Dane Scott, of LeBuzz and BeOSRadio fame, was kind enough to "sit down" with me for a while and answer a few questions I threw his way, concerning TuneTracker.

Let's get right into it Dane. What is TuneTracker's present status?

TuneTracker is doing very well. Sales are building steadily over time, and word is definitely getting around about it. I just returned from Canada where I did several presentations to station groups up there. You could see the tension melt from their faces as they saw how well the program works. The biggest thing we have to overcome with new folks is incredulity that our system can do all we claim for the money. Once they realize it's true, we have won them over.

What do you see in TT's future? Both in technical and commercial terms.

I see us continuing to cater to the smaller stations, but on two tiers. We will have TuneTracker 2 for the small non-commercial stations, including all the innovative new kinds of radio over the Internet, intranet, parking lot radio, on-hold radio, as well as over-the-air, of course. Our other "tier" will be small commercial stations. Our new TT2 Pro release will definitely appeal to the small town commercial stations because it makes professional broadcasting so reliable and easy to do. I think we're going to have a little revolution in that market as people discover us.

In terms of new developments, we're only a day or so away from releasing our final Beta version to a select group of testers, and after that we'll come out with TuneTracker 2 Pro. That one adds some much-requested features the commercial radio stations wanted, including a really quality time-announce feature and customizable importation of traffic logs.

Traffic logs are schedules of what commercials should be played when, and they're generated by special software commercial radio stations use. Starting with TuneTracker 2 Pro, we can import the schedule and add it to the program log (playlist) directly. But we can do it in a way that's totally unique, I think. To my knowledge, we're the only system that can do all the music selection, import traffic, and generate the program log in a single program, in a single step. We've also added the ability to do background recording to specific file formats, per event. In other words, you can schedule our TimeTracker program to record various live stuff for broadcast later, and can specify that one recording be done in WAV, another in ADPCM, and if you're rigged up for it on your system, even direct recording of feeds to MP3.

One other nicety in the new release is auto-clock-updating via NTP. If you're hooked up to the Internet, TT2 Pro will routinely check the Internet for the correct time and update your system clock. We've been busy as you can see.

It seems that TT is the only BeOS-only commercial product that is doing quite well out there. Has it brought in a profit yet? And what is the secret of it's success?

Yes, it's profitable. We just make certain we have little-to-no-overhead. Our programmer is paid on a commission of sales. Our only advertising at present is our web site, which scores really well in Google (try searching on the words radio automation). If you're not in-debt at all due to development, you have the ability to get through the lean, startup period with no pain and wait-it-out as people discover you.

Now that word is getting around, we're seeing a nice influx of business that will only continue to grow over time. The other secret of its success is that we believe in treating our users like kings and queens. That's another area people are incredulous about at first. "How can you give such good support for such an inexpensive product?" The answer is, we're happy to, because that's the secret to happy customers, which means more word-of-mouth and more business. You can never go wrong by treating people well.

It's public, the good relationship between you (and TT) and yellowTab. What can end users expect, in the future, from this relationship?

We want to be able to offer a TuneTracker/Zeta demo CD that allows people to test both, right off the CD. That lets them do so without touching their hard drive, partitioning, or booting into Windows and installing BeOS PE first. If they like it, they can buy and unlock and install both and start setting up their radio station immediately.

Great, that's a wrap! Thanks for your time Dane.

You're welcome. It was my pleasure.

So there you have it, definitely an interesting read. For more information (including pricing and ordering) about TuneTracker, head over to it's site. Thanks once again to Dane, a really nice guy, and to everyone out there for taking their time to read this.