2009-12-26: Seasons Greetings & Success in 2010 (short version)

The Thoeny Family (2009-12-25)

New address: 1022 Belvedere Ln, San Jose, CA 95129, USA phone +1-408-255-1477

From Peter

2009 was again an eventful year for us. And time seems to pass by faster, despite some challenges we had in 2009.

Our family is doing well. Ladina was invited by her former teacher to participate in the first International Guzheng competition in Hong Kong in May. She returned with silver. Well done and well deserved!

In summer, Ladina decided to go to Switzerland to study at the Kantonsschule (High School) in Zug. She is living with my brother Christian & Luzia Thöny family. In return we have their daughter Sina with us for a year to study English. I call that daughter swap. A friend suggested may be it was a parent swap. Good point! Ladina took the Guzheng over to Switzerland where she entertains family and friends with the ancient Chinese instrument. It is great to see Ladina grow up as a responsible teenager.

Alexis develops as a typical boy and teenager. He recently discovered the passion of Golf thanks to a good teacher, Shona's friend Michelle Lo, who is a Golf instructor in Los Angeles. Alexis and I continue to enjoy launching rockets. Alexis likes to do all kinds of technical experiments. Recently he built an airgun that can shoot an arrow 150 meters.

Shona's nephew Yung Shek Ringo Leung is now living with us. He is studying at Foothill College. He turned 18 and just got his drivers license and a small car. A growing family needs more space. Shona was very lucky and found a nice house nearby. The Cupertino school district has many Asians; it seems like all neighbors are from China, Taiwan, Japan and South Korea. Life is good.

The open source TWiki continues in a smaller scale after the split in October 2008. At that time we initiated a community governance model based on the commercial open source Ubuntu project, with the goal to scale the TWiki community and project. The split happened because a collection of consultants who had their own commercial agenda did not agree with the new governance model. While several attempts have been made to reach out to the new community to have a friendly relationship, unprofessional and discourteous behavior including defacing the TWiki.org sandbox, aggressive and misleading information on Twitter and IRC channels on a daily basis, virulent blog posts and disingenuous spam emails (using the twiki.org user database from an old backup) to try and capitalize on the success of the TWiki project have made this task difficult. The good news is that after the split we regained an active, professional and courteous community. We are now working on recruiting new contributors.

The Twiki business is still a small business. We operated for two years with two interim CEOs, first with co-founder Rod Beckstrom, then with Tom Barton. In summer we could engage Jitendra Kavathekar as President and CEO, full-time that is. We initiated a number of changes: We renamed the company from TWIKI.NET to Twiki Inc, we hired Milind Pansare, a very experienced VP of Marketing coming from Sun Microsystems. We changed our tagline from "enterprise wiki company" to "enterprise agility company" to reflect better where we position ourselves compared to the competition. We enhanced our product line with the very little Engineering resources we have. Sopan Shewale is doing great work in India. In the Silicon Valley we hired Ian Kluft, who loves flying airplanes and launching high powered model rockets when he is not working on Perl code. Will Thomas is driving sales and business development. We also hired sales associate Sumit Grover, fresh from MBA. We gained more customers, including a major company in the entertainment business and a major social networking company that everybody knows. My goal is to build a large and successful business for enterprise collaboration. We have lots of good ideas but need the capital to execute. We are trying to secure VC money, until then we have to operate on a small scale.

I wish all of you lots of success, peace, health and joy in 2010! Life is colorful, make it happen!

From Shona

It is as usual a good year for me. Ladina went to Switzerland for her high school. All friends said it's so sad, but not for me. She goes back to her country and stay with family. As a parent we need to respect their choice, Ladina is happy. Thanks to Skype video, we can talk and see each other everyday. We have two family members from Hong Kong and Switzerland, Ringo & Sina, both are 18. They are very good and helpful. Alexis is having so much fun with them.

We moved, it happened so fast. I found the house and we signed the contract within a week. The owner is Japanese and Chinese couple. They are very very nice. We are lucky with Ringo & Sina here. They helped a lot with moving, as well as my friends Anna's family, Ching with Praxis, Alex and Cherry's son Alvin. It was fun to move, team work. I didn't have to do much, haha.

I wish you all good health, and a happy life forever.

From Ladina (14 years)

Eine schöne Weinachtszeit und ein wundervolles Neues Jahr. Merry Christmas and a wonderful New Year to all who are reading this. My German has improved (hopefully) from these past months studying in Switzerland, and I hope to improve it further in 2010.

From Alexis (almost 13 years)

I wish you all a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

From Sina Tschirky (18 years)

A very merry x-mas! an alli/ a tutti / for all my very nice friends

From Yung Shek Ringo Leung (18 years)

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

Photos from 2009

Please see our 2009-12-26 letter with many photos from 2009 at
http://thoeny.org/letter_2009-12-26.html