What gave you the idea for WizeHive and how long has it been established?
I am an overscheduled business guy. I had multiple pain points that overlapped with each other. I am involved in tech services firm and wanted a simple, social type of CRM system that functioned somewhat like Twitter so I could monitor my activities there.
We could not find anything that worked, believing that traditional CRM products were too ridged and structured. Meanwhile, I had co-founded Dreamit Ventures (dreamitventures.com) and I was working with my partners virtually to build it and we had emails flying all over the place and I needed a way to collect and sort through all of the great ideas and information. I looked around the marketplace and did not feel that the existing products had the right mix of features and ease of use … so we started building WizeHive and we’ve been working on it now about 18 months.
How many people work for WizeHive and how did they come to the company?
The number is changing (growing) daily, but we have about 10 people working within the company now, although not all full time. Most of them are local (Philadelphia area) who we found through the growing tech community.
What has been the biggest challenge so far?
Trying to be patient. We have so many great ideas for the future of WizeHive but can only get so much done at any one time and it has sometimes therefore been very difficult to wait for certain features to get added or completed.
And what challenges do you see for the future?
We honestly believe the current and planned features make WizeHive better in many ways other products. One of our upcoming challenges is to make that more clear and obvious to people when they comparing products for their own use.
Do you have any plans for other services?
Lots. We probably have about 100 ideas or items we’d like to add on to WizeHive. We’d like to see WizeHive evolve to not only provide broad based horizontal value to people who want to share tasks, information and ideas but to also help people improve their productivity in very specific, niche ways.
What do you think are the major obstacles to getting people and businesses to use web based services?
That has not yet been an obvious issue for us. I imagine over time some larger organizations may have concerns about data security and we have tried to address that by including SSL to all customers, secure servers, constant backups, etc.
What is the biggest incentive to get them to switch to cloud based systems?
I think having the data available from anywhere at all times is very powerful. I also think over time people will realize that the costs are far less than maintaining a big infrastructure.
How do you see web based services in five years time?
I think it will evolve like many markets. Right now there is a lot of activity .. somewhat of a free for all with lots of new niche services coming out to try to take a slice of this market. I think over time there will be natural consolidation so people don’t have to use lots of different services…and I think with some of the new products on the horizon people will be able to truly collaborate in real time via any number of access points (computers, mobile devices.)
What happens when someone puts a digger through the cable?
We all get to take a long lunch! Seriously, I think moving to the cloud will happen in a big way and over time I think more and more redundancy will be put in place to make sure that there are ways to work around that.
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