The PDF2XL Birthday greetings contest is over and we have a winner!

In the past month, we celebrated the 5th birthday of PDF2XL – Cogniview’s flagship product. As part of the celebration, we invited you (our blog readers and customers) to leave a birthday greeting on the blog.

We also promised that the authors of the 10 best greetings will receive a $20 Amazon gift card. And that the two best greeters will win a Kindle 3G Wireless Reading Device. Well the party is over and it’s time to give out the prizes…

But before I reveal the winners, I’d like to say that we were really moved by your reaction. I’ve personally read the 170+ greeting several times, some of the greetings you left made me laugh and some were so exciting, they made me tear up a bit.

I’d like to thank you for letting us know that we make a real difference in your lives. It means a lot to me and the rest of the team here at Cogniview.

And now to the winners – the 1st place goes to…

Frank Kotulak said…

I was so happy to hear of your good fortunes, your longevity and your excellent product which we use daily.

I had worked for the County less than a month when I was given a 3 year old problem of transcribing state data that came in PDF form to usable information. Attempts had been made to duplicate the programming process with no success and it took 1 months of manpower to transcribe everything manually.

Rather than the programming approach I decided to look for and of course find a screen-scraping utility such as PDF2XL that could accurately and reliably transform PDF data into an Excel spreadsheet. PDF2XL did (and continues to do) the trick!

The work savings time for what was an intractable, unsolvable 3 year problem went from one month to one hour.

For my effort and good fortune to find your product, I was given a county based “make a difference” award because of it and no employee had ever received such an award after one months of employment!

So I say hear, hear! to your 5 year birthday and a great product! May you have a 10 year birthday celebration!

Javier Cobis said…

I am really convinced that one must find tools that reduce repetitive and boring activities in order to really focus on those important ones. Mankind has always tried to do so by many ways. Most machines invented have been created precisely because of this: printing revolution is a good example. Instead of worrying about making copies of the same book again and again… it permitted, on the other hand, to worry about creating new ideas, new books, and as a consequence, progress accelerated, as well less pain and healthier lives were possible, most of the time.

To me, this program has made things easier. Before knowing about it, I was thinking about how to extract a lot of very important digitalized data and I thought it would take too much time to do it in a practical way…..Can you imagine typing a huge overwhelming torrent of data sheet by sheet everyday for, as least, approximately, one year?. At that moment, I promptly started to find out a better way to do so, until…I found PDF2XL.

That day I was very impressed that the solution for that problem really existed, and for the first time I was convinced that I could accomplished my mission: an academic goal I had started to pursue at that time. Otherwise, it would have been almost impossible to do that without changing the subject of the investigation. It was a lot of data”asking” for somebody to understand them and about to say something to people.

Well, as a result of all that, I truly express my gratitude to PDF2XL for contributing to make life easier, minimizing those activities really repetitive and boring through a great, well-conceived program it really is, and even better people behind it: no many providers offer a really good, genuine care to customers and attention to details like Cogniview always does.

Thank you very much, Congratulations and Happy Birthday PDF2XL!

JCR

Second place winners – $20 Amazon Gift card…

David said…

Congratulations on your 5th anniversary! You have made my life easier and you deserve all the best. I hope you like the picture: http://kcy.me/el5

David Sanz, Account dpt. Barcelona, Spain

Steve Wells said…

No fancy thoughts here.  Just a simple testament.  I had PDFs containing data on literally millions of feet of drilling from a couple of gold mines in Canada.  I desperately needed to do detailed analysis on that data.  I needed to bring it into a SQL Server database in order to do that but doing it manually was simply not feasible.

Your product PDF2XL made that project possible and indeed not too difficult at all.  The data import was done and the analysis made me a good bit of money as it allowed me to invest in a nearby miner with confidence that the nearby miner was hitting grades in their diamond core drilling that were consistent with proven mines next door.

So, your product paid for itself many, many times over.  In effect, you created not just great software but also great economic value.  That’s not easy and it’s a hugely important thing.  Congratulations on a 5 years and here’s wishing you many more.  The money I spent on your product was some of the best invested money ever from my perspective.

David Said…

Wow, how times flies. It felt like it was yesterday that I tried in vain figuring out how to convert a pdf to excel. I tried this product and that product and they all felt out of place, incomplete, or too hard to use, etc. Then as luck would have it, I came across pdf2xl. I was amazed how smooth, fast, easy and very well developed the program was. Productivity wise, it’s a timesaver. Status wise, it amazes others that I can convert pdfs so quickly and accurately. Kudos to the developers for creating such a helpful program. I love it and will continue to support the product and spread the word.

