Be_Silly

I've no idea as to why my longer comment above was modded down. Was merely a discussion as to real risks in data storage of emotional value, some bits personal, some technical in aspect.

I think it's fair to be skeptical of new companies offering long term services. I wasn't bashing the company who is subject of this discussion. I was merely saying that the scary bit is not just i you're an investor but possibly also as a customer. Anyone recently read a SEC filing of their bank / thrift / life policy company? My most important thought regards this discussion is that there are ways you can communicate the stability of your company to customers who wish to rely on it over long periods of time. One way i imagine not to do that well, is to point out you've no business model. That's not quite the same as a "caveat emptor" warning. In fact the lack of plan, or general presentation of te service, has obviously been taken to be altruistic by some observers who have commented here. No problem with that, it's a cool idea, but try it differently, would you buy archive length storage from me, even for good money, if i said i'd no idea how to break even? Or is it okay only if it's free, which presumably it cannot be later on? How would you make this break even?

Sure, but i'd rather know how that's codified into business rules and policies. I try to do that for my own company. People change, staff moves, even if infrequently, you get a new CEO . . . qualifying this as a personal trait isn't much substance in my book. It's not concrete, even if it's an honorable intention. Sorry, but i don't see how you hinge a business plan on merely an intention to play nice. Google codified their original intent roughly as not doing crappy flashy adverts, so that's a tangible. But some processes are never immediately visible to customers, and how you you apply attitude as a criteria to that? If you run a shop which prides itself on exceptional behaviour (distinct from a market around you where you see values are a real reason hindering growth) is it not reassuring to try at leat to find some measurables? One might manage a lot of this in interview for new hires, or you might insist on a certain policy regards customer support, such as never giving a stonewall answer per a policy but giving your reps the power to look into a problem. What i'm suggestig is you can do wonders with company culture if you nurture it like a first born, but are there not times when this can be checked against behaviour more thoroughly? I'm thinking about the number of times my cellular reps promise me, voice and in writing, they'll fix a billing glitch, and not once have they come through. That's possibly measurable, as an example. As in "why does customer x contact us so much?"

Maybe just my mass of plugins but FF3.6 isn't loading tenderapp, while chrome just fine. s'pose could be google's search redirect playing funny with requestpolicy, but am confused :~/

Apart from pricing, what's better than FogBugz, in terms of your decision? I can't find a straight features page, though straight to API faq so that's good.Seems to be Ruby, whilst Fog has XML and presumably, being .net a few other interfaces.

What confuses me is that OP wanted or hinted at a desire for a expanded feature set that Fog doesn't apparently have. Which are they that Tender gives? (I got the API point, that's good, but Fog being based on the CLR would give more ways to extend it if you took the site licensed version instead of the hosted version.

Also nitpicking, but Fog for the site install prices much more nicely than the on-demand version if you've >5 users.

I'm just utterly confused as to what was the OP's question was - it's so utterly vague - and led me to ramble off in different directions above. So what's the comparative benefit?

I'm a fan of Joel Spolsky's writing, and have evaluated Fog online, from POV of whether it would be useable by non programmer staff as comfortably as i'd like.

but i'm not yet a customer as you might guess from my above psts i've interest to do things which aren't standard for a code shop. Basically, i know the value i get is in much deeper planning and i'd have to write a lot of what's desired by my company, meanwhile Fog looks robust enough to use it as a way of pulling together a few things which aren;t totally out of its design intent. Outlook integration is a useful thing not so much for management but for syncing nicely with the cell phones we use, e.g.

I mean i'm not shilling for Fog, i just don't know what the criticism is except price. What is the OP disliking about the Fog APIs e.g.? If i put my cynical hat on, i'd just say this has been a "Ask /." kind of experience. I'm interested enough in the subject to engage, but have no way of really replying. Was the Q really "what's not Fogbugz out there are cheaper?" I genuinely don't know, nor can i (presently) find any links to older HN discussion which might be useful.

