The migration to other platforms has been painful, to say the least.

Several years after Dabble first launched, no other provider comes close to matching Dabble’s price, features, or its amazingly wonderful user interface.

I’m sorry it was bought up by Twitter. It should have been bought by Apple and incorporated into the iPhone, iPad, and any other product they’ve got.

We really, really, REALLY love the user interface. We used it for our editorial workflow, for bookkeeping, for HR, to collect survey data, to gather statistics, and for any other company function that involved gathering and managing data.

After Dabble announced its impending doom, we tried out every other platform out there, and nothing even comes close. Which is suprising. After all, how hard is it to rip off — I mean, be inspired by! — someone else’s user interface?

Dabble did an amazing job at making relational databases simple and intuitive.  But enough about that. Here’s what we have learned.

Go big

If you’re going to be using a Web-based platform, go with a really really really big one. That way, there’s less chance of it shutting down. And, if it does shut down, it will affect a huge number of customers — so there will be migration paths available to other systems.

In our case, we have moved our customer relationship management databases over to Salesforce.com. It’s a big, big, BIG platform. Lots of features. Better email functionality than Dabble.

Unfortunately, the user interface leaves a lot to be desired. But, with all their revenues, maybe they’ll be able to afford to do some housekeeping and make it more usable.

In any case, the documentation and tutorials are great — no complaints on that front. Of course, they wouldn’t need the tutorials if they just fixed their interface problems… oh, well.

Go WordPress

We are big, big, BIG fans of WordPress. We’ve been using it for our company websites for a while now.

The latest release supports custom data types.

This is a big deal.

You see, at its heart, WordPress is a relational database. Typically, it only has a few tables — the table with the blog posts, another table for user names, etc…

You’re not really supposed to access the database directly — you can really mess up your blog.

But with the new custom fields functionality you can, in effect, set up new tables in the system.

For example, say you use your WordPress site for a few static pages — About Us, Contact Us, Pricing — and blog posts filled with your latest company news. And, say, your company does events. You can set up a custom post type called “Events” and in there you’d have the event title, the body of the post — the event description — and as many custom fields as you want, such as date, location, speaker, price, and so on.

With a little bit of template fiddling, you can have those events now come up in a section on your website, and be searchable and otherwise integrated with the rest of the site.

We take this a step further — by making some pages and options visible only to users who are logged in (that is, company employees) — we can also add in internal pages for workflow monitoring.

Zoho Creator

For everything else, we’ve gone with Zoho Creator. In fact, they’re still in the process of migrating our databases from Dabble. One is pretty much done, and we’re integrating it into our workflow now.

Zoho’s pricing is similar to that of Dabble, though the user interface leaves much to be desired. In addition, Zoho Creator presupposes a higher degree of technical knowledge on the part of the person setting up the database. And it has a scripting language. Dabble didn’t have a scripting language because it didn’t need one — all its features were readily accessible through its menus and options windows.

However, Zoho gives you a lot less storage than Dabble did for the same amount of money.

Open source it

Ideally, I would want to have a front end to mySQL that runs inside WordPress that’s as easy to use as Dabble.

I can see a business model here.

A company can write a set of plugins to do basic database administration — create new tables, add fields, add entries, create links, create and display views, and allow updates.

Then they can sell additional plugins or templates that sit on top of this basic functionality.

I would rather pay money for a plugin and template — and have as much storage as my hosting provider offers (i.e. — unlimited!) — than pay a monthly fee for access to a hosted product that could disappear any day.

And if it was open source that means that I would still have it even the folks who created it folded up shop and went off to do something else.

If anyone is interested in working on this with me, email me at maria@tromblyinternational.com

I’m told that Drupal already has some of this functionality. But I can’t even read the Drupal installation guide, much less actually install it. Whereas WordPress is a small business person’s dream.

Don’t try to talk about OOP
What are those objects supposed to be?
In ten minutes I’ll be out the door
I like that old time COBOL code

Still like that old time COBOL code
That kind of coding just soothes the soul
I reminisce about the days of old
With that old time COBOL code

Don’t give me .Net or php
C# and Ruby are not for me
One sure way to get me coding now
Ask me for old time COBOL code

Call me a relic, call me what you will
Say I’m old-fashioned, say I’m over the hill
Today’s software ain’t got the same soul
I like that old time COBOL code

Still like that old time COBOL code
That kind of coding just soothes the soul
I reminisce about the days of old
With that old time COBOL code

Iwinski was great to talk to — and the guy is an international entrepreneur himself and really knows his stuff. He’s the managing director of Jin Fu Consulting, a firm that is focused on cross-border merger and acquisition research, guidance, negotiation and execution between firms in the United States and China.

