Software Industry Conference 2009

This year’s 2009 Software Industry Conference was no disappointment. With some great speakers and great company it was an excellent chance to put some faces to names that we knew only by email and newsgroup postings.

This year we spent a lot of time talking in the hospitality suites, here’s who was on hand:

• Association of Shareware Professionals
• Avangate
• cleverbridge
• Digital River
• Shareware Promotions Ltd.
• Softonic
• Tucows

Nico and Roger hang out in the BitsDuJour exhibition booth on Friday night. We had a lot of familiar faces and some new ones stop by, a really great night.

We had some tasty “bytes” on offer on the exhibition night too.

Nico chats with Oliver Grahl, who tops the BitsDuJour leaderboard of top sellers for PDF Annotator

Mike Dulin cracks jokes at the ASP Luncheon.

Most of the e-commerce providers were on hand at the SIC this year. We caught up with the new e-commerce company UpClick.

Rik Roberts shows how a real man should perform at the Shareware Industry Awards.

Don’t Reinvent the Marketing Wheel

Stand on the Shoulders of the Giants

In this time and age, each and every company is trying its best to be different. Innovation seems to be the name of the game and entrepreneurs are literally scratching their heads to be original, creative and off beat in their sales and marketing strategies. And of course, the call of the times is to have a unique selling proposition, out-of-the-box strategies. But I can’t help but wonder why entrepreneurs single-handedly have to do all the spadework. Can’t they take reference from the past? And most importantly, doesn’t this question call for a passing thought at least?

In simple words, the entrepreneurs need not ‘reinvent the wheel’ again and again. Just look out, what your peers and predecessors have done. Examples will be in plenty. If that’s not enough, check out some renowned books written by distinguished sales and marketing gurus. Almost all the marketing strategies will find a mention here.

Have you heard of the phrase ‘standing on the shoulders of the giants’? The dictionary meaning says “Using the understanding gained by major thinkers who have gone before in order to make intellectual progress”. Don’t you think this is the best way out.

Some of the well-known books that entrepreneurs can peruse include,

- The E-Myth by Michael Gerber

- Magnetic Marketing by Dan Kennedy

- Meatball Sundae by Seth Godin

- Duct Tape Marketing by John Jantsch

All of them are great read; hopefully you like them and most importantly help you expand your Business.

Bridging the Gap between Actual Offer and Sales Copy

You are all set to open your sales innings on an encouraging note. And you have already crafted a grand sounding sales copy for that purpose. The best things being you are pretty sure that your copy will strike a chord with the prospects.

But as someone said, Man proposes and God disposes, your sales efforts fall apart like a pack of cards. The buyer has out rightly rejected your offer. But wasn’t your sales copy fool-proof, then why was this red-light shown.

While not disputing for a moment, about the brilliance of your sales copy, however, there may be a combination of factors that may have contributed in this deal going awry.

Flaunt your price-tag- Never, be ashamed about the price of your products. Customers or prospects simply don’t flip through the pages, ignoring the price element, for the simple fact that price has a fundamental role to play, before a sales deal is finally closed. If your sales copy is really good, then be rest assured that you have hit the bull’s eye. However, don’t go about feeling sorry for you have given your product a price tag that it’s worth of.

Clear-Cut Offer- Be sure that you mention the price. Furnish complete details of the products and services you are offering and any additional bonuses you are planning to unfold in the future.

Purchase Options: Give the prospects a variety of ways to order: phone, fax, mail, online. The more diverse you make, there are chances that you will receive more offers.

Payment Options –Present different kinds of payment methods. Purchasers are keenly interested in knowing the various payment options available.

Contact Information: Some brilliant marketing messages have been dumped as the prospects have failed to find the contact details

Don’t miss your sale at the offer point.

How to attract Your Prospect to the Sale

Did you ever try to figure out why your customers are not reverting back, when you are sending them some attractive marketing offers? May be he (she) hasn’t even taken the pain to read your offer. But what more can you expect from the customers, who are flooded with more than 3,000 marketing, messages. So it is but natural for them to dump each and every marketing offer that comes their way

There are certain marketing filters you need to take into account, before the customers start reading your copies and are ready to communicate with. Here are the steps:

Step 1- Know your customers- This makes the message more targeted and helps you draw his (her) attention. And your customers or prospects will get a feeling that you deeply care for them.

