Black On Stuff

Last weekend I attended the 7th annual european conference for the independent software vendors. The conference was held in Köln (Cologne) Germany, in the Marriot Hotel. Each year there is another city where the conference takes place, like Strasbourg (France), Brussels (Belgium) and Cambridge (UK). Next year (2008) it will be done in Berlin for the first time. There is a reason for choosing this city: the wall of Berlin is the place where East meets West, so the organizers wanted something in the middle for both Eastern and Western European countries.

It was my first time at this conference (Avangate’s second time) and I must say that I was expecting more people to come. The speakers and the presentations were interesting but this is not the only reason to come. I was asking two guys from SmartSoft (Bulgaria) why they came and the answer was very natural: “we need to recharge our batteries, we have so many things to do (like web optimization, marketing etc) and do not have the time to do it and the conference just confirms us that we still need to do it. And there’s the beer too ” … That sums up why a software developer should be there: to meet people in the same business, to learn something from the people that already did it and of course to drink beer.

My overall feedback is this:

The location: Very good
The speakers: Very good
The topics: Good (can be improved)
Number of participants: Normal

The one thing that’s missing this event is the advertising. My guess is that not too many people know about it. And it’s a shame, because the organizers are doing the best they can to get key speakers and offer actual subjects.

The event started with a happy note with a remix of John Lennon’s “Imagine”: “imagine there’s only one browser, it’s name is Firefox, and we’ll only have to build just one website …” … I don’t know the words, maybe someone can post it somewhere as I catched on my camera just the end (available on YouTube).

Other resources:

Pictures of the event (and more) at shareware-beach
Pictures of the event at Avangate

Last weekend I’ve been to Moscow for the Autumn session of Isdef conference. It was my 4th time in Moscow for ISDEF, representing Avangate. We have sponsored this event, as we did it for the last two years. A three-day event with meetings, parties and networking.

The organizers continued to setup the conference outside Moscow, like it was also in the spring, but this time it seemed to be a little too far from the city (20 km, Foresta Tropicana Hotel). Sure, the location was perfect for a nice quiet weekend with the family but not for a conference of such scale. Fresh air outside, green grass, some snow around the buildings. The conference is quite big, lots of participants, one of the biggest software communities I’ve seen. Having the presentations divided in two different buildings (one it was a big white tent, like a bubble, usually used probably for sports activities during the cold season) was not such a good idea for the sponsors. First day of conference seemed like nobody knew that there was also an exposition hall.

I have noticed an increased number of foreign participants which leads to the conclusion that the Russian software market is getting more attention each year. And for the right reason probably: the software developers are coming from all over Russia and neighboring CSI countries. There are people coming from more than 5000 km away, from the Irkutsk city near the lake Baikal. So having an on-the-fly translation service, like it was last year, it might have helped the foreigners to understand the Russian presentations.

The first two days were dedicated to Russian speakers and some of them seemed to have a really good speech. Me personally, I’ve found some interesting subjects that were worth listening (like the one Natalia Kaspersky had), but unfortunatelly, without a translation service I had to settle for the English presentations only.

On Sunday (3rd day) almost everything was in English. And of course, each eCommerce provider (our competitors) had 20-30 minutes to present something. I will not say any names, but it was a mixture of plain company advertising, technical things and nice reporting/statistics bars. Laurentiu kept the Avangate presentation about the difference between Resellers and Affiliates, to emphasize the Reseller role in a growing International Business (and of course the need for a PRM system e.g. myAvangate).

One new thing for this conference was the eCommerce providers panel, where Avangate, Plimus, Cleverbridge and DR were put face to face to answer general questions like “what are your commission rates” or “where did you get the company name” or “what should we expect from you next year” or “why are you better than the other ones”. I do not want to start a discussion about any of these subjects, I will write another topic someday.

Overall, the conference proved to be quite beneficial for us, even though the conference setup was at a lower level, compared with the old conferences. Meeting new people and sharing information with current partners was one of our accomplished goals. Vodka is still the Russian official drink, no beer at the official parties (barbecue and banquet). And even if we were in a hotel with a tropical flavor, there were no real fruits anywhere.

