Phoenxsoftware.com, Blastgen.com and subdomains offline on Monday 23th of August due to backup

All our domains will be offline during a short backup on Monday the 23th of August 00:05 GMT+1. The domains will be back online within 15 minutes. These back-ups will be executed because of recent DDOS attacks on other major software distributors and newssites.

List of all domains being backed-up :
-Phoenxsoftware.com
-Blastgen.com
-36ic.phoenxsoftware.com
-lpx.phoenxsoftware.com
-iphone.phoenxsoftware.com
-duelpro.phoenxsoftware.com
-roc.phoenxsoftware.com

Help pages, update servers, blastgen registration, 36IC, DPR & LPX DashBoard channels and the ROC server will be offline as well.

We apologize for this inconvenience.

New business and development strategy

New business and development strategy

As some might have noticed we are going to overhaul the phoenxsoftware business strategy. This might not be very intresting, but if you know that this means we are going to cancel the development of many apps it might concern you.

This all came in response to a 50% decline in our website’s traffic from nearly 30.000 users a month to +-15.000. It opened our eyes and made us realize that investing so much time and money in something where we don’t get anything in return for is useless. To be honest with numbers, Phoenxsoftware and surrounding services cost 280$ for the server, 60$ for each of our 2 domains (Phoenxsoftware.com and Blastgen.com), 99$ for our iPhone Developers account and 99$ for MobileMe synchronization services, making a total  of 598$. And how much do we earn annually? 200$ from advertising revenue. This means we lose nearly $400 dollars a year for bringing free apps to the people.

Some will say that it could be because we aren’t renowned enough. To give you some numbers, we have +-500.000 Duelpro Users, +-700.000 36-image converter users, 100 people testing our Antivirus Blastgen’s Beta and about 100.000 people using various windows utilities we made. A 300.000 visitors a year website and 1.3 million people using our software deliver us $200 a year. That’s how much our current business model earns us. We are a team of volunteers and still people think we are evil and rich.

First of all, you have noticed that we are developing more apps for the iPhone. That’s because there is no money in Windows development. Windows users don’t pay for software, Mac/iPhone users do. So that’s why all Windows users can wait until we are finished building and maintaining iPhone apps before the next Windows app will be launched, which is 36-image converter 4.7. We need the money from our iPhone development to fund Windows Development.

We now have two versions of our windows software in the iPhone production queue, iDuelpro Mobile (Duelpro) and yes, I can admit it, we built an iPhone version of 36-image converter called “iPhix” that was the big surprise on the iPhone part. It should be released to the App Store within this and a week. Even the site is already online, but more about that later.

We are planning a lot more iPhone apps and other apps for the Mac, but also windows apps with premium services. There’s still some software that deserves our attention, 36-image converter will remain our flagship together with all 36-products, but will be linked to a premium web service in a while and we will advertise iPhix during the 36IC installation to people with iTunes installed. ROC will get ROC Plus a premium version which allows custom ROC ID’s. And we will also continue the development of Blastgen, our commercial antivirus.

Now which application’s development will be halted then? Here you go :

-Mphix

-FileTorment

-SpeedShut (OpenSource)

-FileTorment Suite

-InfoBlaster IN4

-LockPhix (OpenSource)

-CachePhix

-LoadDown

-SpeedShut Lite (OpenSource)

Some of these applications may still become OpenSource. But for most of them development isn’t paying of and hence to our new businessmodel, useless.

So in short, most of our apps will be ditched, we don’t care anymore about our annual amount of visitors, we are silently ditching windows for cross-platform development and we want to run at least break even.

As some might have noticed we are going to overhaul the phoenxsoftware business strategy. This might not be very intresting, but if you know that this means we are going to cancel the development of many apps it might concern you.

This all came in response to a 50% decline in our website’s traffic from nearly 30.000 users a month to +-15.000. It opened our eyes and made us realize that investing so much time and money in something where we don’t get anything in return for is useless. To be honest with numbers, Phoenxsoftware and surrounding services cost 280$ for the server, 60$ for each of our 2 domains (Phoenxsoftware.com and Blastgen.com), 99$ for our iPhone Developers account and 99$ for MobileMe synchronization services, making a total  of 598$. And how much do we earn annually? 200$ from advertising revenue. This means we lose nearly $400 dollars a year for bringing free apps to the people.