The next evolution for the program would be to create mobile app versions, Android, iPhone, Windows Mobile for those quick on the go situations when a conversion is needed.

Happy 5th Birthday and hope for many more.

Chong P. Yun Said…

Congratulations for you, my Best Relationships……!!!!

Happy 5th birthday! I always try to find an easy solution to all my work problems. and then I found you, I tried it and the rest is history. You just don’t know how much easier my life has been. When your boss thinks you can do magic that’s just great. I just wish I had found you sooner.

Very happier, you make my life very important every day.

Thanks for helping users create data from PDF files.

I was so happy to hear of your good fortunes in the world, your longevity and your excellent product which we use daily.

So I say hear, hear! to your 5 year birthday and a great product! May you have a 10 year birthday celebration!

I think that you are the best friends in providing solutions in my work.

Congratulations on your 5th year!!! once again…….!!!!!!!

Chong P. Yun, Acropolis Appraisal, Real Estate Appraiser, Bellevue, WA

Shawn Setnicky Said …

I’ve said over and over how great of a product PDF2XL is. It’s not easy getting my company to buy things, but once I showed them how much time I save, they were ready to buy.

Among my other conversion jobs, the big one I receive each year is a 400 to 500 page list of about 7000 buyers. They give you the list free, but it’s in PDF format, which I can’t print labels from, and the information is spread across two lines.

One year we spent hours manually retyping the data (not my idea, I just work here). Four people typed for hours. Imagine the cramped fingers and errors that were probably made.

With PDF2XL was able to cut my time down significantly and reduce my error margin to none.

If you add up my hourly pay rate that I’d normally spend doing all this work and then look at the price for PDF2XL, the company is saving thousands of dollars each year.

Thanks! Happy Birthday!… by the way, I forgot to mention in my last message that the place we get our buyer list from DOES make one in Excel format, but they charge you .20 cents a name! That’s roughly $1400 saved right there.

Shawn Setnicky, Sonali Corporation, Administrative Assistant

Shasvat Sharma…

Really ? Only 5 yrs. old ? Honestly, it is rare to see any company create a product that is extremely useful at such a young age. Productivity can be measured in time and money and PDF2XL has saved us both in extreme quantities. We just upgraded and renewed our licenses because we now literally (and figuratively) cannot proceed without including PDF2XL in our project plans. PDF2XL is one of the greatest inventions, and if you see the person who invented the wheel … tell em’, “We said so”. Because we can still get by without a wheel (walk to work), but cannot work without PDF2XL.

Wish you a happy “5th” birthday and extreme success for the future.

Robert Del Riego Said…

I bought your program to deal with a specific client project and it was a life saver. The project completed successfully, and I thought great, that was worth it, now back to normal business. Next I know, another client comes along with a similar problem. Then another. Being a bit slow, I finally came to see just how widely useful this program could be. Now I’m using PDF2XL ALL THE TIME. I’m afraid I’m going to wear it out. I’ve even turned on an associate to it and she loves it. So, happy birthday? Hell yes, Happy Birthday! Glad you were born!

Chistopher Said…

Happy birthday! After reading books and articles saying that no more than 5% of new enterprises survive for more than a year, I know that PDF2XL is a story of success for Cogniview. So, what good points can you draw from that experience?

If you look through the theory, you can say a number of factors: risk analysis, pareto analysis, adequate planning and decision making… But every of this good characteristics remit to a essential factor for success: Good people.

And for them is the greeting in this fifth birthday: Not for the company, not for the sole management, not only for shareholders, but for all of those good people who had their impact in the success story you are living now. Congratulations and continue making our world a better world, not by your products, but by your good being.

Charles Rother Said …

Happy Birthday PDF2XL! Since you have come into to my life, you have brought me joy, happiness and fulfillment. I now can get my work done and still have a life.  Before you came into my life, I spent countless hours manually typing reams of data.  Before you arrived, I searched the whole world for you.  In fact, before I found you, I had several flings with much more expensive, but inferior products proclaiming to do what you do. After trying other products, I conclude nobody does it better than PDF2XL!