David Iwinski

Fons and I talked about how we first met in Shanghai, and Fons explained how the China Speakers Bureau works.

We talked about how we started the China Speakers Bureau, and how we run the company virtually — using Google Apps, Skype, and an online workflow system running on DabbleDB.  And we also talked about our virtual corporate campus running on the OpenSim open source virtual environment platform.

Fons and I also talked about the book we’re currently writing about the hypergrid, and promised we’ll come back when the book is released.

Visit the show page for more information and to listen to a replay of the episode — our segment is the one titled “Doing Business In Multiple International Markets?  ‘The International Capitalist’ Has You Covered.” You can also listen to the entire episode on BlogTalk Radio.

Not the price it costs to produce products — but the price it takes to produce one more product.

Say, for example, you have two newspapers in the same town producing almost indistinguishable products.

And it costs, say, $1 dollar to print and distribute one additional newspaper.

The newspapers charge $2 for the papers — $1 goes to cover the marginal costs, and the rest is divided between fixed costs and profit. By fixed costs, in this context, I mean the money it costs to produce the first copy of the newspaper — the salaries of the editors and reporters, the rent of the newspaper building, the capital costs of the printing presses.

At some point, one of the two newspapers will decide to try to grab market share from the other one and lower its prices. Say it drops its price to $1.50 while the other newspaper doesn’t. If the two have equivalent content — and readers don’t have any particular loyalty to one over the other — everyone will switch over and the $2 paper will go out of business. To keep that from happening, the $2 paper will also lower its price to $1.50.

In a free market, the two newspapers will continue to lower their prices until they can’t go any further without losing money or making the profits so low that it’s not worth the effort.

In practice, of course, one newspaper will buy out the other and enjoy monopoly pricing — it can decide how much to charge so as to maximize revenues from its geographical area of coverage.

So what happens when there is no additional cost to produce a new copy of an item?

One example of this that we’re all familiar with is television and radio broadcast.

If you’re living within the coverage area of a television station, it doesn’t cost the station anything extra to beam the program to you. Cable television companies have to lay new cable. But not broadcast stations. They put up the antenna, and everyone within range can listen in.

Radio and television stations could, if they wanted, charge their audience members. They could encrypt their broadcasts and sell decryption boxes to individual subscribers.

Say one station charged its viewers $10. Another station, with equivalent content, charges only $5. After all, it’s already paid for the antennas and the journalists. Either the other station matches the price cut or it goes out of business as everyone switches over to the cheaper one.

The two stations will continue to lower their prices until they’re just above the marginal cost of each new subscriber — but that marginal cost is zero.

And, in practice, terrestrial radio and television stations give away their programming for free, and use advertising to offset their fixed costs of production.

So what about online media?

The incremental cost of each new website visitor is pretty close to zero. There are fixed overhead costs — servers, content, staff.

If two websites offer equivalent content, then traffic will inevitably flow to the one that charges less money, since customers aren’t total idiots. Eventually one of these websites will figure out how to bring in enough advertising revenues to cover its fixed costs, and give away content for free, as radio and television stations have done for decades. The for-pay websites will have to do the same or go out of business.

The main exception to this, of course, is monopoly content. If, for example, mine is the only website to offer Dilbert cartoons, and the public really wants Dilbert cartoons, then I can charge whatever people can afford to pay. But this is only as long as I maintain the monopoly. The minute I start allowing other sites to reprint Dilbert cartoons for, say, a fixed licensing fee, then those other sites can lower their prices and we’re back in a competitive landscape.

Apple is able to charge more than its marginal costs for its products because it controls the distribution network for a very popular product with unique content. As soon as that content is available elsewhere — say, through Android-based alternatives to the iPad — it will quickly start losing market share to lower-priced alternatives.

Music, software, books, and movies are three types of content that used to have marginal costs. It cost money to print DVDs and books. It cost money to get them into stores. It cost money to hire clerks to sell them. With electronic distribution, the marginal costs of these goods are zero.

We’re already seeing out-of-copyright works available legally, for free, on electronic distribution networks.

