More strategic and development questions

As I mentioned on my last post while we continue very focused on acquiring new customers (we should be closing 5 new customers before year end which is obviously lots of hard work still ahead but more than achievable looking at the negotiation status of some of our current prospects) we also looking at different strategic questions for the coming future

Just to list some of them

1. We will be finishing release 4 this fall bringing some key developments for enabling digital entertainment leaders as of today. However we need to start thinking about new functionalities for 2009-2010 and defining release 5
2. While some new functionalities are/will be developed in-house there is a need to expand and strength our current partnerships and also to look for new companies/partners in different verticals, type of countries
3. Acquiring and growing middle management (I will dedicate my next post to this subject)
4. How do we acquire a better work/life balance on our lives while looking at a business that will become bigger and more complex to manage and where serving more than 10 countries does pose a huge challenge to this work/life balance
5. Extending from the previous point we need to understand if/how/when we open new offices (apart from Madrid, Zaragoza (oru new R&D lab) and Dubai) namely London, South America and maybe Asia
6. Start using new technologies internally (video conferencing, web sharing tools,etc....) to limit traveling and expenses while improving communication and reach. Being a huge believer than trust (with customers and new team members) and commitment is built face 2 face, I also believe that once this is initiated we can used new technologies to manage more effectively what we do (and the fact that people on our remote/virtual offices will be always far away from us)
7. How do we market the company by using more and more (both in terms of resources and efficiency) Marketing, PR and stakeholder management to expand the brand recognition and our reach beyond our prospects
8. Do we keep growing organically or it is worth it to consider and dedicate management attention to inorganic growth (knowing that there are a decent number of companies our there that are small but have either an interesting customer footprint (3-4 customers generally) or technology/application. I tend to believe that inorganic growth is key when looking at a second financing round which is part of 2009 strategy

I will try to expand my thoughts over some of those in coming posts but I will love to get comments from you mainly on the later points (2, 6,7 and 8)