Step 2- Keep a tab on the customers- Make it a habit to take follow-ups with your customers, probably you will be able to strike a better deal.

Step 3- Give value to your customers- Every marketing message that you are putting out should be from the prospects viewpoint. It should bring profits to the prospects first. Moreover the message that you send should do a little more than what you sell. It should educate, engage, entertain and helps your prospects some way or the other.

Step 4- Give customers due importance- Once your prospects fall in to your trap, see that you keep in touch with him(her) on constant basis. New customers and the old customers need the same kind of attention. Shower them with your attention, and see how your fortunes turnaround.

About the Author
This article was provided by Mayur Dicosta from made-from-india.com

FMCharts: Dynamic and Accessible Web Charts

I have been developing a script that shows bar graphs. While similar
systems already exist, this one particularly is geared towards
accessibility. I was inspired on CSS For Bar Graphs. However, a major improvement is the added flexibility that comes from implementing it in ECMAScript. Even with these changes, the prevailing
first intention remains: that the graph is readable in plain HTML,
which is why it is appropriate for an accessible design. It works by
firstly creating the appropiate DOM tree of the graph, and then
applying the corresponding styles.

The script is available at the address http://0xj.info/js/graphs.js. Using it isn’t that complicated.

The first thing is to create an instance of the object.

var x=_FMchart();

Then a layer must be specified, either in string or in DOM node form.
Accordingly:

x.setLayer("LayerID");
x.setLayer(document.getElementById("LayerID"));

After that, the data should be given:

x.draw(
{title:"Cases of H1N1 Influenza A in South America by country (progessive)",
categories: ["AR", ["BO","999"], "BR", "CL", "CO", "EC", "PE", "PY", "SR", "UY", "VE"],
proportional:true,
multidimentional:true,
dimensions:{w:"600px"},
data:{
"20090626":[1587,47,452,5186,72,125,360,79,11,195,153],
"20090705":[2485,319,812,7342,101,163,811,103,12,195,204],
"20090709":[2677,544,977,8160,118,204,1135,114,12,195,222],
"20090711":[2928,545,1027,9549,138,204,1580,114,12,520,231],
"20090714":[3056,545,1027,9549,166,204,1753,114,12,520,234]
}
});

The properties are

title

title (caption)

categories

array containing the different elements described by the data. In
the example, we are using the default colors for all the categories,
with the exception of BO (using color #999999.)

proportional

if set to true, it replaces the absolute values by relative
percentual values (eg 4 in a sample of 10 is represented as 40%.)

multidimentional

if set to true the length of the bars must be proportional among
them (only available for a sample or more)

data

the data itself. Labels are needed to compare data from different samples.
dimensions an object containing either one or both of the properties w (for
width) and h (for height), with units

helper

the function which will apply the styles. For example, for a pie
chart it will be x.helpers.pie

helperArgs

array containing the different arguments to pass to the helper.

For instance, the first value sets the radius (in pixels) to use for
the pie chart when using helpers.pie

Pie charts require SVG or VML support. Bar charts are currently supported on the following browsers:

• MSIE 5.5, 6, 7 and 8 (for Windows)
• Netscape 7 and 9
• Arora 0.7.1
• Mozilla Firefox 0.8, 1.0.8, 1.5.0.12, 2.0.0.20, 3.0 and 3.5
• Konqueror 3.5 and 4.2
• Galeon 2.0.6
• Opera 9.26, 9.63, 9.64 and 10
• Kazehakase 0.5.4
• Epiphany 2.22 and 2.26.3
• K-Meleon 1.1.4
• Flock 2.0.3
• Safari 3.2.1 and 4.0
• Avant 11.7

A demo available at http://youruseragent.info/download/chart.html. More information (in Spanish) is also available.

graphs.js

This is a post from Web Dev News, a site brought to you by Xavisys Web Development.

FMCharts: Dynamic and Accessible Web Charts

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UpClick Brings 0% Fees to Software Sales

There’s been a lot of talk about the latest e-commerce platform to emerge on the scene. We took the time to talk to Michael Dadoun, UpClick‘s COO. Here’s what he had to say.

1. UpClick is the new kid on the block’ in a world of many e-commerce services. Why does the web need another payment processor?