All this management software, whether for bug tracking or whether you make it front of house or anywhere in between is so useful to any helf - evolved business of any size, i seem to remember IBM paying a pretty penny to get ahold of Lotus who sussed the business pitch in the 90s.

I suppose that what i'd like is a discussion as to what's state of the art, what companies or systems are really pushing the limits and getting things good and affordable, not a mere comparison with FogCreek which is very well written up for a company of any size.

I'll post separately with my confusion points, so please understand i'm probably just missing the point here.

best to all.

What i think is scary is the idea subscribers / users might actually rely on such a service 100%.

Or is it more scary to tell your customers, from whom you've not yet worked out how to ask for money, which presumably is essential, that maybe before they send in their most valued pictures that they should run a rigourour local backup regimen? Like they'd enjoy that!

Even more scary yet is the potential for this to be a bait and switch. First you upload your treasured family stuff, then the company, for whatever reason, runs out of money to "develop their business model" or changes control or management, and then they send you a bill to "upgrade" your service to keep your records intact, same time as sentient customers realise by that time there's not been enough reinvestment to actually place any kind of measurable guarantee as to the integrity of your data.

"Please send me the things you most care for, all your precious family stuff. Don't worry, i'll work out a way of making money out of you later!"

That's what i hear.

Meanwhile, optical "rusts", drive controllers fail, popular FSs do nothing to prevent corruption even on simple copy functions (NTFS, looking at you, but you're not alone) and consumer spec HDDs are doing duty cycles more like enterprise array components did a short while back, as machines get used increasingly 24/7 by family members, for streaming vids, for all the stuff many individuals rely on to keep their present social life intact, let alone their legacy family life preserved.

I'm not wholly against TechCrunch, it is useful to have all the startup hopefuls in one place for reference. But with the readership they have, and not even one cursory mention of the pitfalls which are well known to anyone professionally touched by the storage industry, is a travesty. Their advertising revenue is no - doubt robust as a consequence.

I keep reminding myself, that despite Google's history as a bait and switch (from "no advertising" to biggest ad agency in their economy) the most significant thing they've done is make the general public aware of the value in archive, in scanned works, out of copyright works, and even - allowing this is hugely contentious - in the value of capturing storing and promoting "abandoned" works, the value of which no-one likely knows. I've strong reservations as to Google's approach. But if you read William Patry, their counsel for copyright, you couldn't find a more lucid general, philosophical approach to why what they do is not against the spirit of copyright law. (which views i believe he held before he joined Google) . Oops, touching on a huge subject, but my private view is that because Google can do this, whether they effectively monetise it or not, they are alerting a vast cross-section of the population to the idea there's value in old works, scanning, digital preservation. Having run a "ancient work" preservation project more than a decade ago, which flunked as budget was really beyond a small outfit who had to turn income more directly, and the quality ambition was high even by current expectations, the thing which bugged me was the number of people who suggested the effort was futile, of no particular value. Now, of course, i get told how such projects are futile because Google will just do them, but there's more art to preservation than they are generally doing - they showed the mass route and network effects can be done. Some of the stuff i was involved in capturing simply isn't even in national libraries. Not bitter or anything, in fact just jealous i'd not been born a decade or two later to enjoy all of this when i was in education, thinking i'd not have dropped out had i been able to do so much research so readily i'd have quickly understood my interests the better :)

No in the internet domain or electronic, but Wilhelm Research have epic amounts of data on film longevity, and you can download freely their 800page illustrated history / report book which is awesome. You find out things like Kodak knowingly sold crappy film stock that would fade to uselessness within a few years, which explains why there's so many 70's and 80's vintage movies no-onecan get on DVD, because the originals are spoiled short of painstaking and hugely expensive restoration. Can't remember if this applied to consumer film, but Kodak sure lost their reputation bad, letting Fujifilm grab the market.

Side note: the true losses i've experienced of family records were precipitated by ignorant relatives disposing of things they had no right to. My only ever data loss was also caused by carelesness or malice by a third party.

As a direct result of this i realy got into learning about everything from backup tape wear to filw system formats, data integrity. I suppose that might be a silver lining, certainly i am able to use what i learned most weeks for work.

