Big Winter Sale

We are glad to announce that Big Winter Sale is starting on the 1st of December and will last till the end of the year. During this time you get 50% off any edition of DataObjects.Net and Help Server. To apply this 50% special to your order, just enter DEC2011PROMO coupon code at the shopping cart or product checkout page.

Should you have any questions, please email to sales@x-tensive.com.

Sincerely,
Xtensive.com Sales Team

We've launched 9facts.com

I'm happy to announce the launch of alpha version of 9facts.com - a new and pretty risky project I started nearly 6 months ago (see my blog post about this). 9facts is a social service for sharing and comparing facts related to you, your friends, and people you know.

Xtensive was involved in its creation as co-investor, together with Leonid Volkov.

Home page of 9facts.com displays the topmost
 achievements in your country, city,
and groups you're in, including your friends' group.

The service is focused on local fact rankings: nearly any group of people there has its own fact ranking (top facts). This feature allow users to compare and highlight their own skills in a group of people they belong to (city, country, college, school, company, etc.). On contrary, most of rankings available on the web are global, so 9facts is designed to change this.

Never compare your inside with somebody else's outside. Your true value depends entirely on what you are compared with.
– Bob Wells

The problems we're trying to address:

• There is no single place on the web, where you can compare yourself with other people by the whole set of metrics that are relevant to you. We are talking about nearly any metrics - e.g. your birth date, height, the number of hours you spent at work during this month, the highest place you've ever visited, the deepest dive you've made, the number of miles you run this week, your reputation on Stack Overflow and so on.
• Most of the ratings on the web are global, but local ratings seem more important in our life. E.g. what a reputation on Stack Overflow says about a person in general? Almost nothing. But being compared with reputation among developers in his city or in his company it becomes more meaningful. The same can be stated about nearly any metric: almost no one remembers his position in global rating on Stack Overflow, but you'd definitely remember you're #1 (#2, #3) on Stack Overflow in your city or company. 
• If we're able to compare an arbitrary set of such metrics for arbitrary groups of people in real time (e.g. your productivity measured by RescueTime + the number of LOCs you committed + the number of tasks closed in issue tracker), we bring Google Analytics to the world of achievements and productivity of people. This must be a precious tool for business and it is attractive for people as well, since they can identify and highlight their local or global successes (e.g. attach them to a CV). Moreover, people will use such a tool to compare and fix achievements of their kids.
• If we're able to fix nearly any facts, we can identify the most popular facts in a particular group of people. And this set of facts nicely describes what's common for this group. E.g. if it's a group of bodybuilders, most of them publish the weight they push, muscle size, etc.; if it's a group of developers, they compare their reputation on Stack Overflow, number of committed lines of code, lists of technologies they use, etc. Travelers might count the number of countries they visited, driving fans - the horsepower of their cars, and so on. Imagine, you're visiting some event and instantly see the most popular activities and achievements for the whole group of people there. IMO, that's cool!

So that's what 9facts should finally evolve to: a tool allowing you to share and compare arbitrary (but mainly measurable) facts about your own and about other people. Currently we're just in the beginning - "About 9facts" page describes the current state of the project. The limitations it has now include:

• Absence of an API allowing third-party apps to push facts with measurable data to it, although there are few integrated data providers grabbing some facts from Facebook, Twitter, Stack Overflow and RescueTime. Also, you can enter the facts manually there - our presentation explains what's so unique in this part.
• Logging of facts with data sequences (i.e. data change charts) is not yet implemented.
• Some of essential social features aren't added yet - e.g. there is no messages, notifications about your high positions in tops and so on.
• UI/UX certainly needs to be improved as well - some actions and implied results there are far from being obvious.

The good news is that the service already works, and you already can compare yourself with the people nearby you (or in your city, country and so on). This can be done in 3 simple steps:

• Register or sign in to 9facts
• Specify your city or country in account settings - otherwise you facts won't appear in city / country tops.
• Enable one or more fact providers and try to add some facts about you manually. If you don't know what to add, look up the biggest top to get some ideas (remember, there is "Add fact like this" action in context menu of any fact).

We'd highly appreciate if you share your impression with us by sending an email to info@9facts.com or leave a feature request @ UserVoice.

What makes 9facts attractive for developers right now, and why we announce it here? 9facts allows you to create a single page containing the most important information about you, and a significant part of this information can be gathered and updated automatically:

• The time you spend working, as well as your productivity measured by RescueTime
• Your reputation on Stack Overflow
• The number of recommendations on LinkedIn you have
• Upcoming: your VCS statistics, the list of technologies and tools you're actually using, etc. - as you may find, software developers is one of groups we'd like to attract first. 

So 9facts allows you to create your online profile showing how you're compared with other people by each metric that is relevant to you. Also, it's a nice way to know something new about people around you - e.g. you can find out who in your city has the largest number of friends on Facebook (enable Facebook fact provider), or made the highest parachute jump (add this fact). Take a look at top facts for "Yekaterinburg" keyword to get the imagination of this. 

