strapping shall be successful...

cu next week,
Wolfgang




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