But my real concern is how little people understand bit-rot and data integrity in general for storage. My view is nothing is yet truly archival quality. One of the things i learned was the way careful movie studios (used to?) separate their color originals into monochrome R,G,B reels, because the mono stock lasts so much longer, doesn't fade. Also i learned about Technicolor, which uses organic dyes which don't fade or hardly fade. But the original technicolor process is no longer used, apparently the last few lab setups were sold to China. I think China maybe got a good deal, and i wonder if we won't see it making a revival? That thought came courtesy of Andy Grove's recent interview where he observes that if we throw the "low tech" jobs away to other ambitious countries, eventually they innovate with it, like RCA / Westinghouse televisions and then Sony who then outsoruced to Korea who are the present hib of plasmas / lcds and so on.

What i mean is, don't outsource your family records and memories. Write stuff on paper.Print digital picstures on the best current Epson or Canon ink and put them in a dry dark place. Put a lock on it or put it under a attorney managed storage contract so your kids can get access but not throw it away in a fit of upset or stupidity.

As for this service, i admit i've not read much on their site, but where is the front and center discussion of how they've addressed the myriad ways data gets lost / corrupted?

I looked hard at trying to start a service similar to this, but not with the same angle. No way could i make the numbers work on a "freemium" model. Some website outfits do diligent archive style backup for pro photogs, and they charge very serious amounts of money, and i couldn't get any of those on record as to storage policies. It's not just having ZFS, but every app which touches your data better be doing checksums and more, and when i modelled my own idea, i had a 4 - tier multi redundant system that extensively used WORM tape for anything flagged "archive". The numbers got hard at the point the equipment his EOL or cumulative MTBF required preventative reinvestment. I was looking hard at trying to find insurance cover so that, should three data centers all fail, i could at least give some financial condolence to customers / cover lawsuits, but never got right at the kind of person who could quote me. I suppose that would be "cat risk" and i'd need a big "RE" not a front line insurer, but that was only part of my problem. If data is truly private - it might be of a marriage which went wrong and you only want those records to be available after a decent amount of time has passed - you need to build a fairly sensible, but necessarily complex, security model. Then there's the simpler fun of where to store keys, and how do you make any of this easy to use . .

I fear that projects like this risk more tears than they solve problems. The obituary thing is just a gimmick. What print paper runs an obit (for real,not as a paid insertion) without someoe caring to contact them and explain why this person was significant. Not only that but the few obits of friends of mine had to be written on a volunteer basis, even for pretty well known people, because the paper (a major national) allocated no budget for that beyond very high profile people.

I don't want to simply knock this project, because it's an interesting idea, but i think it's flawed and fragile. I don't want to place trust with a faddish organisation when, heck, i've been burned by trusted family and weak courts and straight up accidents and worst of all, couldn't care less attitudes. Only you care enough to do this. If we all did, maybe family life would get a lot nicer for some of us?

Just a thought. Best to all.

I'm not thinking you meant me, but there are a few comments above who've not got profiles with contact details. You didn't say who you called out to! :-)

Just a thought! (as someone who finds nested threads difficult to read because of funky word - wrap and believes a shaded color bar is the solution to srting replies from OP / sub posters and has never seen it on any forum) 'nuf of my griping, but shout out who you mean!

You say no-one will convery because your app is not fundamentally changing how they work.

How about you get really intimate with what they use, how they use it, and work on simplifying workflow UI, readability, all the human factors stuff which seems to be overlooked once a project gets rolled out because the painful bit of codifying processes too all the budget?

I mean, work out what you could overlay as a benefit, in a drop - in app. Ignore bling, save where used to flag data that needs working on urgently, and think about that old hullabaloo of the 70's consultant with clipboard: time and motion. Think how many times a UI context switch is required. Take away frustrations.

Obviously i've no idea if what yu're working on is the slightest bit suitable fr this treatment. But if i had a nickel for every time i've seen a support rep slam down their phone (i was going to say smashed, but we're all enlightened PC people now!) because of something as dumb as having to hit the fourth button on their machine to transfer a call, i'd be doing pretty good.

