by Ron Miller

Much Ado About Apple: What Will it Take to Make Wall Street Happy?

2008-07-24T09:17:56-04:00

Link: Much Ado About Apple: What Will it Take to Make Wall Street Happy? - DaniWeb TechTreasures

By most people’s measure, it was quite a quarter for Apple, but apparently not for the geniuses on Wall Street. While Apple sold almost a million iPhones in the first week (think about that for a second) and had what BusinessWeek called a “blowout quarter,” an off-handed remark by Apple’s CFO Peter Oppenheimer sent stock prices tumbling yesterday.

First FierceContentManagement Newsletter Published

2008-07-23T13:28:00-04:00

Link: FierceContentManagement Newsletter

I'm pleased to announce that, as of today, I am editor for FierceContentManagement newsletter, a FierceMarkets publication. I will be writing a weekly column and gathering links to important news related to content management. Please take a look and let me know what you think.

LinkedIn Branches Out with NYT Deal

2008-07-22T14:14:03-04:00

Link: LinkedIn Branches Out with NYT Deal - DaniWeb TechTreasures Blog

In a promising technology mash-up, the New York Times (NYT) has entered into an agreement with LinkedIn that displays a list of suggested content for readers on the NYT web site based on information in their LinkedIn profile. For now, the service is confined to the Business and Technology section.

My Blog Scores 8.4 Rating on Blogged

2008-07-21T18:00:49-04:00

I'm very happy to announce that my blog has received an 8.4 rating from Blogged.com, a web site rating service. That's good for 60th place among tech blogs. According to the email I received announcing the rating, they evaluated based on the following critera:

We evaluated your blog based on the following criteria: Frequency of Updates, Relevance of Content, Site Design, and Writing Style. After carefully reviewing each of these criteria, your site was given its 8.4 score.

Trouble with Your Vendor? Try Twitter

2008-07-18T09:19:46-04:00

Link: Trouble with Your Vendor? Try Twitter - DaniWeb TechTreasures

Is your vendor giving you trouble? Won’t respond to your calls? Won’t help with your problem? Who you gonna call? Well, when I spoke to Brent Leary, a partner at CRM Essentials, yesterday, Leary surprised me when he suggested if your vendor won’t help you, go on Twitter, find a person with expertise in the problem area, and ask them.

6 Technologies That Compliment CRM - Inside CRM

2008-07-17T20:08:03-04:00

Link: 6 Technologies That Compliment CRM - Inside CRM.

I published an article this week for InsideCRM on 6 Technologies that Compliment CRM. CRM is just one piece in the enterprise software puzzle and if you can understand which pieces fit together, it can help your company work more efficiently, rather than maintaining each database as an information silo. This article looks at 6 software packages that work well with your CRM software.

Track Your Company's Vital Stats with Dashboard Software

2008-07-17T20:03:42-04:00

Link: Track Your Company's Vital Stats with Dashboard Software - BusinessWeek Small Biz

I just published an article for BusinessWeek Small Biz on using dashboard technology for small business. Dashboards give you an at-a-glance, graphical view of your company's vital statistics. It can be useful for any size business, but especially small businesses, which need to assess the current state of the business quickly without tying up too many resources in the process. Most small businesses will probably use a package like NetSuite or Salesforce.com, depending on their needs and the types of information they need to track.

I spoke to a couple of small business owners: one using Salesforce.com and the other NetSuite. I also spoke to a company that rolled its own dashboard software to meet its unique data requirements (see the sidebar article). Finally, I spoke to Boris Evelson, a Forrester analyst who covers dashboard software to get his view on the industry.

Common Sense Prevails in Google-Viacom Privacy Mess

2008-07-16T09:04:50-04:00

Link: Common Sense Prevails in Google-Viacom Privacy Mess - DaniWeb TechTreasures

That collective sigh of relief you hear this morning is probably the millions of YouTube users who are relieved that Google and Viacom have reached an agreement to protect their privacy. All I can say is thank goodness that common sense prevailed for once.

Consumers Should Be Mad as Hell Over iPhone Launch Debacle (But Aren't)

2008-07-14T08:22:21-04:00

Link: Consumers Should Be Mad as Hell Over iPhone Launch Debacle (But Aren't)- DaniWeb TechTreasures

By all rights, iPhone consumers should be storming the gates of Apple headquarters this morning in true Bastille Day fashion after Friday's mishandling of the iPhone 3G launch, but as far as I know all remains calm in Cupertino, and consumers remain strangely silent over the whole affair.

ContentNext Gets Sold for $30M

2008-07-13T15:50:13-04:00

She wrote faithfully home to mama
"Now mama don't you worry none"
From small things, mama
Big things one day come
~Bruce Springsteen, From Small Things

I learned on Friday in John Blossom's blog that Rafat Ali's publishing company, ContentNext, publishers of paidcontent.org (among others) was sold to Guardian News and Media in a deal reportedly worth a whopping $30M.

I have to admit I was excited for Rafat when I read this news because I first met him way back in 2003 at the first business blogging conference in Boston. At the time, he was just starting PaidContent.org and our conversation stimulated me to start blogging at at at time when most people had never heard of the concept. Today I'm writing post number 731 in this blog and it all began with that simple conversation. Here's what I wrote in that first entry called So it Begins:

While at the conference, I met Rafat Ali, owner, publisher, editor and chief bottle washer at paidcontent.org. Rafat is the prototypical blog publisher. Working alone in his apartment, he produces meaningful news on the paid content industry, an area I also cover extensively as a freelancer working for EContent Magazine. Rafat has freed himself from the constraints of typical corporate publishing by creating a publication where he is only answerable to himself and his readers. He has managed to cobble together a living in this fashion using the old-fashioned advertising model. I greatly admire his approach.

The event was sponsored by Jupiter Media and it was a really interesting time because blogs were at that time just beginning to be recognized as a business tool and there was an tangible tension in the room between the original bloggers who saw blogging as their personal sandbox and the new breed of business people like Rafat who were attempting to monetize the medium.

Well here we are just over five years later and Rafat has built his publishing company into a legitimate publishing force and for that, his company was purchased for a hefty sum on Friday. I'm really happy for him, but I'm also happy to see that, as Blossom pointed out in his piece, how far this type of publishing has come.

In a sense it almost seems ironic that his company was sold to a mainstream publishing group when you look at the roots of his publishing company, which was about escaping big media, but that only proves to me how far he took his vision. From small things indeed, big things have come, and I couldn't be happier for Ali and his team.