Tucked away at the grassy edge of the scenic Northern California foothills a few miles from Metabyte’s Fremont headquarters is the historic community of Niles, a once-thriving moviemaking hub during the early days of cinema. Ninety years or so ago you would have strolled its small-town America main street alongside the likes of Charlie Chaplin and the first great western movie star, Broncho Billy Anderson. Many of the rustic 19th and early 20th century buildings where these early movie stars lived, dined and shopped still remain, but these days they are occupied by trendy restaurants, boutique antique shops, and specialty craft stores. Many of these businesses are beta customers of HotDoodle (www.HotDoodle.com), Metabyte’s latest innovation to be unveiled this month that provides an easy path to web presence for small businesses, entrepreneurs, clubs, schools and organizations without the tech hassle. Among these businesses in Niles, many of the owners built their own websites picking from a wide selection of ready-to-use HotDoodle templates. The busier ones got a helping hand from students at a high school in Fremont and a university in Texas. One even got help from a stay-at-home mom in Idaho.

“How often don’t small businesses come across the passing thought of having a web presence their own?” asks Manu Mehta, the President and CEO of the 14-year old technology services company whose normal clients are Fortune 500 and midsize companies. “Many small businesses are held back because they see the website creation process as expensive and cumbersome, or they simply don’t know how to go about finding a web designer. Or, even if they manage to get a website built, they don’t have the time or skill to make changes to keep their website current later on.” Mehta is currently banking on his vision that given a customer-friendly technology every good gardener, teacher, local basketball team, residential club and school would want their offerings to be stated out in the open on a web space of their own. And HotDoodle is the breakthrough technology that could turn every web savvy teenager, college student or a stay-at-home parent into a helpful resource to help small businesses get there.

With IDC’s research estimating 24 million people running home-based businesses and many more millions of small business existing in the U.S, plus the rising onslaught of single entrepreneurs, there is a huge white space in the small business website category. “We often think internet has become ubiquitous, but strangely some of our own backyard small enterprises and entrepreneurs do not have a website even,” says Mehta. HotDoodle is positioned to garner business across this huge market segment in the coming years.

Oddly, and historically, small businesses have been an elusive market. A few early bloomers of internet who have tried to make it happen succeeded in garnering mind share of large enterprises, but gathered moss addressing the mass of businesspeople. “HotDoodle,” says Mehta, “irons out all the pain points of creating a website and helps millions of web savvy people to turn into an army of web designers and use HotDoodle as a marketplace to target the demographic sweet spot with innovative technology.”

Hot about Doodle
At the heart of HotDoodle is its modular and scalable technology that lets one design websites in the most simplistic way ever. “Our architecture is based on a Lego-like building block concept. We have blocks for every possible feature one could think of on a website – text, pictures, bulletin boards, blogs, log-in screens and more. All customers need to do is choose and arrange these functional blocks and edit them in their own words,” says Lynn Slater, the chief architect of HotDoodle. It is also ideal for group collaboration – a benefit for schools, clubs and organization that might divvy up website tasks among its users.