Just a little Cooqy

Wow, what a year so far! In early January, I started doing some consulting on the side to create Rich Internet Applications using OpenLaszlo. What started with one client has mushroomed into a dozen clients, growing to the point where I had to hire some part-time help. The projects have ranged from more e-commerce widgets like Cooqy’s, to a multi-protocol instant messaging widget and a video editing application. RIA’s are very much in vogue, as witnessed by Microsoft’s Silverlight and Sun’s JavaFX wanting to steal some market and mind share away from Flash.

I haven’t had time to attend to Cooqy until recently. Fortunately, Cooqy pretty much runs itself and keeps growing without too many hiccups. Cooqy has received a new website design and some overdue defect fixes to the widgets during the last couple of weeks. Creating the new HTML website design was another experience in multi-browser compatibility hell. I sure do hope I never have to work with traditional HTML/JSP/.NET website development ever again.

Sharp-eyed eBay sellers may have noticed recent changes to Cooqy’s pricing structure first introduced in late January. The pricing structure is intended to provide a throttle of the widgets’ usage on eBay.com web pages, because eBay doesn’t allow Cooqy to generate any revenue from eBay’s own web pages. I want Cooqy’s widgets to be used by enough eBay sellers on eBay web pages for marketing purposes, but not so much that the bandwidth and server expenses make it uneconomical. As it is today, the widgets can be used free of charge on eBay’s web pages for sellers with less than 500 items in inventory. The pricing structure may change again, depending on if Cooqy continues to remain profitable as it grows.

As fun as consulting on various OpenLaszlo projects has been, growing a consulting business wasn’t in my plans. I’m currently in brainstorming mode, searching for a new business idea to grab my passion. There are few restrictions on the new types of web applications that can be developed with RIA technology like OpenLaszlo. The challenge is to find an itch that everyone needs scratched.