Recently I gave an interview for JoomlaSverige, the Swedish Joomla community. We are reproducing the interview here in English, with their permission. You can read the Swedish version here http://joomlasverige.se/joomla/tillagg/13-snabba-fragor-till-parth-lawate
Parth Lawate tell us about you and your company
Thanks so much for interviewing me !
I am a old time Joomla guy working with Joomla since the mambo days. I love to promote Opensource & am an avid Linux & Joomla evangelist. With a view to be able to do what we loved best, we formed our company while still in college studying for our Mechanical Engineering degrees. Stumbling on Mambo while working on some non profit projects earlier was one of the best things that ever happened to us !
Our Company Tekdi Web Solutions was founded in 2006 ( We just celebrated our 5th Birthday !) & specializes in development on Open Source content management systems like Joomla, Drupal Wordpress , Ecommerce systems using Magento , Adobe Air Apps, Appcelerator Based Mobile & Desktop development & also builds custom apps. With a team of 25 + Developers we are always raring to go on exciting & innovative new projects !
Techjoomla was founded 2 years back in order to specifically bring focus to Joomla based Product development & channelize our ideas & our customers needs into sustainable open source products that could add value to the community. In Techjoomla we believe in doing community driven development & involve the community as much as possible in the ideation process through our Labs board where we post all our experimental work. We believe that listening to customers & love to delight them by providing high quality & innovative extensions.
You have recently released SocialAds 2.5 - can you tell us about SocialAds?
SocialAds is one of our leading products that brings a modern & intuitive Advertising management system to Joomla. Its the only Advertising management system in Joomla which offers "Social" or demographic targeting, just like facebook. With a super intuitive & easy to use "Self Service" Ad Designer, SocialAds lets advertisers create their own ads on your Joomla website , Chose what kind of targeting is needed ( Optionally also set it up to Target Guests) , Chose whether to pay Per Click, Per Impression or per day & Pay online using an array of payment methods , without the admin needing to make a single click. The admin can however optionally chose to moderate every ad for content.
The Best feature of SocialAds as our customers say is the Ad Designer. As one of our customer says, "When you look at a ad built in the designer, you just so love the look of it , that you have to buy it !". Plus SocialAds gives the power to the Advertisers. They chose the look of their ad, who sees it, how they want to pay. & even where they want the ad to be seen & on the top of it they get a Snazzy Ad Statistics Dashboard which lets them monitor the performance of their Ad. SocialAds increases advertising ROI by a huge amount.
With SocialAds, we have tried to lower the entry barrier for advertisers by allowing anyone to advertise without having to create any kind of Special Advertising Accounts. Whats more, we also have something called promotion plugins, to make it super easy to Advertise something you already have on the site.. Say like a SOBI entry or JomSocial Groups.
With Version 2.5, SocialAds is not "Necessarily Social" . What it means is that it can also be used on Websites that do not have Social extensions like CB or Community Builder. Plus 2.5 introduces a lot of features traditionally expected of a Enterprise level Advertising system, without losing out on the simplicity of use that makes SocialAds so popular. We now have Zone Management, Ad Layouts, Zone based Pricing to let site owners charge more for premium spaces, Coupon management for promotions & over 100 + other small features, bug fixes & improvements !
SocialAds has something for Developers too ! Now SocialAds supports various plugin types to extend SocialAds in some amazing ways. Adding more payment plugins, Adding more ad layouts whats more with the next version, you will be able to write targeting plugins too in order to extend SocialAds targeting capacities.
Many of your extensions are well integrated with Jomsocial and Community builder - is it hard to update and adjust your own extension in order to work with latest version of a third-party?
Well only if the 3rd party doesnt provide a robust API & plugin architecture ! But with CB & JomSocial, these guys are really great. Both of them have a super API with excellent documentation. The guys at JomSocial are always willing to listen If we want some new plugin event. In the end its really about collaboration. Its great to be able together with this amazing community of developers that makes Joomla so powerful.. which i guess takes us to your next question !
Why did you choose to develop for Joomla?
Joomla is an excellent CMS or Development platform & is backed by a great User as well as developer community. We had been working with Mambo/Joomla for almost 4 years .. & have kind of developed a expertise in it & also have a good sense of the communities needs. Finally its very much fun & a great learning experience to grow with & collaborate with the great Joomla developer community.
What will we see from TechJoomla during this year (any new extensions, features etc)?
We have quite a lot coming up ! There is Broadcast which is a Social Stream sync extension for JomSocial which allows you to integrate JomSocial's activity stream with Facebook, LinkedIn & twitter & also allow uses to post updates to all these networks from your site. Its sparked quite some interest & will help sites achieve tighter facebook integration.
Then we have a full rewrite of JBolo coming with ver 3.0 which will happen in late June which promises to get rid of Javascript conflict type issues & add a great performance improvement. With SocialAds , we have Keyword targeting( Contextual), Geolocation targeting & another Major development related to the same in in the works, but we are keeping it under wraps for the moment ;) . With Invitex, we have a concept called "Invite Anwhere" coming up which will allow you to use Invitex to invite for anything.. just like you can integrate a commenting system with any content !
JomSocial 2.4 was released recently & it comes with a slew of new features to empower your Joomla Social network.We have been working closely with the JomSocial team to ensure that all of our products work well with this new release.
s a great pleasure to announce that 6 more of our extensions are now Joomla 1.6 compatible ! Joining the 1.6 native extensions are Network Suggest, People You May Know & Mutual Friends for both CB & JomSocial. Note that in case of JomSocial , all these extensions are also JomSocial 2.2 compatible. Besides the 1.6 compatibility, we have also included quite a lot of Bug fixes & some feature additions in all the extensions. For the full changelog, please click on read more. Users with active subscriptions shall be able to download the extensions in the My Subscriptions area.
