Each year there is a competition for open source related business plans sponsored by the Open Source Business Foundation. The cash prizes totalling €75,000 are awarded at the Open Source Meets Business conference held each winter in Nuremberg, Germany. This year, two InitMarketing customers won prizes, with OXID eSales sharing the first prize (€32,500) and todoyu winning third prize (€10,000).
todoyu was developed by snowflake productions, a Zürich-based services company specializing in the open source licensed TYPO3 content management system. todoyu is a web-based system for project management, time tracking, and billing specifically tailored to the needs of small-to-medium sized service agencies (e.g. lawyers, engineers and architects, services, advertising and PR agencies). It improves billing accuracy and timeliness, saving companies time and money. todoyu was conceived out of snowflake productions own needs and experience over the years.
todoyu is focused on project managers with small-to-medium sized teams who are still active participants in delivering value to their customer — they do not want to be spending a lot of time and energy on project administration and billing. As such, they do not need expensive complex software to learn and manage — they need an easy-to-use solution with no installation or upgrade headaches that they can easily expense. They need a way to quickly and automatically bill their client without resorting to other systems or complex error-prone transfer processes.
todoyu stacks up well against competitive offerings (e.g. Basecamp, Projity, ZOHO Projects) in the SaaS space and offers unique advantages. It will be offered as a subscription (Basic and Premium) and a complementing set of services that fit the historical expertise of snowflake productions. I worked with the snowflake management team to develop their todoyu business plan in November in time for the competition submission.
The todoyu site is up and running an extended beta program presently (auf Deutsch). The English release of todoyu is planned for Spring 2009.
Disclaimer: I work with InitMarketing from time to time, and I worked with the snowflake management team to develop their todoyu business plan.
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