Archive for the 'Events' Category

Moving on Up! To 1530.

Published February 12, 2010 Events Leave a Comment
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Soonr just completed the move of its’ office, back to where we were before! We moved across the parking lot to the tower where it all began. There’s an awesome view of Silicon Valley from our offices numerous windows.

View from Soonrs conference room.

You can see San Francisco on a clear day!

When our lease expired in our office space and we found out that our original space was available, we moved back! You can see all of Silicon Valley and even San Francisco (about 1 hour north of us) on a clear day. In the picture above, Apple Computer is on the left, Moffet Field (where the Google guys park their airliner) is just left of center. San Francisco is just right of Moffet Field (way behind it) with the San Jose Airport in the middle. To the right, you can make out downtown San Jose and where one of Soonrs data centers is located.

Our new address is 1901 S. Bascom Ave. STE 1530, Campbell, CA 95008. If you are in the area, please visit!

One last thing. Our phone lines may not work just yet. We are having a heck of a time switching vendors and maintaining the same number. It’s a long story, just come visit in person or send email. We respond to those right away.

A Pause for Regular Maintenance

Published February 10, 2010 Events , New Features Leave a Comment
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We just wanted to give our users a heads up that we will be doing some scheduled maintenance really early in the morning (EST). Some updates to the system are being applied on February 10, 2010 at 4.00 am Eastern Time (US) – 10 am CET  (DK).

During the maintenance period (estimated at 5-10 minutes) you may get a message telling you to try to access Soonr again in a few minutes.  Curious as to why this is necessary? Read on!

There are basically three different Levels of updates that we can apply.

Level 1 - these are scripts, graphics, web pages, etc. that are loaded dynamically and can be posted without any impact on the overall service. The updated files are simply loaded the next time you encounter a page the requests them.

Level 2 – updates are rolling updates, meaning that we can apply them to one server at a time while another server picks up the load. Once again, no interruption in service is noticable to the users.

Level 3 – requires that we stop the service since it requires changes to the core system database schemas or other constantly used information. These changes are usually linked to major new features.

Now you know. As you may have guessed, Level 1 & 2 changes happen all the time in the background. Level 3 changes require a notice like this one.

Thanks in advance for your understanding. We will continue to make Soonr the best in class service for Active Backup and Collaboration!

Migrating a Blog from WordPress to WordPress.com

Published November 18, 2009 Events , New Features 3 Comments
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In the past Soonr hosted its WordPress blogs on its own hosting service. As such we had complete control over everything, but we also had to maintain our blog. That meant that all code updates, plugins, RSS, trackbacks, etc, etc,  – all had to be maintained by someone in the company. Well,  it became too hard. Not only was it time-consuming, we’d have to mess with the occasional spam posted as comments from those .ru domains. Yeah, you know who you are.

WordPress will host the new Soonr blog

So one of our engineers proposed that we move to WordPress.com or TypePad. These are arguably the two biggest platforms out there. So after a few days of poking about we decided to goto WordPress, as much for familiarity as features. Besides, all the blog authors already knew how to use WordPress.

The Migration:

So it sounds easy right? But what if you want to maintain all your previous posts? How about all the images? Oh yeah, there’s the domain names and the IP address. Then there’s the links to point to the blog. All these had to be considered for the move because you don’t want them to break.

Now, kudos to WordPress for making the text, comments, and tags, easy to migrate. It was literally a 5 minute export then import process. But now all the manual parts begin. I am deep in the midst of moving over the images. We were able to import most of the images from the previous site, but many were scattered in different directories and these have to be tracked down and moved one by one.

The Advantages?

Why go through all this pain? Well as the primary author of the blog, I can say that the authoring tools are much slicker, the add-ins are much easier to install, and the crosslinking to social networks, rss, etc. are practically done for you! It’s definitely going to be a lot easier to use going forward.

The bottom line is that this is a perfect example of why you would want to outsource something instead of doing it all in house. Sure the migration is a bit painful, but afterwards I’ll have all the advantages of having the blog maintained by a provider and all I have to do is enjoy the benefits.

So, this brings me to Soonr. Why mess with in-house backup, mobile access, and collaboration tools? Just like our blog, you should take the time to migrate. It may seem daunting now, but the payoff will be well worth it!

Now, I just have to update a half dozen or so old posts a day until the end of the month….

Netbooks and collaboration are the key!

Published April 22, 2009 Events , Mobile Markets , New Features Leave a Comment
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Well, the news hit at 8am this morning and the blogosphere is buzzing. Soonr released its new version 3.0 today and people have noticed a little. Among the publications writing stories are:

TechCrunch – Soonr Updates It’s offering….

Cnet – Revamps Search, iPhone feature

Venturebeat – Soonr gets more collaborative

It’s great to see our efforts picked up by these premium sites! It’s like a who’s who of the tech industry. I’ll continue to post more as we see more. There’s a lot of people running around at the company right now. Trying to keep up with all the buzz.

Recession = You should get MORE than you paid for!

Published April 15, 2009 Events , Mobile Markets , New Features Leave a Comment
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Every year I take my family up to a ski resort in Lake Tahoe called Heavenly. No where was the effect of the current economic conditions more apparent to me. In 2008 we were waiting in long lift lines, and the restaurant and lunch areas were packed. Here’s a picture from 2008:

Top of the Gondola at Heavenly Lake Tahoe

Fast forward to 2009. As we made our way to the gondola this year we noticed the lines were non-existent. Then we got to the top and this is a picture with the same area in the background.

Hardly anyone in the background here.

It’s barren! We used the area to teach a friend of ours to ski for the first time!

In times like these, everyone is re-evaluating what they really need to buy. People expect to get the best value for the services they pay for. Think about what you pay for on a monthly basis for work? Do you have a DSL line, backup service, file or picture sharing service, and Sass workspace software? Do you have internet access in multiple places like a DSL line for your home, work, phone, and maybe also your laptop? Why do you need all those redundancies? Why are you paying multiple times for the same thing? In a recession we are all looking to do more with less.

We believe the same thing at Soonr. We want to provide a service to our users that has unparalled functionality and can make them the most productive when they are mobile. You shouldn’t pay for several separate services when a fully integrated single service would be much better and cost efficient! Stay tuned faithful Soonr users, we feel your pain and will help you. Mobile productivity is about to become a lot more integrated, exciting and a terrific value.

Incidentally, I heard on the news that the ski resorts in Tahoe closed last weekend. This wasn’t because of lack of snow, there was a lot of that! It was because of a lack of people. They just couldn’t operate profitably anymore without the people there. It’s a good thing you can integrate your data and mobility services and get more than you paid for in this recession. Stay tuned….

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