After re-doubling efforts and re-building my staffing and recruiting firm, and Alex bringing his company out of bankruptcy, we began talking about building a company together. We talked about all of the mistakes we both had made in the past.\

• Growing too fast.
• Focusing on revenue instead of profit.
• Giving shareholders more attention than customers.

In 2001 we were both still focused on our day jobs, but along with two other partners we started Architel. The idea was simple – flat-fee IT support for small businesses. We had lots of ideas on how to deliver ‘aligned’ services. By 2003 I noticed that both of us were spending more time talking about Architel than our day jobs and that is when I suggested we become full-time partners.

We put two desks in a room and wrote a business plan focused on building a sustainable, customer focused IT business. Our first objective was to avoid all of the mistakes we had made in the past. Our second objective was to build a company that was both fun and rewarding. After almost a decade of working together I think we have succeeded. Besides our primary business, Architel, we have been involved with a few really exciting projects including MotorSport Ranch, ShopSavvy, Fancast and WhiteBox. Anyway, I just wanted to congratulate Alex on the recognition!

Are you an entrepreneur? Do you work for a startup or small business?  Looking for a job?  Looking for a partner?  Looking for angel investment?  Come on by for a drink and some fellowship with like-minded folks from North Texas.  The event is in the INFOMART (1950 Stemmons Freeway) at the corner of Oak Lawn and I-35.  We get started around 5PM, hope to see you there.  Just RSVP here.

Among the few that are hiring is Big in Japan, a 4-year-old Dallas company that creates applications for mobile devices. Big in Japan has added 50 developers and designers since May – half in the U.S. and half overseas – and is hiring more, said co-founder Alexander Muse.

“Mobile applications markets are exploding,” he said. “If the economy were doing better, we might not be hiring as many people because we might have more competitors. The irony is, the economy is actually helping us.”

However, three other Dallas businesses that Muse is involved with are not hiring. He said one – Architel, an information technology outsourcing company – would have to start gaining more clients than it has been losing to justify more hiring.

The competitor suggests that this is ‘proof’ that Architel is ‘blowing up’. This is NOT true.  Ironically, if you have ever been quoted in the press you might know that what is printed is not always exactly what was said.  For example, in this case I was asked if Architel was hiring and I indicated that we are ALWAYS hiring, but that we were not increasing headcount.  I explained that the Architel business was flat – i.e. that we were gaining new clients at a rate that equaled our loses.  Several of our clients have been sold, some have filed bankruptcy while others have downsized considerably.  Scott and his sales team have been doing an amazing job of replacing troubled customers with new customers – Architel’s monthly recurring revenue is actually at an all time high (i.e. albeit only slightly more than it was last year).  Flat is the new up, right?

What the article fails to mention is the fact that we have been buying IT services companies that haven’t been able to weather the current financial difficulties.  Ironically, the Dallas Morning News wrote about our growth via acquisition in an article titled, “Dallas entrepreneur buying struggling tech startups“.  We have not been expanding our headcount, but we have been acquiring our competitors, their clients and some of their more talented employees.  Architel has more than 100 employees today – much of this is through our acquisitions and not organic hiring.

So if you receive an email from one of our competitors suggested we are not doing well – ask them why they aren’t talking about their own success.  This specific competitor claims they have 99%+ rate of client retention – I know for a fact (unless than have 5,000 clients) that their retention rate is lower.  How do I know?  Their clients are now our clients.  Why?  Hopefully because we offer a great service.

You might be surprised if you realize that the current email protocol is 40 years old – older than the modern internet.  If you had to start over today and wanted to build ‘email’ what would it look like.  I can guarantee it wouldn’t be anywhere close to the current protocol and implementation.  Google has spent the last four years developing Wave, but instead of trying to sell it to us they decided to give it to the world for free.  This is ground shaking.  The most advanced communication platform delivered to the world for free.

I was in the audience as the Wave team demonstrated Wave and it was amazing.  They received a standing ovation – guys were holding their laptops over their heads – it was as if Bono had just given a free concert and explained you could come stay at his house anytime.  Literally amazing.  I can’t really explain why Wave is so important – maybe you should just check it out for yourself (it will take 80 minutes):

Rafe Needleman explains it very well in a post titled, “Hands-on with Wave”

Google just opened up to a limited audience its very interesting communications experiment called Wave (news stories). Our hands-on evaluation: there’s a lot to like. It really is a more contemporary take on communications. But it will knock many e-mail users off-balance.

Even Wave’s own Software Engineering Manager Lars Rasmussen told me, “It takes a little getting used to,” and, “We’re still learning how to use it.” Imagine how everyone else will feel.

If you want to try Wave, you’ll have to wait. Google is making access to the service available to some developers and press, but full availability will not be until “later this year,” Google says. The version we tested was very raw, still in development. Many features were not implemented and the system threw us a few errors. But the framework and philosophy is clear to see, and that’s what this evaluation is based on.

Getting started in Wave: It looks a lot like e-mail…

(Credit: Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)

What’s Wave?

Wave is real-time e-mail. What that means is that when you’re writing a reply to a message (or “wave”) that you receive in the system, the recipient can see what you are typing as you type it. It will come as a relief to most that the real-time feature can be disabled if you click on the “draft” button (not working in my trial) while writing. But real-time visibility is the default.

You can put your replies anywhere in the message. You can also do this in regular e-mail, but in Wave, your comments are easy to pick out since the app bounds reply text in colored boxes with authors’ pictures embedded in them. Those of us who prefer to reply to e-mail messages at the end (or the beginning) and not piecemeal can just reply as usual. But when you want to write a surgical point-by-point reply to a message, Wave makes it easy.

