2008-01-06: Fun, Successful and Healthy New Year 2008 (short version)
 The Thoeny Family in Harmony, CA (2007-12-27) |
From Peter
2007 was quite an eventful year for all of us. In April I co-founded TWIKI.NET together with Rod Beckstrom. Rod is a serial entrepreneur, a motivational speaker and co-author of the bestseller The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations. We founded the company to cultivate, nurture and advance TWiki as the leading open source enterprise wiki. I have seen that wikis can fundamentally change the way people work together; it was always my dream to create a company that helps revolutionize collaboration and enhance productivity in all organizations. TWIKI.NET is a funded company. We are currently operating under a Series A Angel fund; we are now accepting bridge loans by private investors (let me know if you are interested), and in spring 2008 we will go for an institutional Series B fund with Venture Capitalists. Typical for Silicon Valley startups, it is very hectic, we improvise a lot, and we have lots of fun! The open source TWiki project is moving along well. We had our first ever TWiki Community Summit, where 12 key contributors met in Rome, Italy in August. We also started to engage the user community by organizing TWiki Meet-Ups in the Silicon Valley, Berlin and other places. We would like to expand the TWiki community, we are looking for committed contributors to work on spec, code, tech writing and marketing. Dan Woods and I have been working for a long time on a Wikis in the Workplace book. We preempted it for the Wikis for Dummies book, which came out in August. I continue to take every speaking opportunity, such as Tutorial on Wikis in the Workplace at the Wiki Symposium 2007 in Montreal, Canada. Ladina continues to learn Chinese Dance; she has several performances a year. She also started to learn Guzheng, a Chinese table harp. She was rehearsing in a local orchestra that was invited to play in Beijing for the Olympic committee in August. We all planned to go to Beijing, however, there was lots of back and forth if they could perform there or not. We first went to Hong Kong to visit family. Shona and kids continued to Beijing, I went back home to launch TWIKI.NET at LinuxWorld in San Francisco. To the big disappointment of all the kids and parents, the orchestra could not perform for the Olympic committee, but a very short clip was aired on CCTV-2. Alexis is drawing me more into the world of model rocketry. He is designing is own rockets with simulation software. We are members of the LUNAR club that meets at a ranch east of Stockton, CA, to launch low to high powered rockets. The FAA is locking down the air space so that members can shoot rockets up to 15,000 feet. Alexis is asking me now to get a certification to launch high powered rockets (he is still too young.) It is hard to keep in touch with friends spread all around the world. I hope we can meet one day at home in San Jose, or around the world when we travel. I found Facebook, a social networking website, good to keep in touch with friends and business associates. Shona, Ladina and I are registered, you can find us there. I wish all of you a fun, successful and, last but not least, a healthy new year! Life is colorful, make it happen!From Shona
HAHAHA!! As usual late greeting from Thoeny family; at least in touch once a Year. I wish you all good health, happiness and success for whatever you do!From Ladina (12 years)
I hope 2007 was ok for everyone, and wish luck for 2008.From Alexis (almost 11 years)
I hope you enjoyed 2007. I wish you luck and lots of fun for 2008.Photos from 2007
Please see our 2007-01-07 letter with many photos from 2007 at http://thoeny.org/letter_2008-01-06.html