Newsletter February 2010

Aloha,

This is Alwin, writing to you from Maui, Hawai'i.
Sytske and I are here to attend a 3-day marketing seminar
and we decided to extend our stay to a 2-week vacation.

So here I am, sitting on the balcony of our hotel room, overlooking the ocean.
It's 7 AM in the morning (jetlag!) and I've already spotted a couple of whales.
Not a bad place to be writing the February edition of the
Collectorz.com newsletter. I could get used to this :-)

Just had a quick chat with Robbert and Ronald at the office (it's late Friday
afternoon in Amsterdam). They're making good progress on the final stages of the
Amazon-Free project. We're still on schedule to be free from Amazon on March 12.
Let me give you a quick overview of the status:

* Movie Collector *
Of course, Movie Collector is Amazon-Free already, but AJ, Martin and Rowdy are
still working to make sure you won't miss a thing. Their main focus is adding
barcodes and with success: our online movie database now recognizes over
half a million barcodes.

In the meantime, I have reached an agreement with MovieMeter.nl. We are now
allowed to use their Dutch plot summaries for our online movie database.
I am working on a similar arrangement with FilmAmora.com, for plot summaries in
Spanish and for EAN barcodes of spanish DVD editions.
Let's hope we can make more deals like this in the future.

* Book Collector *
To make up for the loss of Amazon on March 12, we are implementing a lot of new
stuff for our Collectorz.com online book database:

- Sven has added 13 national libraries as back-end sources, for France,
Scotland, Germany, Portugal, Spain, US, Switzerland, Australia and Canada.

- I have negotiated a deal with ISBNdb.com and our online book database system
is now using their huge database (over 5 million ISBNs) as a back-end source.

- And last but not least:
Today, Ronald and Sven have released a new 6.5 version of Book Collector for
Windows. It features a new Submit to Collectorz.com feature, which lets you
submit your data and cover images for inclusion in our online book database,
so that all users can work together to make it better and more complete.

* Music Collector *
For our music database, we have also added new sources for data and cover art:

- MusicBrainz : We are now using MusicBrainz as a back-end source for CD-ID
searches. If a CD-ID is not found in our own database (listing over 3 million
CD-IDs), our server now queries MusicBrainz first, then freedb.
Of course, caching the results for future use.

- Discogs.com : The 2nd source we added is the excellent Discogs database of
CD and vinyl releases. Quality data and lots of cover images (front and back!).
Good stuff. Their server is a bit slow though, so we decided to host a copy of
their database on our own server, updated on a monthly basis. The cover images
are still retrieved from their server, so you may see some delays when
previewing Discogs.com results. Sorry about that.

Both sources are live now, for Music Collector 9 *and* for all older Mac and
Windows versions. No software update needed, the MusicBrainz and Discogs results
are integrated in the results of the Collectorz.com source. Dinh and Martin
are still tuning this integration, so that both will be fully tweaked and
debugged before Amazon-Free day.

* March 12 *
Two weeks from now, on March 12, we will stop all Amazon searches for music and
books in our Collectorz.com online database systems. On that same day, all
Amazon sources in older versions of Music and Book Collector will stop working.

This will make Collectorz.com completely Amazon-Free and we will be able to
re-launch our iPhone apps Clz Music and Clz Books.
And more importantly, we can finally get back to what we were doing on
Black Tuesday (January 19), the day we received that nice email from Amazon :-)

Thanks for your patience and support, or as they say here: Mahalo!

Alwin
Collectorz.com