We have been working hard during 2007. Now it’s time to be rewarded with a few days off for holidays.
Our support and technical departments will be closed from Dec 29 to Jan 2 so our staff members can finally spend some holiday time with their families. You can submit your support tickets, pre-sale inquiries, and orders during that time, they will start being served on January 3.
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!
OK, it’s just about time for Skalfa Claus to raise his tousled head out of development docs and announce the December revision of SkaDate: version 6.560
Here’s what we got for you in this release:
- New template
- Upload photo at sign up
- Username choice blacklist (admin, office, support, etc…)
- Instant AJAX username check at sign up
- Index page thumbnails resize fixed
- In the match template of the activity scheduler, the admin can set the amount of matches to be sent, and the match list is randomized each time an email is scheduled
- Profile custom HTML can be turned off
- AJAX chat user sex is displayed with an icon
- Admin can see which photos are password-protected or friends-only
- Suspended users are always taken to you-are-suspended page at sign in
- A profile can be optionally invisible until the admin approves it.
- Number of users in your area statistics
- Total number of site users statistics
- Birthday list
- URL field type added
- Multiple admins
- A snowfall of minor fixes, optimizations, and enhancements.
Features and enhancements for this release were chosen primarily from our customers feedback, partially from what you guys asked on this blog. Keep up the good work so we can do the product even better.
If you don’t have anything to play with during Christmas holidays this version of SkaDate is perfect choice. Run to check demo and submit your feedback.
With the coming holidays we are happy to announce a special offer, “ChuPPo Xmas Gift”, which gives you 2 FREE months of ChuPPo chat!!!
ChuPPo Xmas Gift is a limited offer which starts today and is only available until December 31. If you want or already have this powerful audio/video chat application on your website, now you have an opportunity to use ChuPPo FREE for 2 months without any limitations or restrictions!
We want to reward all of you for the feedback you always provide. The product gets better on a daily basis because of you. In return we want to support you with a nice gift and stimulate the growth of successful web communities.
For those who are not yet familiar with ChuPPo, it’s a Voice/Video Chat/Messaging Software aimed to enhance communication opportunities on any community website. The user features includes webcam streaming, user-created chat rooms, private messaging, video/audio control and smiles set. ChuPPo Admin Panel allows controlling interface language, customizing rooms, tracking usage statistics, etc. Following new trends, ChuPPo is a frequently updated software package.
Join us this Christmas and enjoy!
Our current customers can get 2 FREE months of ChuPPo by contacting our support team!
ChuPPo chat has everything for high quality communication which is so essential for people especially on holidays. We advise you to have ChuPPo integrated, because it will attract more users to your web-site. People love interaction and are happy to use all opportunities to talk, hear and see each other. Communication should be fun and it is… with ChuPPo chat!
Merry Christmas!
Thanks, Emil! :))) So, here we are and let’s begin!
So many questions on how to launch a dating website and no answers? We’ll start from the very beginning and provide you with some tips and recommendations of how to start your own dating or social networking web-site.
The best advice for today:
Stop thinking of big client database – start thinking of client needs!
No objections! That’s true, it works! What do I mean by that?
I used to hear from people starting dating/community website that they need a big database to become successful. They are definitely right… if this is not the first question they ask after buying software. Got it?
Your first question should be “Who is my audience?”. Who are those people I’m doing this website for? What do they like? What do they need? WHY do they need your website?
Ask as many questions as possible to find out who is “your database” before thinking of increasing it to hundreds and thousands of people.
In order to identify your clients needs you should know who your audience is. You need to “draw” the client portrait. Try to describe in details (more details – better results).
Example: My client is single man/woman living in Paris aged over 50, with high average income and passion for traveling.
If you start by taking care of people needs in real life dating you will result in big client database. There is no other way to make people stay on your site.
In our future posts we’ll cover the steps you may take to start dating/ social network web-site and costs associated with this process. Wish you to have more active and interested users on your web-site!
I’m glad to announce that we are opening community business marketing section on our blog. Let me introduce Uliana Kumenova - our VP Marketing and editor-in-chief. Uliana will share her thoughts and gather most useful Internet materials specific for our market.
There are certain marketing technics to promote an internet community - some of them are effective, some are not. Those technics tend to change over time, so our work is to follow them.
Not only you will be able to get help on your individual questions, we can build constructive dialogs, exchange ideas and learn to understand our customerbase better. Welcome to our discussions.
Feel free to subscribe for marketing section RSS.
While we work on the upcoming release your site can have some holiday fun. We got a nice visual effect addon for your site to spice it up for holidays. Have a look at chuppo.com. You can have the same for your site for just $50.
Last year we did it free upon request, so old-time Skadaters can recognize this nice addon. This year we have so much more hosted customers that is why we must charge small fee. We’ll remove the effect when you tell us.
Feel free to submit your request to support team.
Just a quick note that we added a new mainstream smileset to chuPPo Chat application. You can choose one or another smileset in the admin panel. Feel free to test if you like new smilies better than the old ones.
Meanwhile, we are working on the new default chat skin. Watch news.
I am thrilled to announce our birthday. Yes, December 1st was the 3rd anniversary of the official Skalfa eCommerce existence. We had a great Saturday night party, on the first winter day.
I want to thank all our employees residing in USA, Europe, and Kyrgyzstan. When you spend one day with these guys, you can see people that put in so much more than a plain 40 hour week. In the democratic environment of free ideas, and free communication you can see testing and technical people discussing marketing, or billing staff suggesting changes to the development plan. A small company greatly depends on everyone’s contribution, because it makes so much impact on the overall process. So far Skalfa has been good at attracting talents and motivating them by especially hard challenges. This is one of the key factors for our success. Skalfers, thanks for making this happen.
I want to thank our customers all over the world providing a lot of feedback and allowing us to do our best for their business. Our customerbase is so diverse, so it makes us even more proud to provide something to change their lives. It keeps us doing great things and it adds extra motivation by the fact that some customers make more revenue using Skalfa products than our company turnover.
We proved we have a successful mix of modern approach to software development and a selection of bright people. We are small thus we are fast-moving. We are 18-28 years young thus we are smart and strong. We are stable because we have mature software and streamlined service. We are brain-sufficient because everyone of us gets a share of the wealth they generate.
Looking back I see that a lot has been done, a lot is being done, and a lot more is yet to be done. During that period we have been forging tools for small businesses, defining our targets, developing our practices, and implementing our vision. Inevitably, ideas produce ideas, and we are working to push the limits up upon the base we have created. I am now more excited about Skalfa than I was back 3 years ago when we decided to officially start a social software company.
3 years past. A lifetime of big challenges ahead. It’s just the beginning.
Emil Sarnogoev
CEO
