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Sep

10

Lifting The Cone of Secrecy

Filed Under Software, business, life, technology | 2 Comments

I am going to avoid using the word “stealth mode” for my startup and our product. Whenever I hear someone say their product is in “stealth mode” I interpret that as “I don’t have anything worth showing to anyone, therefore I pretend its more important….mode”. If you are involved in my extended network, you know what I have been doing, roughly. I have not been afraid to brainstorm and discuss this product with people I know and respect because that is how great products are born.

November marks an entire year of incorporated business for my company, Panoctagon. It has been an absolutely amazing ride, I wouldn’t trade any of the past experiences I’ve had for the world. I have worked with a lot of extremely talented people, I have learned and done a lot of things that have nothing to do with software engineering (which has been a lot of fun), and I can say we survived the first year.

We spent a lot of time honing our skills as a group, defining some pragmatic approaches to not only software but our business practices, and have become a pretty efficient group. I am happy about this.

So, what have we been doing? Today I am proud to announce the launch of our first software product, Happening. We have not officially released it into the wild yet, its still got some rough edges and polish that needs to be applied, but its nearly there. Happening is an event management and publishing solution for education. What do I mean by that? Technology in education often is crap. Talk to people who use it, they never have anything good to say about their tools. Ridiculous overhead, costs way too much, and requires a lot of hands on training.

We decided to build an affordable, easy to use, hosted service that attacks the age old problem of managing and communicating events for schools; event calendaring, if you will.

Happening is more than that, though. There are two very important markets for us, the first is the administrative people inside the institutions who have to do all the monotonous data entry, using the advances in technology that we in the consumer web take for granted, we hope to provide an unparalleled experience that is robust and intuitive. Might I also add, you won’t be needing weeks of training, that is our #1 goal. I spoke with a few different schools we are working with on this project and they all pretty much responded “how much training will you be offering us”, and I responded “I a product that hasn’t even been completed yet, is going to have a huge learning curve and weeks of training attached to it, we’ve failed”, and that has been our mantra, from day one.

Happening is not just about the administrators though, its also about the parents and students, and redefining how they interact with the event information that they care about. Happening is going to change the way parents and students consume event information through their schools, and I am excited to see how things changes things for them.

Lastly, I have to ask this, If you know someone who works for a school who might be interested in a service like ours, please feel free to contact me or forward me information to contact them. We are very excited about what we’ve been up to and want to get schools just as excited.

Also, I’d like to thank my team, our advisory board, and my family and friends for their continous support and advice. We would not have made it this far without you all, and I hope we can make this into something great for education.


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2 Comments so far

  1. Mark Azevedo on September 10, 2008 5:52 pm

    “Stealth mode” is only for camouflage technology, ninjas, and storytelling assholes who haven’t found a purpose for their work yet.

    But I digress, it really has been a really fun ride Derek. I’m looking forward to whatever happens next this new exciting year for Panoctagon!

  2. Mike W on September 11, 2008 9:33 pm

    Congrats on surviving the first year! Here’s to hoping for many more successful years for Panoctagon.