Movies and music are already available for free on television and radio and to a limited extent on the Web. This will only grow as licensing deals spread and companies figure how to how to use advertising revenues to offset fixed licensing costs so that they can get the content to the biggest audience.

I predict that we will soon see free, ad-supported electronic books, starting with the publishers’ back catalogs and out-of-print titles.

Software is already moving to a free model, with enterprise products like Google Apps, and free-to-play games that make money from selling in-world virtual goods.

Any company in the business of producing virtual goods has to think about either offering hot, in-demand monopoly content, or finding out a way to distribute it free.

A couple of staffers were reassigned, the rest laid-off. We lost our anchor client, the client we launched our company with.

In the journalism community, it’s common to hear that the problem is with our readers, that they’ve gotten used to getting news for free on the Internet, and these readers need to be re-educated, marketed to, manipulated into somehow paying for content again.

Before the Internet, the story goes, people paid for their news. The Internet spoiled them, turned them into free-riding leeches drinking our nation’s media dry.

When the media are all dead, they’ll be sorry. Readers will be stuck with shallow blogs that refer to one another in an endless cycle of navel-gazing, without any hard news to give them meaning or substance.

The attractiveness of this argument is that it puts the blame squarely with the people who deserve it least — with the public. And lets the folks who are to blame, who are running the media into the ground, off the hook.

THE COST STRUCTURE

One issue — which should be completely clear to anyone who’s read The Innovators Dilemma — is that there is a fundamental difference in the cost structure between producing Web news and producing print news. Newspapers spend more than half of their budgets on printing and distribution — and a third on editorial and administration.

This means that every new reader has almost linear impact on costs for a newspaper.

For the Web, the incremental costs of adding new readers is minute. In fact, the Web is more like radio or television than print.

Oh, and there’s no way I’m paying extra to get my stories on the iPad, when those same stories are available for free, unless the iPad stories offer a significantly better experience. And I’m having a hard time imagining what the iPad could do that would be valuable and useful that the Web doesn’t already offer. Ad-free news? Google News has that. Videos? Every site has those.

Newspapers have repeatedly tried ways to get people to pay for content by packaging it differently, in PDF files, or those annoying online magazines that are almost impossible to read, and completely impossible to link to.

And even if Apple did create a way in which the iPad was significantly better than the standard Web experience, the Internet cost equation would still come into play.

Electronic distribution is cheaper than print. Even distribution on an iPad. And as long as its cheaper, one of your competitors will find a way to undercut you and deliver the same news product for free. And I’ll get their App instead of yours.

MEDIA DOESN’T HAVE TO BE SUBSCRIPTION-BASED

It took 35 years after cable television was introduced in 1950 before half of the US population was paying for a cable subscription. Today, a third of all Americans still get their television for free, over the airwaves.

The situation with radio is even more illustrative. Only 6% of the US population currently pays for radio, through satellite radio subscriptions. More than 93% of us get our music and news for free, over advertising-supported airwaves. And we’ve had commercial radio available since 1920.

Clearly, there’s a way to deliver content without charging for subscriptions.

YOU GET WHAT YOU PAY FOR

I do admit — I pay for cable television and cable Internet in my house. There are free alternatives — I could watch the three or four channels I get for free, and use public WiFi at the local library for my Internet.

I pay for cable and Internet because I get a substantial advantage by doing so. I get to watch Comedy Central, for example. The kids get nature documentaries and cartoons. I like watching USA and TNT. I don’t bother with any of the premium channels. I’m not alone — only a third of cable subscribers pay for premium channels.

When we pay for something, we expect to get something significantly better than what we could get for free. With basic cable, I get significantly more channels, and much better picture quality. With premium cable, I would get newer movies and show likes the Sopranos and True Blood. And I hear you can get sports.

With my broadband connection, I get high-speed access to funny pictures of cats whenever I want. My kids get online encyclopedias — not to mention Google, Skype video chats with their friends in China, MIT’s online classes, recipes, weather — pretty much anything they want to find out, they can. We live in miraculous times. I’m willing to pay a chunk of cash every month for that miracle.

