Оригинал: http://www.iltuosistema.it/

«1) ‘small’ news about yellowTAB:

• yT makes their CD’s theirselves. It is cheaper and it is also faster. In this way they can ship very fast a number of copies to a certain distributor. This is very important for yellowTAB. They are a very young company and need the money to stay a healthy. It is known that yellowTAB does not have the money as Be Inc had in the old times. But that does not tell us they don’t have the power to create a good OS. yellowTAB does not have investors. Bernd Korz invested a lot of money in the compagny.

• Now they have around 15 developers, 3 sales people(1 inhouse) and a lawyer. All together they have about 35 people(In time there will be more) working for yellowTAB.

2) Marketing:

• Bernd had a visit at PalmSource and he talked about ZETA R1 and BeOS R5 with Jean–Louis Gassée. JLG is still using BeOs R5 as long as it is possible, but when Bernd showed him ZETA R1, JLG was impressed. Bernd showed him the wireless preferences, the PhotoGrabber which downloads pictures from his digital camera and more. After the demonstration, JLG wanted to have a copy of ZETA R1.

• JLG told Bernd that Be Inc did sell less copies of R5 then yellowTABs Zeta R1. When Be Inc sold 17.000 copies sold in a certain period, yellowTAB sold 70.000.

• First a Zeta base will be created in Germany. And as we see, yellowTAB is also doing a lot of effort to get a base in Japan. These markets are very imported for them. In time they will focus theirselves to other markets which will be Europe and the United States. These markets are more difficult to get foot on. This because of patents and certain laws and rules that you need to follow.

• In the future yT want to sell around 250.000 copies of ZETA R1. They want to accomplish this by creating a big network of resellers. You already see they are creating a network of resellers in Germany(http://yellowtab.de/shop). In time there should become more resellers in other countries also.

• yellowTAB is also going to organise an event to show third party compagnies what they have.

• yT knows openssource is important these days. We all know Haiku is the opensource version of BEOS R5. yT also knows that very well and in a way they support Haiku by paying some developers to develop things for ZETA and HAIKU.

3) New developers:

• In time yellowTAB will need more and more developers(http://www.yellowtab.com/jobs/). As we all know, there are not that many people who have good BeOs API and kernel skills.

• They search for people with good knowledge of other OS’s like Unix,Linux even Windows.

• People with fresh ID’s that could help yellowTAB to create a good OS that contains all the good points of other OS’s.

• They also have students that create some stuff for them. It is good for both sides. They don’t cost that much and are motivated. ZETA will then also be more and more known in the schools and students.

4) Future versions of ZETA:

• There will become a localized version for every country in time. Now there is one for Germany, Japan and the English version.

• The best supported languages are German, Japanese and Dutch. In the next version more languages will be better supported.

• ZETA now runs without problem on a AMD64 and a 64–bit version of ZETA will be shipped next to R2.

5) What about the forgotten Zintro?

• The Zintro will still be shipped, but there are still some issues with the grafick driver and the BONE stack. yT is looking for it now and when the issues are solved, they will sell the Zintros.

• yT is also looking for a new ‘ZETA’ machine. They are now looking with a compagny from Switserland to create ‘ZETA’ machine with a cool design. So at the end, yellowTAB will sell a ‘ZETA Box’ which will be a box with a cool design and it will contain hardware that is fully supported by ZETA R1 and future versions.

6) ZETA Event:

• There will come a ‘ZETA Event’ and it will NOT be a second BeGeisterd. It will be more a ‘B to B’ event.

• An event of 2 or 3 days with workshops of ZETA R1 and products of other compagnies like Xentronixs and yellowBites.

• Third party compagnies would be invited to see and learn more about ZETA and all what is around it.

• Bernd expects 500 to 1000 people (compagnies and others) could come to the first event which would be in Mannheim or in Frankfurt. They want to have the event before the end of the year.

The Bebug Team»