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[Cancelled] OpenProducts to take over Excito B3 product line

Posted: 05 Jun 2013, 01:19
by tor
Update: Sorry to be the bearer of bad news. Unfortunately OpenProducts has determined that it has to cancel the plans on a B3 takeover. Read more later in this thread.

Original post:
OpenProducts are happy to announce that Excito and OpenProducts are currently working on the final details of an agreement with the intention that OpenProducts will take over the Excito B3 product line.

OpenProducts is currently owned by Tor Krill and PA Nilsson – one half of the founders of Excito – and have been part of the development of the Excito B3 and its predecessors. The intention for OpenProducts is to further develop products to be used in the everyday digital life. Products will be targeted towards people using new technologies and to those that have realized that you should buy the product, not be the product.

Excito will focus on the new product range and target audience, while OpenProducts will continue to work and develop products in the spirit of B3 and Bubba.

During the summer, the intention is that OpenProducts gradually take over the responsibility for selling and supporting the B3, including the forum and wiki sites.

To start this off, a joint campaign with greatly discounted prices of B3 will be started shortly.

Tor Krill and PA Nilsson, OpenProducts
http://www.openproducts.se

Excito B3 webshop
http://www.excitostore.com

Re: OpenProducts to take over Excito B3 product line

Posted: 05 Jun 2013, 01:56
by DanielM
I'm not 100% sure, but this sure sounds like great news! Very much welcome back Tor!

Any comment on what this means for the upcomingish B4?

/Daniel

Re: OpenProducts to take over Excito B3 product line

Posted: 05 Jun 2013, 02:38
by pa
OpenProducts and Excito are two seperate companies and we can not speak for Excitos plans of their future.
However, OpenProducts will continue to develop products, but it is too soon for us to be discussing future products, right now we need to focus on getting the final details together with Excito and get the support and forums up and running from our side.

/PA

Re: OpenProducts to take over Excito B3 product line

Posted: 05 Jun 2013, 02:48
by RandomUsername
Good luck to everyone involved in this endeavour - on both sided of the fence.

Just an administrative question - will you be maintningvthis forum for bubba related products? I suppose you'll be starting a new one on your own site.

Re: OpenProducts to take over Excito B3 product line

Posted: 05 Jun 2013, 02:57
by johannes
Thanks! (Note that the fence is quite low in this case since we know eachother really well, we will work together during the transfer to make this smooth for everyone).

Regarding the forum I leave this for OP to decide.

Re: OpenProducts to take over Excito B3 product line

Posted: 05 Jun 2013, 06:20
by theWebalyst
tor wrote:[OpenProducts] ...will be targeted towards people using new technologies and to those that have realized that you should buy the product, not be the product. [My emphasis]
I'm very encouraged by this and intrigued. Would love to hear more about what this statement means to you - the problem as you identify it - the needs you expect to cater for - and some ideas about how you might do this.

1) Do you think this will require some re-definition of the Bubba product roadmap and what kinds of change *might* this involve? I imagine it does, but from my viewpoint, quite probably for the better.

2) Do you envisage something akin to, or even based on Eben Moglen's FreedomBox?

Fascinating!

I'm very glad you have found a way to continue to support this market, and wish you (OpenProducts) and (the "new") Excito the very best of luck :-)

Mark

Re: OpenProducts to take over Excito B3 product line

Posted: 05 Jun 2013, 13:52
by Ubi
Hi Tor and PA, welcome back. I know the B3 forum is in good hands with you guys

The only thing I do not understand is the reasoning behind the summer campaign, which suggests stock clearance, which suggests product discontinuation.

Re: OpenProducts to take over Excito B3 product line

Posted: 06 Jun 2013, 05:29
by NisseJ
Or maybe they have a lot of 1 Tb discs :)

Re: OpenProducts to take over Excito B3 product line

Posted: 06 Jun 2013, 05:47
by RandomUsername
Two possibilities spring to mind:

1. They want to sell some stuff quick to get some liquidity into the company.
2. Excito have a load of stock that it is not economical for either party to sell to OpenProducts so they are selling cheap to get rid.

Both are just speculation on my part though.

Re: OpenProducts to take over Excito B3 product line

Posted: 06 Jun 2013, 06:18
by johannes
Maybe. Or it's just summer and we feel happy and generous. :D

Re: OpenProducts to take over Excito B3 product line

Posted: 06 Jun 2013, 11:30
by Cheeseboy
This sounds like good news to me too.
Welcome back Tor and PA!

Re: OpenProducts to take over Excito B3 product line

Posted: 06 Jun 2013, 15:24
by tor
Hi all,

Sorry for the late reply in this thread. We salubrate the Swedish national day today :)

To start off let me say that even though we are working on getting the deal into place between Excito and OpenProducts (OP) we still have some work to do finalizing this. Thus anything I say right now must be interpreted as my and OPs opinion and nothing else. With that said here are some early comments.

@RandomUsername, regarding the forum. Nothing is decided on this yet. I however think that we either archive the current forum at Excito, leaving it read only. This to keep search engine indexation working. Then we duplicate it on our domains for future operation. The other solution is to move the forum completely and leave redirects at Excitos servers. We have to work this out later.

@theWebalyst, it is unfortunately to early to talk more seriously on OPs future roadmap. Our intention however is to try keeping a close relationship with you, our customers, while doing new developments.

I also think that you are interpreting our statement above correctly ;) Then if we will develop a FreedomBox I don't know at the moment. (One solution regarding the freedombox is that we port it to the B3 platform which should not be a biggie since it seems to run on a Debian base on similar hardware.)

Regarding the summer campaign. I leave it up to Excito to comment on why then. I can however say that we are working on our own solution for selling the B3 (a web shop then) And we will also start of by selling the B3 on the same terms as in the campaign. If everything goes according to plan we should have this up and running during the next week.

To finish up, lets hope that we can make this an exciting continuation of the Bubba product line!

/Tor

Re: OpenProducts to take over Excito B3 product line

Posted: 06 Jun 2013, 16:42
by theWebalyst
Tor, thanks for responding. Your answers are encouraging.

A quick comment on the forum and search indexing as I do SEO for a living - don't allow duplication of content as this is a big no no for Google and will be penalised. Do create a copy and set up redirects (301). This will preserve the Google rankings. You'll need a redirect for every page you want to preserve, but this should be possible using a single .htaccess rewrite, provided the forum is a true copy (e.g. just the base of the URLs changes).

Good luck with the negotionations - it can be very tricky working out all the details - like a divorce!

Mark

Re: OpenProducts to take over Excito B3 product line

Posted: 08 Jun 2013, 09:02
by 86ivar
pa wrote:OpenProducts and Excito are two seperate companies and we can not speak for Excitos plans of their future.
However, OpenProducts will continue to develop products, but it is too soon for us to be discussing future products, right now we need to focus on getting the final details together with Excito and get the support and forums up and running from our side.

/PA
How long must we wait for B4 then? has there been any development at all regarding B4 by you or OP?

Re: OpenProducts to take over Excito B3 product line

Posted: 08 Jun 2013, 10:02
by 86ivar
NisseJ wrote:Or maybe they have a lot of 1 Tb discs :)
You can get even it cheaper here:
http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications ... dbEiB8NaPw