About GaterWare®
DataGater, LLC was founded in 2007 by a consumer psychologist, Dr. Langbourne Rust.
He recognized that the market psychology of the current marketplace systems was seriously deficient - especially for the independent developer and for the more-hesitant consumer.
Each of the current systems carried one or more serious deficiencies:
To consumers ...
- The capital investment required for high-quality
SaaS and
pre-packaged apps
- Delayed gratification - between purchase and received value
- Uncertain return - in an unpredictable world
- Feeling short-changed by Lite versions
- Feeling confused by overlapping feature sets in tiered versions
- Feeling gypped by being chained to one-seat installations
- Inconvenienced and frustrated by complex registration procedures
- Distrust of suppliers - seeing them as the enemy, not a partner.
To developers ...
- Revenue loss to pirates, hackers and cheats
- Development time and costs of protection measures
- Liability costs of holding client data
- Inaccessiblity of the long-tail: the insecure, infrequent,
hesitant or beginning consumer
- Revenue leakage from Trial Ware
- Revenue inadequacy of ShareWare
- Need for additional revenue sources after a sale is made
While each of these problems had been recognized by the industry, and measures taken to deal with them, no one appeared to have been able to deal with all of them.
Dr. Rust figured out a way that developers could distribute their software for free without worrying about piracy, give consumers access to full-featured apps and bill them only when they were sure of the value they'd be getting - at a rate that reflected how big their project was.
He was awarded a U.S. Patent for the invention in 2007.
Between 2007 and 2010, the DataGater system was developed, tested, and readied for distribution.
The first application to use it is the Researchers FieldKit (r),a do-it-yourself platform for conducting in-person website and media testing, focus groups and ethnographic research, released in 2011.
The GaterWare SDK, or Software Development Kit, for adapting apps built on the .NET Framework, is available for download here.