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Everyone at Pedagogue hopes
you had a restful and enjoyable holiday. We assume that
like us you have been back at work for a while and are
already engaged in your 2009 plans. Of course, we all
know that 2008 was a difficult year economically. We
hope you were not personally adversely affected. For
us, despite the economy, 2008 was another year of growth.
On a GAAP basis we had the same double-digit growth
rate over 2007 as we did in 2007 over 2006. Will this
continue in 2009? It’s impossible to know but
we have good reason to be optimistic: We have a solid
and profitable business model, overwhelmingly satisfied
clients, an excellent product and strong momentum from
2008. In our core life sciences market we added four
more of the top 20 pharmaceutical companies as clients
and have seen steady growth in other verticals. We continued
our global expansion and are now testing in 70 countries.
On the product front we rolled out Version
9.0 early in the year and almost all of our clients
have already upgraded. Version 9.0 is so feature rich
that not yet everyone is taking advantage of all of
its new features, but as our clients become more comfortable
with its power we are seeing steady uptake. Among the
most popular new features are: e-mail notification,
testing by objective, and segmenting exams into independent
sections.
Development of Version 9.1 continues at
a good pace. We will complete programming during the
next two months, put it through rigorous testing and
then release it to our clients. Although Version 9.1
started out as a point release (hence its decimal incremental
number) we have so loaded it with new and important
features that it could have justified a designation
as Version 10.0. It will have seven new question types
and enhancements to all of the existing questions, along
with dozens of other new features. Speaking of Version
10.0, we already have preliminary design documents completed
so that we can begin programming just as soon as Version
9.1 is out the door.
As always, we look forward to hearing
from you, so please contact
us and let us know what you are thinking about our
testing system. Most of our new features come from client
suggestions.