Some facts about the place:

- there is a plane in the middle of the resort

- the taxi from the Sheremetyevo airport to here should be around 2500 rubles (and not 4000 as most of the foreigners paid)

- you get to see the country side of Russia while driving to the resort

- the receptionists do not speak/understand english that well (we have arrived at around 1pm and they said that the room will be ready at 5pm; we asked for a room with a lake view and the girl at the reception made some phone calls and returned with the keys to our room, to be ready in 20 minutes – and not in several hours. I wonder what did she understood. Because the room didn’t had any lake view but quite opposite, the forest).

And some pictures I’ve shot:

I have received yesterday an email from yahoo with the message that yahoo photos will no longer be available starting September 20. They give me the chance to move my pictures to Flickr (or even Shutterfly, Snapfish, or Photobucket) at a click of a button. I have a few albums on yahoo, so the moving will not be a problem. Yahoo made it clear that moving to their service, Flickr (which I’m not currently using) would be the smartest choice, so I have decided to go with them. I had the surprise to receive a Pro account for 3 months on Flickr

But my personal choice for a photo-sharing service is Tabblo. Great tools for album creation, easy to use, comments enabled. Give it a try!

So I have decided to uninstall Ubuntu. I had it on a big partition of 50GB and another one with 2 GB for swap. I had only a few problems with this system, but the main reason to get rid of it was because switching between two systems was quite annoying. I mean you either have it all in one place or not.

I have found that accessing NTFS partitions was quite easy, even in write mode.

I have found that accessing ext2 partitions from my XP was easy too. For this I was using Ext2 IFS for Windows, a driver that maps the linux partitions into XP drives. I was disappointed to see that I could tamper Ubuntu from XP, read and write configuration files etc. Not too safe.

The interface on Ubuntu was quite nice but I messed up something related to transparency and windows effects so the interface was running quite in slow-motion. Too many settings related to these kind of enhancements so I wasn’t able to setup the default settings.

The system update procedure was very easy, even tough there were a lot of packages to update each time.

I tried to install my TV card to watch some DVB TV on my Ubuntu, but this was quite impossible. The lack of drivers for this is something one should think before trying to use another system.

So here is how I have uninstalled Ubuntu: delete all two partitions and reformat them with an XP compatible file system (FAT32 or NTFS). To restore the masterboot record, most of web articles were pointing me to use Windows Recovery Console available only from XP install CD and an utility tool called fixmbr. But since I could not find my XP cd I had to look for another tool. The best one I found was MBRWizard who does more than just fixing the MBR but that was enough for me.

The command line for this was “MBRWiz.exe /Repair=1″. Simple, huh?

So remember: if you’re not ready to fully go using just one OS, you will not be able to use two at the same time.

When using the Avangate AfterSale Message feature for the order finished page, you can add any type of tracking code. Including Google adwords for conversion tracking. Since we have received a few question on how to get this code, here are the required steps:

1. Access your Adwords account
2. On “Conversion tracking” section click on “Get conversion page code”
3. Choose “Per sale” and then the default adwords text
4. Since this code will measure how many sales the Google Adwords advertising has generated (conversion rate), this code will be placed on Avangate’s “Thank you for your purchase” page. The page is on SSL, so “https” must be selected in “Security Levels”.

The generated code needs to be added in Avangate Control Panel, section “Marketing Tools / After Sale Message”. Most of pay-per-click advertising programs are offering tracking capabilities and generally, the steps are the same.

But in the end it matters only how the gathered data is used / transformed in information.
More information about Google Conversion Tracking can be found (of course) on their website: http://adwords.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=27338&topic=60

“eCommerce times” writes an article about Google’s entry into the online payment market, while making a comparison with Paypal and adding some facts about Google Checkout.

The interesting thing is that our romanian branch is quoted in this article:

E-payment services are not new. ePayment Solutions, GECAD ePayment, Intellipay and Neteller carved out viable e-payment businesses. However, countless other vendors entered and exited the market as many consumers didn’t have a compelling reason to use the services, merchants balked at the added expense and vendors could not figure out how to turn a profit in this space.

Currently we’re not considering Google as a competitor for ePayment, especially because they are aiming the US market, while ePayment is only for the local east european market. But some competition would be a valuable thing, even if this would be such a giant as Google.

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.