Buzz

Last weekend Edmonton was the second coldest city in the world, only beaten out by somewhere in Siberia. Minus 48 degrees Celsius. That's just as cold in "English", as I once heard Fahrenheit described by an American. No one is in the streets. You can't walk more than 100 metres or you freeze your butt off. Cars won't start, the roads are pure ice, everyone is holed up in their houses for 2 days, only venturing out if absolutely necessary. It's a great city to develop software. There's nothing else for my team to do but fiddle with code, resize icons and generally improve the look and feel, speed and ease of our application.

I can guarantee that we were the only company in our city that was doing surveys last weekend. 13 came through the ice mist via MovesOnline. 79, 000 pounds, Ellen, our retired salesperson who has moved with her artist husband to a little town 80 miles north of here responds to these enquires as they hit her computer screen. Business in the internet age-or should I say ice age. I love it.

Many of you now using our web inventory service will know the method used by MovesOnline to create a packing list for each household inventory. So far, we have relied on the historic averages of packing material requred based on the weight of furniture. In our experience these estimates are accurate within 20 percent. Admittedly 20 percent sounds like a rather large error, however with a normal size household of 100 boxes, this is really only 20 boxes - maybe 4 or 5 dolly loads - not at all significant in the overall scheme of things and no where near as significant as having to move 20 percent more household furniture!

Our moving company, Highland Moving, is based in northern Canada, where nay of our moves are in remote areas. As such, we have had years of experience in predicting packing requirements based on telephone surveys and our packing estimates have proven to be functionally accurate in predicting carton needs. Each company using MovesOnline can input their own factors or averages for calculation on the administrative page.

We have already included additional information in the site to more closely determine packing requirements and we soon hope to incorporate this information in our formulae. For example, number of people living in the house is certainly relevant, the degree of clutter and the inclusion of "collections" whther these are books, beer bottles or beanie babies, are all available and can all be used to modify these averages.

We will also soon ask for additional information from your customers that will help our estimates. We are already looking at including closet space in appropriate rooms so we can more precisely determine wardrobe boxe needs. We are also working to modify our formulae to take into accoutn specific furniture items, so taht our estimates are based not only on the weight of the furniture, but also on the type of furniture. The number of china cabinets being an immediately obvious factor that could be included, or knowing how the amount of large woodworking equipment will impact the need for small tool packing. There are many more possibilities.

In reality, we have found that many if not most shippers have a good idea of the number of boxes required to be packed or moved. Either they have moved recently and know the number or they are already self-packed by the time they reach us. Some choose to move their own boxes to save money and leave us eith furniture only. As such, we will be including a "number of boxes if known" into the room selections that are made by the customer. Their estimates can be doule checked using the internal formulae in MovesOnline.

MovesOnline is a dynamic and evolving service. We continue to monitor information received from MovesOnline by our moving company, and we welcome any suggestions that can make this tool even more effective for our users.

My name is Don Kachur, I've operated a family owned moving company for 30 years. My obsession is the internet, especially trying to figure out how it can help make the moving business more efficient and profitable.

Oct.31, I was in San Francisco attending a "Software as a Service" conference. MovesOnline had been givign us the birth pains since we put it "in the wild" in March. So far it was only operating on our website, Highland Moving, a company that has been a test bed for software development for 15 years but our new web service was way too slow to be practical. It was painfully slow to refresh - the kiss of death when your whole "thing" is ease of use. If your application is slow, your customer is faster - at disappearing.

The boys in the bat cave were already stressed out with everyone finding "bugs" in their newborn pride. Then the speed issue went from evident to critical. Get speed or we outsource the rest of the software development. They asked me for "one week, ten days max."

"Today is Wednesday" I said, Al, Trev and Cindy, our IT manager, worked their butts off that week. I guess that's why the phrase 24/7 came out the the technology business.

Even thought I had taken in the Halloween festivities in the streets of San Francisco the evening before, I was up early sitting at my laptop. I logged into my moving company intranet and scrolled down to "daily booked moves" one of the reports I check every day. Lately I had been checking it as frequently as 20 times a day since every new inventory submitted by a customer on our website showed up as another "online move request". If that move request had a weight in the next column, the customer had done the online inventory. That meant MovesOnline was working. Our customers were filling out a complete household inventory on their own, without us having to visit their house or spend a half-hour on the phone with them. My salespeople could often close the sale over the phone.

Wow! Fourteen! Fourteen inventories submitted overnight. It takes one surveyor a week to do that many. I woke up Willy, my girlfriend. "They fixed it!" She feigned excitement. The java script worked. It was fast and it was starting to look like MovesOnline was finally ready for prime time. We never came close to a viable product - until now. For concept to first working model in 9 years including 4 "never-worked, half-built" versions. It was always to slow, too awkward to navigate and usually, way too far ahead of available technology.

Now the idea and the technology had finally merged. Software as a Service. The Cloud. Web 2.0. Lot's of neat new words that meant we could build one fast and easy version of this software, put it on Amazon's servers and let anyone in the world use it for a small fee. A web-utility for the moving business. Software that was like electricity.

Rebounding from despare to optimism for the 21st time this month I decided its time to launch phase two. Get this skunk works software program ready for commercialization. Risk another quarter million. Hire more consultants, graphic artists, web designers and press writers. Travel, learn and sell. I am off to Dallas, Newy York, hopefully Rhode Island next week. Meanwhile the inventories continue to roll in. It works.

What the hell is cloud computing and why should you care?

"Cloud Computing", sometimes called Web 2.0, gets lots of press these days and for good reason. It allows software developers (like us) to distribute their solutions to many users (like you) inexpensively. Software becomes a utility - i.e. a product that provides many people with inexpensive solutions relative to their usefulness. Older software, where you had to install software on your company computer, provided a few users with expensive solutions. Cloud computing provides many users with cheap solutions by letting moving companies use the software simply by linking up to it on the web-or the cloud. Just as electricity off the grid is a bargain when we consider generating our own, MovesOnline is also a barain considering its benefits to moving companies and the consumer.