It's not fair of me to keep using phone use analogies, but i don't se enough info as to what other people ar trying to solve here, hope you get my drift anyhow.

Can you write "helper app"? Remember multifinder or i forget the name but whatever it was on early macs which allowed you to copy and paste to a stack? Id there something functionally simple like that you can offer which doesn't mess with the underlying interfaces, but which still requires some pretty neat writing and likely a fairly deep understanding of the existing apps to make work consistently and without snarling anything?

Whenever i get private project time, increasingly rare sadly, i keep sketching out UI models for a desk phone which would be complimentary to the tracking / contact apps i use, not be a awful ugly alterntive. Things like flipping a contact window from the list on the handset to my main monitor. The hard bit isn't so much now i have to work out a way to communicate that from phone to PC, because one way would be to loop the phone data to the PC and use the new USB screen driver tech. The hard bit is working out what you want to really happen. Is that, you finger flip a contact towards your main screen, and you get a fully expanded list of the discussions you've had with them? Can drag and drop work with this in a kind of wacom tablet way, so then hw does movement on the obviously smaller touchscreen translate to your main monitor? If, say, i've a preference for greyscale display on anything which cannot be usefully colored to convey real information, does the "flipped" window stay greyscale? Do i want the flipped window to be large, float or be even a normal window, or do i want it "brought back" / closed by a gesture on the phone screen? How could i do that from a cell phone?

That's pretty pie in the sky for a solo project, but whilst there remains good utility from desk bound objects (my favourite gripe is i can dial important customer numbers from memory faster than i can bring their entry up on my very latest processor Nokia) and these objects, like everything else, wear out, and are now nicely converging to voip protocols which are mature enough there's no reason to go for a proprietary type such as cisco, theres a market for these things.

Making any of this elegant is no small ambition. But consider this thought, that i remember new employees getting "phone training" because they needed to know how to handle the butt ugly interfaces of pbx attached phones which to this day are not often much better than a bunch of soft keys and if you're lucky those keys are customisable but still very basic features. Why can't i drag and drop a call with my finger whilst i'm on another call? The other thing is with the iphone we really have a lot of people finding new ways to use a telephone, and hat idiom i think will spread to the desk phone. Suddenly it may not be necessary to train someone how to put a call on hold, transfer and pick up the next incoming without muffing it with fat fingers. If i remember, AT&T research got quite far as to graphical interfaces, i think the device was called an I-O or something. It ran on an ATM network for the prototypes.

I can;t quite be apologetic about my phone obsession. Companies still buy an awful lot of desk phones, and getting those to work with even simple contact apps is often a total PITA, and not much benefit is derived. Make the right connector, and you've a very interesting straddle market, selling forklift hardware upgrades and the back - end to make them play nice. Ouch, i just remembered that awful word "middleware"!

About the time they ran those Apple ads where some exec thought his staff were taking office computers home, but instead was told they were bringing their macs to work, i worked front line call center as a first job, where the productive people brought in their own phones and headsets, and went to extremes to patch them in to the corp pbx. That time, the phone of choice was a AT&T model with a 4 line VFD which we could read even in bright light and at an acute angle, and which you could "alpha tag" your incoming numbers, basic caller identity, but which the official office system supposedly didn't support, but did, and we hacked (nicely) our own caller groups so we could take decent length breaks and be covered by a buddy across the room. Make that stuf real simple, and - apart from the up tight "Office the movie" kind of echoes this gives off, yu have a lot of people in regular jobs wanting your kit badly.

Idle random thoughts, really. I think this pretty uncool bit of daily work is simply under cared for. Yet there are an awful lot of very big businesses for which the phone is their primary income point. Maybe if this ageing tech actually worked well, we'd not have outsourced call centers because center staff could actually be more productive. At least in that dimension. I've too many "account managers" at our telco who're authorized to do diddly squat to assist me, which is likely the reason senior mgmt don't care for which pbx / phones they use.

