Thank you to those who have emailed your support, it’s unfortunate that this blog post has gotten as much attention as it has and that things have happened the way they have.

Caspio Response: Your experiences are not industry standard.
We have more than 55,000 databases deployed in over 43 countries with
monitoring systems in nearly two dozen locations around the world. All of
our code is tested on various platforms and with a cache of different
browsers (and versions). If your experiences are different, it’s most likely
the JavaScript you’re working with isn’t clean (lowercase, combine all
JavaScript in one tag, etc) and should be subject to some code audit or a
peer review. Our application is 100 percent xHTML compliant. All the latest
versions of all major browsers that are on all major platforms are supported
by our product. We have tested the system extensively on the Windows and Mac
platforms and with the Internet Explorer, Firefox and Safari browsers.

Caspio Response: There is no “live site available for
testing” as it won’t be available to clients until December 1. If you know
and understand how elections work, with respect to districts, seats, races
that cross one or more geographical boundaries, etc., then it should be no
surprise that the application is very sophisticated in nature and relies on
a robust relational database management system to power the software.

Caspio Response: This is an inaccurate statement and you
greatly over simplify the programming necessary to accomplish the task. The
application allows the user to pick and choose which candidates they want to
vote for and then print a customized ballot that they can take to the polls
that list those candidates. Our objective was to maintain the site’s
branding and keep the ads in the print version, so the printed version
maintains all size content including any ads but it only prints the
candidates that the user has selected. The customer has the option of
utilizing their own printer CSS to hide any unwanted element from the print
version. An add-on option is available to pop-up the ballot on a clean page
designed specifically for printing.

Caspio Response: You sort of miss the point on the tiered
pricing model. Yes, larger clients will have a larger audience and therefore
more transactions to the database. The tiered pricing allows us to quickly
scale the application to handle the load of having tens of thousands of web
hits an hour. This is where our elaborate server farm comes into play. With
each search is a transaction to our servers, plus inbound and outbound data
transfer (bandwidth). Think of it like a cell phone plan. Would you expect
two people to pay the same amount if one person made 100 calls a month and
the other 5,000? No, because there are fixed costs involved in the
infrastructure to handle the call volumes regardless of account size, and it
is equitable to spread out that cost based on anticipated web hits given the
client’s market size.

Caspio Response: Absolutely, as each email is customized and
includes a secure method for the candidate to access the candidate side of
the application to enter demographic information and respond to customized
questions. The email process is built right into the workflow of the
application, as well as the ability to send notifications, reminders, etc.
Caspio is against SPAM and our Terms of Service requires our customers to
follow the law.

Caspio Response: Your statement is unfounded. We have
thousands of clients, none of which have any issues with Caspio seamlessly
integrating into their sites. You say it “could be problematic” yet you have
never has a demo or requested a free trial of our Caspio Bridge platform,
which is available at http://www.caspio.com/media
. If the analytics tool is widget-aware it
will be able to pick up the dynamic content that is served.

Caspio Response: You sort of miss the point here, too. Size
of a newsroom has little to do with whether it makes sense to engage in a
third-party relationship. Businesses make smart financial decisions every
day for what makes the best sense for their company. Just having someone who
can develop doesn’t mean they can write code that is scalable on an
enterprise level. There’s also the processes and infrastructure involved to
maintain the code and continually grow the application. Let alone the
hundreds of thousands of dollars invested in primary, secondary and
redundant server farms to account for disaster recovery. There are also the
engineers and database administrators who need to keep everything running
and the web and network administrators who maintain the security of it all.
In the end, the pricing is spread across our entire client base to make the
product most affordable for clients in any market size.

Caspio Response: Thanks for insulting my entire team of
developers before you’ve ever even seen the product. At least they now know
your opinion is baseless since you pointed to a similar product that we
built for one of our clients and not the product we will be releasing on
December 1.

Caspio Response: I’m curious to know what functionality and
usability you thinking we’re lacking?

Caspio Response: Again, your opinions are baseless because
you haven’t seen our product, nor are you aware of any of the technologies
we have to accommodate online viewers with disabilities.

{Edited Nov. 19- JC}