Well here I am trying to focus on the screen to give a summary of day one from the European ShareWare Conference 2006 here in Cambridge although very tired at present so the spelling and grammar are probably going to be even worse than usual.
Well first of all if you were at the conference then Hi and if not, well shame on you as you are missing a very interesting and informative conference.
This is the first one of these Ive been to so I was unsure as to what I should be expecting, how many people would be their and all that. Numbers were good today, a nice big turn out but no to large that it was difficult to see/hear, although given this is a Europe conference then I guess that actually very few of the micro ISVs/ShareWare authors have come along.
I think calling it a ShareWare conference is selling it a bit short as today covered SEO, email marketing and goggle adwords which were really interesting to me for both my web based products (Dollars to Pounds exchange rates and BookSwap.ws) as well as windows applications (i.e. Dinner Timer for timing your cooking), where "ShareWare" tends to conger up the thoughts of a standalone application that installed on your computer.
All the talks from today were very interesting, some to know as background and to be aware of for future developments and others for here and now.
I was pleasantly surprised by Thomas Wetzels talk of Grow your Google Adwords account successfully, Ive used Adwords for some time now and whilst Im no expert I did think I understood a fair amount. I learnt a lot from Thomas talk, not least about his analytics tool for adword tracking which Ive downloaded already and Im about to go and play with. I also learnt that Im not alone by loosing money with adwords, although to be fair I did expect this from the way I have it configured and how I want to attract customers.
I was also very impressed by the presentation Sinan Karace from InstallAware. Installers are the first thing your customers get to see of the product for windows applications and its critical for the success of the product that it goes better than just OK. At other companies Ive worked at Ive purchased the well known installer that is a competitor to InstallAware, which I ended up having to use to create installers for the applications I had written and I have to say how much I hate that other companies installer application and upgrade pricing!. InstallAwares product looks really good, having written installers I know its no stroll in the path and to see the examples and the flexibility of the InstallAware product I was impressed. I shall be downloading that very soon and running it through its paces, their pricing also looks very impressive and a much more friendly upgrade policy!
I couldnt end the post without mentioning Bob Walsh of My MicroISV and author of Micro ISV, From Vision to Reality of which I am half way through, this is a great book, full of useful links and interesting interviews. Anyway, it was great to see him talk in person, and very interesting as well. You may also want to check channel 9 as their are a couple of interviews with him under the micro ISV section (sorry no link, it's a nightmare to navigate channel 9, maybe I'll post the links in my next post when I have a little more time).
Im looking forward to Sundays presentations, although dreading the 9am start, I mean, a 9am start on a Saturday and Sunday Im a night person and this is one major shock to the system!