After you came into my life, you have helped me so much. In just a few mouse clicks, my hundreds of PDF pages are easily and accurately converted.  PDF2XL, you have saved me $15,000 and approximately 150 hours each year.  Happy Birthday! Thank you for being the best product in the category.

Chris Said…

Your story is an awesome example of how often our first attempts and ideas aren’t the most effective in generating income or growth.  I love how you turned to your customers and asked/saw what they wanted and used that to find a market that would pay for what you could provide instead of just throwing in the towel. I read about another company the other day that just said “well we’ve tried to make money and we just haven’t been successful” – on that blog post a whole bunch of customers were saying well if you would offer a yearly subscription plan we would pay you!  Had they gone to their customers they could have saved their business and years of work.  Nice work, great story, Happy Birthday and if you keep building your business the way you have thus far you’ll have many more birthdays to come!

Thank you all,

Hadar

This month Cogniview is celebrating the 5^th Birthday of PDF2XL – our flagship product.

It’s not that we always had PDF2XL, the truth is that Cogniview started as an Enterprise software company that aimed to sell its Enterprise-Level software products to IT departments in large organizations.

We spent a lot of money on flamboyant marketing campaigns, well-dressed sales people and a variety of other time/money wasters.

After 5 years of struggles that created a huge hole in our bank account, we woke up and realized we had to survive. So we turned to our customers that said…Make us a decent PDF to Excel converter. So we thought – why not, let’s give it a try … and this how PDF2XL was created.

Since then, PDF2XL licenses were bought by more than 20,000 companies in a variety of industries all over the globe.

We are thankful to our customers, our employees, our partners and our blog readers who have contributed their time, energy and resources to help Cogniview achieve so many successes.

So, Let the party begin. And here are the party gifs…

We would be overjoyed if you would consider leaving PDF2XL a birthday greeting on this Blog post. And to make the birthday even more festive, we are also giving $20 Amazon Gift Cards to the authors of the 10 nicest greetings.

And the best greeting will also win a Kindle 3G Wireless Reading Device!

So, we invite you to share your thoughts with us by leaving a comment on this post.

Sincerely,

Yoav Ezer

CEO

It all started last month when the company that will market these cars, Better Place, opened its visitor center to the public, and I decided to go there with all the guys (and gals) from work, to get some questions answered as well as to see the prototype vehicles. As a side bonus, I got to drive one of the prototype cars.

It seems that the visitor center is still under heavy construction. A D-9 bulldozer was moving mountains of land around, and many construction workers were hard at work, probably building more showrooms and infrastructure.

Some of you probably haven’t heard about this company and their electric vehicles (EVs), or about their business model. In short, their short-term goal (~15 years) is to transform small countries to EV-only, and thus make whole countries independent of foreign oil.

Sounds a bit pretentious? Well, their plan is very detailed and seems to be well on its way, at least in their “pilot” countries, Israel and Denmark. With the help of the governments and some private investors, as well as the European car manufacturer, Renault, this company seems to be headed for a revolution in the transportation energy market.

The electric cars

Let’s start with some details! I am a beginner physicist and a professional programmer, so bear with me if I juggle some numbers from time to time. The technical data was taken from the company and its representatives.

What we saw were prototype cars, which used to be regular Renault models like the Megane and Laguna, and were converted to electrical ones by taking away the gas tank, replacing the engine with an electrical one of 115 horse power, and putting a large 250kg 250Liter Lithium-Ion battery pack in the trunk.

They told us that the first consumer model (the Renault Fluence) will be available to customers during 2011. These models will be specially-designed, so that the battery pack is at the bottom of the car, just under the seats. An equivalent of a gas station will have a device to replace the battery pack in under 5 minutes.

A new, fully-charged battery pack (supplies 400V, and holds 24kWh) under average Israeli-driving conditions has enough juice for a range of at least 100 miles (160km) of driving. They did not know how much the battery pack’s capacity degrades over the years, but that is not too important because of the business model.

How it works for us, the drivers

Their business model revolves around customers becoming subscribers for travelling from place to place. You don’t buy the battery charger, you don’t buy the electricity itself, and you don’t even buy the car or pay for mechanical service. You just pay as you go, per mile, and that is it.

When you subscribe, you get a new car and free installation of two charging sockets anywhere you want (for example, at your home and at work). The socket is a three phase 220V 50Hz AC, just like the regular mains, with 5 leads (2 for communication). It seems quite sturdy and simple. I would say even the least tech-savvy drivers will be able to handle it.

