2010-12-28: We Wish You Success, Good Health and Lots of Joy in 2011 (short version)

The Thoeny Family (2010-08-15)

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

From Peter

2010 was an eventful year again, this time with some challenges. Shona was diagnosed with stage 1 breast cancer this spring. She went through treatments and recovered fast. Shona could avoid chemo thanks to a relatively new Oncotype DX test that examines the genomes. At this point all looks OK and as planned, with a low risk of recurrence. Shona took it in stride. I am thankful for the advances in medical research; I am so glad we live now, and not 50 or 100 years earlier.

Ladina spent a year in Switzerland at the Kantonsschule Zug as an exchange student. Thank you brother Christian for hosting Ladina! She came back this summer, re-energized for high school. Ladina and I talk now in German. Before she went to Switzerland our conversation was Swiss German one way, English the other way. Ladina continues studying Guzheng, and just recently she started learning a very ancient Chinese instrument called Guqin.

Alexis continues experimenting with many things. From skiing to golf, from air guns to model rockets, from melting glass to making cheese. He loves woodwork at school, he brings home beautiful clocks, padlocks and plates.

Ringo Leung continues his study at Foothill College. He got this first car, a necessity in the Silicon Valley.

Sina Tschirky was with us for a year, she went back to Switzerland this summer. We miss her! We have now Mengyi Xu, a student from China living with us. She is studying at De Anza College.

Work is very challenging. We have not been able to secure venture capital money as planned, so CEO Jitendra Kavathekar and I bootstrap the company the best we can. We have good customers by name, such as Disney, US Federal Reserve Bank and Sony, but the average deal amount is still relatively small. Sopan Shewale, our engineering manager in India, left this summer. We engage consultants as needed, but most of the R&D and support falls back on me.

I am putting a lot of effort into getting more people to contribute to the open source TWiki. This turns out to be very challenging because we have persistent efforts by a fork (a splinter group that separated from TWiki in 2008) to position us as hostile to open source, and as outdated. Both are nonfactual; we are more inviting to new contributors than before the split (the developers who treated new contributors rudely left for the fork), and our product is better than ever in terms of quality, usability and feature set. For example, we had no need to release a patch release after the major TWiki-5.0.0 release for 4 month. In contrast, the fork had to release emergency patch releases in two week intervals in a recent minor release. Recently we have more contributions on plugins. For example, Craig Meyer is working on an EncryptPlugin to safely store passwords in TWiki pages; Aaron Walker is working on a SliderControlPlugin to get Mac style controls in TWiki. I am very grateful to all the TWiki contributors! Thank you, Thank You! Please help spread the word, we are trying to grow the TWiki community. Let me know if you have ideas how to grow the community.

I'd like to expand on my speaker engagements and do more advocacy work for TWiki. However, my workload is so high that I cannot do much, far from my personal goal. Robert Scooble, a well known tech blogger, interviewed CEO Jitendra Kavathekar and me, How Work is Changing with the Open Source Wiki Pioneers: TWiki (and, yes, you can see the smear campaign by the fork in the comments section). This summer I gave a talk at NASA Ames on Structured Wikis at Work - Enterprise 2.0 in Action.

I am looking forward to 2011, a new year with fresh ambitions.

I wish you loads of success, mixed with a healthy dose of luck, good health and last but not least lots'a fun in the new year!

From Shona

It was a good & hard year 2010. Ladina is back, yeappppppeeee! My friend Wendy said: No matter how hard of the day, life keeps going on. Happy life will make u younger & healthy.

I wish U all Good Health, Happy Holidays & Years!

From Ladina (15 years)

Merry Xmas and a Happy New Year!

From Alexis (almost 14 years)

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to all who see this! 8D

P.S. Have a great one this year.

From Yung Shek Ringo Leung (19 years)

Happy New Year!!! Have fun before the "End of the World" come ^.^

Photos from 2010

Please see our 2010-12-28 letter with many photos from 2010 at
http://thoeny.org/letter_2010-12-28.html