You are right. There are a bunch of payment processors in the market already, but we see ourselves as much more than a basic payment processing platform. UpClick offers software vendors a one-stop solution for selling online with an economic model that makes it a no brainer for them. Before UpClick, there were basically two types of payment processors that software vendors could choose from: on one side, they could choose companies that offer a commoditized product where differentiation is low and the only factor is pricing. On the other side, they could choose a value-added ecommerce platform that (on average) cost between 7 and 15% to use. We have a different approach. Our emphasis is to create value for our customers by offering the best technologies and practices, maximizing their Average Revenue per Order with optimized cross-selling and by offering a dynamic affiliate marketplace.

2. On your homepage there’s a big “0% fees” advertisement. If you don’t charge any fees then how do you make any money – what’s the catch?

No catch. We indeed absorb the payment processing costs and the costs of first level customer service. We make our money in 3 ways:

- We enable merchants to cross-sell products from other UpClick Merchants on their check-out pages. When this happens, we take a small commission and the two merchants split the remaining revenue.

- We offer consumers complementary products — such as CD backup of the software they bought — at the time of check out and/or after the transaction is approved, and split the proceeds with the merchants.

- We charge a small $1 fee for transactions generated by our affiliate marketplace (compared to up to 30% of the commissions charged by other affiliate networks).

3. We’ve seen UpClick mentioned in the media a lot recently, are vendors signing up?

Yes! The reaction has been tremendous and our value proposition gets our potential customers’ attention every time. Of course, we understand that changing to a new platform provider is something customers do prudently and often only after testing. However, we’re seeing a lot of traction and are actually exceeding our forecast

4. So give us the rundown, what features does UpClick’s system have?

We have a long list of features and the best way to see all of them would be to visit our website. Even with all our features, one thing we’re especially proud of is our extremely simple interface. A software vendor can sign-up, upload his product and license keys, and get our innovative buy buttons to put on his site in about 5 minutes!

5. Besides the big “0%” is there anything that differentiates you from the most established e-commerce solutions such as Digital River and Plimus?

Pricing of our services is of course the obvious one, which helps our Merchants save money. But, we also enable merchants to make more money as well, through our cross-selling capabilities and our affiliate network. Merchant A can dramatically increase his average revenue per order by offering to his customers a product from Merchant B at the time of check-out, creating new revenue for both of them. Another differentiator is our geo-targeting tools that allow merchants to customize pricing per currency (ie. $19.99 in the US or 19.99 Euros in Europe, instead of the typical straight conversion that would give 14.39 euros). There are many more features that differentiate us, and as I said earlier, despite the feature-rich platform, we’ve very easy to use.

6. Is UpClick just for software sales or does your system allow selling of other products?

Our expertise is in software sales, so for now, that’s where we are focused However, we also support some related products such as ebooks, and have plans to eventually expand into membership sites (content, newsletters and even Software as a Service) and maybe some other product categories.

7. E-commerce continues to grow, even in this sluggish economy. How do you see the next twelve months playing out for software developers?

The software industry is a great place to be. It is still a growing industry. The international markets have been an area of strong growth for North American software companies and will continue to be. Consumers are buying their software online now more than ever and that trend will continue in the next 12 months.

That being said, the online selling of software is extremely competitive, but we believe that we offer the tools to allow companies of any size to compete internationally.

8. With new business models such as SaaS (software as a service) and web applications, do you see desktop software, and desktop software sales, as having a limited lifespan?

Very interesting question. Obviously SaaS is a growing segment and one that is getting a lot of attention particularly in certain markets such as Asia. We don’t see this as a threat since we will be supporting both business models in the future. Having said that, we don’t see the downloadable software market as disappearing any time soon. We believe there will always have a need for software to run, protect and maintain your machine.

9. As you work with a lot of developers, you must see people making the same mistakes over and over again. If you had one piece of advice for developers what would it be?

Keep it simple. Most of us working in technology have a tendency to try and build too much functionality into our products to a point where they become too complex for most people.

10. Will we see you at the Software Industry Conference in Boston this July (we’ll be there too)?

UpClick is a proud sponsor of the SIC. We will have a booth and I should be giving a presentation on Localization and Cross-Selling. We’ll see you there!