With satellite radio, the difference is less obvious, and probably ephemeral. I can pull in Internet radio for free on my iPhone while I drive cross-country (I assume other phones can do the same thing these days, or are about to). Pandora is also a great — and free — source of music both at home and on the road. Internet radio quality is high — much better than Internet video, since it requires less bandwidth. And the old-fashioned radio is pretty good, too. We get NPR news when we need it — commuting to and from work. Prairie Home Companion on the weekends. And I’m always scanning past other radio stations as well, that deliver news, and sports, and commentary, and various musical genres.

Unless I was a rabid fan of talk shows only available via satellite — like Howard Stern — satellite radio doesn’t offer much in the way of improvement over what I already get for free.

I’m not a bad person for preferring free radio. I’m not mooching off of anyone — I listen to the commercials. Occasionally I fork over some dough to NPR. And the system works. Broadcast radio and television have found a balance between what they can afford to produce, and how much they are able to earn from advertising and donations. This balance has worked for decades.

The Internet media just need to find their own balance.

TOO MUCH OVERLAP

Yes, I get paid to report on things. And I firmly believe that a well-educated public is the cornerstone of democracy, and that a free market of ideas is a necessary precondition for all other kinds of free markets.

But we used to have a lot of duplication of effort in the old pre-Internet days.

Say a big story was breaking in Moscow. The newspaper from Boise would send a guy to cover it. So would the newspaper from Pittsburg. The Pittsburg readers wouldn’t see the Boise paper, and vice versa. The fact that two reporters were paid to write almost the same story wasn’t obvious to the readers, and there were plenty of columnists and journalists who were turning in the same exact stuff as someone else at a newspaper a few towns down the line. After all, how many different ways are there to say the same thing?

To some degree, the wire services cut down on this duplication of effort. And radio and television were quick to roll out centralized news bureaus, since the costs of sending local television crews around to all the big international stories would have been prohibitively expensive.

But still — you can only watch one television channel at a time. If one station airs the same exact story as another station that’s not surprising — it’s too be expected. After all, no station would want to miss covering the big story of the day.

And, to some degree, it’s good that we have competition. Having three or four different takes on the news — or 30 or 40 different takes — is good for us. Competition helps news organizations improve. But there’s a point of diminishing returns, when additional eyes on the story are no longer adding value, but are just wasting money.

The Internet has accelerated this trend a hundred-fold.

If you want to know the latest news about any topic, just head over to your Yahoo or Google or Bing home page (or whatever aggregator you prefer) and you can compare the stories from Boise and Pittsburg, the wire stories, and even the stories from newspapers in Moscow itself. Geography — and language barriers — disappear, thanks to Google News and Google Translate.

Meanwhile, many international publications, especially those focused on business, are putting out English editions, specifically for the readers who find them via the Web.

And it’s not just the geography and language. In the business sector, publications used to be very narrowly focused on specific verticals. If you were interested in a story on Chinese manufacturing, for example, you might find a story one month in a magazine about semiconductors, and another month in a magazine about furniture distribution, and the next month in a magazine dedicated to the textile industry. Few people would have the time or money to subscribe to all these magazines. They would wait for the Wall Street Journal to get around to writing a broad overview story.

Today, with Google News, you can read about developments in a variety of industry verticals related to your area of interest.

THE PRO-AM DIVIDE

There’s a lot of invective spewed against bloggers by professional journalists. Many forget the entire journalism professional started out — in a way — as bloggers. Journalism used to be a craft, not a profession, and newspapers were leaflets with plenty of point of view and less of solid reporting.

Newspapers do have editors, and this is nice. If you’re paying for a newspaper subscription, you don’t want the day’s edition to be full of unreadable twaddle. You’d be willing to pay extra to ensure a decent quality of output. And since individual readers usually had no way to check the facts of a story, it was nice to know that there was someone doing it for you.

With the Internet, if you don’t like a story, you just stop reading and go grab that story from another source. For any popular story there will be hundreds, perhaps thousands, of alternative takes. Pick one you like better, and the Internet as a whole will rearrange itself so that next time the better-written, more popular stories will come up first when you search.

Some of those nicely-written stories may be professionally edited. Others might not. Either way, it’s irrelevant. If you don’t like it, go on to the next one.

And if something in a story doesn’t ring true to you, Google it. The world’s best fact-checker is at your finger tips. And, honestly, its much better than the fact-checkers I used to have in the good old days of print. Though, to be honest, in around 20 years of writing, I was professionally fact-checked only a handful of times. Normally, if something seemed off, the copy editor would just send it back to me for confirmation or clarification. And there was rarely any way to independently verify my reporting, especially if I was filing from a far-off country.