Some will say that it could be because we aren’t renowned enough. To give you some numbers, we have +-500.000 Duelpro Users, +-700.000 36-image converter users, 100 people testing our Antivirus Blastgen’s Beta and about 100.000 people using various windows utilities we made. A 300.000 visitors a year website and 1.3 million people using our software deliver us $200 a year. That’s how much our current business model earns us. We are a team of volunteers and still people think we are evil and rich.

First of all, you have noticed that we are developing more apps for the iPhone. That’s because there is no money in Windows development. Windows users don’t pay for software, Mac/iPhone users do. So that’s why all Windows users can wait until we are finished building and maintaining iPhone apps before the next Windows app will be launched, which is 36-image converter 4.7. We need the money from our iPhone development to fund Windows Development.

We now have two versions of our windows software in the iPhone production queue, iDuelpro Mobile (Duelpro) and yes, I can admit it, we built an iPhone version of 36-image converter called “iPhix” that was the big surprise on the iPhone part. It should be released to the App Store within this and a week. Even the site is already online, but more about that later.

We are planning a lot more iPhone apps and other apps for the Mac, but also windows apps with premium services. There’s still some software that deserves our attention, 36-image converter will remain our flagship together with all 36-products, but will be linked to a premium web service in a while and we will advertise iPhix during the 36IC installation to people with iTunes installed. ROC will get ROC Plus a premium version which allows custom ROC ID’s. And we will also continue the development of Blastgen, our commercial antivirus.

Now which application’s development will be halted then? Here you go :
-Mphix
-FileTorment
-SpeedShut (OpenSource)
-FileTorment Suite
-InfoBlaster IN4
-LockPhix (OpenSource)
-CachePhix
-LoadDown
-SpeedShut Lite (OpenSource)

Some of these applications may still become OpenSource. But for most of them development isn’t paying of and hence to our new business model, useless. ROC will also be on this list when we have no ROC Plus sales.

So in short, most of our apps will be ditched, we don’t care anymore about our annual amount of visitors, we are silently ditching windows for cross-platform development and we want to run at least break even.

Blastgen Antivirus Primitive Beta successful!

The primitive Beta we released of Blastgen Antivirus has been quite successful. After just a few months without even having advertised, the fastest antivirus on earth already has 100 registered Beta testers. Many people have even asked where they could buy the full version.

But of course we are far from a working Blastgen, we are struggling to get a decent amount of malware in blastgen’s database and there is still much work to be done fixing and tweaking the core, since it has proven unstable with many people getting overloads and syncmode5 errors. These errors are caused because the CPU can’t handle the speed of the code processing.

Although many reviews and comments were positive there are also a lot of sceptical people who can’t believe what they see with their own eyes. Therefore if Blastgen is finally released as a stable version, possibly this summer, we will put the necessary caution remarks on our site. Blastgen indeed is the fastest real time antivirus but it lacks an extensive virus database and in depth or boot sector scanning.

We still have a lot of work in progress but we are confident in the chances Blastgen has. Even of becoming our most successful product, which may be able to put us on the software-map once and for all. Since we would like to get Blastgen Antivirus 1.0 online by this summer, our team has expanded and we are ready to continue development this summer at high speed.

You can still download Blastgen Beta build 3000 here>

Announcement : Blastgen Antivirus 2009, the fastest antivirus ever!

It was a well kept secret for a long time but now the first Beta has been finished we need Beta testers so here it is, project “Graverobber” or Blastgen, the fastest antivirus on earth!

 

Blastgen Screenshot

 

 

We started development of Blastgen 3 years ago, but it was discontinued due to a lack of time. Now that I’d found a colleague in the development of Blastgen I continued it 2 months ago and now it’s already time for the first Beta.

Blastgen can scan an entire PC in less than a second by using a special core called BlastX2 which is able to process mass amounts of code, being able to process 5.000 files each second. This feature combined with intelligent design that checks for symptoms rather than scanning an entire hard drive makes Blastgen about 5000 times faster than the current record holder NOD32.

Of course you can see for yourself and try it now by going to the Blastgen Beta pages.

The first Beta is released to test the definitions for false positives and see how the BlastX2 core runs on different kinds of configurations. This version can find malware but cannot remove it as it is not armed yet. This security will be removed as the current definitions are approved to be safe. The current version hasn’t been tested on Windows Vista, but it will automatically update itself in case there is an issue in Vista.

This was the big secret, so enjoy!
We truly hope Blastgen will become a succes and that people won’t have to wait for hours to scan their PC.