The Snowtide Blog

We have one open position, and we are also accepting internship applications. Do you feel up to a challenge?

This morning, we put some limited-time-only discounts into place for PDFTextStream to celebrate the new year. You can now purchase PDFTextStream server deployment licenses for as little as $999 USD (optionally with Premium Support). These licenses carry no CPU restriction, so you can use them on your 1CPU development box or your 64-CPU Superdome. And, as always, you can use the same license under Java, Python, or .NET. This sale starts today, and ends on January 31, 2007. You can place your order here (with payments handled by Google Checkout).

This is quite a deal — these unlimited-CPU server licenses usually cost $13,750 USD. That’s quite an insane discount, but I thought it was worth the chance. Theoretically, this will create a little buzz, increase our customer list by quite a bit, and maybe expose a different class of users to PDFTextStream that might have previously written it off because of its admittedly high (normal) price tag.

This is also a decent pricing experiment. We’ve never done much experimentation in the area of pricing, so we’ll now have one more data point on our demand curve (as described brilliantly by Joel). I don’t think that this particular experiment will have any lasting effect on our pricing for PDFTextStream, but it will be an interesting exercise nonetheless.

We’ve finally recovered from our harrowing experience of being discovered via digg (so horrible to have the problem of too much attention!).  PDFTextOnline is back online, and greatly beefed up.

Also, the new interface I promised earlier is now in effect as well.  It’s simpler, easier to understand, and provides some new features as well (such as being able to choose the font used to display extracted PDF text, and being able to choose which layout mode should be used when performing each extraction).  Let us know what you think.

Finally, we’ve brought in Adsense ads.  I guess we’ve sold out now, eh?  Of course, it’s the smart thing to do given the pretty significant waves of traffic we continue to get from around the web that was prompted by the digg post.

I might write more about specifics, but I wanted to get this link out there.  I only now came across Guy Kawasaki’s entreprenuership video series hosted by the Stanford Technology Ventures Program.  It’s from 2004, so I’m probably the last software company owner to “discover” it, but I’m glad I did nonetheless.

I’ve long discounted Guy as “that Mac evangelist from way back” — to my detriment.  He’s really putting some great content and great ideas out there, regardless of what some may think of how he comes off personally.  There are so many aspects of these clips that resonate with my personal experience of launching Snowtide, seeing it fail, and then relaunching it again two years ago (and thankfully seeing it soar this time!).  That kind of connection-at-a-distance is rare, and really valuable, so I’ll certainly be keeping up with (and catching up with) Guy’s doings from now on.