Just a quick post to let you know that I’ll be speaking at Google’s Devfest event today in Sydney.

I’m giving a half hour presentation on our experiences integrating AffinityLive with Google’s App Marketplace, and will be following Don Dodge and the team from Atlassian.

If you’re coming along today, come over and say hi, and if you’re keen to follow along, there’s a live Wave as well as a uStream channel at http://www.ustream.tv/channel/devfest-au.

In late October, we presented at Tech23, held in Sydney, Australia. We had a great day, and appreciated the many conversations about the state of the market we’re targeting at with our software, and the kinds of features which professional service directors are hoping to see in an integrated web-based suite.

If you didn’t catch all of Geoff’s presentation we’ve embedded it below. Thanks to the IPitch guys for making it available. The camera follows Geoff rather than the presentation (slides can be viewed here) + you might need to boost your volume.

If you were still thinking about seeing Affinity in action, you’re welcome to join us for an online demo. We run webinars regularly to varying audiences of journos, industry peers, prospects and potential partners, and it’s great to show people what we’ve got, as well as hear your feedback.

We’re excited to be exhibiting for the next two days at Web Directions South, the leading web conference in Australia each year.

If you’re one of the hundreds of web professionals attending this year’s event, please drop by to find out a bit more about how Affinity can help you spend more time working and less time on admin – oh, and get a bit of our delicious honeycomb!

Brad Howarth‘s new Cover Story for CIO Magazine includes a great reference of the work we’ve been doing with the NSW Department of Planning and their use of Affinity to track the billions of dollars a year in their Major Projects Tracking System.

It was great that John Ross from the Department was able to be to frank and honest with Brad, and we’re looking forward to being able to announce another important intiative we’re in the middle of working on with the Department now…

Last night we were very fortunate to win the CeBIT 2009 “Early Innovation” award for our service and client tracking software, Affinity.

The win caps off an incredible week for us, with us passing the milestone of more than a million client interactions tracked, and then our launch of the newest version of Affinity by Dr David Skellern, the CEO of NICTA.

We’d really like to express our thanks and appreciation for our many clients who’s enthusiastic adoption of Affinity helped us to reach these milestones and achieve this success, as well as our many supporters within the startup community.

For more info, you can read the Press Release: Hiive Systems wins CeBIT Early Innovator Award.

Hiive Systems is excited to announce that we’ve been announced as a finalist in the Early Innovators category for the CeBIT.AU awards this year.

You can see the full list of finalists at the CeBIT website.

Webciety

Hiive Systems is excited to announce that we’ve been selected to exhibit at CeBIT in the showcase Webciety pavillion. We’ll be joined in the Webciety area by other exciting Aussie web companies, such as BuzzNumbers, Tjoos, Siteflex, Travellr (who won the wildcard spot) and many more – a dozen in total actually.

Since Webciety is a part of the broader CeBIT show, you’ll need to register for CeBIT to be able to get in and have a look around. The good news is though, we have a special promotional code, which you can use to get FREE entry to the show, saving you $65+GST on the normal ticket price.

To reserve your ticket and save the $65, simply go to https://www.mycebit.com.au/rego09/ and when prompted, enter our special access/registration code, webcietyca09.

Hope to see you there!

Recently Hiive Systems has been lucky enough to be featured in stories from two of Australian’s leading news sites which cover online businesses.

First cab off the rank was TechNation, which back in late January featured Hiive Systems amongst some very illustrious company in their article “4 Reasons Australia Is Becoming An Enterprise 2.0 Hub“. We were pretty excited and humbled to be featured alongside companies such as Atlassian, who just today announced they’d passed the $US100M revenue mark, Sassu, who provide a very well regarded accounting package on a software-as-a-service basis, and Ross Dawson, Mr Enterprise 2.0 himself, who next week is running his now-famous Enterprise 2.0 Executive Forum in Sydney. Thanks Kim for taking the time to cover some of the businesses who are intent on keeping Australia home.

Within a week we’d been fortunate enough to be covered by one of Australia’s leading tech journalists, Brad Howarth, as part of a piece for Smart Company, “The Digital Dozen – Our Next Big Things Online“. This article was more broad in scope, focusing on businesses involved in all sorts of sectors including both B2C and B2B plays. Thanks to Smart Company and Brad for the exposure and the vote of confidence in what we’re doing here at Hiive Systems.

Stay tuned for more info about Hiive in the news, and if you’re a journalist looking to cover an innovative Aussie company with a global outlook, don’t hesitate to give us a call or email.

Our Christmas Present: Hiive Systems website live

We’re really proud to announce that we’ve just set our new website live. To be honest, the site is a couple of months behind our own ambitious internal schedule for an October release, but we’ve just been too busy working on client work and in product and technical development to be able to find the time to give it the last push it needed.

While we’re pretty proud of what we’ve launched as a first pass, don’t think for a minute that what you see is all you’re going to get. We’ve got big ambitions for taking the site forward in the coming months: we want it to be the kind of site where prospective clients can find out about our products at their own pace, and reach out to us to participate in one of our regular webinars, roll out a trial or even buy our products, live and online. We also want it to be somewhere our existing clients can come to discover all sorts of new things they never knew.

Helping to make this vision a reality, we’ve got a new staff member starting in early January, and one of his first jobs will be put together a video tour and overview of the site so people can get a much better appreciation of our products and services than written words and screenshots alone can achieve.

We’re also working in the background on a little self quoting tool, which will allow visitors to our site to appreciate how affordable Affinity and Gravity could be for their service-based organisation – stay tuned for that one to make an appearance early in 2009!

Finally, thanks to all of our existing clients for your support and words of encouragement as we bought Hiive Systems to life as a spin-out from sister company Internetrix – we look forward to moving forward in leaps and bounds together in 2009 now we’re getting the establishment work out of the way!

Merry Christmas from Geoff & the Hiive Systems Team

While we’ve been busy the last couple of months in moving existing Affinity and Gravity clients across to the new Hiive Systems platform, we’ve also been building out our offering by configuring servers in datacenters in North America as well as China.

Setting things up in North America was pretty straight forward, but the need to be on the other side of the Great China Firewall – to ensure we can offer fast speeds to mainland Chinese based clients – created a few interesting challenges.

The first challenge was to get some reliable server infrastructure that we can scale, and get it operating from a datacentre within Mainland China, in our case, in Beijing.

I had a bit of a short-cut here, having rolled out similar infrastructure for our sister company, Internetrix, earlier in 2008. Working off a Centos 5 platform, and pulling down RPM’s from repositories outside China was exceptionally frustrating and very, very slow . It appears the main why China maintains control/censorship over the internet is through DNS poisoning, so DNS lookups are very very slow, and changes to the /etc/hosts file on the server to match what I was seeing from here in AU proved to be a handy way to speed things up.

The next challenge we faced was to update the language libraries for Affinity and Gravity to ensure our latest versions are available in Simplied Chinese. While we did a full conversion a couple of years ago, we haven’t kept up to date with the latest upgrades, including the major 3.0 upgrade in September, so we’ll need to get our act together there soon.