About the Author
Michael Dadoun is the COO and co-founder of UpClick

Drupala Installation Profile 5.19 v1.0 – Social Networking & Social Bookmarking for Drupal

The Drupala Installation Profile is built on the Drupal 5.x Drigg Installation for social bookmarking and the Advanced Profile Kit for social networking. The site architecture makes extensive use of Views, Panels, and multiple content types to build a portal organized around taxonomy terms that includes blogs, articles, social bookmarks, and user profiles. The Drigg base theme has been redesigned to position featured categories in the primary links section and Drigg categories in the sidebar. This allows for an easy customization of the site structure to support virtually any topic. FCKeditor is pre-installed and configured for WYSIWYG blog & article publishing. The Drupala theme is two columns, optimized for APK & Drigg, and cross-browser tested in FF, IE6, IE7, Chrome, Safari, and Opera.

There are two live sites currently based around the Drupala installation profile:

• http://drupala.com
• http://www.seo-mix.com
• Demo: http://demo.drupala.com

The Drupala Installation Profile contains two new themes, “Drupala” and “SEO-Mix”, as well as more than 50 contributed third-party modules for the Drupal 5.x platform. The installation package includes a MySQL database map and full Drupal 5.x installation. The Drupala and SEO-Mix themes are only different in the color of the top buttons of the GUI & search interface. The Drupala Installation Profile can be used as a base for multi-site installations, and comes with upgrade documentation.

• Download the Drupala Installation Profile at Google Code:
  http://code.google.com/p/drupala/
• View the complete list of included modules

The benefit of the Drupala installation profile is the combination of social networking and social bookmarking with a solid theme that can be deployed from a database map to pre-populate the site structure & configuration. With the Drupala installation profile, you can reduce the development time needed to build an advanced social networking / social bookmarking site on Drupal 5.x from 5 to 6 weeks to less than 1 week.

Visit TypeHost Web Development for more information: http://www.typehost.com

Drupala Profile – Installation Instructions:

1. Upload & unpack the site files in domain directory.

2. Create a new MySQL database – grant user all powers.

3. Use phpMyAdmin or command line to import MySQL database map.

a. To import a database with PHPMyAdmin: http://drupal.org/node/81995 –> may be necessary to edit database line in MySQL file to the name of your database

b. Big Dump: http://drupal.org/node/43024

c. Command Line:

mysql -u drupaldbusername -p  drupaldbname < /home/drupaltest/public_html/backup/drupaldb.sql

For future reference for others:

1. By your method of choice (I used PHPMyAdmin) backup your database and make sure you select the option “Add DROP TABLE”

2. From the commandline run your database. Below is a template of the command (remove the brackets and put your specific information in):

mysql -u [database_username] -p[database_user_password] [database_name] < [/path/to/your/backup/database/dbname.sql

An example:

Database Name: drupal

Database Username: acert93

DB User Password: testing

Backup database: backup_drupal.sql

Path to database: /home/demonstration/www/backup/

mysql -u acert93 -ptesting drupal < /home/demonstration/www/backup/backup_drupal.sql

References:

http://drupal.org/getting-started/5/install/create-database/mysql
http://drupal.org/upgrade/copying-your-live-site-via-command-line
http://drupal.org/upgrade/backing-your-site-command-line
http://drupal.org/node/77853

4. Edit /sites/default/settings.php

+ update database name, password, & user name (usually “localhost” is constant)

+ update base url

+ update cookie domain

+ save / replace – changing permissions as necessary

—> note: you can also review & edit the site “term changes” in the settings.php, see: http://drupal.org/node/131061#comment-636000

5. Browse to the domain – your site should be live.

+ login with ID: “admin” – password: “test”

+ immediately change the password to something secure and begin configuration of the site.

6. Set up cron for the domain as usual.

Note: there is a “dashboard” page in the admin menu that contains all the instructions for configuring the Drupala installation and customizing it to your content. Just click on “Configure Site” and follow the links & instructions.

Drupala Profile – Configuration Instructions:

1. Goto “Site Information” & change the site name & email:

2. Goto the Taxonomy section – change the main categories & featured section information for social bookmarks, articles, and blogs: /admin/content/taxonomy

Note: Offset the “Blog” and “Article” taxonomy by one term when updating the settings, as the first portal view is a list of all content types and not tied to any vocabulary.

