This is that time of the year again. On the first day of winter we celebrate the birthday of Skalfa eCommerce. Today we hit the 5 year milestone.

Let me go a little personal here. When 5 years ago I announced starting a new company I was not nearly confident it’s going to shoot. We needed to start from scratch after the first year so we were a software product company without a product. Hell, that was tough but that was the time we again proved the simple truth – gather talents and build something people want. That worked. Any piece of software can be built if you have capable people on your tank and some passionate customers to start with. Some people were very early to grasp values we were aiming at.

Now SkaDate is one of the most recognizable names in the online dating software world. We never aimed at “growing big” but grew 5 times in staff – by customer need.

Thank you all for supporting us all these years. By using our products and telling us where we need to improve you’ve been pushing us forward. A lot of your ideas are surprising and encouraging. Every time we raise another big project on SkaDate I feel excited about how people use our software. I hope to enjoy it years and years on. The upcoming year is going to be revolutionary for our company with the launch of new open source and SaaS products in our core competence marketplace. Watch our progress, we want to share that with you.

Happy Birthday Skalfa!

Happy Thanksgiving to all our customers!

You’ve been a fantastic crowd all these years. Thanks to your demand and feedback we’ve developed military discipline when serving you. Thanks to your patience we’ve been able to polish our shortcomings and actually improve all across our bottom line. Thanks to your insight we’ve created a marvelous product. Thanks to your ideas we’ve been able to take part in raising the best dating and community sites on the Internet.

All Skalfa employees in the USA, Czech Republic, Kyrgyz Republic and Russia want to wish you happy Thanksgiving, terrific Christmas shopping season, and new successful endeavors in the upcoming year.

Thank you guys.

Emil Sarnogoev
CEO
Skalfa eCommerce

Let me congratulate all Skalfa employees and customers with this important date. We just turned 4 years!

There are a lot of complexities in running a social tech company and we’ve eaten a lot of them during all this time learning to produce the software that solves people’s needs and supporting their businesses. As we move forward our vision clears out, our operations get more streamlined, and our focus gets even sharper as Skalfa capitalizes on its niche and shows steady growth.

I’m glad we made no layoffs since the nuclear winter start and don’t plan any in the nearest future. I can’t remember any moment in our history when we had a better team than now. That’s a fascinating feeling when you see talents working on what they can do best of all.

We plan revolutionary upgrades for 2 of our products and at least 2 new product launches in the upcoming year. And we are starting with that right now. The world is going to see the result of our hard work in exactly 30 days. Well, some select customers are going to see it in just 15.

Thanks for kicking with us!

Emil Sarnogoev
CEO
Skalfa eCommerce

Just a quick note of news:

1) chuPPo Chat has become lightweight due to its transition to Flex 3 framework. Now it will load faster than before thus improving users’ experience.

2) Due to numerous requests we have implemented “video in pop-up” feature. Now if you look at someone’s video in chuPPo Chat you can not only put it to video dock but also open it in a separate popup window – this makes it possible to resize the video without interfering with chat interface.

Feel free to check at chuPPo Chat demo.

We are glad to introduce chuPPito – a small object for engaging users into your running copy of chuPPo Chat. It’s a variable size widget that reflects what’s currently going on in your chat rooms.

You can place this widget anywhere on your site, for example on index page. You can set your own custom widget size to make it fit your page layout. This can be a great little tool to engage your customers in your site activity.

An improtant notice to SkaDate users: chuPPito will be integrated with the next SkaDate update but you can have it in advance. All others chuPPo Chat users, feel free to make inquiries for chuPPito installation assistance.

This particular chuPPito object is connected to chuPPo webcam chat software demo by simply indicating its URL in connection parameters. Feel free to look at this post page source to find out how to install it yourself. We’ll follow up with more detailed installation instructions on chuPPo.com.

We have updated chuPPo Messenger application.

Update summary:
- Skin, smilies change support
- Custom languages support
- Usage statistics
- Usage tracking now based on successful IM sessions between members, not on simultaneous users online like before.

Log in to admin area. Now you can see a separate tab for Messenger with its own settings. Feel free to check and let us know if it works well for you.

SkaDate

It’s that time of the product life-cycle again. We are planning next major upgrade for SkaDate, version 7. We are at the stage of gathering all the feedback and putting on paper what should be implemented.

We target the following 3 objectives with SkaDate 7:

1) Several major new features (groups, classifieds, etc.)
2) A lot of enhancements and optimization of the existing features. This is the neverending mission across the product existence history.
3) Performance optimization. We made some custom performance tuning for several big customers. Some of that can be implemented in the main product.

And of course, SkaDate 7 is not going to be a great thing without your suggestions. We found great value of communicating with customers, so new SkaDate can’t go without your contribution.

chuPPo

chuPPo applications do not have any versioning because of the hosted model and constant incremental development. You do not need to download anything, you just see your chat, IM, and recorder getting better, often on a daily basis.

Currently we are eager to hear from our audience what chuPPo can do for you.

Skalfa Boards

Now, for some action go to the new Skalfa Boards and let us know how we can make running your business easier. From now on this is the right place to give us some insight on improving our products.

Facebook installation of chuPPo Chat has been updated. We activated the new skin, and added long awaited invite friends feature. Now, with custom user-created rooms and friends invitations this Facebook application is going to add even more value for its users.

Soon chuPPo Chat will have “friends” feature for all sites. It will mean that the logic of the site will pass relationship between users, so those who are friends will enjoy better placement and visibility for each other. This is going to greatly improve user experience on busy sites including Facebook.

Add this app and invite friends if you want to have fun with your Facebook friends online and support chuPPo.

We are glad to announce that chuPPo extends its set of free offers again.

This time we introduce completely free text-only version of chuPPo Chat with unlimited user sessions.

If you go to your admin area statistics page you will see the following:

As you see in the legend, audio/video sessions and text-only sessions are counted separately! This means can use your a/v sessions up to the fullest while being able to switch to text-only mode.

You can switch between a/v and text modes any time in the main settings tab of your admin area. When you are in text mode your sessions are still counted (so you have a good picture of your site usage) and an unobtrusive advertisement banner from chuPPo is shown below the chat.

You don’t have to pay anything, it’s FREE.
You don’t bother about running out of user sessions, it’s UNLIMITED.
You can set it up instantly, it’s COPY&PASTE.

Go use it now. Your feedback and suggestions are greatly welcome.

As you might have noticed we released a new skin for chuPPo Chat.

This skin will be default for all new chuPPo Chat installations, existing customers can activate it in chuPPo admin area.

We think user interface tweaking can never be too much. Together with the skin, chat application has got some minor interface improvements. Feel free to comment if your users like the new app. We are going to clear out and polish every single detail based on what your users say. Since community business is always user-centric, you might want to gather some feedback from your chatters.

Good luck in your endeavors!