In the history of commerce, I would guess that we in the technology industry are in a somewhat unique period. I’m talking about the current business model where a software company offers its product, or at least an entry level version of it, for free. So, when I see an article like this, where it’s stated that it’s time for a valuable product like the Office Suite to be provided for free, I have to roll my eyes…

Any product that I get value out of, I’m willing to pay for, and am actually more comfortable if I’m paying something for it. (I’m the guy who actually pays the extra $10 to www.weatherunderground.com for the “premium” offering that’s not ad-supported.) Why? So I can reasonably expect the product to be available and of high quality.

At TrackVia, we have the same approach to our own business. As a hosted application provider, we incur some level of infrastructure costs for each account that’s created. And that infrastructure cost pales in comparison to the cost of providing the hands-on customer support that we deliver (for example, we have a human being, in our office, answer all of our calls during business hours). So, if we were to offer a permanent free version of our product, then we’d be burning cash to cover the expense of supporting our free users, and would either have to pass those costs along to our paying customers or we’d be on the quick path to being out-of-business.

We’ve never offered a free version of the product, and we have no plans to. We’re just old-fashioned this way, and believe that we’re building a more fundamentally sound business by providing a valuable product that we’re paid for in return.

So, as easy as it is to dislike Microsoft and to resent the amount of money we pay for their products (I agree that monopolies are a bad thing) it doesn’t mean that the opposite extreme – free – is the right answer. Companies that provide a valuable product and that receive a fair price for them are built for the long run.

Unfortunately I was unable to attend the Web 2.0 Conference in person but have been following the conversation via Twitter. I commend the organizers for structuring an impressive and diverse range of speakers and topics that have elevated the conversation beyond solely the web’s challenges and opportunities. It is great to see the web community explore new roles the web can play in the challenges facing our world today from politics to global finance to healthcare.

Following the tweets got me thinking about TrackVia and how we have expanded our own line of thinking from where we started several years ago. We got started by helping a $5 billion transportation project solve a major data management problem. The problem: How could they track, manage, and respond to the unexpected volume of comments received from the community? The solution: TrackVia’s online database that provided a powerful and user friendly database that collected comments via web forms, organized comments by relevant category and provided a tool to share information with the community, vendors and government agencies.

By harnessing the best that technology has to offer and providing software through a web-based approach, we have evolved our online database solution that has been embraced by thousands of users in industries such as real estate, recruiting/hr, advertising/marketing, money managers, and non-profits alike in nearly every U.S. state and over 30 countries. When we started a few years ago, we knew a really diverse group of companies and industries would find our solution a useful tool. For example, a major food bank in California is tracking donors and campaigns with TrackVia and a global sustainable energy company is tracking logistics, inventory and wind generator defects with TrackVia.

We agree with Tim O’Reilly that this is just the beginning of the Internet; we also believe that this is just the beginning of TrackVia. We look forward to further expanding our presence and evolving our product with our current customer organizations and exposing our web-based database to new industries looking for a better way to collect, organize and share data.

To our customers, we are curious, what were you using before TrackVia?

It’s been interesting, to say the least, to watch how people and companies behave during the current problems in the financial sector. It’s given me just a hint of how people must’ve felt at the onset of the great depression, when there were runs on the banks. Knock on wood, we don’t seem to be headed for large scale runs on the banks this time around, and I think that the underlying reason is that people today have more confidence that their money is secure with their bank. And they certainly seem to believe that their money is more secure with a bank than it would be under their mattresses.

That realization has led me to an analogy about companies’ willingness to store their information with someone else, rather than keeping it on their own servers and PCs. As with cash, it’s tempting to feel that your information is more secure if it’s on your own machines, under your own control. However, I think that this feeling of security is largely an illusion. Today, “security breaches” are more ho-hum than they are the result of sophisticated, stealthy hacker attacks. For example, a company is much more likely to lose control of information through lost and stolen laptops than through a sophisticated hacker attack from Eastern Europe that overcomes multiple security layers protecting a network.

This is pertinent, of course, to TrackVia given that we’re in the business of providing our customers with both a great database application and online access to, and storage of, their information. In that sense, we’re a bank that stores and protects your information for you, a secure online database. Even though the model of hosted applications like TrackVia isn’t new (it’s been called the ASP model, Software-as-a-Service, etc.) I think that the time has come when most companies are willing to trust that their information is safer with us than it is under their mattress.

Welcome to the first installment of our series, “Shoulda Had TrackVia.” If you take a good look around, information is being mismanaged everywhere these days! And at no time is this more evident than when a big election rolls around.

Before reading further, I’d like to point out that this post was written from a data management not a political view point.

Local and state governments all over the country are in a panic, voters are dreading long lines and wondering if their votes will count this year.

If only we could’ve gotten to Ohio faster. It turns out that this crucial swing state’s election chief says they’re going to have to start creating their voter database from scratch after the election! Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner said Thursday that voters’ names will be maintained but the system must be fixed to allow easier searches.

Brunner says the system has been flawed since it was built by different vendors who didn’t always create a similar system of data entry fields.

“Shoulda had TrackVia”. Our powerful search tool just may have made the difference; searching in TrackVia is a breeze. And those data entry fields? With our easy import/ export features and the flexibility in our field types, Ohio could’ve saved itself a lot of money.

Jennifer if you or any other election official needs help putting together a voter database after the election, you know where to find us!