You can check who owns your domain name simply by looking up your domain’s WHOIS record. The person or company indicated as the registrant in the WHOIS record is the owner of the domain. If the registrant data doesn’t show your name and your contact details, you don’t own your domain.

Most registrars sell domain privacy services. The selling point is that WHOIS records are harvested by spammers, and surely you’d like to pay a small fee to receive less spam. But what you’re really paying for is for your registrar to own your domain name on your behalf. If there’s ever a problem with your registrar, they will be the owner of your domain, not you. Good luck suing them for breaking their domain privacy service contract. Quite a few registrars have gone bankrupt or had their registrar accreditations terminated in recent years. In such a situation, ICANN needs your contact info in the WHOIS records when they do a bulk transfer to another registrar. My domain names are very valuable to me. I’d rather get some more spam than to take risks with my ownership of my domains. The article WHOIS Masking Considered Harmful on CircleID discusses this issue in depth.

Another issue are technical glitches. Recently, I looked up the WHOIS records of some domains I had recently transferred to a different registrar. To my surprise, the new registar was listed as the registrant of the domains I had transferred. When I logged onto the registrar’s control panel, the contact details for those domains were totally blank. It seems the contact information was lost during the transfer for reasons unknown, and the registrar had put their own information in the WHOIS for my domain because they have to put in something. Fortunately, all it took for me to fix this problem was to enter my contact information for those domains.

I love it when our customers write in, or come up to us at shows, and tell us how much they love our products. When people e-mail, unprompted, comments like:

My job used to consist almost entirely of comparing SQL databases, by hand. Now that I've started using SQL Compare I've bought a pair of glasses, painted on eyes, and now spend much of my day snoozing

Of course, the best testimonials aren't words. They're green, six by two and half inches, and have George Washington on the front. It's easy for people to say good things about your software. It's only when they pay that it counts.

Or that's what I used to think. Yesterday evening, somebody e-mailed me this video of Rodney Landrum getting a Red Gate tattoo:

Wow.

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Anthony Flack, one crazy (in a good way) indie game developer has been “animating” clay (yes, you read correctly: clay) graphics in his game. In his blog entry he mentions that this is indeed a clay-animated game. Which means that all the graphics in the game are made from real clay models - they are NOT CG renders made to look like clay. (I wonder how much time it has taken…)

Didn’t see that coming.

Take a look at that blog. The pics are awesome.

body { border-style: none; background: Window; color: WindowText; } #ljcutbegin { width: 100%; height: 1px; border: 1px dashed black; } #ljcutend { width: 100%; height: 1px; border: 1px dashed gray; } blockquote { border-left: 3px solid silver; padding-left: 10px; margin-left: 10px; } .bjspell { border-bottom: 1px dotted red; } }

If you’re involved in the operation/management of a startup, you’ve already heard a bunch of advice over the past couple of months.  Much of this advice can be summed into about two words: Reduce Expenses.

I did a bit of paraphrasing (there are lots of variations and extensions to this, but it’s close enough).  The advice is intended to accomplish one thing:  give you more “runway” so that you can survive the down-turn.  Overall, I think this idea of increasing the time that you can continue to operate your startup is a pretty good thing to solve for.  The more time you have before you run out of cash, the higher your chances that you’ll actually succeed.   I’ve said this about long-term startup strategy before:

“Part of your long-term strategy should be to survive the short-term.” 

If you don’t live long enough to see the long-term, all that strategic planning and world-changing vision is not going to amount to a hill of beans (I have a running assumption that the value of a hill of beans is negligible, though it does seem odd to me that we’d use this as a benchmark — but I digress).

So, back to the advice:  You need to survive, and so you should reduce expenses and thereby increase the time you have to figure things out.  That’s great, but it’s only one part of the equation.  In reality, the length of time you will survive is a function of how much cash you’re burning.  Your expenses contribute to this cash-burn, but there is this other variable in the equation that people don’t seem to talk about a whole lot.  Revenue.  It’s almost like we’d forgotten about that. 

When software companies are born, there’s this vision of building a great products company.  Software startups tend to make a conscious effort not to emphasize services.  The reason is simple:  The margins in selling a product are usually much better.  Further, it’s hard to get venture-funding if selling services is a big part of your strategy — for the right reason.  So, many startup people (including me), shy away from selling services.  We accept that it’ll likely become necessary over time, but we hold-off on it as long as we can.   Now, I’d argue that in today’s climate, things are a wee bit different.  If faced with the decision of having to scale back expenses (which is usually means letting go of people), generating some service revenue might not be such a bad thing.  Sure, as a software company, selling services may not have been part of the original plan, but neither was this massive economic downturn. 

So, here are a few thoughts on selling services for revenue.  Note:  These points primarily apply to B2B companies. I’m also drawing these points mostly from experiences at my prior company (not my current one). 

