Nico Westerdale Accepts Nomination for a seat on the Association of Shareware Professionals Board of Directors.

I stand before you here today, addressing all my fellow members of this great Association, with profound gratitude and great humility, I accept this nomination for a place on the Association of Shareware Board of Directors.

Many of you watching may not know this junior entrepreneur from England, and I'd like to spend a few moments to introduce myself.

My journey is an improbable one. Being born in England, of American parents, I learnt programming at an early age on a ZX81. I was schooled in art, and came to New York to participate in the great experiment that only America could forge, the dot com boom, and then inevitable bust. Born out of this I formed Iconico.com and set about to produce my own shareware tools and sell them over the web.

Now our economy faces a similar collapse, and during such times it's every member's responsibility to change, to think anew about the role shareware plays, and I believe that my skills learnt through hard times and hard work will help the Association through these dark times.

A year ago I took over the running of BitsDuJour.com and worked as a community organizer with developers, ISVs, and ecommerce providers alike, helping them to promote, market, and sell their products. We rebuilt the infrastructure, eliminated waste, and forged new partnerships whilst never pandering to the special interests, all in the cause of giving developers a global audience for their products.

As we stand at this crossroads in history the ASP has a choice. To continue the same failed policies of the past which have resulted year on year in falling memberships, or to embrace change. We must look hard at the $100 membership fee and find new ways to market the Association in order for fledgling developers to come on board in these tough economic times.

We must look hard at the ASP website, and our marketing efforts. Our organization is one that still produces a printed paper newsletter, when great financial savings and even greater exposure could come from blogs, rss feeds and wikis. We must embrace this change for the future, not in the quality of what we are doing, but in how we get our message out there.

I believe that despite our best efforts the ASP has lost respect amongst the professional software community. As a member of the board of directors I will be prepared to sit down with leaders of the OISV, and Joel on Software, at a time and place of my choosing. Isolationism in the recent years have only lost us members, and by negotiating without preconditions, and starting face to face talks with our competitors I believe that we can forge new alliances and regain respect for our organization on the world stage.

As small business owners and developers we all share a hope for the future.
I've seen that hope in the developers who work long nights and weekends, with the dream that one day they can give up their day jobs and devote themselves to their business full time. I've seen hope in the eyes of people in conferences from Denver to Boston, and this great Association that we have built together serves that hope, that dream for a better future.'

Fellow members, we cannot turn back. We cannot walk alone.

At this moment, in this election, we must pledge once more to march into the future. Let us keep that promise, that independent Shareware promise, without wavering, to the hope that we confess.

Thank you. God bless you. And God bless the Association of Shareware Professionals.

Research in Motion is coming online with an application store uniquely its own. On Tuesday, RIM unveiled two distribution initiatives for BlackBerry smartphone applications at its annual developer conference: A new online application store and a new on-device application center that opens up BlackBerrys millions of users to developers vying for an audience.

RIM said it plans to launch the BlackBerry application store in March 2009, giving its users a one-stop shop for compatible applications and a user-friendly way to manage upgrades and purchases.

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The popularity of mobile phones in South Africa is helping to tackle HIV and AIDS in the nation.

Project Masiluleke will send one million free text messages a day to push people to be tested and treated.

Approximately 350,000 people die of AIDS related diseases in the country every year.

Trials of the system showed that calls to counselors at the National AIDS helpline in Johannesburg increased by 200% when messages were broadcast.

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We're happy to announce today the release of Clipstory. We all use Copy and Paste all the time, but the problem is that you can only copy and paste one thing at a time.

What's needed is a way to copy and paste to the clipboard, and see the history; and that's why we call our new application Clipstory!

Clipstory gives you a huge extension to your copy and paste abilities, you can quickly cycle through your entire history of copied text, files, images, audio and binary data. Through use of the keyboard shortcuts a preview popup is shown in the corner of your screen, and this works with any and all applications.

Clipstory's full list of clipped items is easy to search and scroll through to find something that you've clipped a while back. You can save, restore and even set up custom filters to automate your clipping and save items. Clipstory's powerful functions are sure to save you time every day, and never interrupt your normal work.

The software is available on trial download and can be purchased for $19.50. Feel free to download and give it a test run.

