TrailsWeb News - 2012-09-08TrailsWeb Looks to the Future, Sets GoalsAs the U.S. economy followed its real estate market into a prolonged slump, TrailsWeb also experienced a decline in revenue. Presently, the company operates from South Dakota with only one staff member. TrailsWeb has a contract for its CEO to spend 40 hours on-site each week developing software for the State of South Dakota. This is good news because it means TrailsWeb has stable revenue to keep its core businesses and servers in operation. Another benefit of this contract is that TrailsWeb is reaching greater levels of liquidity. This period for TrailsWeb seems to be characterized by low expenses and consistent revenue, but slower development of our products. Some users of Moneylender Professional may have noticed changes and fixes get published in a few weeks instead of a few days. Companies with websites hosted by TrailsWeb have seen the same slowdown for edits to their websites. We consider this temporary decline in responsiveness a necessary, albeit undesirable, side-effect of ensuring the continuation of the company. Our goal through this period is to adjust the company to be focused on providing a set of interconnected products. We have a fledgling website management system, a robust loan servicing program, and a variety of financial and non-financial systems which are not presently available to the public. Our objective is to create a cohesive platform of financial and web services that provide new options for users of our products. For example, a lender would be able to use our loan servicing program to manage their loans, and use our website management system to allow borrowers to check their loan balance and make payments online. In order to make the system truly useful, this will be done using software APIs (application programmer interface), enabling third party developers to build or customize systems on our loan servicing or website core. Until now you had to hire TrailsWeb to make any customizations, but going forward, we'll be working to provide more options for our customers. We'll also be working to implement third party APIs to make our products more compatible with software from other companies. We still have a long road ahead as we attempt to build core profitability from our existing products. Finding the right people to bring their talents and skills to TrailsWeb is always a challenge, especially so in South Dakota. Growing at a pace which matches the company's current income levels requires discipline and innovation at the business process level, but we're certainly up to the challenge. |