Thoughts On Product Companies Selling Services

1.  Selling services (related to your offering) is almost always easier than selling product.  If you don’t think you can sell services to your target market, I’d be concerned about whether you can sell your product.

2.  Offering services to your existing client-base often works well.  There are two benefits:  You get some revenue and you help your customers get more value out of your product. 

3.  You should be careful that the services you sell don’t center around customer-specific modifications to your product.  That’s a high price to pay for revenue.  On the other hand, if a customer is willing to pay for enhancements that you think would be valuable to a meaningful percentage of your target market, it might be OK.

4.  You might find that offering a bundle of services along with your product increases your probability of a sale.  Some customers might be more wiling to buy if they knew they could get your help.  This could include training, data conversion, implementation, and customization.

5.  Though services margins are definitely lower than that of product, one of the nice things about selling services is that it’s easier to manage head-count.  For example if you’re trying to figure out whether to hire/keep someone, trying to figure out whether they’d be accretive is simpler to figure out in the services business.  Not easy (particularly in this economy), but easier.

6.  I’ve found that the people delivering services on behalf of your products company are often great at uncovering sales opportunities.  For example, you might have a consultant that is helping a customer complete an implementation.  During this process, she could identify how your product could be used in a different division of the company, leading to an upgrade.

7.  Services are often a very effective way to guard against attrition in some of your recurring revenue stream.  If you’re delivering services to a customer on an ongoing basis, and they’re thinking about cancelling (in which case you’d lose maintenance/subscription revenue), you’ll likely hear about it sooner and have a chance to do something about it.

In closing, one important point.  I’m not suggesting that you use the service revenue excuse to refrain from cutting expenses that you should be cutting.  If you need to let people go, you need to let people go.  Also, keep in mind that expense cuts are immediate and generating revenue (even service revenue) takes time. 

Summary:  You likely had lots of good reasons to not sell services when the company started.  But, times have changed, and you might want to revisit some of those decisions and arguments.  Selling services may be the lesser of two evils.

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Stack Overflow Podcast episode 30 is up, with special guest Richard White of UserVoice.

Not loving your job? Visit the Joel on Software Job Board: Great software jobs, great people.

Those pondering what kind of architecture (code design) their game should have, might benefit from checking out GameArchitect.net. Good stuff there.

Want the ultimate portable to-do list?  Try this product out that can be found at Fred & Friends.  The To-Do Tattoo is an easy, do it yourself, to-do list that you can take anywhere.  From the website:

Our To-Do Tattoo kit includes 12 graphic “To Do” forms that you can apply to your body wherever it’s most convenient (or creative) and a skin-safe, washable-ink gel pen. You’ll never again have to make lame excuses for missing bowling night or your mom’s
birthday.

You can find this product on Amazon.com for $3.50 per 12 pack.  I’m personally waiting for the GTD version!

On a side note, if you want a portable to-do list that you can run from a flash drive why not take a look at Smart To-Do List?

HelpSpot customer and fellow MicroISV Stephane Grenier just released his work of love, Blog Blazers. The book is a series of interviews Stephane conducted with 40 popular bloggers. I’m honored to be one of the bloggers, though there’s a lot more talented bloggers than myself in the book including the likes of Seth Godin, Eric Sink, Jeff Atwood, etc.

One of the keys to my success if not the primary key has been this blog. While I don’t write as much as I used to, the early years of UserScape and it’s success were almost completely dependent on this blog and the traffic it generated. Without this blog I’d almost certainly be working “For the Man”, filed away in some cubical farm.

While blogs are no longer “new” as they were when I started, I still think they’re a key component to any startups business, especially a MicroISV. Now, one problem with blogs is that it’s often hard to find concise advice on how to blog well. Even just figuring out where to start looking for advice is difficult. Sure there’s lots of “how to blog” links in Google, but few get into the subtle details that make a truly successful blogger. Blog Blazers does just that. If you’re starting out in blogging or want to grow your blogging presence this book is where to start.

Now, Stephane has been kind enough to offer my readers an amazing opportunity. He’s given me 10 copies of Blog Blazers to give away free on this here blog. I’ve thought a lot about how I might give these away. I don’t want to do anything cheesy nor do I have time for a very complicated give away. So here’s what I’ve decided:

To receive a free copy of Blog Blazers be one of the first 10 people to agree to write up a complete review of Blog Blazers on their own blog. That’s it. This is on the honor system. If you’re not going to write up a review about it then please don’t ask for a copy and let someone else have it. You must have a blog to be eligible.

If you’re ready to commit to doing a review then just do the following:

* Post a comment below stating you’d like to review Blog Blazers and include your blog URL
* Include your real email in the email field

I’ll email the 10 people to get their address information and ship off the books, probably next week.

If you have a blog and think your readers might be interested in this giveaway please link them over.

Thanks!

Update: We’re at 10. Thanks everyone!