Charging is done at 3kW and it takes around 7 hours to fully charge a battery, in a process carefully controlled by the car’s computer. It comes out as less than 8 hours because the car’s computer prevents you from emptying the battery completely, so it won’t die before its time.

The subscription includes as much charging energy as you like, and as many battery replacements as you like. The only thing you pay for is distance travelled. If you think about it for a moment, it makes a lot of sense, because the travelling distance is the most important thing you actually get from using the car. It will not cost you more if you use the A/C, turn the radio on, go uphill all the way, or choose to drive especially slow or fast (within the limits of traffic law, of course).

The tour guide told us that the price per mile is not yet decided upon, but that it will be competitive to what people are used to today. Most cars is Israel are either privately owned or leased through a car leasing company.

On the way back we did some calculations. I own my car, while my colleague leases his via our company. He drives a bit more than I do, but running all the numbers, we came to the conclusion that the total cost of travelling with either of our cars is pretty much the same. We took into account (for me) the price of my car, its licensing and insurance fees, and car value degradation, (and for him) his monthly leasing fees, and of course fuel for both of us.
It sums up to around half a dollar per kilometer, or 75c per mile. If their subscription fee would be around that price per mile, it would be worth it even without taking the environmental-ideological aspect into account. I know some people who would be willing to pay a bit extra for that noble cause alone.

Environmental impact

The company emphasizes the idea of saving the planet and repeats that idea many times in the videos we saw. Let’s try to dig into that:

An electric car creates almost zero air pollution when it operates compared to gasoline cars. It’s not a 20% reduction; it’s more like 99% reduction. And it also makes much less noise (more on this in a moment). But it still requires a lot of energy to make it move, and this electrical energy has to be created somehow. Creating it in a power plant generates air and noise pollution, but elsewhere… not where the car drives. The environmental benefit for highly populated areas like city centers is considerable. We will breathe fresher air, no doubt. But the question still remains: Does the system as a whole really reduce overall pollution in order to save the planet?

Israel is a small country and has very little spare energy to waste on charging cars. The total electricity usage on hot days (when many people turn on their A/C around the country) can reach 96% of all the power plants production capacity combined (10GW out of 10.6GW). None of the various power plants are nuclear, so all of them are big polluters. The few solar and wind plants (in the Negev desert and in the Golan Heights, respectively) are not producing much energy, if at all, and are mostly for research purposes. If another coal/natural-gas power plant is built just for the purpose of supplying enough charge to the cars, the environmental benefit of electric cars might be lost completely.

The company’s answer to this problem is a smart charging system which profiles users according to their usage. If a driver (e.g. an IT worker) parks her car at work every weekday at 9am and usually only uses it again at 5pm, then her car’s charge cycle will be delayed a bit, and it might be 1pm or 2pm before her car starts charging.

Another driver (e.g. a sales agent) who drives a lot all day, will get priority every time she hooks the car into the socket, because she needs the energy more readily.

On the other hand, if the first driver has some unusual urgent matter to attend to (say, she has to fix a problem in a client site), and needs to use the car at 10am, she can instruct the system to “charge me now” and she’ll get priority, as well as a more rapid battery charge.

This is an interesting mechanism, which attempts to utilize the grid to its full potential while prioritizing customers according to their profile and/or other needs. I am eager to see if this will work as planned and if it will be too much of a nuisance to users or not.

My colleague asked them about the reduction of noise pollution. The prototypes we saw were just as quiet as a brand new “out of the factory” car, but not much quieter. On the other hand, when the engine is under load (such as going uphill) you could really feel the difference, as the electric motor is much quieter than a screaming internal combustion engine.

We were told that the consumer model will be fitted with a speaker and a “drive-tone” (an extended word play on ring-tone and true-tone), so that pedestrians will notice it and be less likely to get run over. In other words, the sound of a car that we are used to, will be artificially generated for the sake of safety. This makes sense, but I believe that eventually, if the whole industry converts to EVs, this feature could be taken off (not in the following 10-20 years though).

I asked them about the environmental impact of dead batteries, and in the behind-the-scenes operation required to periodically charge as many as 2 million cars, assuming all cars in Israel are replaced with their electric counterparts.

As with any lithium-based batteries, their lifespan is limited to around 10 years. This is longer than your standard cell-phone battery because of special sealing techniques. However 2 million cars still needs at least 2 million batteries (plus spares for changing), so the dead batteries might pile up to become a serious environmental threat.

