Bruno Lowagie's Online Gazette

In the last few weeks, I've worked hard on a slide deck and a 10-minute talk explaining my business. The last few days mainly consisted of "killing my darlings". That is: removing slides and text to make my pitch as concise as possible. Now I'm making a second slide deck with the content that didn't make it into the pitch. I'm going to use that slide deck to anticipate "unexpected" questions.
For instance: Why did you come to Silicon Valley? There's a well-founded answer to that question, and there's a simple answer.

We've had stormy weather for a couple of days now. I still managed to go to the office on my bicycle, but this tree in our garden didn't survive the storm:

When you work at iText, part of the job is doing iText projects and iText development, but there's more. If we want to be successful at what we do, we need to stay alert, and research all kinds of new technologies and evolutions. There's also a general rule at iText: whatever we learn, we document.
That's why I'm proud to present the following articles:

Seems like Google Analytics does some post-processing on the numbers of absolute unique visitors:

So instead of 680,775 thank you's, I only had to say thank you 680,581 times ;-)

On behalf of the complete iText staff, I would like to wish a Happy New Year to all iText users, and I wish to say thank you! 680,775 times to every single person who visited itextpdf.com in 2011. We've been working hard last year, and you are making it worthwile!


With more than 1.2M visits, good for more than 4.5M page views, we did more than 30% better than last year.

The holidays did less damage than expected to the Alexa ranking of http://itextpdf.com

I already peeked at the Google analytics results for December, and I can already say that the expected dip between Christmas and New Year is visible, so don't expect us to break any records this month.

A couple of months ago, we announced a new product in an interview on Dzone. Today, we are proud to present a first demo:

You can try this demo for yourself on http://demo.itextsupport.com/xfademo/ using your own files or some of the files that were used in the video.

It's as if everybody wants to have a quick look at the iText site before the holidays:

Jeroen, one of the iText developers working in the iText Dev Shack in Ghent, just informed me that O'Reilly published a new book about PDF:

It goes without saying that I was very curious to find out if iText was mentioned in the book, so I went to Google Books, and I queried the book for "iText":

Today I noticed a strange phenomenon when inspecting my personal Google Latitude page. I would have expected something like this: