The OpenWater Blog

Introducing OpenWater Weekly: A Business Growth Conversation

Welcome to the inaugural installation of OpenWater Weekly, a conversation about business growth and contemporary events with Tim Spell and Kunal Johar, by Katie McCaskey.

Kunal’s business updates

NEW DEVELOPER. Welcome to Daniel, our newest developer. Daniel will be working on 1-2 day integrations to start. He’ll be training with a client that utilizes several common integrations (single sign on, field pre-population and push back).

NET NEUTRALITY STRIKES? One of our entertainment clients, the Peabody Awards, uploaded a record amount of video to OpenWater’s platform this year for their annual awards. Peabody discovered a slowing of video uploads and longer than usual upload times.

This is a real life example of the effects on net neutrality and how internet pipes work at large. Kunal ran several tests and determined the root cause, in this case, was two-fold. The first: more Peabody uploads were happening on private versus corporate networks than in previous years. (Private wifi networks are by default slower than corporate networks.) The second: there are few “big” pipes that route all of the internet’s traffic. This gives these biggest players the ability to route traffic packets as desired, favoring some traffic over others.

To compensate many corporate players, like Dropbox, are forming “content ingestion networks” to group larger amounts of traffic and get better priority standing. OpenWater is investigating implementing one of these networks to protect against throttling.

NEED FOR SPEED. On that note OpenWater implemented smart routing across all of our accounts. This means faster speeds and lower latency for all customers, especially our overseas customers.

TABLE THAT. By popular request OpenWater is rolling out a new release that improves table fields. This is a usability upgrade will save you time inserting table data and will be easier on the eyes, too. We are also working on an overall new look-and-feel for the software.

Tim’s business updates

COMPANY CULTURE. As we look into the future it’s important to think about and reinforce OpenWater’s culture. The core focus of our company is happiness and accountability. We believe that in order to sustain long term company growth, keep our team together, and ensure continued recruitment of top-notch talent, we need to have an environment we all like to go every day. We believe that OpenWater should be a place where everyone has the opportunity to grow and develop individually. We believe that health should never be sacrificed over work.

BRAND EXPANSION. Our clients are using the OpenWater platform for many creative uses. Our most active clients use OpenWater for all of their Grants, Fellowships, Call for Papers, Scholarships, Awards and Board Nominations (and even more!).

While the Awards feature remains a priority, we will be unleashing a new website in the coming weeks. It will showcase the fact that OpenWater is a true all-in-one system to manage any application and review process.

RAISING FUNDS – OpenWater Public Equity Token Sale?
As we approach $5MM in annual revenue at OpenWater, we’ve been approached by growth equity funds to invest in our company and facilitate expansion. We have ambitious development plans; the idea of raising money to facilitate brand expansion is appealing. While outside equity is something we are strongly considering, we are also monitoring the progression of a concept called “Security Token Offerings,” or STO. An STO would enable us to sell shares of OpenWater directly to interested investors/individuals online.

At a high level, we could potentially take the shares of OpenWater Software, Inc (currently 100% privately owned with no outside funding) and put them on the blockchain and open it up to investors worldwide. People who buy shares online would officially become shareholders of OpenWater. Token owners would receive any distributions and voting rights associated with ownership.

We at OpenWater see a future, not far in the distance, that allows for this type of concept to exist. We are excited by the possibility of being pioneers in the space.

We will keep everyone up to date about the progression and potential legal implications of this matter as it matures.

CLIENT FEEDBACK
All features in our software have been created based on the needs and feedback of our customers. We value your ideas and will lean on your feedback even more as we expand into more areas. Have a comment or want to let us know what you think about this? Email info at getopenwater.com.

Katie McCaskey

Katie is OpenWater's Content Director. Her interests include entrepreneurship, permaculture, and blockchain. She enjoys spicy food and salty words.

OpenWater Weekly: Dogs! Dogs! Dogs!

Learning Series: Staffing a Gala