Webvisia reviews

I thought I'd add a bit of reviewing weight to this one, partly because I'm a Palm user myself, even though the model I have is so old it has a monochrome screen and I have to wind it with a big key. So I'm a bit pissed to find someone might be exploiting Palm users.

According to the "Our Team" page, this is "a dynamic, results-oriented company with an aggressive strategic plan for growth that includes many innovative product lines for Palm OS PDAs."

Now that's interesting, being that Palm released the last model, the TX, back in 2005, and doesn't even make Palm OS PDAs any more. So I'm afraid that however dynamic and results-oriented this aggressive company gets, nobody's interested any more. Palm, and the world, have moved on.

Obviously this site shouldn't even be there any more. Looking at the "news", I see that forthcoming releases are due in January, 2006. So we're either in a time warp here or someone just left this site online in the hope that people would send money. And come on, is "Duck Hunt" really likely to be the top game on offer? I mean, anywhere, for any device whatsoever? And - a real blast from the past - they have hints and tips for Galaga and Space Invaders. Wow, now I could really have used those back in, let me see ... 1985?

So anyway, moving on, and according to Google the address they give in the USA is that of Dryfast Air Duct, Carpet Cleaning and Water Damage Restoration, an unlikely trading partner but most likely the tenants that followed them in. More interestingly, the domain is owned by the same person who owns a site called BulgarianGuide.com, and given that the Webvisia software company claimed to have "engineering divisions" in Sofia (engineering divisions? For Duck Hunt?), we may assume that's where he, and the remains of webvisia, are now. But we'd be wrong ... read on.

As an aside, and of interest to me as I live in the San Francisco bay area myself, the Bulgarian Guide tells me:

"We are proud to note that the Downtown area of San Francisco was designed by a Bulgarian architect, Ivan Tzvetin."

This will come as a pleasant surprise to Ivan if he reads it, as he never did any such thing. And he'd have to be awfully old if he did. No, what he did do was enter a competition back in 1965 with a fellow architect, with a landscaping design for the Civic Center. And they won, which is a matter of pride for Bulgaria for sure, but nothing was actually built and he certainly didn't design the buildings in the Civic Center unless he started before 1915. (source: https://digital.lib.washington.edu/architect/structures/7438/)

So it does rather look like exaggeration comes fairly easily to this person, doesn't it? Or at least lack of research, which is not a helpful quality in a dynamic, results-oriented, aggressive software designer.

Further into the Bulgarian Guide we find that the man behind Webvisia is listed with an address different to the Walnut Creek one on his website. This one is:

150 Cresta Drive, #6
San Rafael, CA 94903

which according to Google Maps is a residential street of mainly apartment blocks. The name is Orlin Mirtchev, his cell number is listed publicly as (415) 425-3877, and as he was selling tickets to a Bulgarian bash in San Francisco as recently as March of this year, I guess there's a good chance he's still around. Maybe if you've not had satisfactory customer service at the webvisia site, you might give him a call about that. Or if you're still unsuccessful, maybe have a word with Farmers Insurance, for whom he works as an agent: http://www.farmersagent.com/omirtchev/

What is also concerning is that this software is still being distributed, or at least listed, by various file repositories on the web, including respectable ones like CNet and Techrepublic. I wonder if anyone gets their software and gets it to work?

It could be that this was an unsuccessful project, goodness knows the web has seen enough of them and I've even had a few myself over the years. At one time, nobody would have predicted that the Palm company would fail to keep pace with the market and end up abandoning the iconic Palm Organizer in favor of a range of cell phones, and other types of PDA haven't fared terribly well, either. The concept is dead, long live the iPhone. So it's entirely possible that this was a sound project gone wobbly, but even so, if it's still online and still claiming to be active, the site should provide proper customer service. And that means replying to emails and answering the phone. If that's not possible, it should be taken down before it fails anyone else.

We think they are a bunch of thieves and should be shut down. We purchased a game for a Palm handheld and received a registration key. The key turned out to be invalid. When we tried to contact them via email several times, they did not respond. We tried to call them using a phone number from their website but the phone number did not connect us through to them. All we wanted was a refund for a game that did not work and we could not get a hold of them. So they basically stole our money.