For a look at the site, interface, features, etc. of Basecamp®, visit BaseCampHQ.com

If you work with CMS software, you will quickly be deconstructing the site and thinking how you could easily rebuild it with a forum, comment section, calendar, etc. That in itself is the main part of the story of Basecamp®. The web design firm who built the site, 37 Signals, launched it in 2004 – right at the time when a huge turnover and change in web development was occurring. In a sense, they capitalized upon the CMS and the outsourcing trends at a time of perfect conjunction with Web 2.0 economic expansion – and Basecamp® became one of the web’s biggest success stories and hottest properties. But Basecamp® also influenced the development of other CMS platforms, helping them evolve into the form we know now. In the process, they also gave birth to the open source web framework Ruby on Rails.

Thus, if tracing the evolutionary lineages of CMS software backwards to the “game changing” and decisive moments of industry beginnings, the launch & expansion of Basecamp® and Ruby on Rails are really important. Even more so is the huge client and user base that 37 Signals generated with the site. Taking a look at their “buzz” page, you can see a long list of corporate clients (http://www.basecamphq.com/buzz) and featured articles in almost every mainstream media business publication.

The traffic statistics for Basecamp® are less important than the amount of market share they have in the outsourcing and corporate project management sectors. According to Alexa, the site only ranks at around 33,000 for total internet traffic on average over the last 3 months, but spiked this week to rank around 8,000 globally. Nearly 46% of the users are from the USA and 12% from India, confirming the outsourcing trend. But considering over 90% of Basecamp users are likely developers and programmers, clients and managers, and that demographic represents less than 5% of all web users, the company has massive saturation in an essential market.

In fact, Basecamp® is becoming so ubiquitous that its name has become like Gmail, mySpace, or Facebook – widely recognized and understood, pointing to and referencing its own services. Combined with its directorship of the Ruby on Rails project, the privately held 37 Signals is looking at a huge valuation and possible takeover bid. For example, in this blog post from 2006 voodoo ventures (http://www.voodooventures.com/2006/11/27/basecamp-vs-dropsend-valuation-smackdown/) estimates the value of the company at $48 million. More recently, altgate predicts Microsoft will buy 37Signals this year at a price between $80 million (10x projected income of $8 million annually) and $300 million (hot web real estate price).

“37signals has several other products, but Basecamp accounts for about 60% of their projected $8 million in 2008 revenue. By the way, my friend Jed Christensen has a killer blog post on 37signal’s financials where he walks you through how he reverse engineered their numbers. If Jed’s numbers are right, 37signals is a cash machine (with only 12 employees and annual costs of $2 million before taxes and $6 million of EBITDA). A company that produces those kinds of numbers is certainly going to attract M&A attention even in a depressed market.”

“37signals also has a great business model. They’re considered the ‘gold standard’ for the freemium model where you give away basic service and charge for enhanced features. Their free trial and $24 per month basic service level make it very enticing to try out. This is exactly what’s killing Microsoft Project specifically and Microsoft’s application business generally. The low price also keeps them from getting the axe when budget cuts come.”

“Finally, the good folks at 37signals are true visionaries and not just on the technology or business front but in terms of building great organizations too. I haven’t met founder Jason Fried but reading interviews and stories about him, he’s clearly the real deal. And they didn’t just create a great company they also spun off their technology into an open source framework (Ruby on Rails) and refined a new form of development termed ‘Getting Real.’ Think about that for a minute. Here’s a company that is doing amazing things and they also had the time to create the dominant web 2.0 development framework and write a book. Yes, they’re a small team, but that too is a testament to their talent.”

(http://www.altgate.com/blog/2008/12/microsoft-buys-37signals-for-200-million.html)

According to Wikipedia:

37signals promotes an internally-developed Agile software development methodology and philosophy called ‘Getting Real’. Getting Real eschews formal programming methodology and focuses on creating useful alpha software with small teams, then iterating to a simple useful application based, in part, on real-world customer feedback. The company initially expanded without venture capital and advocated the ‘self-funded startup’ approach, although it has since taken investment from Jeff Bezos.

37signals has held seminars about their methods in Chicago and other U.S. cities. The philosophy recommends online advertising (particularly via blogs) rather than standard methods. The company uses Apple computers exclusively and has said it would ‘never hire someone who doesn’t use a Mac’.

Since 37Signals clearly has an anti-Microsoft bias, I disagree with altgate’s prediction of a Microsoft takeover, but do think that as the company has already taken investment from Amazon, there may be a chance of a takeover coming from that direction. Clearly Basecamp® is established with huge popularity and adoption across the Fortune 5,000 companies, and is a perfect match to the scaled use model of the Amazon cloud. The BasecampHQ homepage is featuring a Safari screenshot, and the popularity of Basecamp in the developer community makes it attractive to a company like Apple that pride’s itself on being the preferred choice of design professionals. Apple also has a close relationship with Ruby on Rails development and may find ownership of a popular, fast-growing, open source web framework like RoR attractive.

Oracle’s Telepresence seems to challenge Basecamp® indirectly by offering a more expansive option of video-phone communications. Since Basecamp® already has add-on features that include chat and time tracking applications, it is possible that the company will introduce this as another paid option for Basecamp® subscribers at sometime in the future, creating another profitable revenue stream. I think Basecamp® has hit a key point of new market creation, establishment, and dominance and will be bought up this year from some direction, but the site will continue to become more popular with clients and developers for managing outsourced, international web and software development projects.

This is a post from Web Dev News, a site brought to you by Xavisys Web Development.

BASECAMP – 37Signals & RoR one of Web 2.0′s Best Start-up Businesses

Before

After

The instructions from the Vector Magic website:

Using Vector Magic is super-simple:

• Upload your image
• Answer 2 to 3 questions in the user-friendly vectorization wizard, thereby picking the vectorization settings
• Vectorize the image
• Download the result! You can even review the result in detail online before downloading it

The site gives you three choices as to how the image is processed. The first is as a photo, with complex shapes, patterns, textures, and shading. These are typically converted for some type of artistic or stylish effect, and lack the “sharp corner” effect of the other processing methods. I used the photo setting to process the images displayed above, and the bitmap was perfectly rendered, in high definition and without any data loss or distortion whatsoever. Vector Magic offers an additional two settings for logos that include blending (nice curves) or without blending (jagged edges) which I did not use at the time.

The Vector Magic interface can be seen below:

Vector Magic Interface

Basically, I did not need to adjust any of the default settings to get the image effect I was looking for, and even though the upload connection was slow, it was just a few minutes through the whole process and I was downloading the vector traced .png of the photograph to re-import into Photoshop.

I repeated the process with the image below:

Before

After

The images above are scaled down from the larger originals I used for processing with Vector Magic, and possibly the animated-style or effects are less evident with smaller images. Nevertheless, as the final image below shows, the photographs cleanly transferred into vector-based line drawings with a unique look and feel very different from the original. While this may not be desirable or needed for every image on a site, when you require an application that transfers photos to vector images, Vector Magic does it simply, easily, and free of cost, making it a great addition to your set of graphic design tools.

Final Image

For More Information, visit the Vector Magic Website.

This is a post from Web Dev News, a site brought to you by Xavisys Web Development.

Vector Magic – Online Conversion of Bitmaps to Vector Images