When a battery dies, its contents (the electrolyte, the anode and cathode) can be recycled just like any other Li-Ion battery. However, I am not aware of any such recycling plants for these batteries in Israel, and when I asked them about that, they did not know where the recycling would take place either. Nor did they know how much energy it takes to recycle each battery.

It will be interesting to investigate this further, because off-shoring the recycling process might prove to be not economically worthwhile. Meanwhile it would be a big loss for the environment if the batteries are not recycled.

The test drive

The tour included a lengthy presentation (around 23 minutes) which included a hologram of the lead entrepreneur Shay Agassi, as well as colorful eye-candy entrance of a model car. It was too kitschy for my taste, and packed full of buzzwords and slogans.

Then we finally got to see a prototype car up-close and even drive it for a bit. They would not let us look under the hood. Apparently their refusal has something to do with a contract with the manufacturer, Renault.

When not moving, the engine is dead-quiet, but I could still hear a small hum from some ventilator, even after turning the A/C completely off.

Driving the EV felt just like driving my gasoline-drinking car. The gas and brake pedals, as well as handling the steering wheel felt just like any other car. It also accelerated nicely; there was no sign of it being “weaker” than a regular car.

One difference was on the dashboard: Instead of an RPM gauge, there was a power gauge. The scale runs from around -50kW to +200kW. Don’t be alarmed, negative power is still not defined. The scale works like that because when you let go of the gas pedal, the engine works as a dynamo to charge the battery! The negative values are there to indicate that the power is used to decelerate instead of accelerate (hence charging instead of discharging).

Another difference is in the gears, as in… there are none. The engine can produce the maximum torque at any RPM, which means that gears are not needed at all. One gear fits all. This is also why there is no “clutch” mechanism either (manual or automatic). It does boggle the mind a bit at first.

So there you have it. I believe this is a start of a revolution in the global car industry as well as the oil industry. I have a feeling that this will make a lot of headlines in the near future, and I am planning to be an early adopter of this technology, if the price won’t be too high.

We only ask two things:

1. No foul language please. If your feedback is not positive – that’s OK. In fact it’s more then OK, we learn a lot from feedback. But please… no foul language.

2. If possible, please write your story in English.

And that’s it. Just scroll down to the end of the page and leave your comment there. I am really looking forward to your feedback.

Back to the story… I was absentmindedly browsing through the search results when I noticed something funny right after Cogniview’s Wikipedia Article…

Well… It seems that for some reason, the Trinidad and Tobago foreign office was selling one of our products. And at a discount. Funny, I thought to myself, I don’t recall signing a distributor agreement with the Trinidad and Tobago government. And we NEVER sell at a discount. So I followed the link to see what’s up:

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Apparently, someone at the foreign office of Trinidad and Tobago has set up a store selling pirated software copies. I kept looking around and found out that all the software sold on this site was either bought at “an auction” or is a discontinued product line…

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Well… I can tell you that we never sell software at ‘auctions’ – whatever those are – and we did not discontinue any of our product lines. Besides, I am guessing that Adobe didn’t discontinue it’s Acrobat product line and it’s still being sold at huge discounts on the Trinidad and Tobago software store -

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Further investigation into the matter shows that the guys (or gals) at the ‘Trinidad and Tobago software store’ take fraud very seriously…

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I am pretty used to our software getting hacked and sold at a discount. That’s the price you pay when you sell software, I guess. But we found out that most people are decent and don’t go looking for pirated copies. (Either that, or they are afraid of the viruses that are installed along with those copies). But this is the first time an actual government office site was used to steal our products.

I tried contacting the Trinidad and Tobago foreign office several times but to no avail.

So… What do you think we should do next? Can we ask that the Trinidad and  Tobago official site be de-listed from Google? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.

We also promised that the authors of the 10 best greetings will receive a $15 Amazon gift card. And that the best greeter will win a Flip Mino Camera. Well the party is over and it’s time to give out the prizes…

But before I reveal the winners, I’d like to say that we were really moved by your reaction. I’ve personally read the 190+ greeting several times and I’d like to thank you for letting us know that we make a real difference in your lives. It means a lot to me and the rest of the team here at Cogniview.

