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If it were still a home-grown software with a small DEDICATED staff of designers and code writers, I think we would be seeing more of those enhancements and fixes.  Along with fresh new ideas.

I get the feeling that they just want to push the next version out the door to make some more money.  And as was already mentioned, not even fixing the older versions first, just moving on to the next version with a minimal amount of hoopla advertising.
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3 not-quick things:

What factors lead you to that feeling?  I truly want to combat this whenever possible.  There have been multiple service release showing our dedication to fix the products and bugs, we took serious user input and invited a public beta on this version and have tried to increase our communication with users.  We are trying pretty hard here to make you feel like we aren't corporate!  Do you have any suggestions on ways we could communicate that better? 

We are a very small, VERY dedicated staff that make up the Smith Micro Productivity and Graphics group here in Watsonville.  I've been here 9 years, and there are at least 10 people here who have been working with Poser longer than me and done more than the 3 company jump, some have done the 5 company jump.  (Smith, Efro, CL, Meta & Fractal.)  We have even more excitement and energy behind the product than ever before - It's really quite awesome to work here now.  (Oy, there were days in the past company years, it wasn't near as fun..)  I'm pretty excited to start doing a few more behind the scenes pieces so you all can really see who is working on the software and making the decisions, and where the ideas are coming from.  I will say what I always say - the motives behind the development and sale of this product by the team here are pretty darn awesome.  (And while our owner is bigger than in the past - they are certainly behind this product line, and it is not just another horse in the stable.)

Regarding the contest - I'm pretty sure that I had uploaded at least 30 videos the day before the close of the contest.  We're just trying to do more events, you should see a lot of these kinds of things for our products this year.  Not everyone will want to play every game, take every discount or visit every website.  I'll definitely work on some camera-shy events.  For this particular contest - I thought it was better to not cut 9 people out of the prize, that seemed silly.  If we had gotten 100 entries, chances are we would have probably had to enforce things like the video time limit, etc.  But, I was really excited by the quality of the entries and want people to have good happy feelings about participating in things, not negative feelings.  We haven't done many contests, this was a test of the waters again.  If you missed this event, watch out, you never know what we're going to do next!  I don't think there is any direct relationship between the events, prizes and contests to the future or development of the product, nor any indication of a corporate influence in them!  If that's what you're hearing from this though, I need to rethink how we approach things.

Regarding the website - We tried to add the new "microsites" in order to be a little more graphic and image based as well as share more of the product information.  Check out poser.smithmicro.com, anime.smithmicro,com and manga.smithmicro.com in order to see a little less corporate feel of the company and graphics products!

Thanks for being part of this community - I am not here as much as I like, but I do try and listen and carry forth the messages here, and know many more lurk...so keep talking, and we'll do what we can!

Tori Porter
Online Marketing
Smith Micro

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