Getting your iPhone app listed in the iPhone App Store is a notoriously arcane, difficult and lengthy process. I think I have found out why. The App Store icon The symbol of Freemasonry (from Flickr)       

Friend of mine (expert 3d artist in my opinion) said he’s going to prepare a model pack (3d characters) and I agreed to help him get some information about what sort of models & animations he could start doing.

The guy can do really slick looking 3d models & animations, so if you want to say your opinion about what kind of models the first pack should contain, please tell your suggestions. I already told him that I’d be after a “general 3d model” (and then of course several zombie textures ;)) and different type of movements and some animations.

So, what kind of 3d models (and animations/textures) you’d want? Fantasy? Modern? Sci-fi? World war style? Monsters? Humans? What kind of textures? Cute? Horror?

Here’s Robert’s reel from 2007 (also including work from 2008):

Firstly let me just apologize for the on and off “In Stock” and “Temporarily Out of Stock” messages appearing on the Blog Blazers listing on Amazon. What’s happening is that we’re trying to work with Amazon’s JIT (Just in Time) inventory system and experiencing some difficulties as illustrated in the screenshot below:

Basically the way it works for first time and self-published authors is that Amazon doesn’t want to order too many books ahead of time and be stuck with a larger than necessary inventory on hand. Nor can we blame them. From what I understand, most self published books end up selling less than 200 copies, and 60% of these sales are to friends and family. That’s pretty dismal. Of course that’s not always the case, there’s lots of examples of very successful self-published authors. The biggest I know of is Robert Kiyosaki who started his book series of Rich Dad Poor Dad as self-published. Another great example is Peter Bowerman with his book like The Well-Fed Self-Publisher.

In any case, Amazon is looking out for itself, and that’s perfectly understandable. Selling books is a business, and they do it well. So what happened with our book is that Amazon initially ordered a small number of books. Now before I continue, something to be aware of is that Amazon will only accept books they ordered if they come with a purchase order (barcoded). You cannot just ship books to Amazon to add to their inventory when you want to, you have to wait for them to order books. Makes sense.

Anyways, a lesser known trick is that they will often accept more books than requested as long as they’re part of the same purchase order and as long as the surplus is reasonable (don’t try to ship 1000 books when they ask for 20). However knowing that Blog Blazers is going to is selling well, we decided to ship some extra books with each PO (Purchase Order). On average so far, we’re shipping 2-3 times as many as they request per purchase order (sometimes more).

Getting back to our story, within a day of being released, the Blog Blazers inventory on Amazon was sold out. And it’s no wonder, the initial order was too small. Which means the status of Blog Blazers on Amazon fell to “Temporarily Out of Stock”. The next day, another PO came out, we did the same. And on it’s been continuing since…

So if you see the book Blog Blazers on Amazon with a status of “Temporarily Out of Stock” don’t worry, this is because Amazon is still trying to figure out how many books they need to have on hand to meet the number of books sold (JIT - Just in Time). And it definitely isn’t helping that the sales of Blog Blazers are increasing on a daily basis as more and more bloggers are posting about it every day!

I guess of all the problems I could have, this is the best one to have. But still…

Michiko Kakutani reviews Malcolm Gladwell's latest book in the New York Times: “Much of what Mr. Gladwell has to say about superstars is little more than common sense: that talent alone is not enough to ensure success, that opportunity, hard work, timing and luck play important roles as well. The problem is that he then tries to extrapolate these observations into broader hypotheses about success. These hypotheses not only rely heavily on suggestion and innuendo, but they also pivot deceptively around various anecdotes and studies that are selective in the extreme: the reader has no idea how representative such examples are, or how reliable — or dated — any particular study might be.”

This review captures what's been driving me crazy over the last year... an unbelievable proliferation of anecdotes disguised as science, self-professed experts writing about things they actually know nothing about, and amusing stories disguised as metaphors for how the world works. Whether it's Thomas Friedman, who, it seems, cannot go a whole week without inventing a new fruit-based metaphor explaining everything about the entire modern world, all based on some random jibberish he misunderstood from a taxi driver in Kuala Lumpur, or Malcolm Gladwell with his weak theories on tipping points, crazy incorrect theories on first impressions, or utterly lunatic theories on experts, it all becomes insanely popular simply because the stories are fun and interesting and everybody wants to hear a good story. Spare me.

Friedman and Gladwell's outsized, flat-world success has lead to a huge number of wannabes. I was really looking forward to reading Simplexity, because it sounded like an interesting topic, until I settled down with it tonight and discovered that it was chock-full of all those amusing bedtime stories about the map of the cholera plague in London in 1854, which I've heard a million times, and then suddenly I noticed (shock!) that not only was the author a journalist, not a scientist, but he was actually an editor at Time Magazine, which has an editorial method in which editors write stories based on notes submitted by reporters (the reporters don't write their own stories), so it's practically designed to get everything wrong, to insure that, no matter how ignorant the reporters are on an issue, they'll find someone who knows even less to write the actual story. Panicking, I began to flip through the book at random. There's that story about Don Norman and complicated user interfaces. Here he is reading Nassim Taleb. I've heard all these anecdotes! Stop, already! I threw the book away in frustration.

