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Interview: Dataviz
May 7, 2004
Dataviz Focus Week here at PocketGoddess.com concludes with an interview with Danny Tu, a product marketing manager with Dataviz. Read on to find out just how Dataviz keeps coming up with all those great products!
How long did it take to achieve full support for Word and Excel files in native format? Do you believe that it has fundamentally changed the user experience for Documents To Go?
While we can’t comment specifically on how long it took, native file support was the main project we tackled for Documents To Go 6. Has it fundamentally changed the user experience? Yes and no. As converged wireless devices take off, users truly need an “unthethered” handheld and native support helps make that possible. Customers who are still using OS 4 devices, and who don’t rely on expansion cards or wireless connectivity, may not find native file support as relevant yet. So, while native file support may have fundamentally changed the user experience for a portion of our customer base thus far, as handhelds have become more and more powerful, and to compete with the MS Office equivalents on the Pocket PC side, we knew it was a necessity to add native support.
What’s next for Documents To Go? It seems that you’re expanding in different directions now, with the inclusion of PDF viewing capabilities and a graphics viewer. Will the focus shift more to other products now that the office suite is basically “complete?”
It’s true that we have developed a pretty comprehensive office suite, but there is always something to work on. We definitely see a variety of ways and directions to improve Documents To Go. The software is still being actively developed and gets a lot of attention internally. We are driven by our partners’ needs as well as our customers’ needs. We rely heavily upon customer feedback, and collect suggestions via our website. I’d encourage any reader to submit feedback about any of our software via our website: http://www.dataviz.com/feedback. However, as you may have noticed, in the past year we have introduced a range of new products outside the Documents To Go line. Some of these new titles have complemented the office experience, such as Beyond Contacts, which synchronizes with Outlook, and SmartList To Go, which synchronizes with Access. Some titles go outside our normal range, such as Dose-A-Day and PDA Playground.
Do you believe that DTG is the “best” product possible, considering the relative lack of competition in this Palm OS software category?
We always strive to be the best and never want to get complacent. As you know, there are certainly competitors out there — we consider our competitors to range not only from Palm OS to other platforms. We want to provide the best Office experience of any handheld platform. We got a lot of good press last year for our DocSync technology, which guarantees the integrity of desktop documents after synchronization. Several notable technology journalists have compared our office software favorably to Microsoft’s Pocket Word and Pocket Excel. While we appreciate the recognition, it just makes us want to do that much more to ensure we truly provide the best handheld office suite experience for users.
Passwords Plus is a great application, considering today’s concerns about privacy and identity theft. Is Dataviz considering releasing additional security programs for Palm OS devices?
At the present time, we don’t plan to. As I stated above, we are customer driven and we welcome feedback on this subject. We do now have experience writing a secure application, so if we got presented with a great idea who knows? Through the reaction to Passwords Plus, we also have recognized that security concerns are paramount for our customers. To that end, we added support for adding password protected files to Documents To Go.
PDA Playground is the first Dataviz application aimed primarily at children instead of professional adults. Do you have plans to release additional children’s titles?
We actually see PDA Playground as aimed at parents rather than their kids. While the games are certainly designed for younger kids, we’re marketing the software to our user base as an addition to our line of productivity software. As I’ve been told by some of the working parents around the office, there are times you need something to distract your children for just 15 minutes so you can make a call, concentrate on driving, or wait for a restaurant table in peace! Since you always have your PDA with you, it’s a natural fit to load PDA Playground so you are always prepared for those situations! We may try to take advantage of some marketing opportunities with other handheld titles for children, but right now PDA Playground is it for our children’s titles.
I’m really enjoying the Dilbert Dose-A-Day calendar. How did the idea come about for that product, and can we expect to see more characters/themes in the Dose-A-Day line in the future?
The concept for Dose-A-Day was actually developed in-house by a few people from various areas of the company. They came up with the idea and presented it to the company, and it was a hit! Naturally we were thrilled to work with Scott Adams and his classic Dilbert comics. We also lined two other great partners: John McPherson’s Close To Home comics and Golf by Gary McCord, who’s a CBS commentator and PGA tour fixture. We would love to get more ideas for new titles from our customers. Once again if you have any ideas please submit them via our website http://www.dataviz.com/feedback.
Do you have any plans to develop applications for other platforms, such as Windows Mobile or Symbian?
Believe it or not, four months ago all our handheld applications were for Palm only. Now, we have several titles that run on Pocket PC (Passwords Plus, Dose-A-Day and PDA Playground). We always keep an eye on other markets, but at the present time our primary focus is the Palm OS market.
Finally, can you give my readers a sneak peek at upcoming Dataviz products or enhancements being planned for existing products?
We have some upcoming updates we are pretty excited about. This winter we will be releasing a free update to Documents To Go that will accommodate some of the popular new handhelds. We’ll be adding UX50 landscape support, Garmin iQue 3600 support for the 320x480 portrait screen, enhancing support for the Treo 600 5-way navigator, and more.
