Creately Blog

Update: Adobe Flash Player 10 for Creately

Everyone at Creately have been working really hard over the past couple of weeks adding brand new features and KObjects to the Creately library as well as updating the performance of the application.

Here at Creately, we feel people matter, and want to continue to keep our customers happy. We’ve had a few emails from our users reporting various issues like wonky Text Rotation in Flash Player version 9. We’ve tried our best to fix this problem, but unfortunately certain issues like this have their root cause in bugs inherent in the Flash Player, that we cannot do anything to fix.

So after careful thought, we’ve decided to raise the minimum required version of the Flash Player to run Creately from Flash Player 9 to Flash Player 10.

Besides fixing this bug, we want to take advantage of the new performance improvements in Flash Player 10 to deliver a better experience to our customers over the coming releases.

Other Active Script 3 enhancements available in Flash Player 10 also provide more efficient data structures and will let us deliver smarter and cooler features.

You can test the version of Flash Player you have installed and if you’re not using version 10, click here to upgrade now.

So we’ll leave you with this task as we go through the final stages of releasing our brand new Projects feature.

@charanjit

Image by: Mayuki/CC BY 2.0

Beta Over - Creately Launches New Plans

Today is the most exciting and exhilarating in our journey with Creately - Creately is out of Beta!

With our move out of beta we are also announcing two new versions - Creately Public and Creately Plus!

After a year in beta, during which we showcased at Demofall 08 & TechCrunch 50, we now have what we, and the majority  of our users (over 90% of people give us 4 or more stars) consider to be the best online diagramming and design tool on the Internet. By moving out of Beta we are offering our users and future customers the opportunity to tailor their Creately experience and enable us to continue to improve and keep Creately development moving at the pace it has been.

Creately Public is as the name suggests - Free for anyone to use - it costs you zip, zero, nada, nothing! There are few limits to what you can do with it but it won’t stop the diagram dabbler from creating beautiful looking diagrams.

Creately Plus! is the first of our paid plans - it offers what the heavy user and privacy concerned user will need. (I didn’t say pro here as this is coming in a future version).

A lot has been argued about the merits of Free and Priced models by smart people like Chris Anderson, Malcom Gladwell and Fred Wilson and I am not going to re-iterate the same discussions. We have a fresh (and dare I say adventurous) perspective on the matter.

As a business, we need to make money for our shareholders and to allow us to continue to build Creately and other tools in the future. In order to do this we need to increase revenues and profits.

Increasing revenue is two fold.

• By increasing the number of people using Creately

• By converting more free users to paying users

And to improve profits, we could;

• Charge high prices, or;

• Cut costs

Charging high prices is out as we don’t want to rip off customers. Our operational costs per user are pretty low (but not zero as there is still IT infrastructure to support and at some point everyone needs support - we do provide really good support).

That leaves us with increasing our revenue through user growth.

Basically, if we can increase the number of paying users, we can run a better, bigger business.

When we look at users, we think there are 4 types, those that:

1. Pay whatever the price, because they can’t live without it.
2. Pay because they think it’s worth the price.
3. Pay because they think it is the only option.
4. Won’t pay or are against paying for software.

We obviously prefer types 1 and 2. Type 3 and 4 alone are unsustainable for a business as a competitor will always come along and disrupt you. However a mix of these makes a healthy business and user community - we want all types working with Creately.

We believe there is a lot of potential in type 2. However the price one finds ‘worth it’ is extremely relative to one’s economic situation and usage patterns, be it commercial or private. Given we have really passionate users from all corners of the world and our team is from various parts of the world, we understand these factors deeply.

(In case you didn’t know Creately is developed by Cinergix. Cinergix is based in Melbourne, Australia with team members based  in Colombo, Sri Lanka, Jakarta, Indonesia and London, UK. A fairly diverse lot over here.)

So what is the right price? It’s relative.

So we are offering Creately at ANY price our users are willing to pay.

(but keep it above one dollar - unfortunately Paypal isn’t free

You may be thinking - They are Mad!!

