I’m thoroughly impressed with the team at Omega Vortex, the past few weeks. After a lot of development and testing, we finally decided to set a release date firmer than “Q3 2008″ internally. We had two specific products that we wanted to make a release on at the beginning of September (today), NextShout and ComicShout.

At the beginning of last week, one of our clients launched a fascinating exhibit. We’ve been supporting them through the opening of that exhibit and they identified some problems that they needed taken care of by this upcoming Tuesday. Even with the pressure surrounding these issues for Tuesday, our team has executed brilliantly. We brought our own goals to fruition and took care of our client’s problems, as well. We didn’t allow one to suffer for the benefit of the other, we did both.

NextShout and ComicShout were both released on-time, today. Go check them out.

Great job and many thanks to the team at Omega Vortex. You guys are all awesome.

We’re getting really close to releasing some stuff over at Omega Vortex. One of the products that’s coming out soon is Steven’s NextShout. NextShout is a shoutbox add-on to vBulletin that’s been designed to be extremely fast and bandwidth efficient. Where similar shoutbox add-ons are not only more expensive, but end up requiring you to pay more in bandwidth costs to use, NextShout is a cost-effective alternative that will actually save you money, in the long run.

NextShout is now available for pre-order at $15 USD. Purchase it today to get it cheaper than the release price.

Stay tuned for more release information.

Adam Kinder of E29 Incorporated put up a blog entry on the internet’s phenomenon of producing fake companies not too long ago (I just recently noticed it, thanks to Twitter). Omega Vortex got an Honorable Mention on his list of companies that get it right:

A runner up that I’m going to give a nod to is Omega Vortex. Jeremy Privett knows what he’s doing when it comes to setting up a good, fluid development shop. The only reason I can’t 100% vouch for their work is that they haven’t released anything yet, and I’ve not worked with their custom shop. Good group to keep an eye on though.

Admittedly, Omega Vortex fell into the “fake” category not too many years ago before I was swept off to Colorado to go work at Completely Unique and Peak8. I filed papers on GU² Services, Inc. before it was acquired and wanted to file papers on Omega Vortex but never really got around to it until after the Peak8 era.

We do have papers, though! They’re currently in the wrong state, but Alabama’s business laws are incredibly annoying compared to Colorado’s so I may try to put off legally moving the company out of Colorado until I move to NY sometime within the next year. Unless there’s some legal reason to do otherwise which I’m not aware of. We don’t currently have any type of office space, as all of our employees work remotely, so our physical address is pretty much non-existent.

We’re working on fixing that unreleased products issue in the coming months and I’ve been working on ramping up our software division for more progress, now that we’re getting to the point where we can look at it again. Since we have some new people on our team, consulting work should no longer completely bog us down so that no work gets done in our software. We’ll have to see how it goes from here.

Even vague ones … and I mean really vague.

Quite a while ago, Omega Vortex adopted a policy that we would refrain from announcing specific release dates. We won’t even narrow it down to a month for you. There’s quite a few reasons that we do this.

We’re a startup that’s bootstrapping from consulting work. At any given time, said consulting work currently takes priority over all other things, because we have to make money in order to pay bills and keep developers paid. That’s all fine and dandy, but while we’re having to focus so much on consulting, software isn’t being written. This is eating us like the plague. We’re presently amazingly profitable, but not in the way that we want to be. No matter how good our scheduling is, it doesn’t make a difference because we’re constantly having to drop everything to invest time in a new consulting project.

On the plus side, we’re about to simultaneously release a new product that hasn’t been announced yet along with updates to two other products that you may already be familiar with. No matter how close we get to that day, we’re not going to tell you when that day will be, in advance. All of our releases are marked by quarters. Any one year is divided up into three month quarters. Q1 is January - March, Q2 is April - June, Q3 is July - September, and Q4 is October - December. That means that when we mark a release as Q3 of 2008, we could potentially release that product at any point within those three months. If we’re expecting to release in September, we’ll actually really say Q4 so that we have three extra months worth of time buffer to use in the even that something goes wrong. If we happen to meet our goal of September, we just managed to release an entire month early.

Three months of buffer is a pretty decent amount of time. Sadly, because of time constraints with our consulting work, we’re still having trouble meeting those release dates. OmegaVerge has suffered considerably because of this and it has allowed competitors to get a jump on us. (Speaking of OmegaVerge, I’d like to give a shoutout to Ben Babcock who actually managed to help me with a SimpleXML issue by letting me help him with a SimpleXML issue. We now have type-safety/inference of IP.Converge methods in OmegaVerge since we solved that issue, instead of having to pass around SimpleXMLElement objects. Thanks, Ben.)