We're selling a number of old domains, if you're interested in purchasing them, please click the auction link below. This is for the sale of all of the following domains as a complete bundle:

VEGETARIANNEWYORK.COM
VEGETARIANNEWYORKCITY.COM
VEGETARIANNY.COM
VEGETARIANNYC.COM
NYVEGETARIAN.COM
NYCVEGETARIAN.COM
NEWYORKCITYVEGETARIAN.COM
VEGANNEWYORK.COM
VEGANNEWYORKCITY.COM
VEGANNY.COM
NYCVEGAN.COM
NEWYORKVEGAN.COM
NEWYORKCITYVEGAN.COM

Currently registered with GoDaddy.

Taliban insurgents said Tuesday they had told mobile phone operators to shut down their networks during the day in the Ghazni province, southwest of Kabul, saying signals help track insurgent fighters.

The warning comes on top of a Taliban order earlier this year for phone operators to turn off their networks throughout the country at night.

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A Canadian company has unveiled software crafted to prevent people, particularly mobile device-loving teenagers, from making telephone calls or text-messaging while driving.

Aegis Mobility describes DriveAssist as advanced call management technology that essentially creates virtual personal secretaries to intercept calls or text messages intended for mobile telephones in moving cars.

DriveAssist software detects when phones are moving at automobile speeds and then tells callers that the person they are trying to reach is driving. Callers are invited to leave messages or call-back numbers.

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Research in Motion the maker of the Blackberry, unveiled its first smartphone with a touch-screen on Wednesday, its answer to the popular Apple iPhone.
The phone, the Blackberry Storm, will be available later this year through Verizon Wireless in the United States and Vodafone in Europe, India, Australia and New Zealand, the Canadian company said.

The global mobile phone market should grow at much slower-than-expected rates next year as consumers put off buying new devices due to deepening economic concerns, according to forecasts from analysts.

While industry executives often say mobile phones are the last thing consumers will give up to save money, analysts are now citing lengthening phone replacement cycles and weakening economies around the world for their weaker sales estimates.

UBS analyst Maynard Um halved his forecast for 2009 global handset growth to 3 percent from 6 percent, pointing to particular weakness in Europe and North America.

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A few weeks back I purchased a new keyboard through Amazon, and this unleashed a slew of events that left me in the middle of a large scale credit card scam. I'm pretty savvy to online scams, and have never replied to the Nigerian emails asking for a cool million, but this one caught me out!

Now Amazon has opened up their system to allow small merchants to sell their own products, so you can get a substantial discount on a product. For the keyboard I wanted I had a look through the New offers and found many at nearly half off, so I went with a merchant who had decent feedback and clicked through the checkout.

Amazon runs the checkout process, so the merchant doesn't get my credit card number, all good. My keyboard arrived in good time and I got several emails from the merchant, great service I thought.

Then I started getting packages.

The first package that I got was a box of five of the keyboards that I had ordered, then the next day I got two pieces of software. I emailed the merchant and they told me that there had been a mess up in the order and they had been incorrectly shipped to my address. The shipping labels had someone else's name on it so it all seemed like a genuine mistake and the merchant would figure out what went wrong.

The merchant emailed me some pre-paid UPS shipping labels addressed to their 'Returns Department' which I printed out. The merchant even offered to arrange a UPS pickup so I sent on the packages.

A few days later I started to get more packages. These included a video projector, a 30 inch monitor, and some other really big ticket items. I refused delivery of the items and noticed that the items were coming direct from places such as NewEgg and Dell, and at this point I realized that there was something more sinister afoot. I was also getting emails from the merchant pleading with me not to refuse delivery as that would 'incur extra shipping charges' and instead to ship them on to them.

What must have happened was that I had been co-opted into acting as a fence for stolen goods. The merchant has at their disposal a number of stolen credit cards. They were ordering items from manufacturers and having them shipped to my mailing address. I'd then forward them on and there would be no paper trail from the original purchase through to their receipt of the goods.

Armed with printouts of all the emails and photographs of all the shipping labels (I'm now on first name terms with my UPS guy) I went down to the local police precinct. I filled out a form and thought that as I had the address that these good would ultimately go to that the fraud department would be able to track down these guys.

When I did get to speak to the desk Sergent he said there was absolutely nothing they could do as the fraud was no committed in New York state. I called NewEgg and they didn't have any ideas on what to do. Dell has taken my number and a week later has not got back to me.

Now this is a pretty smart scam, and I certainly don't like being taken for a sucker, what gets me is that these guys probably have a huge operation running here and there seems very little that anyone can do about it. I could call up the FBI, but they aren't defrauding me, so I don't really want to invest yet more time in all this.

Maybe this is a well known scam, but it's the first I've heard of it, and it seems the only thing left for me to do is put the word out so that nobody else gets caught in the same trap.