Be sure to stop by our booth and learn a little about integrated marketing services that work with your sales efforts to grow your business.

Customers want to do it on the road and do it on the go. Is your business going mobile with them? Mobile Internet access is growing rapidly as customers and prospects use their smart phones, iPads, Kindles and more to entertain and inform themselves about your business. Is your website mobile ready? Do you need an iPhone or Droid app? Are you engaging your target audience how they wish to be engaged on their mobile device? Quite simply, is your mobile presence making money or killing your business? A mobile presence for your business is essential if you want to be ready and waiting where your customers are most likely to find you. This session will help you understand the various mobile technologies at your disposal as well as how they stack up against your target market demographics. You will learn the advantages, disadvantages and tradeoffs between a mobile website and an app. We will cover the latest tools that you can use to build your mobile web presence quickly and easily. Content remains essential even in a mobile environment. Learn strategic and tactical content strategies that will help your business deliver meaningful value in the mobile context without sacrifice. This workshop will help you make the right choices to exploit mobile technology without breaking your budget while getting to your audience when and where they choose for fun and profit.

If you are interested in generating more sales through effective marketing, then be sure to visit our booth.

If you are interested in generating more sales through effective marketing, then be sure to visit our booth.

Mitch Slater, Managing Principal at Visible Innovations Marketing, will be presenting a workshop entitled Business Plans that Sell at the COSE Small Business Convention on October 26, 2012 at Kalahari Resort and Convention Center in Sandusky, Ohio. Be sure to check out this informative session and kick-start your business growth.

Crafting a compelling business plan doesn’t need to be torture. Learn the practical steps towards developing a meaningful plan that makes sense for your business at its current stage. This seminar will help you analyze, document and defend your business opportunity as you seek equity or debt financing. We will cover all of the major elements of the business planning process including developing an appropriate executive summary, defining the pitch and creating the various presentations tied to the investment screening process. Explore the differences between selling “the business” versus selling “the product or service.” Discover and answer the hard questions as you prepare your business plan and you will succeed.

Way to go Susan!!

Check out the slides below for all of the action.

Enjoy!

Sometimes, even the best technology companies such as Google and Apple can miss a step (Adobe missed out on this one but they were a suspect) leaving us holding the bag as it were. In this case, I had the pleasure of discovering the convergence of Google Apps and Mac OS X Lion and how it can drive one mad. This mad tale begins with my high performing Macbook Pro finding itself unable to shut itself down in the last few weeks. Googling around, I discovered many different thoughts on how/why it wouldn’t shutdown. Unfortunately, my searches found many different, irrelevant and obsolete results with no definitive smoking guns and, more importantly, no vendor taking any definitive responsibility for anything. Old habits die-hard and I set about attempting to isolate the cause of my problems but to no avail. I even went so far as to rebuild my hard disk from scratch with a full, fresh install of Lion. Although it did help clean up the detritus from laptops past, it did not solve my problem.

Perhaps my hardware is at fault. It is a laptop and I do have Apple Care. So off to the Apple Care provider who thought it might be a logic board. After two visits, with boards swapped. I found that shutdowns weren’t still a part of my future. More googling about hidden processes secretly installed by apps sent my down even more fascinating rabbit holes. Of course, Adobe, loads plenty of stuff secretly but they turned out to be innocent. Wait a minute, I did upgrade to iCloud and I know that some of the MobileMe stuff didn’t necessarily get tidied up throughout the transition. What made this even more maddening was discovering that when I had borrowed one of my staff’s new Mac Pro desktop to get some work down absent my laptop, the mysterious problem moved there too.

Sorry, that is too much coincidence for me. Finally, I read through my log files, line by line. And there are plenty on OS X. I noticed something called Google Keystone. What the heck is that? More googling and I found out that Google too installs secret stuff when using Google Apps. Hold the presses. A client sent me a spreadsheet through Google Apps a couple of weeks ago and didn’t I also just open it up on the Mac Pro while my laptop was in the shop? There it was, nestled in the Library folder that Apple conveniently, not, hid from users in Lion. There it was in the log files. With some clever deletions, I discovered that the Google Software Updater was being a bad citizen and not cooperating on shutdown. Dang. What a waste of time and who knew?

So what can all you budding tech companies take away from this little experience?

Full-disclosure is mandatory. Respect the dignity of every user and make sure that they clearly know what you are doing to their machine.

Always provide a means of escape. Give the user control over everything you place on their system.

Document, document, document. Provide an up to date reference (websites are great for this) where users can meaningfully and easily find what they need to know.

Support your customers. When there is a problem, especially knowing that systems and apps are highly interoperable and integrated, be there and help. Don’t leave us captive to incomplete information, forums and hearsay when disseminating knowledge is so easy on the web.

Test. Testing is almost as neglected as documentation is in the industry. When you know that apps are being deployed cross-platform and will interoperate in a variety of environments, it is contingent on you, the vendor, to ensure that the software is sufficiently tested across all boundaries. Looking for collateral damage such as failure to respond to a shutdown request should be obvious and common sense.

Take ownership. If it is your software, your operating system or your hardware, you should be committed to solving the customers’ problems first. Pointing fingers at other vendors and saying it is their problem is a weak response. Customers come first even if you are giving the software away.

Computing is approaching ubiquity. Savvy vendors have the opportunity to grab customers for life when we treat them with respect and truly put their needs first.

If you’d like to learn more on how to do just that, drop me a line and we’ll talk.

I do dig the cool translating glasses (at least for those of us who like to travel and wear glasses).

Form follows function. Right? Well, Bret Victor, designer extraordinaire points out something that is glaringly obvious, yet accepted pretty much as the status quo. All these user interfaces are in essence, an incremental step beyond what he calls Pictures Under Glass. His rant on the future of interactive design points out one the most important things overlooked in designing software for human beings. That is, HUMAN CAPABILITY! (Yes, I’m looking at you Redmond.)

If you think it through, this makes real sense. The keyboard keeps you pretty detached from the real world. A mouse gives you some tactile connectivity but still you are pretty disconnected. The iPad cuts out some of that disconnection, yet, you are justing sliding a finger on glass.

Taking into account what humans are capable of and designing these software tools to match ought to be first and foremost on every developer and designers mind. True interaction. True utility. True connection. They all appear when we not only service the needs of the customer but when we do it such a fashion as to make it truly second nature, dare I say, more humanly? Bret’s rant hopes to inspire a greater vision to find that more integral and useful interface and hurry through this transitional phase. My hope would be that those of us in the creative technology biz will take these to heart and never forget that added dimension in the human equation since that connection can mean real dollars and cents for your business.

Food for thought the next time you think about deploying an app, website or something intended for human consumption.

A promising software startup wasn’t enough for this aggressive software start-up in construction project collaboration. They struggled in a large, but idiosyncratic market that was full of competitors looking to make a quick buck. The underpinning technology offered significantly more advantage than the construction market was capable of exploiting. Was there a better way?

What we did!

We repositioned the existing product, as it was, for manufacturing project collaboration. We knew that the potential for growth here was significant. We marketed the product into manufacturing and found a select number of key reference accounts. We used their hands-on insights and defined the future product roadmap and growth path for servicing the manufacturing product lifecycle market. We built their channel program from scratch as we developed the program materials, located and trained the initial wave of systems integrator and consulting partners. They were recently acquired by one of the major players in the product lifecycle management space.

Exit strategy achieved: acquired by a major player in the space.