This is the third one of the day. My business partner Jeff Atwood was busy extracting himself from the flamewars he started by writing an article on, of all things, NP-completeness, which is, actually, something that it's possible to know something about, because it's not a vague sociological hypotheticoncept like simplexiflatness or blinkoutliers, it's actually a real, important result from Computer Science, with a rigorous definition and lots of published papers, and poor Jeff got himself in something of a pickle by writing a book review when he hadn't read the book, and fortunately, he has comments on his blog, so his readers called him out on it.

Now, I am not one to throw stones. Heck, I practically invented the formula of "tell a funny story and then get all serious and show how this is amusing anecdote just goes to show that (one thing|the other) is a universal truth." And everybody is like, oh yes! how true! and they link to it with approval, and it zooms to the top of Slashdot. And six years later, a new king arises who did not know Joel, and he writes up another amusing anecdote, really, it's the same anecdote, and he uses it to prove the exact opposite, and everyone is like, oh yes! how true! and it zooms to the top of Reddit.

This is not the way to move science forward. On Sunday Dave Winer [partially] defined "great blogging" as "people talking about things they know about, not just expressing opinions about things they are not experts in (nothing wrong with that, of course)." Can we get some more of that, please? Thanks.

Not loving your job? Visit the Joel on Software Job Board: Great software jobs, great people.

I think that one of my most common phrases in email is, "I'll take care of it".

But, when sent from the Blackberry it reads:

I'll take care of it.
Sent from my Blackberry

Translation to the receiver:

I'll take care of it.
Sometime. Or whenever I happen to be back at the computer.

Gah!

I'd love to get rid of that tag-line in my Blackberry emails. I'm not an enterprise customer. Anyone know of a good hack or app that will let me mail from the mobile without this line at the bottom?

When I say I'm going to take care of it, I mean "quickly"! I just think that BB tag-line makes people uncomfortable. Any suggestions would be great.

Feature Waggle

I can't seem to stop updating the app for long enough to build the new public website and tour. Too many little things to add that make a "world" of difference. It's those tiny bits of gratification I get upon completing a feature or update that I appear to be addicted to.

Do you ever step back when you're done coding and keep opening the screen you created over and over again because you're so happy? It's like when I finish mowing the lawn and I love to glance out the window to see those good-looking lines.

Web Surfing

I just noticed again that I have about 10 tabs open I haven't looked at yet. They are all web-comics I opened on social bookmarking sites earlier this evening. So this is what has become of my acts of procrastination.


That was easy.

Did you know that it takes about 5 minutes to get a Federal Tax ID number from the IRS? (It's been 5 or 6 years since I created the one for my current business.)

I had to open a bank account for the new LLC and they asked for the Tax ID for the new business. I thought SHOOT, I forgot, now I'm set back another 4 weeks waiting to get the Tax ID.

BUT, I went online, filled out a web form or two, BOOM, Fed Tax ID number - opened the bank account same day. That WAS easy.

About 20 months ago, I underwent a procedure.  Although my life was never in danger and I didn't have to spend a single night in the hospital, the procedure was not without pain or difficulties.  Regardless, the last 20 months have been like a whole other world.  I benefit from greater flexibility, better vision, and a better resistance to virii.  All in all, I will never regret the final step of dropping Windows - and more importantly Internet Explorer - for Ubuntu Linux.. and more importantly Firefox.

Let's face it, we do have some things to thank Microsoft for in IE6... namely the XMLHttpRequest object.  This concept was copied by all the other browsers and eventually became the Ajax that we know and love.  Without Ajax, the web would not be as much fun and we'd still be all web1.0 and junk.

But haven't we suffered enough?

As of August 2008, Internet Explorer 6 is now officially seven years old.  We know of security vulnerabilities ranging from nasty jpeg-based
attacks to storms of popup windows to ActiveX attacks to just about everything else under the sun.  According to Wikipedia, it hasn't had a major update since 2004 and IE7 is a required upgrade.

IE6 reigned supreme for years simply because the other browsers didn't weren't in the game.  Netscape Navigator was stuck in the land of 4.7 and the updates released were bloated and not well accepted in general.  The featureset simply wasn't there.  But the latest available browser statistics from w3c (below), show a positive trend: IE6 is quietly withering away 1-2% each month while Firefox and IE7 have both grown steadily.

 

2008	IE7	IE6	Chrome	Fx	Moz	S	O
October	26.9%	20.2%	3.0%	44.0%	0.4%	2.8%	2.2%
September	26.3%	22.3%	3.1%	42.6%	0.5%	2.7%	2.0%

Since both IE7 and Firefox are superior browsers - for numerous reasons - this has been a good thing, but Martin Ringlein of nclud notes that this trend is likely to flatten at this point until the next version of Windows... and unfortunately, I think he's right.  Some people are using - and will continue to use - Windows 95, 98, and 2000 until their machine physically dies and they buy a new one...

