Black On Stuff

This year conference is not only one day as the ones last years. It’s for almost three days, from Friday evening to Sunday noon. It’s the third time we’re sponsoring the conference. Friday was just a networking party, a so called “barbeque party” although there was no barbeque but normal catering, but inside a big tent in a park near the hotel. The usual drinks were there: wine and vodka (Russian Standard Vodka), orange and tomato juice and still water. Not too many people, but a great live band.

I was expecting more people this year but until now (Saturday evening) I guess there weren’t more than 150 people (optimistically speaking). The location of the conference (Holiday Inn, Vinogradovo) is not very accessible because it is outside Moscow, there is no direct subway from/to town center. I spoke with someone from the organizers and he told me the reason this hotel was chosen: the participants will not leave early after and during the conference, because they cannot physically do it (or it is very inconvenient).

Anyway, I cannot tell anything about the presentations, because they’re all in Russian. Our presentation is scheduled for tomorrow at 10am and it will present a perspective of automatization in software sales, with a touch of our new product, myAvangate. And it will be in English. Probably the only one in the conference.

I will also post some pictures after the event, cause I don’t have a way to download it to a computer (no cable available).

Business networking is good at these kind of events and after being here twice last year, I get to know most of the participants. After each conference we end up with a few new shareware authors which are using Avangate services and it is a good time to make live presentations of our system.

Of course, DR is sponsoring today’s banquet, as they usually do. A good time to “steal” another one of their clients …

Did I mentioned we have a special offer for all ISDEF participants, including free myAvangate for one year and a special rate for Avangate eCommerce Platform? Now I did it!

We’ve built a list of 50 download portals where you should have your software listed. The list is still open, changes can be applied at any time if a page with a higher rank appears. Even if the listed websites are sorted by Google Page Rank, this does not mean that the first ones are more interesting than the last ones. For instance, my opinion is that websites like softpedia and soft32 could bring more downloads and traffic than download.com or tucows.com. More even, submissions to some websites could prove costly and requiring a lot of time for approval, which is just unacceptable over the web. Luckily most of the websites in the list are processing submissions in a timely manner so the time to market is minimum.

Another interesting list for blog and rss submission is also available on avangate: Free RSS Submission Directories List

Just found out that some of our online articles are translated and published in different languages. For instance, the article Optimizing for MSN? Is It Worth the Effort? has a french version: L’Optimisation pour MSN est-elle Nécessaire ?

Nice. It even looks good in french. Well done! Just in time to fit my new website panorama from Paris

And not only that, but I found an .edu website today quoting Avangate as a reference for writing good software documentation. So after all, the effort starts to pay off. We are investing a lot in quality content for software publishers mostly, putting in words and sentences what seems very natural for everyone. We’re also always recruiting smart people for our web-marketing department.

US goes further in e-commerce development by starting interesting projects targeting rural areas. Just found the National E-commerce Extension Initiative, which looks quite impresive beginning from the fact that it exists.

I quote from this project background:

This initiative, launched in 2003, is addressing various factors that will dictate the adoption and diffusion of e-commerce innovations in rural areas. These factors include such topics as whether rural areas have the technology in place to embrace e-commerce applications, whether these businesses understand how e-commerce can benefit their operations, and whether Extension educators have the resources to provide adequate educational support to small businesses.

Interested to see if Europe will follow. Computers would not be a problem, however Internet connectivity might be one. Large cable operators and providers seem like they are not interested in going outside the cities, providing Internet services. Can’t hardly wait the moment when I will have broadband connectivity in my grandparents back-yard. And not by using mobile technology like 3G or EVDO, which is already available for sometime now.

