Browsing the internet today I found an impressive piece of Open Source. By Eric Bergman-Terrel, the Open Source C# Programmable Calculator lets you program functions for the calculator using C#. It compiles the code you write it on the fly; now I know what I will use when I need a scripting system for my applications.
http://www.personalmicrocosms.com/pages/cspcalc.aspx
Today I got the email accepting tekBlues for MS BizSpark program. I cannot say how useful it’s and how dumb I was not getting into it before.
You don’t pay nothing, and get all the MS Software you need to develop and test your applications. It’s the equivalent to the upper-end subscription to MSDN. You also get support and the chance to list your startup in BizSpark’s directory.
Getting into BizSpark is a no brainer.
In the BOS forum is frequent that some uISVers publish some partial data of their sales, visitors, etc.
Some interesting facts:
Cristian Pascu, FlairBuilder, Mockup & Prototyping tool:
Over the past 2 weeks, the best 2 weeks so far, I had:
~7150 visits
~5800 unique visitors
~12300 page views
~780 downloads (~10% * visits)
~30 sales (~4% * downloads = ~0.4% * visits)
Impressive numbers for a new product, we must take note of the following factors:
Let’s compare it with text2go.com, Mark Gladding posted in BOS after his Bit Du Jour last experience and gave this numbers for reference:
…. To put the numbers into some perspective, I normally average 4-6 sales per week with about 60-70 visitors to my site each day….
text2Go was launched in August 2007, has almost three years in the streets and his daily visits are around 1/10 of the newborn FlairBuilder’s. IMHO, here’s a marketing problem. I like text2Go website, the product seems interesting and I think it has a great potential, in fact it has a 1,4% sales / visitors far over the industry media (according to A.Brice).
Another data point.Mo Flanagan developed a very cool gadget, it lets you view all the windows you like in the Chrome’s tabbed style. WindowTabs (very clever name and good a domain he got) is attractive and visually impressing.
@shanselman tweeted a link to WindowTabs about five hours ago and I have already gotten 50 downloads and several purchases. With AdWords, I struggle to get five downloads a day. Word of mouth marketing rules.
5 downloads a day? using adwords?.
Well, Mo is lucky, his product has the strength to become viral, after the tweet he got featured in lifehacker.com and got a peak of 3280 visits, 1332 downloads and 13 sales.
As the uISVs are cash-strapped it’s important to be careful when investing in external services. Here are some excellent testimonials from people from BOS forum:
Today i’ve applied for BizSpark, I plan to code emailToDatabase.com using VS 2008. I’ve hear good things of MS BizSpark on BOS forum.
Today I have registered the domain for tekBlues second product, EmailToDatabase.Com. Some time ago I developed a component for parsing emails and inserting the data into a database. It’s done on VB.NET and it works like a charm.
I will release two versions of ETD:
I can’t know if there is a real cause-consequence relationship, but today my website PCDesktopCleaner.com is 4th for the keywords “Desktop Cleaner”, lang = en, country = us. The excerpt that google shows has the new text, so it has been spidered.
I don’t have 100% security but I believe keyword density correction did the trick.
Note: it’s a strange behaviour, I press refresh and there’s my site in the 4th place, I press refresh again and it’s not there. Will keep on watching this.
Update on May 5th, everything’s OK, the behaviour is stable and PDC is now in the 5th place for “Desktop Cleaner”.
Update on June 10th, PDC is consistently on the 3th-4th place for “Desktop Cleaner”.
I didn’t mean to “spam” google, but when writing my copy, I used too many times my product’s name “PC Desktop Cleaner”. The title had it, the meta tag had it, almost every paragraph started with “PC Desktop Cleaner”.
Before the last change (with my previous draft pages) my site was in the 8th place for the keywords “desktop cleaner” (language = en, country = us). Now, my site is on the 80th place or even worst.
After thinking about it and reading, I guess I’m in front of Google Spam Penalty. Analysing my page with http://www.ranks.nl, these are my stats:
High keyword density
For the keywords “Desktop Cleaner” I am a serious candidate to Spam Penalty. Keywords are on the url, title, content, and headers, and are repeated lots of times on page text.
I’ve done a simple rewriting of the page, replacing “PC Desktop Cleaner” with PDC in most paragraphs. Now my density analysis look better:
Better keyword density
As usual, I cannot be 100% sure that the reason for my low ranking is the penalty, but IMHO it’s likely. I will follow this up as time passes.
I think my current version of PDC is ugly. Today I downloaded Eltima “Flash Decompiler Trillix” (what a name) and found it gorgeous. My application has a stinky 90’s look (being generous).
In order to fix it, I started looking for a skin component for Delphi. (I hate futile adornments, I like spartanware, it has been a very successful principle in my ad-hoc development business, but I’m afraid that in B2C looks does matter).
Well, after a little googling, found some candidates, then started downloading the trials to make some tests. I want to buy today, because I want to release a better-looking version of PDC this weekend. I have the CC on my table and I’m resigned to spend the customary $100.
One of the candidates was ThemeEngine, I have browsed them many time ago, and the product looked nice. So, I downloaded the trial. I am not very expert with Delphi, had never used a package so I started looking at the Help File to find how to make it work. 1st error, no help for Delphi 2009…
Product development is alive: they released a new version on February/4 2009. But obviously they didn’t think of changing the help file.
Ok, so I used the instructions for 2007 and it worked OK, but I’m a real Delphi ignorant! I don’t know how to set the library path to include the missing DCUs. So I gave the help a new chance, and then I found this:
Strange Help
So this guys haven’t took the time to finish the CHM help. Now, let me be clear on this:
I am thinking as a customer now (if I think as a developer I wouldn’t have the face to criticise nobody after so many years delivering badly-finished system to business users).
As a customer, when I find something not finished, I start to make myself questions like: “what will happen when I have a problem with the component on Windows Vista 64 SP8?, what kind of support and upgrades will I be able to get from this guys?”.. and so on.
IMHO, the lesson of the story is simple. If you want to sell something, give attention to details. If you start something, finish it, and do it well.
This guys have very nice products, they must be master developers, but they lost a sale today.