So yes, we've suffered enough... but we probably have to suffer a bit longer..

MMOBay purchased a paid review, and since I haven’t done review ads for some it’s about time we head for “commercial break”. (There’s some good stuff also for those who don’t care about the ad side of this post).

Site layout
I’d prefer a ‘warmer’ style for a MMO store. While MMOBay is clean, it has this bit ‘cold’ gray style, and it has quite a lot of content. On the good side, it’s good that they let players upload images. That’s a plus. No broken links and pages loaded fast so on the technology side things look good. Overall impression is fine: even the ads didn’t bother me on their site.

I wonder how long they can keep selling MMO accounts?
The first impression that MMOBay gave me was that there’s loads of games supported. You can buy and sell accounts for different games (World of Warcraft being the most popular). For example, there I saw somebody selling ’sexy priest’ for $500.

My initial thoughts were:

• I wonder how long they are going to keep selling these accounts? (since many games says it is against the game rules to sell stuff)
• Why people (and who!) buy these? ($500 bucks for some virtual guy? Where’s the fun of beating the game? Maybe I’m too old or something)
• Why aren’t developers getting into this area of business? (Well, some are)

MMOBay keeps selling this stuff
One thing is sure: MMOBay keeps selling (auctioning) these goodies. Their news item says that today they’ve made their 100,000th auction (don’t know if that’s true, but not saying it wouldn’t be). I think they are having a nice business there (can’t blame for that): they sell (help selling) stuff people want to buy.

Thing worth learning from MMOBay: free credits
Free is good, and MMOBay uses a nice tactic to get people to sign-up: they give free credits. This same method is used by many other sites (such as gambling sites, and very many different stores) where the user gets free credits when he signs up. It’s a good marketing tactic for getting people to sign-up and try your products.

So why aren’t developers doing this?
MMOBay keeps selling Warhammer Online accounts, Warcraft accounts, and so on and legally it’s fine - as long as they don’t scam people’s money they won’t go to jail for selling those accounts. On the other hand, for example World of Warcraft rules say that you cannot buy an account (at least the last time I heard about this) which makes me think why they aren’t getting into this account selling bandwagon? Some games are doing this, and of course there’s balancing issues, but since it happens anyway why not change the rules?

World of Warcraft could have its own marketplace for selling stuff - and it could work according to the rules of the markets. Prices could go up, inflation could take place… and people could buy more credits with hard earned dollars. If balancing is an issue, then perhaps make areas where only “non-sold” accounts could be used? It could actually get by getting sites like MMOBay to partner with them. If people want to buy something, why not sell it to them?

In this sense I don’t blame MMOBay (nor other similar sites) for selling/auctioning accounts. If it’s a good business and there’s clearly a demand, then it starts to feel more like serving the customer. There’s already systems in games that if you buy an account, your reputation might be gone - and you’d never get to do campaigns with others. So, the system for stopping selling is formed by the community.

Why are they pretending to be something they aren’t?
It says in their site footer that “MMOBay.net is the #1 MMORPG auction site to buy warcraft accounts”. From what I’ve learned about marketing I’d say this is a bad idea. The more sites I see having “the world’s greatest whatnot” I immediately think they are lying. I suppose if when your company is big as Microsoft you could perhaps sometimes say that, but otherwise it feels just sad.

In my brain it goes like this: if they are lying about small things, then are they lying about other things - and if they are lying, can I trust my money on them?

Why say something like this if it clearly isn’t true? In my eyes, the site value goes downwards (especially since every other MMO seller is saying the same thing - somebody must be lying there).

So, is it secure?
I don’t know. Maybe, maybe not. The only thing they say in MMOBay about page that “MMObay.net is the #1 auction site for virtual gaming items, including all of today’s top MMORPGs. We offer a quick and safe way for users to buy and sell their items.” I suppose if you know them personally and have traded items there earlier it can be fine, but since there’s no company info, no business ID, no company address or any person names, it’s very hard to think it would be reliable place to buy stuff.

I’d recommend them to give information about who is operating the site. That would help make it more reliable in the eyes of the potential customer.

Another point to concern would be to explain how the site is trustful, and how the transactions are processed. For a somebody who hasn’t bought accounts earlier it might be quite difficult to know how the site operates.

Sexy priest
Almost forgot this one, so here you go.

The priest is in the middle of the picture.

Yes, he is in sale for $500. Poor fellow.

Bottom line
I’ve said it before and I say it again: This is a paid review ad and I recommend everybody to be careful when buying or selling accounts online. It can be against the game rules and might lead into banning your account - or even losing your money. I’m doing a review here, and expect you to use your own brain for what it comes to using their site. Yeh, I know you already knew that, but just wanted to make sure we both are on the same line here.