Today, every reader is a potential fact-checker — and readers are quick to point out not only errors of fact, but also errors of grammar. A prime example of this is how well Wikipedia ranks against Encyclopedia Britannica when it comes to accuracy.

Professional fact-checkers aren’t all they’re cracked up to be.

But then again, neither are journalists.

Is a kid who just graduated from college with a communications degree better equipped to cover a topic than an expert who has been working in the industry for years? If a topic is controversial, or the expert has an ax to grind, then maybe the kid has an advantage.

But in many cases, the expert is a significant improvement. One of my favorite expert-written publications, for example, is the China Law Blog, written by Dan Harris of Harris & Moure. Readable enough for a casual visitor, informative enough to satisfy the most die-hard China expert, the blog does a great job of demystifying the Chinese legal system.

I can’t imagine any print publication dedicating this much print space to Chinese legal issue — unless it was a very narrowly-focused legal publication. Without the Internet, Harris may have occasionally contributed articles to a business newspaper or magazine, or produced a newsletter for his firm’s clients. The rest of the world would have to do without his insights. And we would be worse off.

HOW MUCH NEWS IS ENOUGH?

At my fingertips, I’ve got access to almost all of the world’s English-language publications — and rough access to non-English pubs in languages covered by Google Translate. I have immediate access to the world’s top experts. Top thought leaders. Top gossip mongers. Top humorists. And — why not? — top liars, cheats and crooks. I can find out what the crazy guy living in his mom’s basement is thinking, and what his cat had for lunch.

But there are only so many hours in a day that I can spend reading the news, checking out LOL Cats, and watching funny YouTube videos.

Something’s got to give. I’ve got to do some work, some time.

What I’m probably going to cut out first is reading duplicates of news stories I’ve already read. Except for iPad stories — I can’t get enough of those. Or the oil spill. And I’m definitely keeping the LOL Cats. They get me through the day.

DISAGGREGATION

The one element of the doomsday scenario that I agree with is that of disaggregation.

In case you’re not up to speed on this, it’s where classified ads move over to Craig’s List. Help wanted ads move to Monster.com. Real estate ads move to HomeFinder.com and personal ads move to Match.com.

Auto ads? Online. Supermarket ads? Direct mail.

These were all great, reliable streams for revenue for newspapers and magazines. All that’s left is lifestyle and retail ads.

But remember — radio existed for almost a century without classified, automotive, real estate or personal ads. Television survived for fifty years.

And neither radio nor television news is cheap to produce.

In the end, we’ll probably see a great restructuring of the news industry. Less redundancy, and more specialized, niche coverage. More breadth, and more depth, from a combination of professionals, amateurs, and everything in between. There will be government-backed organizations, and non-profits, and hobbyists, and for-profits.

And then they’ll figure out a way to beam the news directly into our heads, and we’ll have to figure out revenue models based on brain waves.

I might pay extra to keep Glenn Beck out of my brain — now there’s a business model.

We run our workflow systems, our accounting and billing, our recruiting, and our customer relationship management on DabbleDB. We use it as a back-end database for the China Speakers Bureau website. And, of course, we also use it for its intended purpose — to set up and manage data sets quickly and easily.

The interface is so easy and intuitive — and the cost so low — that we’ve grown to rely heavily on the platform.

With the purchase by Twitter, DabbleDB will either be closed down, or sold off to another company. We’re getting ready for a possible forced migration to another platform. We looked at a few alternatives, but none measure up to what DabbleDB offered.

But what we discovered as part of the process was that we’ve gotten too comfortable with DabbleDB, and that there are other platforms that do a better job for certain tasks.

WordPress 3.0

For the China Speakers Bureau, we needed a way to keep track of information about 300 speakers. We needed their names, bios, contact information, photos, areas of expertise, websites, blogs, videos, and plenty of other info, both public and private.

We use DabbleDB internally, to access and edit every bit of this information. We use JSON exports to pull selected data to a website.

Adding new speaker info is easy, using the DabbleDB interface. The website is updated on a scheduled basis with pre-scheduled scripts.

However, changing the website is difficult, and requires editing custom-coded templates, and often requires a programmer.

