Well it's been a long time coming, but in the background of Iconico.com has always been our consulting business. We've kept it quiet, working with exclusive clients to produce some high-end, expertly made websites and applications, but time's come to get the word out.

ICONICODE

We're happy to talk to your business about how we can build your next website or application. We've got a wide technology background, so whatever language you want your code written in, then we can speak it.

We're also experts at usability, so if you have a website or application that just isn't working right, and want to fix more problems than just the visual design then give us a call.

We're happy to announce that starting Monday we'll be running two deals every day on BitsDuJour.com. If you have not stopped by before then take a look, we sell exclusive software titles at huge discounts, sometimes up to 90% off, but you have to act fast, the deals disappear in 24 hours.

For some time now I've had various pieces of artwork and projects online at Iconico.com. This was never really a good home for them so I'm happy to have finally found them all a permanent home at the new NicoWesterdale.com.

If you take a look you'll find various paintings that I've worked on over the years, art projects and some technical art installations. I hope you enjoy.

There's been a lot of talk on this blog, and in private emails about using XML formats to standardize the e-commerce industry. I posted a while back about the call to draw some common ground between the fractured web based systems that have grown up that don't talk to each other, and don't have any similarities from one to the next.

Time's come for a change!

The current state of technology is simply setting our industry back, and so here's the call: For all of you out there that have thought that you'd like to contribute to a better way of doing business then join us in the working group ESIX: Ecommerce Standard Information eXchange.

To set things up I've started a Facebook group so there's a forum for us all to communicate on. There's no agenda other than doing for e-commerce systems what PAD did for software listings.

Join the ESIX Facebook Group here

At BitsDuJour.com we promote software written by a wide variety of developers. We run a 24 hour discount on the software and some developers see a huge uptick in their sales for the day, but some don't, so why do some promotions work, and others don't?

The first answer is down to the software, great software sells, and poor software doesn't, but you can help your chances. We've seen that a discount of 40% or more creates a change of perception in the mind of the customer, moving the promotion from "interesting" to "must have". Given that we run the deal for only one day the large discounts really help to push the sales through in a short time.

We get asked time and time again by software vendors running promotions with us about the best way to help promote a one-day software deal. The answer I always give is that the first and best place to promote is with your existing customers.

The fact of
the matter is that if you send out an email to your existing customers
saying you have a one-day sale with us, and ask your existing customers to
tell their friends and families you will get more sales. In some cases much
more. Existing customers have already made the decision to purchase your software, and if you ask them then more often than not they will be keen to pass on the good news about a product that they already like.

However, there is often a little hesitation in doing this. The savvy developer thinks "Hey, I could do this all myself, and I wouldn't have to pay a percentage of the sales to BitsDuJour".

Yes, you could set
everything up to run the promotion and mail them. However the fact of the
matter is that setting this up will take a significant amount of time on
your part, and we have all the tools you need to run a successful promotion
for you, RSS, notification emails, a professional write-up and layout, so
either you pay in your time, or you pay in your percentage of the sales.

The fact of the matter is that Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) don't set up and run their own daily
deals. I monitor a lot of discussion boards and I can count on one hand the
number of times I've heard of people doing this themselves. So if you resign
yourself to the fact that you're not going to, then why not run a promotion through us and promote to your
existing mailing list. In many cases ISVs never email their customers at all
so yes we're getting a cut, but a cut of sales that would have never
existed.

One last point. We have offered for some time now a way to place all our
daily deals on your website, totally seamlessly branded with your pages. If
your store generates a sale we give you 50% of the commission. So if you set
up a store, and promote your product directing people to your store you'll
get back half of the commission that you pay to us, which is typically 30%.
So basically that's only 15% that you pay to us *after* the discount and any
e-commerce fees are applied.

Put another way, if your product usually costs $30 and you ran a 50% off
promotion you'd pay us a little over $2 per sale for all the professional
features and tools that you need to run a daily deal promotion. I hope
that's finally a strong enough argument for why you should promote to your
mailing list as well.

Details on our partner stores are here:
http://www.bitsdujour.com/partnerStoreInfo

Again thanks to all of you who have promoted with us.

STOPzilla's growth statistics, by any standard or measuring stick are an unqualified financial success. STOPzilla, a fairly new kid on the block, entered the online software world in 2002, and in their first 9 months of business, amazingly generated revenus of $ 300,000. This was followed by a staggering 1000% growth in 2003, with sales coming in at 3 million dollars. This years projected growth is estimated to exceed 20 million dollars.

Marcus Tettmar has been developing software since he was a young student. He graduated from university with a computer degree in 1994 and has been developing software professionally ever since.

In 1998, Noah left Unisyn and independently founded iolo technologies, LLC. Using much of what he had learned at Unisyn, he grew iolo into the multi-million dollar company it is today..

It started out in 1996; Dirk Paessler was looking for a load testing application. Unable to find one, he wrote his own tool. Within two weeks of cleaning it up and creating a web page, he had two customers send him $ 20.00 for the program. Dirk ran his shareware business part time for 4 years. Today with six applications, Paessler Software demands Dirk's full attention. With five full and ten part-time employees Paessler software has grown into a very successful business.

A minor update has been made available for PageGate. PageGate is a network messaging gateway that allows messages to be sent via SMS, Fax and a variety of Internet protocols to wireless devices. The latest release version of PageGate is 5.09 and is available from the download section. If you are a current registered PageGate user the release is available free of charge. Details of the current version changes can be seen in the PageGate release notes.