And now the winners…

Vaughn said…

“Happy Birthday PDF2XL! You deserve it because you have made my birthdays much happier since I started using you. You see, I have the worst birthday imaginable, April 15! Tax day!!! Before you came into my life I spend most of my birthday manually typing data from my brokerage accounts into Excel. Now just a few mouse clicks and my PDF reports are nicely transferred and formatted into Excel just the way the IRS folks like them. So you have not only reduced my procrastination induced stress, you have also made some revenuers very happy. I guess that’s a good thing, huh? Happy Birthday!”

Shawn Setnicky from the Sonali Corporation NJ, USA said…

“I’ve been using PDF2XL for awhile now. It has saved me MANY, MANY hours of time. Each year I get a list of about 8000 names, addresses, phone numbers, emails, etc. The only problem is it’s in PDF format, and not easily manageable. If you want a nice Excel format they charge you 25 cents per name! That’s $2000, I’ve done it three or four times now, you do the math. I’ve estimated I’ve saved over $10,000 using this software and countless hours.
Happy Birthday! Thanks for the great product.”

Raja Sharma from Assurant Inc., Tustin, CA said…

“Our PDF’s were wild, and our morale was low.
Then came PDF2XL, and our faces began to glow.

What took 6 hrs to decipher can now be done in 1.
Now for the other 5 hrs, we just party and have fun.

Thanks to you for this tool and I’ll put it to you straight.
I’ll recommend it to everyone, because Cogniview is great.

So for this 4 yr anniversary, it is my pleasure to say….
Keep “excel-ing” in what you do, and wish you a Happy Birthday!!!

Good Luck n’ Happy 4th Anniversary!!!”

Pierre Mantha from the Britec Computer Systems Ltd.,Toronto, ON Canada said

“As major integrators of Sage BusinessVision software, on a recent upgrade from a competitive product the client could only provide us with PDF files.

From everything from Customer Databases, Vendor Databases, Inventory Databased – all form of reports came in PDF format only.

PDF2XL saved the day (or really the month). Based on the volume of data there is no way we could have tackled this project without PDF2XL. What would have taken litterally months of work to rebuild new structured tables took a 4 to 5 days.

Keep up the great work Cogniview – A Happy Birthday and to many more to come.”

Kris said…

“The day you were born of your parents minds was the day the world changed forever! Happy 4th birthday PDF2XL.
You took a 12 hour job and made it into a 2 hour job by reading over 500 pages of cell phone activity and creating an Excel document that was sortable and searchable. You save my company at least 10 hours of work. You saved my client three days of reading, high-lighting and writing down the activity. And you saved her thousands of dollars to have someone compile the information.
GREAT JOB!”

Jenna Z said…

“Dear PDF2XL,
Happy birthday from a user
Through documents I’m a cruiser.
It may sound cheesy
But with your help it’s easy
And you’ve kept me from being a boozer!
Thanks for the time-saving, sanity saving help! Happy fourth birthday!”

Eugene Hashimoto Said…

“Happy B-day to you and the team. It is really impressive to see the list of customers who have written. Definitely a sign of you superior product and more so, you excellent client service. BTW, you can keep the $15 gift card if I win and invest it back into your company. We really need companies like yours to succeed.
All the best,
Eugene”

Dan Wilcox said…

“My head felt as big as the Liberty Bell.
My brain was smoking like the ashes from Hell.
I was pulling my hair
And was full of despair.
Suddenly I found PDF2XL
Now everything is just going so well
And I am always so eager to tell
How I convert all day long
And still keep going strong
Thanks to Cogniview PDF2XL
Happy Birthday”

Victor Guettlein said…

“Congratulations on your 4th anniversary.
What an awesome product PDF2XL is. Do you know how much time and money PDF2XL has saved me? Literally hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars! Plus it makes me look like a genius to both my vendors and clients. I am actually a genius, and owning this software is just further evidence.
Keep up the fantastic work and innovation!”

Tracy Duke Said…

“PDFXL2,
My job would surely suck without you,
I used to type for 2 days straight,
Then there you were like a soul mate,
Happy Birthday four years old,
To other offices your story I’ve told,
May you be downloaded for many more years
Resting the fingers and bringing good cheers.
Congratulations and Happy Birthday!”

Leisa from Cedar Rapids, IA said…

“Because of your product I have been able to be more productive in my job. What used to take me days to convert by hand now only takes me a couple of minutes. I would like to applaud you in your quest to make life easier for us who have to work with .pdf files. I love this software so much that I have told others within my company and they have purchased it as well.
You are unsung heroes in my opinion!! Who would have ever thought that there would ever be software that could transform .pdf files in a click of a button! Thank you so much!”

