Comrz v Emojo | Affino Social Commerce Suite v Affino eBusiness Suite

The festive break is giving us a breather to catch up with the world around us, giving us an opportunity to catch up with the wider net community, and re-engage with some old friends. After quite a dramatic year, and for what is still news to a lot of people, we thought it would be useful to give some insight into how Comrz is different from Emojo and the current and future direction for Affino.

Comrz v Emojo

The first thing to note is that Comrz is a completely new company with no relationship to Emojo, beyond some of the team members, and the fact that Comrz is now the key driver behind, and support service for Affino.

Emojo was primarily a software company with a broad mission to provide eBusiness solutions for small to medium size enterprises. It ran for 10 years and worked with great companies including MasterCard, Audi, Diesel, X-treme Video, Gill & Macmillan, BBC and UBM. It developed the Affino eBusiness Suite to be a leading eBusiness solution which was the basis of hundreds of promotion, ecommerce, ecommunity and media sites. Ultimately Emojo failed because it dealt mostly with start-ups which were crunched in late 2008 and early 2009.

Comrz is a Social Commerce Consultancy and Service Provider, with a focus on developing commercial communities and community enhanced stores. Our priority is on excellent customer service, innovative solutions and maximum value add to our customers.

Comrz is a true 21st Century Company. It is fully virtual, with the team free to work where they like, currently the main base is London, UK, but we’re also based in France and India. Our main meeting place is One Alfred Place. We have developed new working practices and leverage the best the Net has to offer with great effect.

All our infrastructure runs off the cloud, primarily through Amazon, Google, Yotta and CDNetworks. We have reworked all our applications to be Cloud based, distributed and highly scalable.

Affino Social Commerce Suite v Affino eBusiness Suite

Affino Social Commerce Suite (Affino) builds on the foundation laid down by the Affino eBusiness Suite. The key change is the tight focus on developing Affino for commercial communities and community-enhanced stores. It means that everything we do in terms of development has a commercial and / or community focus.

Affino already excels at digital commerce and for developing corporate and media communities. It is rapidly evolving into being a prime driver for running social commerce campaigns, whereby all products, product collateral, support, content and campaigns are run out of a central Affino hub and synchronised with the leading social spaces including Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google and Amazon.

Quality and Usability

Affino has been transformed since Comrz took over the development. Our priority is always a high quality user experience. To that end: we have fixed hundreds of bugs; streamlined hundreds of work-flows; reduced the ’clickiness’ greatly; completely re-worked many user interfaces to be web 2.0 and real-time; improved the performance dramatically.

We spent the first four months focusing on the user experience, which we will maintain as our primary driver. Over the past couple of months we have also moved Affino forward significantly on the community side with almost every element tweaked or remodelled. We’re now working on much more dramatic changes with major media enhancements and significant up-coming social commerce and commercial community developments.

The eCommerce side has also been extended significantly and we have wrapped up and consolidated many projects which have been under development for some time. You can see much more by looking at earlier posts on this blog.

Great Customers

The most significant change is our customer base. With a small number of exceptions, Affino users are now looking to develop close relationships with their communities online, grow them and monetise them effectively.

It means that Comrz is completely aligned with our customer base and there is a very high level of customer satisfaction with our services, direction and each new release. It makes working a joy, and will see a number of great sites being launched over the coming year.