Company Blog

Just a short post to let you know what’s going on here at Coding Robots.

First off, January 2009 was the best month ever for the company since 2002. We’re looking forward to investing our time and money to bring you new versions of our products and some more fresh software.

BlogJet users would be happy to know that there’s a new version in development (as usual, we don’t disclosure release dates, so stay tuned).

Mémoires 2.0 has been released recently, and there is an update in the works, so keep your feature requests and bug reports coming.

Finally, we’re working on an exciting new (secret) project that will revolutionize the way you                and               . We hope it will see the light of day this year.

Thank you for your support! Stay tuned.

From: Dmitry Chestnykh
To: All Staff
Subject: SOME BUTTONS TO BE DISABLED

Dear staff,

As you may have heard, bright minds over at Nielsen removed “Reply to All” button to eliminate bureaucracy and inefficiency.

Today Coding Robots Executive Council held an event called ¡ACT IMMEDIÄTELY!, and we developed a plan (inspired by can-doers at Nielsen) to further improve our productivity.

We developed four Mail toolbar configurations for different departments.

Support

Our technical support staff can have only two buttons: Get Mail and Reply. Obviously, they don’t need New Message and other non-productive buttons.

Sales and Marketing

Sales and marketing can have four buttons: Get Mail, New Message, Reply to All, Add Address. We are aiming for the best exposure, that’s why they don’t have Reply button, and have Reply to All instead. They can’t have Forward button, because everyone out there is tired of Internet memes.

Developers

Developers can have three buttons: Get Mail, Bounce, Junk. They never use Reply and New Message anyway.

Executives

Finally, we, executives, decided to place stricter constraints on ourselves. Executives are allowed to have only one button: Take All Accounts Offline.

This is one of the many changes being implemented as a result of the ¡ACT IMMEDIÄTELY! initiative. In my next email I’ll talk about removing unnecessary buttons from your keyboards to further spread the productivity virus!

Best,
Dmitry Chestnykh
Chief Executive Officer

Sorry, we incorrectly said that upgrade from Mémoires has 60% discount off the full price. The upgrade ($17.95) is actually 60% of the full price of license, thus the discount is 40%.

Please accept our apologies for this mistake.

Website

We are pleased to announce the new Coding Robots website. It has a fresh modern design, better usability, and improved load speed. If you’re reading this through RSS, check it out!

Forums

We are also resurrecting the old forums in a new format. It appears, switch to Google Groups was a mistake: some users were complaining that groups were not as convenient to use as forums, discussions slowed down, plus there were a lot of spam. (I wrote a forum topic about this).

Welcome back to the old new forums at http://forum.codingrobots.com!

Blog and Twitter

Usually, we published a couple of posts per month in our blog. Starting today, we’ll be blogging more on various topics in our niche: blogging, writing journals, design, and more. If you haven’t subscribed to our RSS feed (or by email) yet, do it now, so that you don’t miss anything interesting. We also have a Twitter account you can follow — http://twitter.com/codingrobots.

Enjoy

Take a look at our website, and if you find any mistakes or bugs, please let us know.

Thank you for staying with us!

P.S. We have some t-shirts for you.

We have updated our support center — it is much better now (though contact form is not available yet. While we’re working on it, please use email to contact us.)

Also, we got rid of the old forum and moved discussions to Google Groups. There are two user groups now:

• BlogJet Users group

  This place is to discuss BlogJet usage, share your thoughts on blogging, ask for help and request features.

• Mémoires Users group

  This place is for Mémoires users to share their thoughts on journaling, ask for help, and discuss ideas for future versions.

We hope you will be satisfied with improved support!

Today we switched to euro pricing instead of pricing in dollars. Of course, this is influenced by recent drops of $ exchange rates… Since we (unfortunately) don’t live in the United States, and are not sponsored by Gazprom, since we have to grow our tiny company and feed our pets (especially, the toilet paper dispensing mascot), we had to switch to euro. I hope you understand this.

BlogJet is now 29.95 euros.

As a bonus for EU customers, they’ll pay less. Let me explain. European Union has a strange tax for downloadable things – software vendors have to pay VAT if they are not located in the EU. When dollar/euro exchange rate was almost 1/1, we decided to sell BlogJet for 39.95 euros, so that our advertised price was the same for US and for EU, but that price already included VAT. We made less money from EU customers, but we were happy that they saw the actual price and didn’t have to worry about VAT. But today 39.95 euros is about $56.24! Of course, it includes VAT, but the difference is huge, and we had a few customers who complained about that (and for a reason!). So, since today we switched to euro pricing, EU customers have to pay 29.95 for a copy of BlogJet plus VAT. That’s cheaper than $56, trust me.

We always want our customers to be happy and satisfied with our software, and we hope you’ll understand this move.

(Oh, and you don’t have to pay in euro – actually, we accept payments in 8 currencies, and you can see prices automatically converted to any of 20+ currencies).

P.S. We’ll let the experiment run for a few weeks, and then decide with what currency we want to stay.

Recently we moved out of the kitchen-based office in my apartment to a new dedicated office. Here’s a short tour.

First of all, this is our… hm… mascot — a toilet paper dispenser robot:

Vladimir bought it in Taiwan.

Continue reading: Tour of our new office →

Me (to the left) and Dmitry coding at CR headquarters.