9facts already won a competition for being presented to Steve Blank at Start-up Rocket - we were among 8 Russian startups selected by PwC, StartupPoint and i-Accelerator for this event. More information about our progress can be found in 9facts blog.

Christmas Sale

We are glad to announce that Xtensive.com Christmas Sale has started today, December 15 and will last till the end of the year. During this time you get 20% off any edition of DataObjects.Net and Help Server. To apply this 20% Christmas special to your order, just enter the following coupon code at the shopping cart or product checkout page: DEC2010PROMO

Should you have any questions, please email to sales@x-tensive.com

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

Sincerely,
Xtensive.com Sales Team

Users from Russia and CIS countries, apply for discounts!

Если вы, или компания, в которой вы работаете, находитесь в России или странах СНГ, сейчас - наилучшее время для приобретения наших продуктов. Для получения значительной скидки на один из них отправьте нам e-mail с информацией, позволяющей нам определить ваш аккунт на x-tensive.com, а так же наименования продуктов, которые вам интересны.

Предложение актуально до 15 июля 2010 г.

In English:

If you (or a company you work for) are from Russia or one of CIS countries, it's a perfect time to purchase our products. Apply for a discount by sending us e-mail allowing to identity your account at x-tensive.com and list products you are planning to purchase to gain a significant discount.

The proposal remains intact till July 15th, 2010.

Free licenses for DataObjects.Net and Help Server for bloggers, article writers and user group speakers

We offer free licenses for DataObjects.Net and Help Server for bloggers, article writers and user group speakers.

The rules:

• We give promotional points for each publication or talk related to DataObjects.Net.
• The idea and content of publication or talk must be previously approved by us to apply for points, although there can be exceptions. So you can apply for points after the publicaiton or talk, but we don't guarantee they'll be provided in this case.
• Exact count of promotional points in each particular case is determined by the scoring rules described below. Scoring rules might change later.
• Each point is equal to 1 EUR.
• You may acquire our licenses, upgrades and support subscriptions for your promotional points, or get a discount for the same amount of EUR. If item is priced in other currency (e.g. USD), the conversion rate for your points is determined by this way: http://www.google.com/search?q=1+eur+in+usd
• Unfortunately, promotional points aren't convertable to real money :)

Scoring:

• Publication in your own blog: PointsYouGet = 100 + 2 * CountOfVisitorsCameToUsFromArticlePageDuring1stMonth.
  Publication of technical article on specialized site (CodeProject.com, etc.): PointsYouGet = 300 + 2 * CountOfVisitorsCameToUsFromArticlePageDuring1stMonth.
• Publication of short article / announcement on social link exchange resource (reddit.com, stumbleupon.com, webresourcesdepot.com, etc.): PointsYouGet = 0.3 * CountOfVisitorsCameToUsFromArticlePageDuring1stMonth.
• Talk @ .NET UG / ALT.NET UG or similar event: PointsYouGet = 300 + 20 * CountOfListeners.
• Additionally, we provide 1 Standard Edition license (of either DataObjects.Net or Help Server) to be gifted to a participant that:
  a) Will take active part in discussions;
  b) Will really need the license.
• Placing logo of one of our products with link to us at your web site: PointsYouGet = 0.5 * CountOfVisitorsCameToUs. New points are calculated each month.
• Something else, that might be interesting for us: we're open for any interesting suggestions, so please send us your proposal by e-mail. This includes writing a sample for us, adding some missing functionality, improving our documentatiuon and so on. 

Remarks:

• CountOfVisitorsCameToUsFromArticlePageDuring1stMonth is determined by our Google Analytics counters installed at x-tensive.com. We'll send you a screenshot (or a set of them) approving the info.
• CountOfListeners is determined by your photos or video.

So hopefully, some of you will like this idea. By heping us to promote our products, you're getting indirect advantage as well: better sales usually imply faster development.

"Guess, who" quest

Our designer just shared the photos of our team members that, by his optinion, express their characters best of all. Definitely a "must see" page, if you'd like to know "who is who" @ our team ;)

Dmitri Maximov talks about our new "Envy" project

Here is the whole story. If you'd like the idea, don't forget to leave a comment there. AFAIK, they spent a lot of time on planning and discussions.

15% discount on Help Server till the end of March

Enter 2010.03 coupon code after following any of "Buy now" links on this page to get it.

"Can ORM make your application faster?" series

In March I started to write a series of posts called "Can ORM make your application faster?". 6 posts are already there, although the whole sequence isn't finished yet (planning to do this in two weeks).

I hope it will be interesting for anyone who uses ORM tools or considers this.

DataObjects.Net: upcoming changes and plans

Recently I made two important posts related to DataObjects.Net future:

• Upcoming changes
• Plans for v4.3 and future goals

Please read them, if you're using this product or planning to use it.