And the 1st place goes to…Peter Dallimore from Stanbridge’s Hobbies, Australia which said…

“Happy Birthday and THANK YOU. What a terrific product. For years I struggled to get my suppliers to send me their invoices as an electronic file – I tried and tried – I even offered to send them my Purchase Orders electronically – but no – they are a backward looking lot!!!! A little glimmer of hope – I bought a scanner and some opposition software to make my own PDFs of invoices – it did not work – that was a was of money. Then success came – I was able to get my suppliers to send PDF invoices via email and then I found COGNIVIEW – IT WORKS – SO EFFORTLESSLY – Last night after a long day at work I received into our stock system a 24 page invoice – 320 lines – from one supplier – it only took 20 minutes to receive into stock – all because COGNIEVIEW created a csv file that I could then import into my system.
Why am I so grateful – you let me have 2 hours extra sleep last night!

Thank you – PS I do not want the gift – the software is enough – and by the way – your support is fantastic too. With 90000 product lines and 250 suppliers you help make it all happen.”

I was reading through the archives here at ‘Codswallop’ and it dawned on me that this blog is way too serious.

If this continues (I said to myself), we’ll develop a reputation of all-work-and-no-play guys. And since being dull is a grave offense, I’ve decided to share with you our weird (and sometimes interesting) life here at Cogniview.

And we’ll start the ‘life is wonderfully weird’ series with our next door neighbors.

They operate a sound testing lab. Which is pretty cool. But what’s really cool is that they build their testing environments using all sorts of strange materials. And they are using the public parking lot to store their strange stuff.

And today, it is cut-up tires…

If you know how you use cut up tires for sound testing, please, please – share it with us in the comments

If you sign up to the service you can have your picture associated with your email address. Comment on a blog that uses Gravatars, or sign up to any other community that uses them and you can have your avatar show up, allowing a consistency of identity for yourself and a more inviting community for the site owner.

All great and useful, but that is all the service does.

Ideally, it would be a true online identity. The beginnings of this would be easy, just add OpenID support, something they can do, keeping in mind Automattic who owns both Gravatar and WordPress has added OpenID to their WordPress.com service.

Gravatar + OpenID would be a single identity both in authentication and visual sense.

Integrate with WordPress.com and they could build in a public profile. Add in friend/buddy support and you have a social network, and through open API plugins could be built that extend this network presentation across any site. With Googles latest developments, such as Open Social, they wouldn’t have to even build most of it.

OK, I have picked on Gravatar here. Truthfully, I wish one of the many services I use would take this kind of idea and run with it. Twitter would work, even Flickr (although they do have things to worry about with the off and on Microsoft dealings). Perhaps Google is best place to do this, especially as they will want to make Microsoft investment in Facebook moot.

One issue I guess is portability of your data means you have even less say in where it appears. Privacy issue?

What do you think? A dream, a likely scenario or one step too far? Please add your thoughts in the comments

It’s always like being the new boy in school writing for a new blog. You are never sure what people will think when a fresh face appears. With this in mind I will tell you a little about myself and then give you an opportunity to tell me a little something in return.

Like Yoav, I am a long-time computer guy in my thirties. My first exposure to computers was when age nine or ten my parents delivered my brother and I a Commodore Vic20. That 3.5k beast became my obsession.

Also like Yoav, my first taste of real hard core computing in the world of work was with a VMS machine, for me it was at age sixteen when I started working at the local general hospital. Being straight out of school I wasn’t allowed to tinker with vital patient data so unfortunately didn’t get to explore the system very much but it opened my eyes to what the world of IT had to offer.

My career since then has seen me in many varied roles, from system and network administration through database and software development. While I loved programming and even co-authored three books on .NET, I recently have left the development world and concentrated on New Media and blogging. Since my first view of Mosaic running over that slow, loud, US Robotics modem in the early nineties I have been hooked on the Web and have made it my primary work for over twelve years now.

I hope with my writing on this blog I can bring you some interesting reading on the topics of technology, the web and productivity.

If you have any feedback on this blog, any suggestions, comments or ideas, please either leave a comment or contact us. It’s an exciting world of technology right now and I am looking forward to helping Yoav discuss it here.