For those who want to buy Warcraft accounts or more information about buying game goodies, could check out their website.

That’s it folks.

Hopefully just in time, here is a to-do list for Thanksgiving Day preparation.  The list is by no means exhaustive and I would appreciate any additions in the comments if you’d like!  You can download the list as a template that can be used with Smart To-Do List software.  The list comes complete with tags that will allow it to be filtered by the number of days remaining: @TenDays, @OneWeek, and @ThanksgivingWeek.  Of course you can easily add or remove items to the list as necessary.

Thanksgiving Day Preparation To-Do List

• Plan your menu.
  • @TenDays
• Decide who’s bringing what dish.
  • @TenDays
• Make a list of grocery items needed.
  • @TenDays
• Estimate number of chairs / tables needed.
  • @TenDays
• Buy non-perishables.
  • @TenDays
• Check and see if you have the proper number of table settings.
  • @OneWeek
• Clean the house
  • @OneWeek
• Check refrigerator and freezer space, make sure you have enough room.
  • @OneWeek
• Get the Turkey
  • @ThanksgivingWeek
• Get activities for the children.
  • @ThanksgivingWeek
• Check camera batteries.
  • @ThanksgivingWeek
• Prepare cooking schedule.
  • @ThanksgivingWeek
• Check thaw time for turkey.
  • @ThanksgivingWeek
• Watch Football!!!
  • @ThanksgivingDay

Right click button below and select “Save-As” or “Save Link As”.

The MicroISV Digest for the week ending November 17th, 2008.

(If you have an announcement of interest to your fellow microISV, indies or startups, please email me at bob.walsh@47hats.com with the word digest in the subject.)

News and Announcements

• Ryo Shimizu, CEO of Toyko-based Ubiquitous Entertainment Inc., has released Zeptoliner, an easy-to-use outliner for the Apple iPhone. I met Ryo in Tokyo this summer - he’s part of a growing list of Japanese-based startups joining the global micro software vendor world.(via email).
• Keith Alperin, Helium Foot Software, wrote in to let me know that the latest installment of the podcast Mac Software Business: Year One is up. When 4 experienced Mac microISVs get together, what they say is well worth listening to. (via email)
• Peldi Guilizzoni the founder of Balsamiq Studios and creator of Balsamiq Mockups has a very detailed post up: Hit $100,000 in revenue, time to start looking up. That’s in less than 5 months, by the way.

Relevant Blog Posts, Videos and Articles

• Show #5 of the Startup Success Podcast is up - This week show includes an interview with Change Round-up CTO Andrew Badera, a couple of microISV tips, and ruminations on our first Social Media President. Subscribe to the podcast in Apple iTunes.

Further (mostly relevant) Reading

• Ready for a whole new platform? “Amazon to Sell OLPC’s XO Laptop Starting Nov. 17″ on PC World’s site. The One Laptop Per Child Initiative has already delivered about 1 million units worldwide in a little over a year.

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If you are not a believer in “Release Early, Release Often” you can safely stop reading now.  No sense in clouding your passionately held opinions with my passionately held, and ill-defended opinions.  My best wishes to you.

On the other hand, if you’re as passionate about the power of the “Release Early” model  as I am, then this article is just for you. 

If one of these tickles your fancy, please feel free to share it.  Lets improve the world, one waiter at a time.  [waiter, as in “one who waits”.  Oh wait, those kinds of waiters wait too.  Screw it, you know what I mean].

Enjoy.

14 Sound Bites And Insights On Releasing Early

1.  Wimps wait.  Revolutionaries release early.

Suggested reading:  “Rules for Revolutionaries” by Guy Kawasaki.  Guy’s my hero. 

2.  Failing to scale is excusable.  Failing to release is not.

3.  Don’t hug your software too hard.  If you love it, set it free.

4.  You will more often regret when you were reluctant than when you released.

5.  At the end of the day…just ship it!

6.  You don’t get a first chance to make a second impression.

I realize the above statement makes no logical sense.  But, the argument against releasing early is often “you don’t get a second chance to make a first impression” and I wanted to twist it into something clever for my purposes.  I failed.  No worries.  This one’s on the house.

6.  It’s better to release early, and irritate some users than not release, and not have users at all.

7.  If it helps you release earlier, know that my software sucks more than yours. 

8.  Ship it now.  Why wait until tomorrow to learn what you can today?

9.  There are always 10 pretty good reasons not to release.  But, they’re not that good — so just release.

10.  Software in the wild always trumps software in waiting.

11.  You’re overestimating the degree to which people give a flying flip.  Get over yourself and just freakin’ ship it already.

12.  To succeed, you need to be remarkable.  To be remarkable, you actually have to release something.

Suggested reading:  Seth Godin’s blog.  Seth’s my hero.

13.  Better to release early and be ridiculed than just ridiculed.

14.  No heroes and legends are created by software that almost shipped.

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That’s about the best I can do.  I have a feeling you can do better.  Post your best pithy insight on the awesomeness of “releasing early” in the comments.

