If you’re a fan of communication, this is a great time to be alive. Between Twitter and Facebook and texting and email and blogs and old-fashioned phone calls, it’s nearly impossible not to be in touch with others.

We love all that stuff, sometimes it can be too much of a good thing. Cliché? Maybe, but also true. We’ve decided to consolidate our feeds, so from now on, here’s where you can find us:

• Follow us on Twitter: @cloudmanic
• Like us on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/cloudmanic
• Read us on our blog: http://cloudmanic.com/blog

In the near future, you’ll also be able to stay in touch with us via our redesigned website.

Why the change? Mainly, to make things easier – for us and for you. 

As we were putting some of the finishing touches on our newest product, we realized we’re trying to communicate on too many channels. We had different accounts for different products, and it was starting to take up a lot of our time to keep up. More importantly, we thought our customers probably had a hard time figuring out the best way to interact with us, too.

When it came to communication feeds, we weren’t being simple or efficient. Which is to say, we weren’t being true to ourselves.

Things feel better now. So please, drop us a line/post/tweet. We may have fewer accounts, but we’re still easy to find, and ready to listen – no matter how you chose to get in touch.

I am writing this post after making the decision to kill months of hard work around adding invoicing to Skyclerk. We have decided to scrap everything and start over as the road we were driving down showed not to be the right path. We almost made the decision to finish up what we were working on, launch it, and then make it better over time. Iterative software development is a notion we grasp onto and practice, but then again, our first release should be something we are at least proud of.

The problem is we made a big mistake. We have been telling customers for months invoicing was coming soon. By opening our big mouths and not delivering we are letting our customers down. For that we are sorry!

Keep Our Big Mouth Shut

Last year we made some big mistakes. We exposed our product roadmap with timeframes of when we thought we were going to have things done. This included our mobile apps, invoicing in Skyclerk, and more. Then we were stuck between delivering on our commitments to our customers and building the best darn product we could. I am afraid the product suffered because of the added stress of hitting targets we announced. If we just kept our mouth shut we would have had the freedom to take the time it needs to release when we knew we were ready, not when we felt we had to get something out of the door.

Transparency

We like to be a transparent company. We like to talk to customers about what we are doing and where we are heading, but more importantly we like to build impressive products and features. We feel we can serve our customers better by delivering something that is “freaking amazing” than giving them an outlook into where we are heading.

I am afraid as of today we will no longer publicly give insights into where we are heading. We will have to keep our product roadmap private. Please disregard any timeframes or roadmap announcements we have made in the past.

Please don’t be afraid to send us your thoughts and comments. While we may no longer respond with “great idea we will start working on it”, we do listen to all our customers, and use as much feedback as we can when building our products and features.

And rest assured, because we do not brag about working on what is important for you, it does not mean we are not doing exactly that.

Exciting news: We just launched Grapeshare, new social network that lets you share the wine you love with friends.

At Cloudmanic, we like wine. For years, the team has talked about wine, discovering new wine, keeping track of wines we have enjoyed, and how there needed to be a better way to share wine with friends. We looked at different wine apps, but there was no elegant tool for what they wanted. We wanted something easier and beautiful. And something that we could use to not only track wines, but discover new ones. Discover people who are like us and like the grapes we like.

So naturally, we decided to take matters into their own hands. The result is Grapeshare, a new social network for oenophiles that lets you share the wine you love with friends. You can record and rate wines, upload label photos, make connections and get recommendations.

If this venture seems a bit different from our other work, it is – and it isn’t. See, Cloudmanic Labs believes in the power of creativity. Every week, we take a little time off from our regular projects to work on other things—or to just brainstorm about what the world needs. At the very least, we have stimulating conversations. Grapeshare is one of those “other” projects. Like all of the things we do, Grapeshare was sparked by passion, and it continues to be fueled by hard work.

It’s great to be able to share that passion with the rest of the world. To get started with Grapeshare, go to the website and sign up with your Twitter, Facebook, or Google account. You can also follow us on Twitter (@grapeshare) and like us on Facebook. Check out our blog for wine tips and stories, and to keep updated on new features.

It’s been busy around here lately. We’ve been neck-deep in work, building products and improving features. As a result, Skyclerk is looking pretty good (see for yourself). But another result is this blog has been a little quiet.

That’s about to change, though, in a big-time way. Here’s a question: Do you like fun stuff? Good! We’re fans of fun stuff ourselves. We’d like to have some fun right here on this very blog. As of, oh, rightnow, we’re moving our product-centric blog away from this space. In its place, we want to bring you fun stuff. Cool stuff (like that photo below). Stuff that catches our eye and makes us want to tell the nearest person, “Have you seen this?” Stuff that we do and think.

We’re going to let our team loose to blog about the things that interest them. Given that we’re a bunch of interesting, interested people (at least we like to think so), the new posts should reflect that. It’s inevitable that at least some of the posts will be related business, accounting, web, etc. After all, that’s what we know, what we live and breathe. But part of spending so much time online means we consume a lot of information. Being human, we think about the information. Being humans with the ability to easily, instantly communicate with other humans, we often want to share that information with you – whether it’s silly or newsworthy, geeky or awe-inspiring.

Why are we doing this? Easy: Because after all, you’re interesting, interested people, and we want to give you things you like – the things outside of business, money and efficiency. We’re hoping you’ll share the stuff you like with us, too.

So stay tuned. Check back. Add us to your RSS feed and follow us on Twitter. Then get ready for the fun.

We have moved away from Wordpress for our blog and have started to use ExpressionEngine as our content management system for the entire site (including the blog).

Our new blog is located at http://cloudmanic.com/blog

We made the decision not to port over our old blog because we have new plans for this blog. Take a look at: http://cloudmanic.com/blog/blog-shaking-news

You can still referance our old blog at: http://blog.cloudmanic.com