2012-12-31: Be SHSH in 2013: Successful, Häppy, Smart, Healthy (short version)

The Thoeny Family (2012-05-13)

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

From Peter

2012 was again a colorful and eventful year for us. Our kids are growing well. Gosh time flies, Ladina will be going to university already next year! She has not decided yet, but she might be going to Hong Kong University. Alexis is developing his technical skills and is dabbling with sales skills. We have Takafumi Nojima, a Japanese student living with us. Good for him to learn Engish, good for our kids to learn Japanese.

In summer the family went to Hong Kong for almost two month. I joined them for almost 2 weeks. It was a fantastic trip to Hong Kong, Macau and Guangzhou. While the family was in Hong Kong I was playing housewife and cooked every day for Taka. No fancy steamed fish, just solid healthy Swiss food.

Twiki Inc the company did not succeed in either bootstrapping the company with sales, or getting more investor money to build a sustainable cloud business. So earlier this year we made the difficult decision to shut down the company. It has been an incredible ride with the company for the last 7 years. I learned a lot, and I am very grateful to all who tried hard to make this company work. Special thanks to Jitendra Kavathekar, Jen Gifford, Tan Dinh and Brian Mellea who did a lot for the company in the final few month!

In the mean time I am doing consulting work, helping transform companies to be more agile using TWiki and other web technologies. Consulting has its own challenges, it takes time and effort to build & sustain a loyal list of clientele. I am also looking for the next business opportunity while recovering from the financial losses of the failed business.

The open source TWiki community is churning out releases that are very stable, and are getting more useable with each release. I am privileged and happy to work with such professional people. Many thanks to release manager George Trubisky who released stable TWiki releases, one after the other. Hideyo Imazu-san and Morgan Stanley team are working on making the open source TWiki scalable to tens of thousands of users and with data replication. We are also working on a new packaging standard for TWiki applications so that we can offer an application marketplace. There are many more goodies ready or in work, such as a tool to build dashboards for teams. We expect to create some buzz when we release the next major version in Spring 2013. We are still a too small community, so I will focus on recruiting more contributors in 2013. Would you like to join us and help create a kick-ass product? Learn how you can get involved with the TWiki community.

I wish you good health, lots of success, some breeze of luck, and a ton of joy in 2013!

From Shona

Happy New Year 2013!

Me and 2 kids were in Hong Kong the whole summer, except Peter who stayed for almost 2 week.

Ladina and Alexis got a summer job in Hong Kong. It's the first time they earned their own money.

Ladina will be in University next school year. My nephew Ringo will be graduating from UCLA in June. He is currently with us for the winter holidays.

I have 3 activities a week, Tuesday bowling night, Friday night mahjong, Sunday Chinese dance and exercise.

From Ladina (17 years)

I wish everyone a Happy New Year!

In June I'll finally be graduating from Lynbrook High School, and for that I am very excited. I am waiting for replies from the universities I sent applications to, and am hoping that my number one choice school accepts me into their entering undergraduate students in Fall of 2013.

All the best for 2013,
Ladina

From Alexis (almost 16 years)

Its been quite a year. All these universal events, as well as my own personal achievements, which of course include finding my first paid documented job, really brought the world together. I know that 2013 will be a great year to come.

I wish and hope for a wonderful 2013; for myself, my family, and as well as anybody that receives our new years resolution!

Photos from 2012

Please see our 2012-12-31 letter with many photos from 2012 at
http://thoeny.org/letter_2012-12-31.html