Not a bad deal if you were looking at getting into wikis or issue tracking. Even if your company is big, if it’s just going to be your IT staff, or just as a proof-of-concept for documentation, this cannot be beat.

The only catch is that there is only three days left for ISVs to take up this offer. Go check out their stimulus page…

As Scott over at The Recursive ISV said, “…it’s utterly brilliant.”

Similarly to Scott, I too was wanting to develop the desktop portions of my ThoughtFiler project in Delphi 2009 but the price of entry is out of my league at this early stage of development and CodeGear don’t appear to have any equivalent programs running. I daresay this will be a huge mistake for them in the future!

Last week, through FB, I reconnected with an old school Friend, Paul, who is developing some of his ideas at HomepageHome. Unfortunately, he’s not blogging his progress yet

Anyway, I wish him all the best with his upcoming v2.0 launch…

It’s great to see someone being able to pursue their dreams. All the best to Paul & his family!

2007 was the year of making a start. 2008 will be the year of making it real!

To actually be developing now feels good. Better than I expected…

Especially after today’s major Skype outage, previously mentioned over here.

I’m thinking that today would be a good day for uISVs to use this outage to contemplate where we are too dependent on someone else, and where we need to setup alternative arrangements. And not just for our VOIP needs either, I’m sure we all have other services which we may need to have alternative arrangements in place for too.

I’m sure Gizmo has received quite a few new signups today…

On the one hand, a new relationship has meant I haven’t gotten as far with the business as I could have, which has meant several months of little to know “business-thinking”.

The unexpected benefit of this is that once I (re-)started thinking about my ISV and various ideas it was all fresh and exciting again and I clearly see the direction I needed to go to with development. I also see what areas seemed so important before but are now less so.

If you’re bootstrapping, a hiatus can definitely be a good thing!

In order to try and cover myself when I quit the day-job, and guarantee a certain level of revenue, I came up with a number of alternative services I could offer to local businesses.

I now realise that I was heading into the dangerous situation of promising too much with too few “me’s”! A significant level of infrastructure would have also been needed to provide these services at appropriate levels.

It’s time to refocus on my original ideas: starting a small software company with a few products/services based around a single core concept.

Consulting/contracting will form part of the early stages of the company for income-boosting purposes, with the current day-job now seen from the perspective of being my first “contract”.

That sounds much better, scary, but better.

Stick to the basics!

• XEN and the art of Virtualization
• Free VMware Server in action

Sometime in the next month I am planning on building a server to be a host for VMs, so these came at just the right time for me. I was planning on using VMware Server, which I have done a small amount of experimenting with, but Neville’s article about Xen makes we want to take that for a spin. I’ll also be taking a look at Parallels to see what their current offerings are like. Of course, there’s also Virtual PC and, possibly, rpath although that appears to have a different focus – I need to check it out further though…

So much for my monthly goals, eh! I did one so far (updates on that shortly). Some of you may have thought that I have given up on this whole Micro-ISV or “escape the cubicle” dream. Not at all! I still believe that there’s a market for my ThoughtFiler idea and I fully intend to build it, but… once I quit and am building it full-time I am pretty sure that I will want to eat, pay some bills and have somewhat of a life.

To that end, I have been rethinking my plans a bit. I have been thinking about contracting sources in my local area and of various other services I can offer businesses around here to provide income streams. I will post some thoughts on all this here shortly if only to provide clarity for myself (as I’m sure most of you have long since left for more exciting uISV blogs!)