With WordPress, we can do all this and much more. WordPress is an open source content management system that you install on your own server (we use Dreamhost, and have been pretty happy with them for the past few years). With the new Custom Posts, we can define custom post types — not just the standard Pages and Posts, but, say, Speaker Profiles. In this custom type, instead of having the usual data — post title, post author, post text, data, and exerpt — we can define our own, unique data fields. Like biography, photo, website, and languages.

We can set up a page where the public can see some of these data fields, and administrators can see all of them. In addition, all the blog posts related to the speakers will also come up on the speaker profile page. On the front page, we can pull in latest video posts, spotlight individual speakers, promote new books by our speakers, or post a calendar of upcoming appearances.

For the basic layout, we plan to use a standard “magazine-style” or “news-style” WordPress template, tweaked a bit to fit our custom post types. Two that we’re looking at closely are Antisnews and MyMag. Other magazine-style themes we’ve used in the past or considered using include Mimbo, Magazeen, and Monochrome Gallery.

I notice that each time I check, the selection of free magazine-style themes changes. One of my favorite themes, The Stars, for example — which we used at Hypergrid Business, is no longer available as either a free or paid version. I’m also a big fan of the themes at StudioPress, including their Magazine Theme.

The best thing about WordPress — other than the thousands of available themes — is the broad range of plugins and widgets available, and the ease with which the site can be rearranged and reconfigured on the fly. We can add new fields for example, add new categories, add new post types… it does take some CSS and PHP knowledge to take full advantage of this, but we’ve got that in-house, as a result of creating several new sites over the last couple of years.

Salesforce.com

We’ve actually written about Salesforce.com before, for our editorial clients. Large companies like Merrill Lynch have been adopting the software-as-a-service platform. It originally started out as an online tool for sales reps, then evolved into a multi-purpose enterprise software platform for customer relationship management, recruitment, project management — even accounting.

I had not even considered using Salesforce.com for my company. The $50-per-user pricetag made it prohibitive, as did the complexity of the platform. That was then.

Now, Salesforce.com starts at just $5 per user. That’s pretty good, for their best-selling sales application. But it gets better. Their general-purpose app platform, Force.com, lets you build your application for free, with access for up to 100 users. From what I can tell, that’s ten tables, with up to 1 GB of data.

Now, Salesforce.com is a lot of overkill for a company our size. And it’s a pretty complicated platform.

But, first, our company will grow. We’ve already grown to the point where we’re having to build a lot of scaffolding around DabbleDB in order to keep using it for our operations.

And, second, after trying it out, it seems that Salesforce.com isn’t as difficult as I initially expected it to be. Most everything I needed was pretty clear from the interface. A couple of things that weren’t — for example, clicking on “setup” to create email templates — was easy to find in the help materials. There are video tutorials as well, dumbed-down to the point where they’re almost painful to watch. Just my speed! I’ve been holding off on watching them until I really get stuck, and I haven’t needed them yet. But it’s nice to know they’re there.

Worst job of my life? Programming in the basement of  a building during the winter. Best job? On the front lines in Abkhazia, on the Black Sea.

I naturally assumed from this that I was an adrenalin junkie who hates routine and loves strenuous physical work.

Then, this past spring, in my doctor’s office, I reported that my energy levels were up sharply. My work habits hadn’t changed — I was still sitting behind a computer.

The doc asked me if I was sleeping less as well. I was. And did I feel fewer cravings for carbohydrates? Why, yes, I did.

He suggested that the sun might be responsible. The spring brought with it not only more hours of sunshine, but also an incentive to go outside and enjoy the warmer weather. He recommended that I try out full-spectrum light bulbs.

I went out and bought a Sun Light Floor Lamp at Home Depot and put it in my living room next to the couch. My living room is the darkest room in the house, with a northern exposure. Normally I sit down on the couch after a day’s work and barely have energy to watch TV or read.

With the new lamp, the couch not only instantly became friendlier and more inviting, but a source of a second wind for me. I would forget to eat as I redesigned my company’s website templates, wrote articles, and edited books. And learned PHP. I would force myself to go to bed around 3 or 4 in the morning, my head still buzzing with ideas.

When I went back to the doc and reported that the light works, he warned me against a potential side effect — I might not get sleepy if I kept the light on too long. I was also advised to try Vitamin D supplements.

I moved the light out of the living room to my office, just in time for the long Memorial Day weekend. The weather was cloudy, and I spent most of it inside. My Monday night, I had lost hope that the economy would ever recover, that business would ever pick up, that the new startup would take off, and that I would ever get into shape.