We might be, however just because one person pays $2 does not mean that is the value to everyone. Perhaps that’s all a student can afford, but to another person using Creately to build mockups for his/her client, it may be worth $20 - the decision has to be personal and realistic.

We think the following factors will help us pull this off:

• We have built a great piece of software. Using our signout feedback widget we polled over a thousand users after they had used Creately and over 80% said WOW, almost everyone else said it’s Great. People constantly say that the Creately experience is far beyond their current experience from existing similar products.
• Most people are fair. Creately is a high-value application, for similar products you’d pay hundreds of dollars for a license. So when compared to the alternatives we believe people will choose a sensible price.
• Our entire team is really passionate about helping customers and it shows in all our user interactions. You guys have told us how much you like our support.

This may be a fairly risky proposition and we know it might not work or be sustainable. So we are piloting this with our group of Beta users - right now this trial is time limited -  so upgrade now while you can name your own price. The offer ends on 17th September 2009.

We’ll keep you posted on how this ‘pricing experiment’ goes. Wish us luck.

Creately through to Finals of Best RIA of 2009

Thank you to everyone who voted. We have made it through to the top 10 applications in the of  Best RIA of 2009 competition. It is a great feeling. You can see the full results on the Insideria website.

The voting for the top 3 starts now til 6th September and we need your help again to get us to the top.

Here’s the link - Just click to vote - http://oreillynet.com/insideria/polls/237.csp

@nick_foster

What do Bing & Wave tell us about Google and Microsoft’s DNA

Two big announcements today from the two big tech giants.

MS came out with their new search engine - Bing

Google with their new communication and collaboration platform - Wave

Both are exciting products but I think you’ll see a fundamental difference in the philosophy of these companies by better understanding the nature of the products.

Bing - The Decision Engine?

From the video of Bing, it seems that they are aggregating services, and trying to build something that is the be all and end all of search. Its power comes from the orderly aggregation and presentation of information sources from across the net. Reminds me of windows and MS’s suite of applications. Very silo-ed, a lot of effort and maintenance in building out the product. Decision Engine - I don’t know.

The MS approach usually offers less in the way of consumer choice - but you’re promised a nice suite that works together. But as we all know, MS more often than not screws this up. This is normally Apple’s forte. We’ll see how it goes with Bing though.  One piece of advice for MS - change the logo for Bing please. ‘Uninspiring’ would be an understatement.

Google’s Wave

Google on the other hand is opening up the platform and wants the rest of the Internet to join in on the ‘platform’ to help finish the product.A very Google approach for solving this really big problem. Google’s core premise is that it is a search engine company, it’s way of looking at things is that the Internet has a lot of good things out there, we will help you bring order to all that chaos to make money. Same with Wave, which is targeted squarely at the developer community. The Internet is home many cool applications, we’ll open-source the core, let others add it to our platform, index it all, and make a buck. You win, we win. You can check out the video on TC or read a short preview on RWW, if you dont have the patience.

Google’s approach casts a wider net, a simple solution with more generic applications. The user would typically get a wider choice but it can end up getting a little complicated. It all comes down to how good the defaults and quick-start features are in the app. Google’s done a decent job of it so far so I’m thinking they’ll pull off Wave pretty well.

What’s DNA got to do with it.

Interesting to note how these two companies ‘think’ from today’s announcements. I think a company’s first product defines what their DNA is.

It’s basically the difference between how a Operating System company solves a problem and a Search Engine Company solves a problem.

MS’s solution seems to be - Try to cover all the bases so the end user can easily get stuff done within the confines of its paradigm. An OS company.

Google’s is - Reuse whats out there to create value for the user. A classic Internet paradigm, perfect for a Search Engine company.

Both companies have these recurring themes across their products and services.  IMO, MS is going to lose the game on the Internet unless they adopt Google’s thinking of  ‘open’, reuse and contribute.

No matter how much resources you have inside your company, the rest of the world is going to have more of it. Might as well figure out a way to use it for your advantage rather than let them be your competitors.

@chandika