You can drop pictures straight into Wave messages (a neat trick in a browser-based app, made possible by Google Gears), and smart assistants will let you convert addresses to maps, automatically fix spelling errors, and expand contact names.

But Wave is not e-mail. In this image, I am watching co-developers Lars and Jens Rasmussen type replies to my query. The teal tag shows that Jen is typing right now; Lars, who just finished typing above Jens, had his own, separate color.

(Credit: Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)

But it’s the reply-anywhere feature combined with the real-time function that’s most interesting. It makes Wave the first useful blend of e-mail and instant messaging that I’ve seen. Unlike Google’s previous attempt to meld the two communications modes into one app (Gmail has Google Talk in its sidebar), this one really works. An asynchronous e-mail conversation between two people can can stay that way, or it become real-time when both parties are online, and the dialog stays in place in the e-mail for later viewing. Switching between the e-mail and IM mode is seamless. In fact, the concept of the two different modes vanishes in Wave.

Wave’s message handling really shines when a conversation is between more than two people. Using Wave and its specific, color-coded replies, a group of people can have an actual discussion in e-mail, in real-time if wanted, without getting bogged down in long multi-message discussions–or worse, in threads that end up forking so that different people are discussing different things.

The Wave in-box pane shows you when there are new messages in your threads by bolding the subject lines, and when somebody is actively typing in a wave, you can see the text come in live, in the two-line preview every message gets. That’s really cool, although it can be overwhelming.

Speaking of being overwhelmed, the first time I had two people replying to me in an individual message at the same time, in different places in it, my head almost exploded. It’s a lot of raw information coming it at once, and it’s very different from the old e-mail or the instant message experience.

A new communications architecture

A lot of what Wave does is made possible by the fact that Wave messages don’t live primarily in the desktop Wave client (which is actually a rich browser-based app), as the traditional design of e-mail dictates, but rather on the Wave server. Messages aren’t just dropped off at your Wave client; persistent links to messages on the servers come with them. When you edit a wave with the Wave application on your computer, it’s immediately reflected back to the Wave server, and from then out to other users who are viewing that Wave in their apps, immediately.

Wave servers synchronize with each other as needed. In fairness, this is not radically different from how Lotus Notes and Microsoft Exchange work, but Wave has no legacy support for old e-mail architectures whatsoever, and isn’t bogged down by the old methods–like the practice of delivering messages to users and then severing the links to those messages.

Other benefits you get from this include the capability to add new recipients to a wave at any time, and for Wave to know, when that happens, what each user has read and what they haven’t. Users’ views into Wave will highlight what’s new to them when they open a message.

And, taking a page from Twitter Search, Wave’s search function will be real-time (it wasn’t when I tried it). If you are searching for a word or phrase in your inbox of waves, and someone updates a message thread with your search target, that message will pop up in your results the moment they type in the change. (You can save searches in the navigation bar, a nice feature.)

All together? Not yet

At the moment, the only people Wave users can communicate with are other Wave users. Wave addresses look like e-mail addresses, but there’s no gateway between Internet e-mail and Wave, so messages send from standard e-mail clients to Wave will bounce. This is a serious limitation, and one Google hopes developers will rectify by writing gateways between Wave and standard e-mail servers, not to mention IM services and other social and workflow systems like Facebook, Bugzilla, and so on. A Twitter interface is already being shown.

However, as Rasmussen told me, Wave is currently spam-free since it’s not linked into the global e-mail system. He doesn’t want to open up Wave to standard e-mail until he can ensure that this system won’t be overrun, too.

In fact, the reason Wave is being released in the way it is right now–as an early developer-only experience–is to encourage programmers to write extensions to it. The e-mail gateway is particularly critical, and Google may develop it itself. Without it, Wave is yet another new communications medium that will have a hard time getting off the ground since it duplicates many capabilities people are already accustomed to. Wave is technically a radical departure from e-mail, but for the end users it will still be used for a lot of the same things e-mail is.

Google’s Wave team hasn’t yet done much integration with other Google developers’ projects, although Wave was introduced to the company through a detailed video demo. As Rasmussen told me, “To say we’re ‘working with’ other Google groups would be a stretch.” Obvious integrations we’re waiting for include Gmail, Google Docs, and Google Voice.

It’s about time

The merger of e-mail, instant messaging, and collaborative editing is overdue. Aside from the inertia of technology, there’s no reason we should we need different applications–an e-mail client (or site), an instant messenger, and a collaborative editor–for variations on the theme of textual communication. I give Google a lot of credit for kicking off this experiment.

When Wave comes out, try it immediately. It really is an eye-opener.

Starting on or about the third week of April, users still running IE6 or IE7 on Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows Server 2003, or Windows Server 2008 will get will get a notification through Automatic Update about IE8. This rollout will start with a narrow audience and expand over time to the entire user base. On Windows XP and Server 2003, the update will be High-Priority. On Windows Vista and Server 2008 it will be Important.

Here is the deal, lots of our clients still use IE6 due to compatibility issues.  Please don’t upgrade because you get an alert.  Let Architel update/upgrade your computer.  We are going to exclude the ‘alert’ from as many clients as possible, but if we miss you – please take note.

Are you interested in connecting with the local startup community? We are working to build a vibrant startup community here in Dallas every bit as interesting and dynamic as San Francisco, Boulder, Boston or Austin. The first step is engagement.

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