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Perspectives on the wonderful world of tech

45% discount on attendance at Mobile Marketing Association Forum, Oct 4-5th.

Save 45% on registration & attendance at next week’s Mobile Marketing Forum with the BLN. If you are thinking of going, there is  a pretty cool line up of speakers and we can save you 45% on the ticket price. Nice!

The central focus of the MMA Forum Series in 2011 is to consider how brands should act in a world dominated by mobile consumers. This event will explore what that means for marketers and the MMA have identified four critical themes that brands and their agencies will need to explore in a consumer-centric/mobile-centric world:

  • Insight
  • Engagement
  • Personalisation & Privacy
  • The Efficient Marketplace

This year’s MMA Forum in London on 4-5 October, 2011 will bring together leading marketers from across the world to share their experiences, challenges, learnings and successes in the mobile channel.

The speaker lineup includes the largest and most diverse group of speakers from global brands ever assembled. The programme includes leading marketers from the following sectors; automotive, banking, charities, food & drink, entertainment, FMCG, media, sport and technology as well as insight into mobile marketing globally. See attendees from MMAF 2010 here.

This event should be in every marketer and mobilist’s diary. If you are reading this, you can save 45% on attendance thanks to the BLN.

Use discount code MMAF_BLN to receive a 45% discount on the full price.

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Leo Apotheker replaced by Meg Whitman at HP but what’s with that Manta Ray?

So HP announce the departure of Leo Apotheker and the appointment of Meg Whitman. Interesting to see how that goes. Ray Lane has moved from non-Executive Chairman to executive Chairman. I saw this, then I thought of the guest blog post Neil Davidson wrote earlier this week about business plans where he poses the question,

“What is your mantra?”

Make it as simple to understand  as Blinkpipe’s: “Video calling as  natural as a handshake, as  reliable as the telephone and as  easy to install as a toaster”.

What is your mantra?

This is HP’s mantra, from the bottom of the press release announcing the departure of their CEO,

“About HP

HP creates new possibilities for technology to have a meaningful impact on people, businesses, governments and society. The world’s largest technology company, HP brings together a portfolio that spans printing, personal computing, software, services and IT infrastructure at the convergence of the cloud and connectivity, creating seamless, secure, context-aware experiences for a connected world. More information about HP is available at http://www.hp.com.”

What does that mean Ray?

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Notes & Index of Business of Software 2010 talks, links to videos & talk transcripts

These are my notes from Business of Software last year. I have updated them to include links to the videos of the talk and the transcripts that I had made. I hope you find them useful.

Business of Software logo 2011

The Business of Software conference will be held in Boston, October 24-26th October 2011. Use code BoSSep to save $450 on the full ticket price until 22nd September.

I thought this might be a useful quick index of each of the sessions from Business of Software 2010, with a link to some further reading. If you would like to buy books, I have given you a link to do so through Amazon. I have an affiliate account with them and donate the enormous proceeds to Byte Night and Children in Need. You can of course buy them in lots of other places.

Seth Godin: www.sethgodin.com

David Russo: LinkedIn

Dharmesh Shah: http://www.hubspot.com/

Eric Ries: http://www.startuplessonslearned.com/

Scott Farqhuhar: www.atlassian.com

Video and transcript here.

Jason Cohen: www.blog.asmartbear.com/jason-cohen

Paul Kenny: www.oceanlearning.co.uk

  • Talk: Engaging Dialogue
  • Twitter Takeaway: Don’t rely on sales people for sales – you have the Founder’s Advantage.  No one can match your experiences.
  • Video and transcript here tbr.

Rob Walling: www.softwarebyrob.com

Peldi Guilizzoni: www.balsamiq.com

Mark Stephens: www.idrsolutions.com/

Eric Sink:

Youngme Moon: www.youngmemoon.com/

Dan Bricklin: www.bricklin.com/

Derek Sivers: www.sivers.org/

Joel Spolsky: www.stackoverflow.com/ www.fogcreek.com/

The Business of Software conference will be held in Boston, October 24-26th October 2011. Use code BoSSep to save $450 on the full ticket price until 22nd September.

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Business of Software hotel almost full.

Quick reminder to let you know you should be booking your hotel accommodation at the Seaport Hotel if you are planning on staying there. With over a month to go the the conference, we have exceeded our allocation on a few nights of the conference already and have less than 10 rooms available at best on any night. (You can of course choose to stay elsewhere but don’t leave it too late to book accommodation. Boston is a great place to visit and this is a busy time of year).

Business of Software 2011, Boston, MA, October 24-26th2011http://businessofsoftware.org For people growing sustainable, profitable, software businesses.

 

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Seth Godin on why he is not naked on stage & other more useful insights. Video & talk transcript from Business of Software.

Seth Godin. “Are you afraid to truly make an impact? The opportunity for linchpin organizations and the people who run them.”

The Business of Software 2011 will be held in Boston, MA, October 24-26th2011. The Business of Softwarefor people growing sustainable, profitable, software businesses. Book by 22nd September & use codeBoSSep to save $450 on ticket price.

My notes from the day including some of the slides. Favourite moment was Seth explaining why he was wearing a suit and tie – the alternative was his other business attire – nakedness.

Transcript of Seth Godin’s Talk, ‘Are you a linchpin?’

Joel Spolsky: I will re-introduce him to those of you who don’t know who this is. He wrote a bunch of these books currently Linchpin on the New York Times bestseller list. He founded Yoyodyne, which he sold to Yahoo. So he’s an entrepreneur. His current company is called Squidoo where anyone can make a website on any topic. It is at 103 on Quantcast. Are you watching like every day to see if you’re on the top hundred sites? No, he doesn’t care about such things. He’s the best marketers in the world and a wonderful blogger please welcome Seth Godin.

