Archive for the 'Business' category
Friday, May 7th, 2010
In January we helped Mark Levison's Agile Pain Relife consulting make a very successful Typepad to WordPress transition. Behind the scenes there is a very interesting design case study, we'd like to share.
The main aim was to move the content from Typepad webblog to his new business domain. Mark's company focuses on the business of "relieving software development pain". He came to us with a great domain and a catchy name for this business: Agile Pain Relief Consulting comes from.
Mark chose the WooTuits theme, which we thought was a great fit. He didn't ask any significant modifications. The challenge was to adapt it to Mark's consulting firm's business goals. At Foliovision, when we talk about customising a template it goes far beyond simple changes like background colour or the size of the font. We start with a template but seek to end with a unique site which look like a custom design.
We firmly believe that getting one's logo and branding right is the starting point for a successful design. Mark didn't have a budget for the logo work so we agreed to do a new logo ourselves which Mark would purchase if he liked it.
Keep reading How much is a good logo worth? Case study: Agile Pain Relief
By Michala
Business |
Tuesday, March 2nd, 2010
Whatever happened to the CDDB and to FreeDB?
CDDB evolved into Gracenote. It looked like they were losing their stranglehold when Roxio moved to FreeDB in 2000. A closed settlement resulted in Roxio moving to Gracenote full time. I hope they were clever enough to get free stock in Gracenote for the pleasure.
The next death knell (although no one knew how important it was at the time) for FreeDB was that Apple went with Gracenote and then disabled any ability for users to submit to FreeDB (for a couple of years it was possible to use the FreeDB servers instead by monkeying around in one's hosts file, but it was a pretty techy solution). Without
Keep reading FreeDB or Musicbrainz: Why is there no software to upload album info in OS X?
By Alec
Business, IT |
Thursday, January 21st, 2010
We use primarily use Paypal for our smaller transactions at Foliovision ($1000 and under). Some customers complain. They'd just rather not do business with Paypal. In these cases, we do have bank accounts in three major jurisdictions but it does slow down transactions and increase transaction costs on smaller invoices.
I tell them there is just no other payment service which works well for small international payments.
Precautions we take:
- we don't confirm our bank account numbers which technically means that Paypal can't withdraw funds from our bank accounts.
- they do do it anyway, but in our case it would be illegal and there's a very good chance that the bank would go after Paypal for the money themselves if Paypal did manage to snooker them into giving them cash.
- we run a balance under $2000. Over that and the money gets shunted off to one of our bank accounts.
- we are very good customers. We send lots of sales through and we buy lots of goods too. Occasionally we even have to switch currencies. Paypal makes a fortune off of Foliovision. We even introduce lots of new customers to them as well.
In general, limit liability and make yourself valuable. I recommend you do the same.
But then I go and read a post like this one about how Paypal single-handedly nearly ruined the Macgraphoto graphics bundle (sorry to have missed it Jacob: great idea for a themed bundle!). And I think we haven't done nearly enough and that we are playing with fire.
Keep reading Paypal sucks but so does Digital River and Google Checkout is no great shakes either
By Alec
Business |
Thursday, October 15th, 2009
One of our clients was recently lured into paying to pitch to a group of investors.
Their product is a good one. I can't say much, but it's in the financial servies industry. Instead of spending their time and money to get the product really into action, they decided to go the angel route.
Madness. The finished product langours instead of making them the money they should be paying. They asked me if they should pay to pitch. I said no, make your company pay each day.
It turns out that the venture capital shark pool is even worse than I expected. There are dozens of these organizations out there looking to suck the blood of the innocent or hapless entrepreneur. These bastards are out for as much US$25K of your money to pitch to disinterested middle-level brokers and junior bankers.
Keep reading Paying to pitch to VC's or Angel Investors
By Alec
Business |
Friday, October 9th, 2009
Basecamp URL change to basecamphq
Today 37signals dropped our domain http://webwork.clientsection.com. Instead they have replaced it with http://webwork.basecamphq.com.
There is a thread on their forums covering the issue. As one customer writes:
BasecampHQ is a stupid domain for one. What is its relevance to my clients? I am paying for a professional service – not for branding that sounds like a paint ball website.
I totally agree. Apparently this change is coming with additional footer branding and additional branding in the emails.
This is a case of breaking the contract with the original customer: us. We are the ones who bought into their white label extranet solution with attractive anonymous core domains like:
- grouphub.com
- clientsection.com
- projectpath.com
- seework.com
- updatelog.com
We pay a handsome yearly fee for the use of the software and the domain. Until recently, it's been $600/year. Now, it's $1200/year. For that fee, we expected 37signals to honour their part of the deal which was to allow us to continue to use the software and environment which we helped them get off the ground.
Keep reading 37Signals, Basecamp URL change and not giving a damn about your customers
By Alec
Business, WordPress |
Tuesday, May 12th, 2009
Last Friday, Anil Dash and I had a delightful conversation. I mean that delightful. Anil and I share many of the same passions: the web, media, user interface, weblogs.
