30 April 2008
mailPrimer is an email service, that takes your every-day email and slaps on a custom designed template – including your signature, logos and links to your website. Its a hosted service, so its simple to redirect all of your mail through mailPrimer to centrally manage your company signatures and to get consistent branding across all of your email – which is a high touch channel with your customers and prospects.
Now - mailPrimer allows you to include RSS headlines in every email you send, making your blog more visible to the people you talk to daily. Considering that 92% of people don’t read blogs, but most read email, this is a non-intrusive way of raising awareness of your blog and keeping people up-to-date with your latest news.
Talk to the mailPrimer guys at 0800 MAILPRIMER or support@mailprimer.com to get setup.
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Posted by Andrew
21 April 2008
- Joel Spolsky, founder of Fog Creek software, author of several books and the man behind the joelonsoftware blog
- Seth Godin, Business Week’s “Ultimate Entrepreneur for the Information Age”, is the best-selling author of 7 books (including Permission Marketing and Purple Cow) as well as the most popular eBook of all time.
- Eric Sink, founder of SourceGear, author of “Eric Sink on the Business of Software” and the person who coined the term “Micro ISV”
- Steve Johnson of Pragmatic Marketing and winner of last year’s Software Idol competition
- Richard Stallman launched the development of the GNU operating system, now used on tens of millions of computers today. Stallman has received the ACM Grace Hopper Award, a MacArthur Foundation fellowship, the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Pioneer award, and the the Takeda Award for Social/Economic Betterment
- Paul Kenny is one of the UK’s top sales trainers, consultants and speakers. He has worked with many customers in three continents, including IBM, Perot Systems, The Guardian and tens of others.
- Dharmesh Shah is a geek, serial entrepreneur, founder of HubSpot and blogger at OnStartups.com
- Jessica Livingston is author of Founders at Work: Stories of Startups’ Early Days and a founder of Y Combinator
- Jason Fried is founder of 37signals (developers of Basecamp and Ruby on Rails) and Signal vs Noise blogger
1 Comment | Business, Software | Permalink
Posted by Andrew
6 April 2008
I’m currently reading ‘Fooled by Randomness’ by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, who has some interesting ideas on the randomness of life and business.
He says his major hobby is “teasing people who take themselves & the quality of their knowledge too seriously & those who don’t have the courage to sometimes say: I don’t know….”.
I’m probably guilty of taking myself too seriously … Solomon (the wisest-guy-ever) also said not to rely on your own knowledge and understanding. So what should we rely on?
If you keep reading, the answer lies not in your knowledge, but in understanding your domain well enough to know what you don’t know and to know how to find answers. Your ability to generate knowledge is more important than your knowledge.
Solomon said that developing good judgement and understanding is the smartest thing you can do – and is more valuable than wealth. Ie – the ability to generate wealth is more valuable than wealth itself. Likewise, the ability to generate knowledge is more valuable than knowledge itself.
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Posted by Andrew
4 April 2008
I’m patiently waiting for the iPhone upgrade (coming soon right?) … but just spotted this handsolo mobile.
Even the iPhone doesn’t have ‘high-five’ call transfer and built in games like ‘pull my finger’.
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Posted by Andrew
1 April 2008
Six months ago Westpac announced record growth and profits … but I miss the Westpac that I knew five years ago …
Five years ago, I took out a mortgage with Westpac and they were great. I was just starting a new software business and Westpac understood this and gave me a business banking manager to help with my business and personal finances.
Back then, Westpac were more than happy to give me a guaranteed rate for 60 days on a pre-approved loan. They also waived all fees on all of my accounts because of my mortgage.
Recently, I had to adjust part of my mortgage and wow have Westpac changed. After agreeing to my changes and the new interest rate, it took a couple of weeks to get the papers sorted. During this time, the interest rate increased – but I hadn’t been given a ‘rate lock’, so I was stuck with the higher rate. I decided to sign a rate lock and to my suprise, its no longer a guarantee from Westpac of the rate I can get – its now a guarantee from me that I will take the loan, with a $250 fee if I don’t complete the papers on time.
On top of that there was the $250 documentation fee and the other $100 fee which they never explained – just charged me for. I also seem to be paying more and more bank fees …
What’s changed inside Westpac? Are they being greedy and exploitational or are they just scared of not getting their 12% growth this year?
4 Comments | Finance | Permalink
Posted by Andrew