Outside of big "old economy" shops, however, this sort of thing could really help small dev shops get their customer relations under control. It's not organization per se - we can all be very controlled as to contact management - but take away just one bit of meatspace logic burden and i know i'd have considerably more time to write. Instead of contact management, i call it "distraction management".

I'm probably candidate for most boring post now, so i'll go curse at my phone's voicemail access system now!

I think the problem with Facebook, is in a straight B2b job, quite apart from the fact i think i could never legally clear working with FB apis, is the info people put on their FB is not relevant to their work. The info i want to plug in to is such as reporting structure, tenure in a position, line responsibility, projects, published papers, conferences attended or talks given. That's very specific stuff which sometimes is publicly available, but usually not. THis intel comes off the direct sales floor. But it can be super useful when you need to work with a customer to understand the scope of their needs, because you have some kind of map based on which you can (if you are good at this kind of interpersonal) start asking how your bit of code affects group a in a related department, or if a change to say a account presentation will go down well with CFO. There are commercial databases which try to keep up with personnel changes in bigger companies. Thomson does one. "Amadeus" a Belgian data source does well for company reporting structure. I'm a firm believer in selling features up the chain in a customer site, not "upselling" them new products. Dones well, this has sometimes had for me the side - benefit of locking consultants out of the loop. Nothing worse than aiming a project or sub - project at needs you've discovered at a custmer, to have a different management branch bring in a consultant to "evaluate" your work's worth. So, i try to insist that the primary role of sales is not necessarily to be closing deals, but to be closing the data we need to work quickly with a customer. I'm specific too, we never use the word "client" beause it sounds too open ended, too "maxing out billable hours". I try to teach sales that the efficacy of their sale is directly related to how easily we can start to work as closely as is practical or legally appropriate with a customer. Basically, play the consultants at their own game. You can bet they know who is who in a attractive potential customer site, because, generalizing,that sems to be the only leverage they ever have.

It's a nice idea you have there. But it's 20 years since i first experienced customer receptions declining to give any info as to employees, even for specific roles / names. I've no idea how legal in a big corp would think, about even using FB personal data to approach or manage contacts with employees. That said, the first thing i learned about sales, which is still an essential component of your job, i'd say particularly so if you're coding to fix a customer problem or desire, is to verbally map out common contacts with the first person you speak with. That's not far from what FB actually does, but you're doing it in person, albeit down a phone call often as not, and so concerns as to privacy can be finely guaged if you learn to listen.

The kind of data we pull in for any company we'd like to wok with is theses, lectures, of who we think pays attention to what we do, even if not "decision maker" then we delve deeper to try to understand the scope of a department influence - are they a skunkworks, with board support, are they mavericks, are they hard pressed ops guys? Sometimes just because who you communicate with might be classified as one of those types, you may be doing a lot of help by widening your contacts outside, because for big corps it's not a given teams talk to teams talk to the right management layers all the time.

What i'm on about i think works for any company you work with above 50 employees, and requires a lot of discretion. I don't have any "hard sell" function in where i work, but it's good to learn off experienced sales guys, and quite often they've worked "hard sell" before. My definition of "hard sell" is to just be absolutely direct about what you want to convey, waste the least time of any party, and haggle price especially if your bit of the project can give longer term or wider benefits. My own experience is you're lucky if you an pitch a technical project at a senior manager and get two way conversation, so the idea is you mix up who you speak with. Learn off a sales guy how to get past secretaries, also, it is handy in a pinch!

Below is opinionated, but hopefully worth airing:

My view is that the field is over-populated.

Probelm is often definition of what's wanted. You end up with overlap between issue tracking and CRM, and if you add in a few outlier requirements you've described half the commercial software i see, from email installs to business automation, ERP and even EDI.

That's quite an exaggerated generalization of mine there, but the list of comercial and non-commercial software which can be put to use as you describe is enormous.

What are you really missing from FogBugz? I'm not clear why you're having to look elsewhere.

