ADRENALINE TEAMS WITH THE MOTLEY FOOL TO DELIVER SOAPBOX.COM
New Information Marketplace Offers Many Best-of-Breed Web Features
(Washington, DC - August 1st, 2000)--
The Adrenaline Group, a leading product strategy consulting and software development firm, announced its partnership role in the development and launch of Soapbox.com, The Motley Fool's new online information marketplace. Soapbox.com connects buyers and sellers of information in an interactive community environment, offering features such as buyer ratings and public discussion areas to empower individuals. Adrenaline's experienced product development team worked closely with The Motley Fool to take Soapbox.com from concept to launch, providing a significant advantage in speed to market and leveraging Adrenaline's usability expertise to design product features that focus on a satisfying customer experience.
Adrenaline planned multiple releases of Soapbox.com and delivered release 1.0 in only 16 weeks. During this time, Adrenaline also delivered a preview release on an aggressive 10-week schedule that rapidly accelerated Soapbox.com's launch. This preview release allowed Soapbox.com to test the author side of the service, while Adrenaline continued development of the buyer side. Members of the Motley Fool community were invited to visit the preview site and provide feedback, as well as purchase research during this test period.
"The Motley Fool has successfully established a brand that represents innovation, reliability and solid technology," said Bob McCullough, an analyst at The Hurwitz Group. "The Soapbox.com project required an accelerated time-to-market, while maintaining their quality brand. The Adrenaline Group was successful at leveraging their deep product development expertise to meet these requirements."
In keeping with Adrenaline's commitment to produce superior products for its customers, the company focused on creating innovative features such as a one-click purchase capability called Quick Buy, an author public profile system, a document management system, a sophisticated accounting system, and integrated community services. Soapbox.com also includes a streamlined, easy-to-navigate interface and a custom, secure financial transaction system designed to scale with the site's anticipated popularity and growth.
"Adrenaline's disciplined focus on the end user provided the advantage we were looking for in the development of Soapbox.com," said Kevin Dewalt, Director of Soapbox.com. "At The Motley Fool, our technology is focused on growing and refining Fool.com, one of the world's premier financial information Web sites. The additional resources Adrenaline brought to the table allowed us to remain focused on the Fool, and enabled a fast and effective launch of Soapbox.com. Adrenaline's strategic business sense, combined with its technological know-how and capacity to execute quickly, served us extremely well."
"Soapbox was designed from the bottom up, offering the Web's best-of-breed features for its interactive learning environment," said Wayne Bovier, Adrenaline's user interface development practice lead. "The clean, simple user interface hides highly developed back-end accounting and support systems - critical elements that are too often neglected in Web initiatives."
"Soapbox.com is a super exciting, ground-breaking business initiative that is likely to change the relationship between intellectual property creation, distribution, and compensation," said Scott McLoughlin, CEO and co-founder of Adrenaline. "Cutting-edge ideas like Soapbox.com need new technology. Adrenaline was delighted to apply our full creative and technological strengths to accelerate Soapbox.com's development cycle and quickly bring this exciting product to market."
About Adrenaline
Adrenaline is a product strategy consulting and software development firm that helps customers bring new products to market. The firm combines small, focused teams and a proven product development process to ship great software products on market-driven schedules.
Adrenaline partners with business leaders to create market dominant products that leverage emerging technologies to provide satisfying experiences for end-user customers. Founded in 1997, Adrenaline has built technology products for over 50 early-stage, venture-backed, and corporate clients including eStudentLoan.com, Washingtonpost.com, PETsMART.com, Agillion, and e-Satisfy.com. The company is headquartered in Washington, DC, and has offices in Austin, Texas.
About The Motley Fool
The Motley Fool's mission is to educate, amuse, and enrich. Begun as a newsletter serving 60 readers in August 1994, the Fool now reaches millions of people every month as it plays host to a celebrated community of individuals dedicated to helping each other make better financial decisions and improve their overall quality of life. The Motley Fool's products and services are available across a variety of media: on its Web site at http://www.fool.com; via its five Simon & Schuster books, all New York Times bestsellers; through its premium products, including online seminars, self-published books and Motley Fool Research; through its syndicated weekly column, currently appearing in more than 190 newspapers around the USA; via its daily "Market Minutes" and weekly "Motley Fool Radio Show," both joint ventures with Cox Radio that can be heard on more than 135 stations nationwide; and on America Online (keyword: Fool). The Fool's international websites can be found at http://www.fool.co.uk and on America Online (keyword: FoolUK), and at http://www.fool.de. In June 2000 The Fool opened its online marketplace at Soapbox.com www.soapbox.com where you can buy and sell information on relevant topics for education, fun, and profit.