3. Goto Menus – update the paths & link titles to reflect your site’s content

4. Goto Blocks – update ads / titles / settings (paths that determine block display may need updated as you make changes):
+ 250px x 250px – top ad: —> change in block:
+ Google adSense – 3 Ads:
—>250 x 250px: image ads only —> change in block:
—>250 x 250px: text ads only – #28488C —> change in block:
—>468 x 15px: link group – #28488C —> this code needs to be changed in:
sites/all/themes/drigg_theme/page.tpl.php
Footer ad is in site configuration settings:
—> you can also change the bottom link menu in this section.

Note: these can be replaced with ads other than adSense or removed completely. Keep the “div ID” tags in code.

6. Goto panels – use the existing pages as templates to build your site:

+ delete / add / change panels pages & layouts according to site design

+ link panels pages to main images in views slideshow to create a navigation path to featured site articles

7. Goto content – review the views slidehow information and update accordingly:

+ Edit slideshow view

Additional Configuration Options:

1. Note: it is also necessary to register the site with recaptcha and enter the information in the module configuration panel: http://recaptcha.net/

2. Also – register the site at Google Webmaster Tools and update the XML Sitemap settings: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools

3. The meta-tag information must also be changed: /admin/content/nodewords

4. Change the information in the contact form configuration panel: /admin/build/contact/edit/1

5. Update the abuse email information: /admin/settings/abuse

6. Update the site name in Buddylist settings: /admin/settings/buddylist

7. Update the “legal” settings and also “terms & conditions” – /admin/settings/legal

8. Update the Webform contact information: /admin/settings/webform

9. …and also delete the panels template pages not needed for your installation:

10. When customizing the profile, it is also a good idea to rename the views and panel pages to something that reflects the updated content – but the taxonomy terms should update automatically.

Additional Comments:

Renaming the views from taxonomy specific tags like “articles_web_design” to “views_1″ simplifies the deployment of the profile & configuration.

If you clone a View that is already embedded in a Panel through a Views Panel, then you may lose the original settings in the panels block.

Updated the Tagadelic settings to display “blog tags” on blog pages, “article tags” on article pages, and “popular tags” (from the social bookmarks) on all other site pages.

Added a content type “slideshow” – for simple views slideshow that links to featured site articles, and more complex sorting of images into portal panels using taxonomy.

Added the Update Status module to the Drupala profile since this was missing from 5.x core: http://drupal.org/project/update_status. This is really an essential module – looking forward to totally automated module & version upgrades in the future.

Important: we do NOT recommend upgrading the version of Advanced Profile Kit used with the Drupala installation profile at this time (Included Version: Advanced Profile Kit 5.x-1.0-alpha5).

Upgraded FCKeditor to the latest version of the module & editor files – preserved the custom configuration for Drupala – Chrome browser scroll area bug solved by editing /sites/all/modules/fckeditor/fckeditor/editor/fckeditor.html

—> xEditingArea to “height: 390px”

The views, views blocks, panels, & other settings should automatically update with taxonomy changes.

For panels portal page displays, you may want to use flash, fpss, views slideshow, animated gifs, or just standard jpg/png files for a top section display.

With the Drupala installation profile, you can reduce the development time needed to deploy an advanced social networking / social bookmarking site on Drupal 5.x from 5 to 6 weeks to less than 1 week.

You can use the configuration “dashboard” page for administration that includes links to the pages above that you need to customize to configure the site after installation. Following the step by step process, you can easily create a custom social network, social bookmarking site, and multi-user blog portal for your publishing niche.

Finishing Configuration & Publishing:

After you have finished configuring the site, delete the dashboard page & menu entry.

Add content to your site.

Review all of the administration settings.

Site Design – Reference:

• Drupala – http://drupala.com
• SEO-Mix – http://www.seo-mix.com
• Demo: http://demo.drupala.com

Drupal Documentation:

• Drupal: http://drupal.org
• Drigg: http://drupal.org/project/drigg
• Drigg-Code: http://www.drigg-code.org
• Advanced Profile: http://drupal.org/project/advanced_profile

This is a post from Web Dev News, a site brought to you by Xavisys Web Development.

Drupala Installation Profile 5.19 v1.0 – Social Networking & Social Bookmarking for Drupal

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