When Publicity Works Against You
Scoble linked off to Blogwerx' new plagiarism detector today which is awsome publicity for them and in most situations would be a sensational boost to a new or newish product. Unfortunately for Blogwerx, their system is completely non-functional, not even the help button does anything. Nor does the all important, money making upgrade button. There's simply no excuse for releasing software that is this badly broken to the world.
I just hope they didn't pay out the $30000 to speak at Demo or if I were an investor I'd be seriously annoyed at them wasting that much money without having a product ready to actually sell. It sounds like the CEO may have just sidled up to Scoble without paying to do a demo so they may be lucky.
The best I can hope for them is that it only works in IE and thus the problems are just because I'm using Firefox. I've got to assume that Scoble at least saw a brief demo of it doing something or tried it out himself. Besides which, I find it hard to believe that anyone would manage to release an entire product that does absolutely nothing at all.
The company has lost a lot of customers today – I certainly won't bother with them in future as I can't have any confidence that they'll get it right. I'd be feeling pretty bad about myself if I were involved in that company right now.
February 3rd, 2007 at 11:25 pm
Adrian,
Thank you for sharing your insight about Sentinel and it’s short comings. The basic core of Sentinel is fully functional its the bells and whistles that are not all there. Was it the best case scenario, not by any means. We understand that and are working as quickly as possible to get the list of things ironed out.
It was my fault that I didn’t mention as well as place on the site that by registering it was the basic free version with almost no bells and whistles.
With a small shop of 3 and getting ready for Demo, some things fell through the cracks and we have to address the issues ASAP. Dont write us off totally as of yet.
Tony Moura
February 4th, 2007 at 6:33 am
Tony,
This isn’t bells and whistles, this is the actual, entire user interface right down to simple stuff like the refresh page link not doing anything. Heck, even clicking on the ad doesn’t take you anywhere! I can appreciate being a small company is hard but this is just plain non-functional and never should have been released.
February 8th, 2007 at 1:35 am
[...] spam bloggers. However, most were concerned with how incomplete the interface was, including being riddled with broken links and other problems that prevent the site from working [...]