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I also spent some free time today catching up with some blog reading and came across Peldi Guilizzoni's balsamiq blog.

If ever the Micro-ISV owner/developer needed an example of why we do this or what the dream is then Peldi is it.

Balsamiq Mockups looks like a great product too.  I'm looking forward to trying it out after playing with the online trial.

It's odd how asking yourself the simple question "What would Bill Gates do?" can bring a clarity-inducing shift of perspective to seemingly intractable problems. I don't why it works, but it does. Depending on the problem you're facing, you can replace Bill Gates with Steve Jobs, or Warren Buffett, or the Pope.

Here are some fictional examples:

Q. What should you do with that troublesome employee who never seems to quite make the grade, no matter how hard you coach him? Should you stick at it, or fire him?
A. What would Bill Gates do?

Q. You're worried about the design of that product. Should you interfere and risk irritating your development team, or let it ship?
A. What would Steve Jobs do?

Q. Should you give up the security of your day job to focus on your mISV, or stay wrapped in the comfort blanket of full-time employment?
A. What would Bill Gates do?

You get the picture.

Got any other problem solving tricks? Post them here ...

I found myself unexpectedly at home today.

This gave me lots of time to just sit and work away on various things which reminded me how much I like working at home and how productive the lack of distractions can be.

The morning was taken up with some client work - trying to find solutions to some annoying, and difficult to re-create, bugs.  But it was successful in that I found a good re-creation scenario for one of them and a solution was soon forthcoming.

This afternoon gave me some clear time to look over my own product in development.

I mentioned in a post on September 26th that I was switching development to a different product.  This has come about more through luck than anything else!

Recently, I've been developing an ActiveX component for a client to allow them to do something specific from IE in their web based applications.

Initially I was asked to find a commercial product to do this work and I did actually find and recommend one.  But the client wasn't entirely happy using a product produced by a Micro-ISV!  The question of support in the event of something happening to the developer was raised and the ISV didn't seem to have an answer acceptable to the client.

So they opted, instead, to have a budding Micro-ISV (i.e. me!) develop a solution for them.  Which I did.

The component I developed was functionally specific to the client but it did make me wonder if there was a market for a more general purpose version and, if so, was anyone doing it already.

I knew of one component, the one I initially recommended, and a web search turned up a couple of others with similar levels of functionality.

They all have wildly different pricing structures with multiple extra cost add-ons, ongoing support costs and differing core feature lists.

I did a round of market/company research too, including obtaining some publicly available company financial reports for the companies selling the products I see as competitors.  I sense-checked all the findings with some friends too, just to make sure I wasn't just seeing what I wanted to see.

In the end I decided there was space for another product in the market.  I have a slightly different feature list which will help to differentiate my product.

For the past few weeks I've been working on the prototype code.  This has gone very well and I have a prototype that has all of the functionality I want in the base product.  And it works too!

I've moved on now and have started coding the real version, carrying over the prototype code where appropriate.

Locking down the component, in terms of licensing and ActiveX security, is something I need to look at soon.  I know how I want to structure the versions of the product, but I'll need to work out how to accomplish this in an ActiveX component loaded into IE and used from JavaScript / VBScript.

I can’t say that the bug this post is about is my worst bug ever.  Or even my most embarassing bug ever.  But it is certainly my most costly bug ever.  But first, a picture.  You can click it to see the full-sized version. The above graph shows two years and change of monthly visitor counts [...]

Last week, 18 of us gathered for the first ever London BoS dinner. It was a great reminder of how the pub, the pizza parlour and the coffee house - real-life interactions as old as beer itself - trump the web 2.0 pretenders of Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.

Whenever I talk to other ISVs there are two recurring themes: pricing and sales. Pricing is hard, as much guesswork and art as science. And most ISVs - those set up by developers, anyway - don't understand sales.

But help is at hand.

Firstly, check out the video of Paul Kenny at Business of Software 2008 (it's embedded below). If you think that your software sells itself, or find sales distasteful and sordid, then prepare to be challenged.

Paul starts off his talk by asking the audience to agree or disagree with statements such as:

"I really love being sold to"
"Generally speaking, sales people disappoint me"

You can guess how that went. In response, he says:

"What you've experienced in your life are banal, mediocre, inappropriate sales techniques. Over the next hour, I'm going to make it my mission to put you in touch with your inner sales person. I'm going to help you love your sales people a little bit more."

And, dammit, I think he pulls it off.

There's no better time to watch this video: as the economy sours, persuading people to open their wallets will get harder. So selling will become more important. Here's the video:

Secondly, Dan Nunan has agreed to host an online chat about software pricing. He'll cover why you can't sell you product for more than $1,000, the wisdom of free, and tricks for charging a higher price in a downturn without offending your customers. It's at 5pm GMT (12 noon EST, 9am PST) on Tuesday November 18th. Go here to register your interest.