The next day, I was back under the sun lamp, and things snapped back into place. I bought two more lamps, and plan to buy more. I’ve already ordered full-spectrum light bulbs.

If they aren’t enough, I’ll install the full-spectrum shop lights in my office and living room (disguised as plant lights, so I don’t look totally crazy). And next fall, when the days start getting shorter, if my energy levels drop, I’ll go back to the doc to find out whether my insurance covers light boxes.

There are some disagreements about how this all works. Is the light supposed to hit the skin, or the eyes? Is the breadth of wave lengths most important, or the intensity of the light?

There seem to be multiple pathways at work here, resetting your body’s internal mechanism to “hybernate” mode when the light fades.

Maybe this is why Silicon Valley is so innovative. The light is good.

We love DabbleDB. We use it to run our editorial workflow. To collect research data. For customer relationship management. And to do our bookkeeping.  The only things we don’t do on Dabble are email and our website. Everything else – Dabble.

We would rather not move.

But if the founders can’t figure out a way to keep the service going, we’ll have to start looking for alternatives right now, since it will probably take a while to migrate.

I’ve been investigating the alternative to DabbleDB, so that we’re prepared in case we need to make a move.

The top candidates seem to be:

Inquit QuickBase — Starts at $300 a month. So out of our reach. Intuit QuickBase offers a free trial and migration support.

Zoho Creator — has a free option, for less than 1,000 records. For our size database, we’ll probably need the $45 or $100 plan. A little pricey. Last time we looked at it, we decided not to use it because it required too much programming on our end — they may have improved the interface since then. Zoho offers to build your apps for free if you switch from DabbleDB.

Caspio — starts at $40 a month, which can handle our size database. (There’s also a free personal option.) The “data page” constraints worry me — seems to be their version of Dabble’s Page Views (for external forms, etc…) In which case pretty limited, may need the pricier plan. Caspio offers free migration support, and a free trial.

TeamDesk — starts at $50 a month.That’s $50 per application. If you want unlimited applications, it’s $250 a month. With Dabble, we kept our editorial workflow apps separate from the bookkeeping apps (for obvious reasons — we didn’t want our writers to be able to give themselves raises) but if TeamDesk has the workflow features that they promise to have, then we might be able to isolate the functions from one another within the same application. TeamDesk offers a DabbleDB migration tool that promises to move everything over.

InfoDome — starts at $20 a month, but just for 6,000 records. InfoDome doesn’t offer any deals, but does have instructions for migrating from DabbleDB.

TrackVia — starts at $99 a month, for up to five users — and 100,000 records.  I can’t find any special offers or discounts for migrating DabbleDB customers.

MyTaskHelper – starts at $20 a month, for unlimited users, projects, and storage. Supports all the top field types, including images and file attachments. Completely point-and-click interface — no scripting. Can create forms and views to embed in website. However, does not currently support the ability to link tables (i.e., it’s not a relational database), can’t filter the views, and no user role management. They’re promising me that they’ll have this functionality done before DabbleDB shuts down (if DabbleDB shuts down). And they promise that they’ll keep the interface to a Dabble-style point-and-click rather than the Zoho-style code-and-script. Their entire interface right now looks a little raw and in-progress. The company is based in the Ukraine, and there are awkward phrasings and odd word choices around the site, as well.

Viravis — free for one user and up to 1,000 records. $50 a month for five users and 25,000 records. So more expensive, and less useful than Dabble. Interface isn’t as nice, and some of it is in Turkish. To use all the functionality, you have to download a Windows application to access the database.  Since the interface is so clunky, you’d probably have to create a Web interface for it from scratch and host it on your own site — and if you’re going to go do that, might as well go all the way and hire someone to set up a custom MySQL database for you.

Have I missed any others?

Does anyone out there have any recent experience with any of these databases?

By Maria Korolov Trombly

I’ve seen a sharp influx of potential entrepreneurs to Shanghai when I was in town the last couple of months.

As the U.S. and European economies head south, I guess that people are looking at the growth numbers, noticing that China is still in the positive digits, and hopping a plane over here, hoping to get something going.

Starting your own company is hard. The vast majority fail quickly. In China, in particular, there are all sorts of regulatory restrictions about starting companies, and what foreign-owned companies can do, and how much money you can take out of the country if you do manage to make it.

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