A big thank you to everyone who tried Spicebird. It's been a week and Spicebird Beta 0.4 was downloaded more than 10000 times from www.spicebird.com.

We did get a lot of feedback from the community - criticism, pats and feature requests. We will try our best to incorporate all you suggestions into the next releases (or hopefully in the updates). If you still have something to say, do mail me at prasad@synovel.com.

We are working towards making our SVN and the bugzilla available to everyone and keep watching this space for an announcement about it.

So, here it is. Spicebird - on its maiden flight. After nearly an year of effort we finally got our act together to release the nascent version of Synovel's free and open source collaboration suite. The released version 0.4 contains well integrated tools of collaboration viz. email, contacts, calendaring and instant messaging.

Spicebird has a long road ahead to become a comprehensive communications suite. We seek contributions from the community towards acheiving this in the form of ideas, suggestions, bug reports and source code.

Get Spicebird!

David Ascher recently mentioned Spicebird in his blog and suddenly we started finding articles and discussions about it at various places on the web. Feels good, but I thought its time we speak about it and set the expectations right.

What is Spicebird?

Spicebird is an open-source platform for collaboration. To start with, we integrated e-mail, calendar and instant messaging into one suite. The features available on the website are for Version 1.0, but we do have plans to release intermediate versions (one of which will be available really soon. Our roadmap and anonymous access to SVN will accompany the release)

Spicebird, our desktop collaboration suite, is almost near to the open source alpha release. We are holding its wings to ensure it gains proper weight before it flies. Being the user loving bird it is, it wants to say a "Hi" to you. And here it is, a preview of Spicebird.

It was created completely in-house and that should be an excuse for any amateurism.

Until we got hold of tools like x11vnc, vnc2swf, gimp, audacity, vnc2swf-edit, creating a demo video seemed to be a task for professionals. Good news is, with these tools it is much simpler than what it appears to be. When I get time, I will write a detailed step-by-step procedure of how we created this video.

First of all I am very happy to announce that Prasad, our CTO is all set to rock the stage at FOSS.in. He is going to take a tutorial on how to write applications on the Mozilla platform (Yes, that is what we are doing here and Prasad is probably one of the best in this country, at it.) So Prasad and I will be in Bangalore from Dec. 4th to 8th at the event.

This event happens to be a pretty big deal for the folks up at Mozilla Foundation as they have put it up on their own site that they would be visiting. It is a pretty big event for the company as this will open all doors directly to Mozilla Foundation. All the big guys at the foundation seem to be coming down including the CEO, Mitchell Baker.

Project codename: Finch

Product real name: Spicebird

Now that results are out of the way, I can delve into how we went about the entire process. So for those of you who don't have the time or inclination, that's all you need to know. For people curious about why this name, how it is related to Synovel and the work we are doing, please read on.

The whole naming process began when we needed to reach out to companies and gather feedback about our product thought and idea. We needed to create an introductory note our product and features and that's when we actually searched for a codename!

We began by trying to shortlist a category among science fiction, animal name, mythological name and so forth. Given that animal names have universal appeal we thought it would suit us the most. More importantly we could find animals that suited our product idea with their inherent qualities.