INTRODUCTION

With the first official commentary coming through that the recession is finally over, I'm glad to also speak of good tidings regarding developments within Jemstep over these past few weeks.

NEW ADDITION TO THE TEAM

First off, I would like to welcome Henry Kleynhans on board, who recently joined our team in the position of Senior Developer. Henry takes our compliment of developers to six, and our total staff compliment to fourteen people.

PROGRESS ON UX/UI

Excellent progress is being made with our alpha testing which has been a prolonged but invaluable process. Based on feedback from our alpha test users, we are implementing various UX (user-experience) and navigation enhancements to the user-interface, some of which have been fairly significant and hugely worthwhile.

In conjunction with our UX consultant, David Abkowitz of Snap Design, we are looking forward to finalizing and implementing these exciting modifications in preparation for our beta launch.

INTERNET TRENDS

Although our initial focus is on the US market, one of Jemstep's strengths is that it can easily be applied to other geographical markets. With this in mind, I recently came across these statistics which I thought were interesting:

as at June 08 there were 220,141,969 Internet users in the USA
currently there are 704,213,930 users in Asia (up from 114,304,000 in December 2000)
there are 402,380,474 users in Europe (up from 105,096,000 in December 2000)

Although expansion into other continents is still some way away, Jemstep's ability to cater for global markets points to a significantly scaleable model and places the company in a strong position to benefit from the burgeoning growth trends in worldwide Internet usage. In line with this, we have filed for patents in the EU, China and Japan (in addition to the USA).

CONFERENCES

As part of our strong philosophy of continually sharpening our saw and keeping up with the latest industry trends, two of our developers, Mark Turner and Brett Cave, are currently attending the JBossWorld / Redhat Summit in Chicago, whilst Kevin Cimring and Simon Roy will be heading to NY later this month for the Finovate 2009 conference. The Finovate conference showcases the best new financial and banking technology innovations, and it will be interesting to learn what some of the recent sites in this space have to offer.

PUBLICATIONS

Clifford Schoeman, our senior product analyst, has written a very instructive article when it comes to balancing the risk vs return of your investment. As you enter the volatile waters of current market conditions, it is highly recommended reading. You can get it here.

Finally, I would like to extend our congratulations to Matthew Rennie, our CTO, on the occasion of his marriage to Lauren. We hope he is resting well on his honeymoon – the next phase of our exciting ride awaits him upon his return!

Yours sincerely
Michael Blumenthal
CEO & President

Jemstep, Inc
Palo Alto, California
September 2009

unsubscribe

www.jemstep.com