If you’re a software development shop and, like us, you can’t dedicate 100% of your time to software development, don’t announce release dates. Even vague ones. Surprise people. People get incredibly antsy / angry when you don’t meet release dates.

Oh, and if you have a historic trend of lack of ability to execute, don’t try to say things like “this summer” or “next month” … I’m guilty of this too, but this is a practice that really needs to stop. I’ve seen so many projects say “next month” and it take so much longer than that. Two in particular have me facepalming, right now …

This is an interesting position for me. Before recently, Omega Vortex has just been a small group of close individuals who all knew each other and have worked together before. Now that we’re expanding and I’m having to actually interview and hire people, I’ve been able to experience what it’s like to be on the opposite side of the process. I’m used to being the interviewee or the person applying and sending in a resume, not the guy interviewing or receiving the resume. I don’t claim to be an expert on interviewing people or sifting resumes, but here’s my list of things that’ll immediately get your resume tossed out of the pile. (more…)

A recent client of Omega Vortex has been hit by the pains of outsourcing. Now, I’m sure there are a ton of really good developers out in India … somewhere. Sadly, a lot of the people I have talked to have had nothing but negative things to say about consulting companies based out in India. It’s certainly a lot cheaper than development shops here in the states, but it’s also a lot riskier. So, here’s my five rules of outsourcing to make sure that you don’t get burned the next time you’re looking for someone to help you complete a project.

(more…)

Go check it out.

I’ve come to the conclusion that I seem to like developing games more than playing them, now. With the exception of games that involve 3D Graphics and such, of course. I just mean stuff like browser-based games and MUDs.

I’m certainly a coder at heart … Omega Vortex just launched its Games Division, so be on the lookout for (what I think will be) some pretty cool stuff from us there.

Ruzena’s a college student and her doing well means a lot to me. While I was in Houghton, I did my part to help her study for a lab practical that she had in her Botany course. She used flash cards as a means to help her learn and memorize the common and scientific names of the plants that she needed to know for this exam. They worked well and I believe they helped her quite a bit. Boy, are they a pain to put together.

As you all know, I’m a programmer. Being a programmer, I believe that software is doing its part more and more everyday to make our lives easier. I like to solve problems, but what are the problems that need to be solved?

1. They’re tedious and difficult to make.
2. They’re somewhat easy to lose, since they can be tiny slips of paper or note cards.
3. They’re not necessarily environmentally friendly.

Okay, maybe that last one is stretching it a bit, but all of you can agree to the first two points I’m sure. So, my goal is to attempt to solve the problems by making flash cards easy to create and easy to access from anywhere you have an internet connection. Enter OmegaFlash, my company’s Open Source Web-Based Flash Card System. In the interim between the company starting and us releasing our first major product out into the wild, I’m going to be going on the endeavor to work on a few projects and open sourcing them for anyone to use and modify.

With a simple and easy to use interface, you can create flash cards for anything. The initial version of the system is going to support users creating a key to store their flash card groups under. You keep the key somewhere safe because it’s what you use to “login” to the system with and how you access your flash cards. You can create multiple groups of flash cards. For example, Ruzena might need to create flash cards for Botany and Western Civ for whatever reason, so she can separate these into two groups so the flash cards don’t get mixed up. It’ll support uploading or linking to images to be displayed on the “front” of the flash card along with whatever text you put on the front, and whatever text you decide to put on the back. For actually viewing the cards, it’ll give you the option of going through the cards in order or going through them randomly, viewing either the front or back first.

For future versions, I’m planning to add the ability to have the flash cards test you, so you enter in what you think is on the front/back and it will tell you if you’re correct and can give you hints on what the other side has if you’re incorrect. I hope this is something that more students besides just Ruzena can benefit from, so I’ll be linking to it from here when it’s ready to be used. Also, keep an eye out for the SourceForge project that’s currently pending approval.

Enjoy.

Ruzena mentioned in an earlier post that I had started Omega Vortex back up, so I just wanted to give a quick update to let everyone know that I’ve setup Omega Vortex’s Company Blog which we’ll use to keep the public updated on our progress on things. Have a look, bookmark it, and let us know what you think.