Anil Dash of SixApart / Typepad by Joi Ito
Anil is a very congenial sort and was a prominent early weblog writer. He is now both a Vice President at SixApart and head evangelist for Typepad.
I have a deep and intimate acquaintance with SixApart's Typepad service, as a founding user in 2003 and now as the founder of the premier Typepad to WordPress rescue service.
The starting point of our call was clear. Anil is annoyed about my regular unfavourable postings about Typepad. I don't know if SixApart is annoyed about our rescue service itself - we've moved some pretty high profile sites in the last few months, some of which I am not even at liberty to disclose their names.
Keep reading Typepad Export Options: Congenial Lies from SixApart's Anil Dash
By Alec
Business, WordPress |
Thursday, March 26th, 2009
I've been reading Jack Welch's Winning.
Though Jack Welch is one mean and selfish man, Winning is a challenging and rewarding testament to Neutron Jack's way of doing business. Welch's philosophy of promoting the top 20% and firing the bottom 10% in a large company is unbelievably Darwinian, even cruel. Welch even runs his personal life the same way - at sixty years of age he writes about co-author and third Suzy "having taught me the meaning of love". Frankly, Welch has grown up children - it's a bit late to be discovering love. Rediscovering would have been far more tactful.
But let's leave the man behind and return to Welch's Spartan philosophy of leaving the crippled employees on the mountaintop to perish in the night.
Jack Welch implementing his Spartan strategies for
HR management and work-life balance
When you read his book, however, you can see how this would work in a company which hires just extremely competitive types. Such people enjoy seeing others thrown down the well. It's a bit of the mob waiting for the witch to be drowned. Welch is appealing to primal nature here, the law of the jungle. The hunter who cannot run fast enough is culled from the tribe and the tribe is stronger as the weakest members can neither survive nor reproduce.
Keep reading Work Life Balance from Jack Welch: A Review of Winning
By Alec
Business |
Tuesday, October 28th, 2008
Gary Vaynerchuk success - photo vinama
Online wine guru Gary Vaynerchuk is really getting around. I've seen him collaborating with internet marketers in the last few months on some relatively dodgy campaigns.
Lately I caught him in somewhat better company. Vaynerchuk was recently interviewed over at e-consultancy and he let fly what I think is the key to his success.
Who should be in charge of this sort of participation [in social media]? Do any rules of engagement need to be established?
It's really like the person who is wearing the underwear... who is controlling the game? That person needs to establish the rules for how you approach it and ultimately rules are hard to control in social media. You are better off letting the world run wild. You cannot completely control your message any more. Be as authentic and awesome as possible or you will fall like the Berlin Wall.
Vaynerchuk's absolutely right. For two years, one of my clients was always very uptight about stating his real opinion. The website languished. Since the last six months, he's been more and more willing to go out on a (at least partway) limb. And since he turned the page so to speak on his corporate persona his website and his sales are going through the roof.
What people are seeking on the internet is authenticity.
How to do change your corporate voice for a real voice?
- Sit down and think about what's special about you.
- Ask your friends about what they love about you.
- Put that personality into your marketing.
If after careful reflection you don't think your personality will bear marketing - some don't, some people are just not cut out to expose themselves in any way - find someone else to be the front person for your organization. And support them fully in their endeavours.
Who would you rather buy from? A person you like or faceless corporation hiding behind marketingspeak and safe publicity material? Makes it pretty clear doesn't it?
Otherwise, go for it. Jump right in. The water's perfect!
By Alec
Business, Internet Marketing |
Sunday, September 28th, 2008
Sift CEO Ben Heald
So these guys over at Sift Media are heading for £3 million of advertising revenue this year. Probably worth hearing what their CEO has to say about online publishing. The first question is a bit silly:
What levels of participation inequality do you see from forum and community users? What can publishers do to tackle that more effectively?
Ben Heald takes a valiant stab at it:
You probably get about 10% of the audience that you are sending your emails to, contributing to the content in some way.
I don't think usage levels have changed that much. It matches the dynamics of a conference, where out of an audience of 100 people, you will get ten asking a questions and one or two people speaking to you after the presentation. I don't think that will change. We won't all become avid contributors to forums. Some people just want to take stuff.
His answer is basically right - participation will not be level - but at the end he goes seriously astray: "Some people just want to take stuff."
Keep reading Paying B2B writers | Reward Models for Online Publishing
By Alec
Business |
Sunday, June 1st, 2008
From the European Outsourcing Conference last week: it's difficult to do large scale outsourcing in Easter Europe:
The delegates realised that Eastern European nations do not have the scale of staff to resource huge outsourcing deals, with the majority (58 per cent) believing that different geographies are suited to different types of outsourcing projects. Only 17 per cent believed that Indian providers are leaps and bounds ahead of all other geographies.
Absolutely. There are just not the numbers here necessary to be able to do it efficiently.
What you can get are a few good programmers on a project.
