Me and Łukasz just came back from San Francisco, California. Wikidot entered AWS Global Start-up Challenge 2012 last November and we were happy to be selected a finalist with an opportunity to compete for the Grand Prize on 23-24 January 2013.
Logos of all finalists displayed on barrels of wine during the finale. Nice.
The challenge itself was awesome. The final round consisted of a presentation in front of the judges — top AWS executives. During the finale in Dogpatch Wineworks we had a chance to present Wikidot to over 500 attendants. The other contestants were so great we felt no huge regret not winning the Grand Prize. Wikidot was among the twelve very top competitors chosen from 2,500 entries from 85 countries and this is what mattered for us.
Andy Jessy, senior Vice President of AWS announcing the winners.
Congratulations to Mortar Data, TraceLink Life Sciences Cloud, LogMyCalls and Grand Cru who won the Grand Prizes. I also wish to congratulate QMedic, DemystData, PlanGrid, Poikos, Hive, Bossa Studios, Playblazer that were awarded with the First Prizes, as we were. It was great meeting you and we came back to Poland with our heads full of great ideas and plans.
During the finale winners smashed real rack servers with heavy bronze hammers. It was the moment I wished I was there. We were sitting in the front row with protection glasses :-)
We also had a series of great meetings, mostly regarding business. Hopefully some might turn into something exciting. We still need to digest all the great opinions and ideas we got for further development of Wikidot. Time will show if they are worth the effort. One thing I have no doubts now is that Wikidot is becoming a serious player in the web business. We will do our best to make it better and larger.
Thanks again to AWS for organising this great event and for giving us the opportunity to take part in the finals. We enjoyed these few days a lot.
Good to hear wikidot and his team is on the top..!
And now back to daily work again: :)
Why is this blog entry not on my activities - even I am a watcher?
No indication of it anywhere on Wikidot itself - only "twitter" leads me to this point!
Service is my success. My webtips:www.blender.org (Open source), Wikidot-Handbook.
Sie können fragen und mitwirken in der deutschsprachigen » User-Gemeinschaft für WikidotNutzer oder
im deutschen » Wikidot Handbuch ?
Thanks for sharing this. Hmmm… not sure why this happened. We will check it later! Cheers!
Michał Frąckowiak @ Wikidot Inc.
Visit my blog at michalf.me
Welcome back guys, and well done. Winner or not, it's great recognition for Wikidot.
(the blog was on my activity)
Rob Elliott - Strathpeffer, Scotland - Wikidot first line support & community admin team.
Yes, welcome back and congrats again. I'm anxious to hear what might be in store for the future.
The comments are in my activity, but the original blog post is not there or in my email notification.
Community Admin
I think we have a few good ideas how to make Wikidot better and how to improve our business side. Nothing ground-breaking but we will be announcing every single thing in advance.
One really great benefit of all these meetings was learning how others perceive Wikidot. This alone gives a great perspective and clearly shows our strengths and weaknesses.
Michał Frąckowiak @ Wikidot Inc.
Visit my blog at michalf.me
It would be really interesting to hear what some of these perceptions are.
Rob Elliott - Strathpeffer, Scotland - Wikidot first line support & community admin team.
General conclusion is that Wikidot has an awesome technology behind it, is mature and stable as a service. Given that we started with very minimal funding and minimal resources we went really, really far and this is definitely appreciated.
I met professionals who knew the market we are in very well. Some were involved in funding or leading similar companies and they knew the situation and challenges. And these include adoption, growth, business challenges etc. In the consumer application area — things have never been easy.
Those who tried Wikidot realized that there are still barriers for broader adoption. And I fully agree. Wikidot is more targeted towards tech-saavy users and gives them really powerful tools. I believe there are opportunities to get a larger piece of a cake. And right now we are exploring them.
As a conclusion, I returned reassured that Wikidot is already great. It has this great combination of community and technology that makes it awesome. And we will try to make it even more awesome! But do not fear — there are no secret plans to transform Wikidot into MySpace of Facebook. We will continue and build upon what we have.
Michał Frąckowiak @ Wikidot Inc.
Visit my blog at michalf.me
Been away for a bit but things look to be maturing nicely. Especially great to see app-building potential progress, but also good to see you don't want to transform into the last big thing. Wikidot just screams with potential of being the tool that might let someone ordinary start building the next big thing.
But I can also see potential for a simpler publishing platform without losing all the power. There's a lot of versatility here.
This is my feeling too. I am thinking more and more about a book (in german) for my (older) ant's, oncles, and other grandma's without any technical background (most of our users here often have such background) but with the clean wish to share their knowledge with the "public" community.
This would open a big segment of users who are searching for a simple tool to publish some text&information without special knowledge of PC or software like word, publisher, open office a,s,o.
I know lot of older people who use E.-Mail for sharing their news but not a wiki based "blog" - even for private circles.
This is like a book I have seen: "intenet for pensionists" … a helper for using it on a daily basis.
Have I the right feeling for such "broader adoption" ?
Service is my success. My webtips:www.blender.org (Open source), Wikidot-Handbook.
Sie können fragen und mitwirken in der deutschsprachigen » User-Gemeinschaft für WikidotNutzer oder
im deutschen » Wikidot Handbuch ?
…and also has features, flexibility and ease of development that is far superior to other heavyweight applications. I now have to use Confluence and Sharepoint on a daily basis and both are a long way behind Wikidot in many respects. And where they have the same functionality, live templates and dataforms for example, this often costs hundreds of dollars extra for a plugin but is out-of-the-box with Wikidot and implemented much better.
I have spent the weekend building an Image Library on Confluence and it was painful. With Wikidot it would have been done in a morning with dataforms, llistpages, set tags and so on. With Confluence it takes 5 times longer and we get a clunky result that doesn't quite do the job.
If there's one thing I want to see with Wikidot it is that the wishes on the official feedback site get dealt with much quicker rather than hanging around for years with no proper feedback or any work being done as far as we can tell. The wish for a date field type on dataforms was accepted in June 2011!
But I started with Wikidot 5 years ago and it was still one of the best decisions I ever made.
Rob Elliott - Strathpeffer, Scotland - Wikidot first line support & community admin team.