Camiloo Limited

Our plans for Year Three

It seems like only yesterday that we opened up Camiloo, but this week marked the end of the second year we’ve been in business. Starting in 2009 with a 4 day per week retainer contract for one client and one day spare for other work, we’ve steadily grown Camiloo into a globally facing small business with 323 customers worldwide.

The past year has been far bigger than we could have imagined, and our accounts show a 120% increase in revenue year on year.

We are continually improving everything that we do. From releasing updates to our software, to purchasing or evaluating better support and helpdesk suites. Support is something we take very strongly.

Recently, we ran a week long test into being open USA friendly opening hours, with our office opening at 1pm and closing at 10pm.
We learnt valuable lessons from this trial, as our US customers preferred to contact us via email or twitter rather than directly calling, therefore negating the benefit of time shifting our hours.

Therefore we invested in moving our support area onto a new enterprise-grade system. We’ll be expanding our usage of this system in the coming months with live chat facilities to better improve our responsiveness to you. We’re also in the process of setting up freephone numbers in France, Germany and the UK. Additionally, we plan to recruit at least 6 dedicated support agents as ChannelUnity establishes itself as the go-to solution for Channel Integrations into Magento and the wider eCommerce software arena. Its our goal to have a least 2 dedicated support staff on-site between 9am and 9pm UK time Monday to Friday by September 2011, contactable via support ticket, phone call or live chat.

One thing we hope to achieve over the next 12 months is a greater level of business focus. As ChannelUnity begins to open up onto the marketplaces served by our current premium modules for Magento, we will remove these premium modules from sale, continuing support for 6 months and providing upgrade incentives to our existing customers. Our lower cost Magento modules – Easy Stock Uploader and The Kit Creator will be released as open source free modules with no support guarantee made.

We’ll then be re-positioning Camiloo itself (as in camiloo.co.uk) as a SaaS, Mobile and Desktop Application Development company. Behind the scenes over the last 12 months we’ve produced 5 mobile applications for clients, and we have spent more than 8 months working on one top-secret mobile application for a client.

Core to these applications has been our fledgling ‘Project Steeple’ framework, which is designed to allow very easy and intuitive iPhone app development with a web based, cached content management system as its backend. Its our goal to open Project Steeple up to other agencies and developers.

So we will then have ChannelUnity – a SaaS application for Merchant integrations, and Camiloo – an application development business. Applications need reliable hosting, and this is where CamilooHost, our dedicated hosting brand will be targeted. Whether you’re launching an eCommerce store or launching a SaaS application of your own, CamilooHost can provide for this. We’ll be detailing our offering later this year as it launches, but we have 5 clients happily up and running on our servers without issue and are confident of their power.

We’ll be relaunching CamilooTalk as a developer API for telephone communication later in the year – this is very secretive at the moment but could prove revolutionary.

And finally, we have our SMS messaging service textCommerce. This recently sent its 1000th message, and we’re seeing new customers download the free Magento module every week. But we know there is potential for much more with this service, and to this end we’ll be launching applications for mobile and desktop which will use the service in new and exciting ways. We’re hoping to reach 10,000 messages sent by September 2011.

With that, its time for us to climb back into our development tools and get coding once more.
Here’s to another successful year.

Mark Newby
Managing Director
Camiloo Limited

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