We continue to work away at the Control-library-Silverlight-WCF RIA-.Net 4.0-SQLServer stack.  It is just taking longer than we thought it would, and has required that we take upgrades in almost every layer of that stack.  That’s what happens when you are learning new technologies: estimates go out the window.

 

Ultimately we decided to release what we had and keep working in the background.  This is to keep faith with the user community.

 

So, under the tab ‘Technology Investigations’ on the main menu, you will find three new options: Space Invaders; Tortoises; and a Drawing App.  These demonstrate some of the vision of Hexagon Global when it comes to delivering high-engagement web-based products.  These three examples do not connect to a database however, so in that respect they are still just ‘toys.’ . They are based on example tutorials from Microsoft that we have been working through.

 

It is a good thing that Hexagon is a privately-held company. If this were a publicly listed company then an announcement like this would cause the market to cane us.  Personally I am glad not to have some smarty-pants young investment analyst telling me how to build value in software development.  David Thodey, CEO of Telstra has got to be jealous at this point.

Rebranding for Asia

For a while now we have been thinking about trading under a more Asian name in this part of the world.  Recalling stories about how Coca Cola sounds like the Mandarin words for ‘sweaty horse,’ we wondered what ‘Hexagon Global’ sounded like to a Mandarin-speaking ear.  At the moment we have a number of different new brands being tested in focus groups in various tier-1, 2, and 3 cities across the Chinese mainland. My personal favourite is ‘The Lucky, Lucky, Rich, Happy, 88 Stallions, Potent Software Company.’  But we await the results from the mainland before taking any decisions.