Mobile apps integration is simply not mature, or rather elegant, for any product i've seen. Zimbra, Lotus Sametime, come to mind as rather half hearted efforts requiring expensive additional licenses. Developer business sales groups really should wise up to the idea that a good mobile app is the thing small companies (mode 100 employees) i know want to have better systems, it's not a mere extra for new installs, it's the driver.

I forget when i first heard about "unified communications" but it wasn't even in the last decade. That promise seems to have been eternal. I feel we are inching closer, though, yet there's nothing breakout good in any category which i've encountered.

What i want is products with common rules engines, or something which can overlay that via apis. Smetimes i'd just like a regex to flag a string in an email as signifying a task is done and update a conversation thread. Sometimes i'd like a proper transaction written back to a sals DB. Sometimes i'd like to know my updates are delivered, with a message broker or transaction manager.It's applying consistency to that which makes me want a common interface to software as varied as voive, shceduling, management accounting (e.g. for that last one where there's a showstopper ticket, i want the revenue forecast to be dropped right away for that customer) Right now even trying for that flexibility requires some big bloat installs and a lot of work, some of it pretty low level.

As to scope for a new product, i don't think you can design a product out of the box for a large proportion of users in your situation. I believe ther attempt with XML and XSLT to find a common interface for data munging was a good try, but it turned out the only thing more verbose than the XML was the acronym dictionary. And a lot of XML i see is serializing ASN or whatever talks to the outside world of suppliers, basically a patch, not a consistent code base, so you are doing mapping schema for more than just your primary DB.

Sure, i'm being very opinionated / hand - waving. But maybe the best anser is to say you should think hard how important your support process is. Is it something which can really make you stand - out? If so, maybe you should invest in time and coding effort to get what you want. There really is no shortage of systems, apps and tools. Just nothing i see which can hook diverse office systems together. Example of this is getting desk phones to be useful. The best i've seen so far is the XMPP calls which SipExec and Aastra kit supports, but still you need some glue, and a lot of thought what you want delivered and why.

I'm emphasising voice in my post because no atter how i type, there are so many times a quick call really sorts out a problem in a fraction of the time. In my integration nirvana, i'd have the phone logs transcribed and appended automatically to the ticket. I'd have my desk phone call up the subject last discussed when i dial a number, preferably on the desk phone itself, so my concurrent work windows can be left alone.

If there's an opportunity to introduce a new product, i think the hurdle is the mind boggling variety of things any successful product would be wished to work with, and you'll bloat at the end of the day.

I doubt that what you want couldn't be done fairly simply on the data front. But UI on mobile devices is a good challenge to put it mildly.

Two favourite related moans of mine is the state of Nokia support, when they remain 50% of the smartphone game and are if anything still popular in the EU, for fresh sales, let alone installed base . . and the limits of active sync, which is often as not the best way to get email up for Nokia and Apple. I probably need to delve deeper into active sync to discover what really can be done with it, but i guess i'm looking at a oh so inspiring compatibility matrix if i use a non MS sync server.

If you want cheap during startup, mind, and don't have serious adversion to MS product, BizSpark is the best dev programme and you get a comprehensive license set for three years. Sure, it's no panacea, but i think their archittecture documentation is pretty intelligable and provided you want to hook in big name PBXs that would be a serious boon to my view.

Since a lot of what i do with contacts tickets and customer data is grunt style data monging, at least you can price a .net dev reliably. Check out LINQ, because it makes for handy glue if that's your environment. Some guys are doing or protoyping "stream" and "real time" BI with LINQ, certainly in some banks. It's not complete or fully mature by some views, but the project i'm looking at this year involved funnelling a lot of context data into priorities for contact follow ups, both externally and internally stimulated. I'd have gone hook line and sinker for this route already if MS would only talk straight as to whether their mobile handset voip integration will ever come to non MS handsets, which they keep hinting at but not delivering.