Seth Godin: Thank you. Good morning-I carry Joel around. He does all my introductions for me. Thank you so much. I love this conference. I love you guys. I love Boston. It’s where I started in the software business. So I’m going to give you a couple riffs about that and then we’ll get going.

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Don’t make my eyes bleed. Don’t bore me. How to hack a business plan that makes sense

A guest blog from Neil Davidson, artist, co-CEO & co-founder of Red Gate Software on how to make business plans make sense to someone that has to read them…

Click on the pictures to download a pdf version of this treatise or download direct at: http://dontmakemyeyesbleed.com

Don't make my eyes bleed.

Over the past few years I’ve read  a lot of business plans. Hundreds.  They were all too long, and  almost all missed the point. A  5,000 word plan will bore and  confuse me. Maybe worse.

Here are the questions my ideal  business plan would answer.  Everything else is fluff.

Best use of most business plans

What is your mantra?

Make it as simple to understand  as Blinkpipe’s: “Video calling as  natural as a handshake, as  reliable as the telephone and as  easy to install as a toaster”.

What is your mantra?

Who is the customer?

It’s not ‘everybody’. It’s not ‘all 30 year old geeks’.

Who is your customer?

It’s Jess. She’s thirty years old and works in the  IT department of a bank. She lives with three  cats. She hates ice cream. Or whatever.  Make your customer concrete. Give her life.

Jess - my customer

Why will your customer pay for  what you’re selling?

Sorry, why will Jess pay for what  you’re selling? Why will she  knock on your door with fistfuls  of cash?

What problem does it solve? How  did she cope before? How will  your product change her life? How much will she pay?

Make Jess come knocking

How will you reach Jess?

What web sites does she visit? What magazines does she read? How (and why) will Jess shout  ‘holy cow, this is brilliant’ about  your product to her friends and  colleagues?

How will you reach Jess?

How many people like Jess are  there?

How big is your market?

Market share of Jess

Who is in your team?

Why will you succeed where  others will fail?

Who is in our team?

If you want bonus points…

Tell me  how you’ll apply the principles of Eric Ries’s Lean Startup movement to your plan.

Bonus points - The Lean Startup

Click the image to buy the book. Go on. You know you want to.

If you want extra bonus points,  fit this all onto a single sheet of  paper.

It can be large.

Extra bonus points

If you want triple plus bonus marks, don’t fit this onto a single  sheet of paper.

Make it stand out. Be different. You’re an entrepreneur. Since when did you follow dumb  ‘rules’? Surprise me.

Surprise me - just not like this!

I hope you enjoyed this small pamphlet.

If you did, please share it. You can find out more about me at http://neildavidson.com

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Business of Software 2011 workshop registration instructions

Here is the final list of Business of Software Workshops.

If you are already registered for the conference, you should go and register for your first choice as soon as you can. As these are workshops, space is limited and demand is likely to be high. You can sign up for the workshops by editing your agenda settings.

For instructions on how to register for the workshops, see here.

Please note that the workshops will be allocated on a first come first served basis so make your choice quickly!

Monday Workshops

  • Paul Kenny,  Rewarding & Motivating Sales People.
  • Peldi, 40 releases a year? No sweat.
  • Alex Osterwalder, Applying Business Model Thinking
  • Nemo Chu, How to Crowdsource Customer Support with Q&A Sites
  • Richard Muscat, Inventing Purple Cows (or how to create Smart Ideas from nothing).
  • Elizabeth Ayer, Market Sizing Action Plan
  • Aaron Schapp, Patrick Foley, Planning for scale
  • Jason Cohen, Ricardo Sanchez, Zuly Gonzalez, Practice your pitch
  • Erik Pelton, The Future of Brands
  • Noah Kagan, Underground tactics to grow your newsletter subscribers to over 100,000.
  • Guy Nirpaz, Using Customer Analytics to Increase Revenues of SaaS Businesses
  • Ernani Ferrari, Workshop: Internationalization & Localization – Expanding software markets.
  • Rob Walling, Writing Game Changing Copy for Websites and Landing Pages

Wednesday Workshops

  • Chris Byers, Changing Horses Midstream
  • Des Traynor, Customer Relationship Management for App Owners
  • Nemo Chu, How to Near-Guarantee Marketing Results
  • Paul Kenny, Sales Skills
  • Beau Adkins, Setting up and managing a software project with Subversion and Trac
  • Corey Reid, Technology hiring/building a development team & the challenges of technical recruiting
  • Dirk Paessler, What do people do to keep their business _online_
  • Elizabeth Ayer, Where it Really Hurts:  finding the pain of your present and future customers
  • Ernani Ferrari, Workshop: Software Product Management – Maximizing investments.
  • Dave Collins, Zen And The Art Of AdWords Maintenance: from exploited to predator in three simple steps.

Purple cow

If you haven’t yet registered, get going! Hope to see you there.

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Fast 50 entry deadline midnight tonight! 12 hours to go.

A quick reminder that the entry deadline for the Deloitte Fast 50 Award is midnight tonight. If you are one of the UK’s fastest growing technology companies, you should enter.

We have run the Deloitte Fast 50 competition for the past few years and it has given us a really interesting view of the cream of the UK’s technology companies. The Deloitte Fast 50 is an objective ranking of the UK technology companies with the fastest growing revenue over a five year period.

The entry deadline for this year’s award is 16th September.

2010 Award Winners

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