Or a lot of reasonably multilingual (we're not talking about the Netherlands or Austria here) customer service bodies.
The very high euro - which seems to be carrying the local currencies with it - does make European outsourcing pretty much a local sport at this point. But there is no shortage of European companies and divisions looking to cut costs without transcontinental travel.
By Alec
Business, IT |
Friday, May 30th, 2008
Have tech companies gone blue chip: no risk, little reward?
Over at purveyor of dubious business advice The Wall Street Journal, Mean Street says it is so:
The good news: Tech stocks are the blue chips of today’s economy. The companies are bigger and better run than ever before.
Still not convinced this sector has matured? Today, there are eight U.S. tech companies with market caps greater than $100 billion. Only three U.S. financial institutions are worth that much. Three. Last week, technology surpassed financials as the biggest component of the S&P 500.
The bad news: Tech stocks are the blue chips. Lower risk means lower reward. Are tech investors mentally prepared for the 10% equity return including a 2% dividend
Those are amazing numbers. Tech companies are bigger than banks. Curiously tech - and entertainment and weapon systems - seem to be the only products in which the US is a world leader these days.
Despite the huge market cap of the top tech companies, I think Evan Newmark is off base on the future of tech.
Keep reading Low returns, safe investment in Tech? No, it's the dawn of a new golden age
By Alec
Business |
Sunday, June 24th, 2007
What is an idea worth?
What is the value of consulting services?
If you say nothing and everything - you'd be exactly right.
One of Paul Graham's startup essays explains the difference:
Suppose YouTube's founders had gone to Google in 2005 and told them "Google Video is badly designed. Give us $10 million and we'll tell you all the mistakes you made." They would have gotten the royal raspberry. Eighteen months later Google paid $1.6 billion for the same lesson, partly because they could then tell themselves that they were buying a phenomenon, or a community, or some vague thing like that.
The significance here is that they went and created and shipped and evangelised the idea.
On the other hand, had Google had their finger close enough on the pulse, they could have made that acquisition many months earlier for a tiny fraction of the valuation.
Or had Google put the right people on their project - Google Video - they could have stolen YouTube's fire before it lit.
Unfortunately normally we don't know the failures, only the success stories. Kiko, the eBay auctioned calendar software, lost to Google Calendar (a fine invention and one you should try if you haven't used it before - we run our entire office schedule on it, and it's a huge improvement over maintaining phpCalendar ourselves or trying to WebDav sync iCal).
So does one aim to be the ones advising Google for a few hundred k/per year - the dilemma with consulting services, is that it's still your life against the clock, whatever the payoff. Effectually, you are a mercenary. When you tire of fighting the Punic wars, you go home and all you take is what you can carry away on your back and your armour.
Obviously startups are the way to go. But it's damn hard work.
Creating a startup is the hardest thing I've ever done in my life and it's cost me dearly.
Am I ready to give up?
No.
When trying to pick what idea to go after, Paul Graham writes:
It seems like the best problems to solve are ones that affect you personally. Apple happened because Steve Wozniak wanted a computer, Google because Larry and Sergey couldn't find stuff online, Hotmail because Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smith couldn't exchange email at work.
I agree wholeheartedly with that. The issue which I am trying to solve is one which causes me stress everyday.
By Alec
Business |
Thursday, May 31st, 2007
Is it possible for the medium sized guys to make money?
You bet.
Network Solutions, bought for $20 million in 2003, was just sold for $800 million three years later.
And amazingly enough, this deal was done by a Persian - Iranian American Jahm Najafi.
So do the Iranians know how to play a poker hand?
It certainly looks like yes. No wonder the Israelis want the Americans to bomb the Iranians to smithereens. Competition isn't fun.
Anyway here's Najafi's story:
Keep reading Network Solutions bought for million, sold for 0 million three years later
By Alec
Business |
Wednesday, May 30th, 2007
Philip Dow's Journler
Philip Dow is the developer of the very well received Mac PIM (personal information manager) Journler about donationware. His application Journler had an open donation policy for personal use. Contribute whatever you like. A single commercial use license was/is $25.
Phil is going full-time as a developer now and is starting to feel the pain - lots of downloads and good press, but not a lot of revenue rolling in.
Out of 580 registered users, Phil had received an average donation of $17. That makes a total of about $9800. But in the end, Phil feels that some are abusing the donation system.
Keep reading Should Software Be Donation Only | Minimum Donation Levels
By Alec
Business, WordPress |
Monday, May 21st, 2007
Some gentlemen search colleagues are thunderstruck by the acquisition of 24/7 Real Media by advertising holding company WPP for $649 million (a tidy sum it is - congratulations 24/7 - although I've always hated your technology). Raycam wonders why more ad agencies aren't snapping up the smaller search houses.
It's simple. All the assets go down the elevator every night (David Ogilvy is reputed the first to coin this phrase).
Keep reading Why aren't Ad Agencies buying More Search Companies
By Alec
Business, SEO |