On the forums, Mark Dalgarno asks "Product managers - who needs them (and are they overpaid)?", and John asks how do you promote software in its pre-launch stage? James Moore has, so far, got the best tenuous analogy between the US elections and the business of software with his comparison with HD-DVD and Blu-ray.

Got an opinion about any of these topics? Post it on the forums.

Want to receive this update once a week? You have three options: join the Business of Software social network, subscribe to the RSS feed of my blog, or follow me on twitter.

During the last weeks I’ve been checking out how BlitzMax works and done little bit of coding (setting up things to port my project to BlitzMax, that’s another story to which I won’t go in this blog post). There’s one tiny thing in BlitzMax that’s getting bit annoying.

The default editor uses Control+Arrow keyboard shortcuts in a really different way than one might expect. When you are editing some text and you press Control+Right Arrow in your keyboard, you’d expect that your cursor moves to the end of the next word. Instead of moving your cursor, BlitzMax IDE opens the next tabbed file there is. It didn’t take me more than 10-20 minutes to get annoyed about this “feature”.

I wonder why they wanted to torture me like this. What bad have I ever done to them? I can bear with all the bugs and delays, but ruining my IDE can’t be forgiven. (Well, luckily you can use other IDEs so you aren’t stuck with the default one - and besides, as far as I know, it might be even possible to change those keyboard shortcuts somehow.)

Funny how such a small thing can have such a big meaning. I suppose the lesson here is that one should follow certain existing & well-working guidelines when doing user interfaces.

On the good side: I really enjoy all the stuff that BlitzMax has - with my long Blitz3D background, moving into BMax looks so far really, really simple. And all the juicy Object Oriented stuff is there! Maybe I’ll forgive this tiny UI glitch after all…

I’ve just been reading about the next version of Flex Builder (code named “Gumbo”) that some lucky people have just got their hands on at MAX NA ‘08, it sounds like there are some great new features.

I’m looking forward to the FlexUnit integration and new network monitoring functionality, they’re the kind features that could make some serious improvements to development efficiency. The network monitor is particulary important to me, as my Flex development is all about sending and receiving data over the network, much like 99% of Flex apps out there.

But, what could be a real winner for future product development is the new Client Data Management (CDM) in Flex Builder, if it works well it sounds like it could be a very useful integrated and supported way of managing large data sets on the client from a remote source.

The new name for the designer -> developer product that was code named Thermo is “Flash Catalyst“, which is a great name for this product. Flash Catalyst will be used to take the output of traditional application design such as multi-layered Photoshop files and turn them into working Flex prototypes. It’s the kind of thing that could seriously aid in the designer -> developer transfer, I expect we’ll see an abundance of great looking Flex and AIR apps with wonderful user interation as a result of the developer being able to better use the designer’s output.

CoCoMo has also been officially released, which looks like a fantastic collaboration SDK. I hope to make use of CoCoMo in the future.

A couple months ago, when I was at ZendCon08, I spent a good amount of time chatting with Chris Cornutt (eygma on IRC and Twitter) who is also the founder of PHPDeveloper.org.  One of the things he showed me was his pet project: Joind.in

One of the odd things about many of these tech conferences, is how speaker/session evaluations are handled.  At many of them, the room manager hands you a printed evaluation form.  You write your comments, mark your scores, and turn it in.  And finally, month or so later, the conference organizers get back to the speakers with the scores.  For a tech conference with a tech audience with tech speakers, this doesn't make a lot of sense.

In comes Joind.in to fill the gap.  It's a simple site listing a bunch of recent - and near future - conferences so you can score and provide feedback online... it doesn't matter if it's immediately after the session or after you get home.  The point is that speakers - and other attendees - can get faster feedback on the sessions and find out which ones get the most interest.  The events listed so far - phpAppalachia, PHP NW, and PHP Works are just a small part of the conference circuit, but they're a great place to start.  I think it will get even better as different unconferences and *Camps get onboard.

An area for improvement:  The primary issue I see at the moment is that anyone can register and leave feedback on any talk.  There's no validation to ensure the person actually attended the session or even the conference.  Unfortunately, to do this validation, Chris will have to get buy in from a few conference organizers to share their lists.  I think this is a unique opportunity that I hope one of them will take.

The new version of Foxit Reader has a tabbed interface.  This is a pretty sweet addition and it’s about time.  Why doesn’t every application do this?  The tabs are optional if you would rather have separate applications open.

Prior to installing the new version I decided to check the memory consumption of the old version by opening 3 different PDF files at once.  As you can see below the total memory used is 32,388 K.

The memory usage of the new tabbed interface version with the same 3 files open was less: 25,548 K.

There are other new features in this version as well.  The magnifier tool, shown below, is pretty nice.  There is also a built in multimedia player for special multimedia e-books.

The only con that I’ve found so far is the ad that is located in the upper right-hand corner.  This ad changes every once in a while and can be distracting.