The Interactive Ideas Blog

Customer Increase of 315% accompanies record sales year.

Portland, OR, January 19, 2010 — Site9, Inc., developer of the web-based, collaborative prototyping software, ProtoShare, today announced a record revenue increase for ProtoShare in 2009. Sales were up 990% from 2008.

The privately held software company also grew its customer base for ProtoShare SaaS by over 315%. Sold both through its website on a subscription basis and with a direct sales force, the software was adopted and implemented by a record number of enterprise customers in 2009. ProtoShare also saw significant growth in subscription accounts adding new users.

“We are delighted that the industry is embracing the value proposition of collaborative prototyping,” said Site9 CEO and co-founder Andrew Mottaz. “When you dramatically improve communication and understanding between team members and stakeholders, and can translate that into changes early in the process, the ROI of ProtoShare quickly becomes clear.”

Last year, leading interactive agencies and Fortune 500 companies Disney, 3M, Motorola, Sony, Razorfish, OgilvyInteractive Worldwide, McCann Worldgroup, Abbott, NBC, and Deloitte adopted ProtoShare to reduce rework, cost, and time on their interactive projects.

“We’re very happy with the numbers for 2009,” said VP Marketing and co-founder Blake D. Johnson. “ProtoShare is the fastest growing requirements visualization solution on the market for a reason. It provides incredible value.”

About Site9, Inc.
Founded in 1999, Site9, Inc. is the developer of ProtoShare. Fortune 500 companies, leading interactive agencies, and web developers in over 84 countries around the world use ProtoShare’s collaborative prototyping to deliver better products while cutting time and costs. No software required.

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According to O’Reilly Media’s  Inside RIA, ProtoShare is among the ranks of Google Maps, Mint, Quicken Online, Mini Cars, and others as the one of the Top 50 Most Usable RIAs (Rich Internet Applications). We are quite proud of our selection, especially considering that ProtoShare was not designed in Flash, Flex,  or Silverlight, but rather uses HTML, Javascript, and CSS to create interactive prototypes with real-time collaboration.

Theresa Neil and Bill Scott, authors of the book, Designing Web Interfaces: Principles and Patterns for Rich Interactions, made the selections. Each RIA had to pass two sets of criteria.

First, does it abide by Jakob Nielsen’s 10 Usability Principles?

1. Visibility of system status
2. Match between system and the real world
3. User control and freedom
4. Consistency and standards
5. Error prevention
6. Recognition rather than recall
7. Flexibility and efficiency of use
8. Aesthetic and minimalist design
9. Help users recognize, diagnose, and recover from errors
10. Help and documentation

Second, was it developed with six basic principles guiding RIA development?

1. Make It Direct
2. Keep It Lightweight
3. Stay on the Page
4. Provide an Invitation
5. Use Transitions
6. React Immediately

With your feedback and suggestions, we continue to keep improving the interface, functionality, usability, and value of of ProtoShare. Stay tuned for some exciting new features coming this fall.

Peter Uchytil, Andrew Kellam, Andrew Mottaz, and Josh Chaney at the ProtoShare booth.

We’ve been so busy since coming back from the Web 2.0 Expo San Francisco, that we haven’t had time to post an update. The event went really well: we met many interesting and intelligent people, generated some very good leads, and demoed the new features and benefits of ProtoShare 3.0 to hundreds of people. We also engaged in some good discussions about Canvas, HTML 5, the web as a development platform, and the future of collaboration. There are many exciting, and useful, technologies on the horizon that will make it into ProtoShare.

Not surprisingly, the Expo also had many presentations and discussions on mobile development and design, with particular emphasis on the iPhone. And if there was any debate, we saw even more evidence supporting the transition of Enterprise players into cloud computing and SaaS applications.

Bill Cullifer, of the Web Buyer’s Guide, has a short interview at Web 2.0 Expo with Site9 Co-Founder Blake Johnson.

ProtoShare 3.0 Announcement in Times Square, NYC

Director Business Development, Andrew Kellam, discussing ProtoShare.

Site9 CEO, Andrew Mottaz, and Director Sales, Josh Chaney, meet with a customer.

Simply-Communicate.com is a UK based website that is passionate about improving internal corporate communications. Their correspondents travel around the world visiting the major conferences on communications and employee engagement. They seek out the latest thinking and case studies that deliver real practical benefits to the large organizations, and share it all online with their community.

We had the pleasure of meeting with Simply Communicate’s Kelly Kass at this year’s Web 2.0 NYC conference. From the many Web 2.0 tools at the expo, Kelly decided to highlight ProtoShare because of its ability to improve a company’s communication and productivity when working on interactive and creative projects.

“There are always changes galore with every Producer and Creative Director wanting to weigh on the content and direction of a piece. Even more challenging is trying to schedule a team meeting to discuss the project; rather than juggling dates in people’s diaries, anyone can simply log on to ProtoShare to look at their prototypes when their schedule permits,” she writes.

“No need to sit in a conference room going back and forth when you can easily post your comments onto the site. For someone who dislikes meetings, that’s a really big appeal for this Global Editor, not to mention lessening the need to email my remarks. Conversations can occur within ProtoShare as a centralized point of communication and my inbox can remain emptier. In these days of information overload, you gotta love that.”

Check out the whole post and watch her video interview with co-founders Andrew Mottaz and Blake Johnson, and SVP, Sales & Marketing Peter Weiss.

Image used courtesy of James Duncan Davidson.

In one of our first posts here at the Interactive Ideas blog, we mentioned seeing best-selling author and collaboration guru Don Tapscott deliver an exciting and insightful presentation on the power of web-based collaboration at Portland’s Innotech conference.

His mantra that “mass collaboration changes everything” really resonates with us because ProtoShare was developed with the philosophy of improving and enabling team collaboration. Wikinomics, Tapscott’s latest book, has received accolades from many luminaries of the tech world, including Google CEO Eric Schmidt who said of it, “Wikinomics heralds the biggest change in collaboration to date. Thanks to the Internet, masses of people outside the boundaries of traditional hierarchies can innovate to produce content, goods and services.”

Thus, it’s quite an honor to have our collaborative web development tool featured and discussed on the Wikinomics blog, where there is also an interview with Site9 (developer of ProtoShare) founders Andrew Mottaz and Blake Johnson.

“ProtoShare opens the process up to other stakeholders, such as the marketing team, allowing them to follow the project’s progress over time, and provide timely and effective feedback to developers, “ writes Wikinomics team member Will Dick. “By improving communication and collaboration within the project team, and between them and their clients, ProtoShare has the potential to revolutionize the process of web design.”

Read the interview and explore more on “the cutting edge of mass collaboration” at Wikinomics.com