I do keep digressing, but i want pbx integration with screen pops available on a tab. Sybase Anywhere is designed to deal with this. OnRelay, a rare Brit company doing good things with SipExec has a partial solution. But it looks like a lot of work from where i'm standing, and my work lives or dies on customer inquiry handling with a big voice dependancy.To my rather simplified mind, i should not have to manually pass the context of a contact or resolution call all the time. This is specific to cell calls. Why does one have to juggle reading a screen, or finding an email thread, when to concentrate on actually speaking to someone, i need to defocus visually and actually pay full attention to what they're saying?

TL;DR version is there probably is a market for new product, but you've not exactly defined it, and for such a product to be truly useful it'd need to play nice with a big range of site installs, hardware (phones e.g. land and cell) and software, and it would be no use to me if the UI wasn't first rate.

final note: this is a very mature market in terms of contituent parts, but having so many failed products, so far as i see it (never yet seen a install at any price which approached comprehensive and simple interface or sub year install times) so you have some pretty big barriers to entry. Kind of project i'd love to do if i had substantial capital to bootstrap and a really caring dev / human factors team. Not something i'd like to do in a VC funded environment, because i am suspicious that product like these are not suitable for release early release often models, and that there could be a good deal of customer business domain specific knowlege required to be implemented first to make such a thing installable in a reasonable time. I'm still surprised how little use colleagues make of their high end cells, even though they're congnisant and if not geek, but very savvy, because somehow it never hangs together well when using under time pressure. Another hurdle is Nokia. You can cobble together anything Blackberry does with any recent Symbian phone, and you can write much more interesting things to that stack, but Nokia seem to go out of their way to hide the possibility. A chat i had with their PR reps in the UK was fascinating - no-one even knew of the capabilities, or that a big network operator in the UK thinks it's ok to blame the handset equipment for problems caused by their proxy servers, in writing no less . . . i figure if i attempted a well integrated system, i'd sure want it to work on that installed base as well as Apple.

Guess i feel strongly about this, so hope what i've said, if not actually helpful, is thought provoking in one way or another. I'd be interested in anyone whose encountered these problems generally and tried to write solutions, as there's ambition at my company to get serious about our systems in this aspect.

kind regards & good luck with your search!

Whoa, i just checked your profile and you work / founded a business in a legal services field.

Not being funny, but i' surprised you're asking HN.

Sorry, to clarify, OHIM fees aren't that bad, but you do have to get a translator because you need 2 EU languages, say Eng / French, and again all that local service address stuff, and if you're a US Corp, registering your corp as trading in the EU, somewhere, someplace, and filing even blank tax returns.

What you really need is an Uncle of a friend who's in this business, and tel lthem you'll f=do the donkey work, but can you use their office and beg tricky questions. Network it. Be prepared for some of the snottiest put-downs though :)

That said, DO IT THE HARD WAY YOU'LL LEARN A F'N TON about business!

Wow! You want to do US + EU!??

So, you're in the many $K in filing fees just to go via OHIM - Office Harmonization Interior Market, to get a EU - wide "passport", and a 1.5yr plus min time to registration, permitting zero challenges, which can be technical from the office, or from watchful competitors. "Watchful competitors" include big corps caring for the penumbra their rights cast.

So: nothing cheap.

If you have a VERY CLEAN application, which means you've thought this out a long while first and read up good, ATTORNEY FEES WILL BE THE SMALLEST COST FOR WHAT YOU ASK

Sorry for all the caps, but you see, you can negotiate simplified atorney fees - you don't want to miss on a minimum response time to a fill-in form question, do you, and you do want a service address for all this etc?

Where attorney fees are a big thing is where you've no clue as to the suitability of your trademark or the areas of business you wish to enter into of might apply that mark to. Then, it gets silly. Or alternatively, cheap only if you plan to scale past a little startup.

Oh, yeah, you do realize you have to actually DO business on record in these jurisdictions to keep your marks, and also to keep marks you have to protect them by fighting infringment no matter how silly, or you vacate your claim, don't you?

Basically, you asked about a commitment amount of money, maybe wondering if it's like registering a domain, which conveys zero rights (See Zappa decision for the very latest in a long list of stupid loosers).