Our webteam released a few days ago an updated avangate.com website, updates focusing mostly on usability. Here are some changes:

- the homepage picture is brand new (we have used pointing girl in some of our posters in the past)
- new tagline, more suitable with what we do each day: Taking Your Software Business Forward
- new signup button … eventually this website is looking for new partners so the button should be there
- new link css design
- right column on homepage is reorganized (we have too much to say and the space is limited)
- tip of the day (we have already compiled tips for the next few months)

Out of the topic, CeBIT Hannover started today. Larry and Alex are already there, meeting some of our partners. Oh, and I just remembered, most of Avangate team is present on a new page in “About us” - “Our people” section of avangate.com. Pictures included too

A few days ago we’ve made public a new tool to customize the Backup CD sold with the software products. Since it’s an important option, we’ve released also a press release, going out yesterday. In the hours after the press release, we have received some questions about what it does and how it works (so it seems that the message is too marketing oriented in the document for the press).

So here is more technical information: until now, every disc that was processed had a customizable face in terms of graphical design and no other custom information. Now, the customer name, product name(s) and license codes can be dynamically written on a disc, independent of the graphical layout. For this to happen we needed to know the exact position on the disc where those elements will be printed. There were two options here: make the publisher calculate the x and y of the elements and then send it to us or set it in an interface or make a nice tool where you can drag and drop the elements, play with the font size and color, see a preview of how the final work will look, adjust again the settings and then save it.

The first option was not really an option for us, because of the errors and extra work might introduce for both the software publisher and Avangate. So we went with the second choice. The tool makes the process of adding custom elements to a CD a breeze. It is using extensive html and Ajax to make it as close to a desktop application as possible. It has the benefit that what you see is what you get. It even has a flash demo on how to use it, in simple steps and with comments.

Major benefit: extra-rapid CD face setup.

Only one “drawback”: the tool will be used only once, when the CD is set up. If the CD face is not changed for a long period of time, then the editing tool is not needed. So this is not a day-by-day tool, but more like a one-time tool. But it will leave any one of us more free time, time to post a new topic in the blog

We’ve just released a new feature available in the Avangate Control Panel: the AfterSale message. The concept is simple. The seller can set up a custom text do display it on the final page, just after the payment has been authorized. The good part is the Multilanguage support: the message can be in any of the supported Avangate languages for the ordering interface.

But even better is the html and JavaScript code support. For instance, adding external tracking codes like Google Analytics is now a breeze. And transparent for the buyer. Practically the possibilities are endless. Adding the support for various variables like First Name, Last Name and Email, a nice combination could work out, something that will make the buyer shopping experience a little bit better but also help the seller track a sale through external tools.

Several implementations are already online. I’m quite curious how our sellers will use this feature, giving the flexible customization support.

The Avangate sister website www.epayment.ro has a new look since yesterday. The old layout was unchanged since spring 2005. With the new layout comes a new website structure, suitable for the current content. The information can now be more easily found even from the start page. There were pages that were quite hidden in the old website, but with most accesses due to content. Also, all pages were optimized for search engines and the site navigation improved.

The website change is a move toward having a unified image both via Avangate and ePayment brands. Practically avangate.com and epayment.ro share the same general look, but with different color styles: red for Avangate and blue for ePayment.

The website is featuring content only in Romanian and it addresses only the Romanian market.

For months I was feeling the need to change something on my home computer. And not in terms of hardware but in terms of the operating system. I’m a Windows user for years; I loved Win2000 and only went to XP when I had to change my hard-drive. Doing some research, I decided that Ubuntu is a Linux flavor that might work for me, it had everything a Windows users should expect.

So I have installed it in a virtual machine first using VMWare. Smooth installation, it didn’t seem to take too much memory on my computer. I had only one problem: network connection, since I wanted to share my XP connection and not connecting directly to the router. Here is how it worked for me: start the “Set up a home or small office network”, follow the wizard and share the internet connection. Then go to Ubuntu to network settings and add the gateway the Win XP local IP address and DNS the DNS addresses already set up on Windows (from provider). Then configure the firewall on the Windows computer to accept remote connections from the virtual machine. That’s it. First time in my life when I played with the Win XP internet connection sharing.

Anyway, having internet connectivity on Ubuntu was a success, so I was able to download the appropriate codecs for playing mp3 and divx files. Office tools were already there (Open Office).

