cleverbill is part of a bigger scheme of small but clever SaaS. This first part introduces easy online management of your bills including help to track payments and respond to overdue payments.
In contrast to other services of this kind, we think there is no point in offering a SaaS that is not much more than a letter-creation-machine (although a fancy one with digital signing of all outgoing PDF files) and then attaching a monthly fee.
Nobody has to pay a monthly fee to be allowed to use the post office services.
So we introduced the cleverstamp. You buy stamps and whenever you send something, one of them is used. Of course you get a starter credit so you can try it without any pain.
But if you decide to stop using it, there are no strings attached.

We think this is the way to deal with SaaS in every case.

The service we came up with at the barcamp last week has a slightly
nicer face and some minor improvements along with its own url now :-}

Check it out at https://tweetalk.com

It will soon be incorporated into a new version of cellcast.

tajapa was the logical progression from the development of cellcast.

Now that we knew how to handle VOIP calls and had a partner to do the interconnection business with the big carriers, we decided we wanted a least cost routing system.

The name tajapa was designed to be typeable on a mobile device, an idea almost antiquated by now ;-}.

On a simple website the user could, after registration, enter phone-numbers and tajapa would provide her with local phonenumbers to call. So everyone could call a cheap local number and then be connected to otherwise expensive numbers elsewhere in the world.

The service was used in private beta for about 6 months before we closed it due to overwhelming competition through

http://jahjah.com

http://rebtel.com

http://grandcentral.com

In spring 2006 i started playing around with Asterisk the Open Source PBX. I connected it to one of the unused ISDN lines at the office and in the evening i had a quick and dirty first version of a podcast via phone production system.
In order to provide multiple concurrent lines we partnered with effringo, a SIP provider enabling company.

In the days to follow i refined that to a service that i called cellcast. The first ever cellcast was recorded on Montmartre on the night the Brazilians kicked the French out of the soccer world championships.

Once it was live, we sent out a press release via hundertelf and the response was overwhelming. I especially remember one morning when i came to work and i found an email from a big german VC in my inbox with only two sentences: “I heard about you. Do you need money?”
We didn’t.

The german hockey-federation adopted the service very quickly and started reporting from every game through all leagues.

In 2008 i added an open API and during the barcamp at burda i showcased the API by developing a twitter/cellcast mashup.

http://cellcast.de

http://effringo.de

http://tweetalk.com

http://xsoo.org

In 2004 it became apparent that the internet would move to the mobile field very quickly.
So we came up with handfisch.com, a community for sharing media to be used on mobile devices. Its USP was/is to transcode all media to types that would be usable on mobile devices, that is to say: we transcoded to match the the exact device downloading the data.

The plan was to evolve into a store for mobile content, allowing people to sell ringtones, apps, etc.
Unfortunately we were overtaken by the development at apple and others.

The name handfisch comes from the kisuaheli word for cellphone, which directly translates to “little fish of the hand”

OOS – the Organic Operating System for the web -

We built the foundation in early 2004 as a basis of the youth-platform of the german office for family affairs.
We managed to keep ownership and therefore released it as an open source project.

What is it? Basically it is a web application development framework based on the LAMP stack. But it’s more than that.
We made sure it was easily extensible on all levels by making sure to built an interface paradigm into the framework that has proven to offer an extremely low entry barrier to new users even when confronted with complex applications. – The installation procedure is much like the experience you get when installing a wordpress blog.
On the other hand we made it really easy for the average PHP developer to create new functionality that embeds seamlessly into the interface and things like rights management.
And thirdly it has never been easier to extend the functionality of a framework: just pop a class (with a few naming conventions for the filename) into a specific directory and it can be accessed anywhere.
Obviously it comes with a lot of system functionality like paypal, amazon, googlemaps, etc
It also comes with a generic API that can access modules and integrates fully with the rights management.

Further information can be found at http://oos.hotoshi.com

///////

In fall 2003, just after i had founded hundertelf, we won the pitch for creating a social network/platform for the german ministery of family affairs.

It was supposed to be targeted at people between 10 and 16 years and its purpose was to create a safe environment in which the users could explore the use of platforms like this without the risk of harassment of data theft and the like.

On the project managers list was about everything you find on facebook these days.

In order to start small and slowly evolve into a full fledged social network, we decided to develop a framework on the LAMP -Stack and release it as an open source product once we were done with the initial development. At the time MVC frameworks were rare. Today we would have chosen ZEND, RAILS or SPRING, depending on the language of preference.

OOS is the result of this effort.

http://xsoo.org

http://netzcheckers.de

http://hundertelf.com

The direct translation of stadtsein.de to english would be something along the lines of: “being the city”.
People could add places of interest to the platform and other people could vote for those places.
It was meant to be one huge interactive yellow-page.

It was a beautiful platform. On the inside and one the outside.
But again, it didn’t fly. It’s hard to say why, because just a little later qype.de did the exact same thing and was successful.

Probably the fact that we tried to make our customers add venues instead of providing them with them, was too cumbersome for most of them.
qype.de realized that much faster than us and built a massive database of venues.

We didn’t go that way because we were afraid of the investment. Lesson learned! ;-}

In 2000 we built something we called portotal.com. Probably it wasn’t the best possible name, but in our minds it was pretty descriptive.
It was a platform for everybody to create their online profile with all the interaction between people. Somewhere between facebook and myspace.
Unfortunately it never attracted any users except our friends.

We thought, the lack of interest was due to the fact that people hadn’t had lots of experience with this type of tool.
But then on the other hand, that’s the problem every first-mover has to deal with.

Now, i think it’s failure had more to do with our ignorance of viral aspects in the design of the platform.
There was no deep need that was being satisfied, except our own wishes of creating something cool.

Like so many projects and ideas it was out there for a while and then quietly disappeared. (Most probably we just didn’t renew the domain at one point.)
Sometimes i’d love to dig out the old codes and install it on some server as part of some “Internet Museum”. (Good idea. If it doesn’t exist, somebody please start one :-})

Although it wasn’t a success in economical or social terms it lay the foundation of our effort to to help mold all the fascinating social aspects of connectedness into software that helps making peoples lives better.

Founded in 1999 wellenbrecher.net “wave-breaker” was a platform to match the needs of (gemeinnuetzige vereine) with the interest of people and companies to donate.

Unfortunately and much to our surprise none of the () were pleased by us approaching them. Their suspicion was that we wanted to get their data, like addresses, and then sell it to someone else.
This is a perfect example of the need of education. The people we wanted to help and who needed help, even demanded it from the public, didn’t understand the mechanics of economics enough to understand their benefits in the idea on the one hand and the fact that they (or most of them) were completely undesirable for anyone who might want to buy addresses.
It was sheer paranoia.

Having had that experience, we are deeply impressed by the people over at betterplace.org who pulled it off and are doing a wonderful job at it!