Finally, I have decided to go forward and install Ubuntu directly on my system and not in the virtual machine. So I partitioned my hard-drive, did it by the book with a separate 2GB swap partition. My friends recommended Kubuntu, so I went for this. The installation was pretty straight forward, I love especially the Live CD where you can “try before install” the basic OS features. I was amazed that after installation I even had my internet connection ready, without doing anything. That’s neat.

But, being used with XP, I was expecting the same font smoothness and at least the same speed. Activating features like transparency made the system work quite in re-run. Opening applications took more than on my XP. And I’m not talking about a slow system, it’s a P4 3GHz with 1GB RAM.

Using the software repositories (both Universe and Multiverse) is like having an indexed download portal at your fingertips. This is nice and Windows does not have that.

Trying to figure out how to use the second monitor made me switch back to Windows. From what I understood searching the web/forums, this is still a problem in Linux in general. Also, I wasn’t able to start my digital TV Tuner and I’m not willing to continue without having the same comfort as in XP.

My conclusion: it’s worth trying a Linux OS, you can clearly see the evolution in the last years. But for productivity reasons, if you’re used with another system you should stick there, otherwise you might end us searching for buttons or icons that you don’t have. It is for sure a step toward Microsoft-Independence that could take a time to make it. And a lot of patience. I wonder what the future will bring, now that Vista is out and MS went into the graphical and productivity zone.

Back in 1995, when I had my first contact with an email address and the Internet (I’ve created my first email address first with the university domain and then with yahoo.com, the email address that I still use it) I had no idea what the future will bring. Those days I had no worries, I was using a text terminal to access the email web interface on a VMS OS machine, I was in the first wave of those using ICQ (hey, I have a 8 digits ICQ ID) but I wasn’t bothered by what was happening on the Internet. Cause there was nothing happening. And never thought what is going to happen during next years.

Nowadays, after 12 years, nothing changed in terms of email technology: we’re still using a web interface to access yahoo email (yes, now it has Ajax technology, but it’s the same), we’re still accessing company email either by using IMAP or POP3 or Exchange protocols, we’re still sending emails via SMTP. Still, everything changed in terms of quantity of emails: I’m receiving tons of spam emails to increase my p…s using a magic V1@gr@ pill or surrogates, tons of emails to get a college degree in minutes or to get a huge discount by purchasing a Windows XP license or to buy a Symantec product. And nobody is doing nothing to put a stop on this. Oh, I have Mozilla Seamonkey with a good Junk email filter, I have an antispam filter directly on the email server, and this gets me through the day, but in the end, I still have to delete tons of emails daily and there might be a good one among those, so I have to take a brief look not to miss the good one. But still, this makes important emails that are marked as Junk to be answered only once or twice a day, which could hurt an online business. And it takes some time to do it, time that I’m not willing to spend on human-filtering spam emails. I have the same ritual each day, otherwise the number of spam messages will be quite high: delete, delete delete. All those meaningless V1@gr@ emails that keep on coming, hoping that one day I will be on their target.

I don’t think I’m the only one having this problem, and no one seem to do something real to stop this. I mean, don’t get me wrong, yahoo has the Bulk folder, hotmail has the Junk folder and google has the Spam folder, there are a lot of programs to help you filter the good from the bad, but it’s all the same. Everything is so relative. It’s only filtering a text they think it could be spam. But why not invest in something that could make the Internet world a better one? Is it that hard to change the current technology? Aren’t we prepared to do this? A few years ago there were rumors saying that yahoo will make you pay a cent for each sent email. This will not happened in the near future if there will not be a substantial change in the technology. Who’s gonna pay for this if it’s all the same? They started with the domain keys, but we’re not there yet. I haven’t seen any results yet.

Anyway, this topic came to me from one of my friend who’s good with names and titles. Hopefully it will not be treated as spam by any filtering rules on the Internet (cause now we have filters for everything: spam domains, spam snail mail etc.).