Stronico – Steroids for Networking We help the world’s best salesmen build better networks

This is not computer related, but it was meaningful enough to merit mention here.

Last February I purchased a Triton Woodworking 3.5 Horsepower router, the only “elite” tool I have for my woodworking hobby.  About 4 months ago I managed to get a 1″ radius round-over bit stuck (“Frozen” in woodworking jargon) into the router.  I tried everything I could think of to remove the frozen router bit.  I pulled so hard I bent the factory wrench (really, I did), I tried using micro lubrication, I let it run long enough for everything to heat up, I consulted the woodworking elders at Highland Woodworking, all to no avail.  As Triton is an Australian company, they do not have a local service center. Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 1% [?]

I wrote up my experiences at StartUp Atlanta, and the good people at Core Motives were kind enough to send me a few corrections to wit (they wrote these in the comments) -

1) Actionable:

a) Sales: detecting the interaction of a prospect who is in a stalled sales opportunity, and pinging the salesperson’s Blackberry, in real time, that they need to call the prospect

b) Marketing: real-time revenue reporting from Google AdWord campaign clicks

* Corporate Purchasing: Pricing starts at $99/m; below the radar of corporate purchasing

* Pricing: simple consumption model with 3 tiers
* Remarkability: “Enables your business to detect, track and target potential customers”

Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 3% [?]

Last night I attended the StartUp Atlanta January event (on the web at StartUpAtlanta.org, @StartupAtlanta on Twitter) where about 60 or so members of the Startup community mixed, mingled, and listened to 5 presentations by new Startups in Atlanta.

The community was quite nice, and the venue, Ignition Alley was cool too.  Ignition Alley is a co-working facility about four miles away from Stronico HQ which is on my short list of places to go when I need an office.   I had a great time meeting everyone and the event was quite well run.

And now, the contestants!  We listened to the presentations, and voted via twitter for our favorites, here were mine, recorded here for posterity.  I judge startups by the following criteria, on a scale of 1-10 (higher is better).  I thought I would share it here for the first time.

1. Problem Solving - It can be a cool product, but does it make anyone’s life easier?
2. Actual Customers - I am defining the customer as someone with both problems and money.
3. Simplicity of Pricing – can the fees be described to anyone, do you need more information about the prospect before you can offer a quote?
4. Chicken and Egg Problem – does the product require a lot of Customer A before Customer B becomes interested,  and vice versa?  This applies a good bit to middleman/broker type companies like E-Bay.
5. Remarkability – that is to say, can someone who heard a quick presentation about it describe it to someone the next day, and have it be understood?

Note, I do not judge the passion of the founders, quality of marketing, execution etc.  That’s too hard to judge based off of a short presentation. Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 17% [?]

As you might expect, most of the traffic comes from Google, and curiously most of the search terms are about problems with QuickBooks.  The How To Fix series is the second most popular.  Happily the search term “Visual Contact Management” is a prominent search term as well.  I’m still debating as to whether or not the photos in the blog posts are of any use or not.

And yesterday was the highest traffic day in the history of the blog.  I’m not sure why, but the middle of the week tends to do far better than other days.

And in case anyone was wondering,  I’ve been building out the public side of the site lately.

Popularity: 2% [?]

I do not know that much about jQuery, or any of it’s offshoots (jQueryUI, etc) but I do have a need for modal popups.  As I am building the website in ASP.net MVC, instead of ASP.net webforms I  have decided to use the jQuery platform instead of the standard Ajax Toolkit.

I have looked over many, many modal popup schemes and decided to use the Queness modal popup method.  It is  the most usable of the methods I’ve seen.   Look for it on the main Stronico site when it launches!

Popularity: 4% [?]

photo credit: Rego – twitter.com/w3bdesign

First things first, I have not seen the Apple iPad.  I am an enthusiastic owner of an Amazon Kindle.  I honestly don’t see what the hype is about.  Granted, I never do with Apple products, but I can’t even see it from Apple’s point of view this time.  The Kindle is perfect at what it does, largely because it doesn’t do that much.  You read order, download, and read books on it.  Period.  The Kindle does that effortlessly and the e-ink is easier to read than paper.  The pages are consistently sized (an under-reported feature of the Kindle that helps quite a bit) and the battery lasts forever.  The Kindle also weighs almost nothing and you do not have to choose between it and a laptop in terms of weight or space.  In sum, the Kindle solves the problem of “I want to read something” quite well.

What problem does the iPad solve?  It will have the low battery life of anything with an actual monitor, so it can’t go that long without being charged, so add in the bulkiness of a charger 40% of the time to the transport of the unit.  It is harder to read (again, relative to the Kindle) so that’s another strike against it.

Perhaps I’m reading this wrong, maybe the competitor isn’t the Kindle, but rather some segment of the iPhone market.  Perhaps there is some segment of the world that is clamoring for multimedia computing power that is available while in motion.  But the obscurity of the Microsoft Tablet OS/PC indicates that there are not legions of people clamoring for walkable computing power.

Happily no one’s products depend on me, so good luck Apple.

Popularity: 2% [?]

The Problem: QuickBooks 2010 refuses to print to pdf when you attempt to send an invoice on Vista 64 bit.

The Cause: Quickbooks 2010 on Vista 64 bit does not work well.

The Solution: Close all programs, go to the Task Manager and make sure that Outlook is not open in the Processes.   Reopen QuickBooks Pro 2010 and try printing the invoice to pdf again.  I have no idea why this works, and I have yet to single out which program is causing QuickBooks to malfunction, but that does seem to fix it.

Popularity: 2% [?]

photo credit: mil8

“Before I tell you about it you have to sign this!” is what they all say.  The idea will be written out over five pages, usually in the passive voice, with as many adjectives and adverbs as possible.  By the time you finish reading the document the concept will be fuzzier than when you started reading the document.

As a solo web/software I’ve signed 15 or so non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) over my past eight years in business for new products and companies.  I don’t recall any of the products being successful in the long term.  In fact, I can’t recall any of the products being around after six months.  Most of the products never reached any sort of development at all.  To a man the people pitching the NDAs had great enthusiasm, and  they all insisted on a great many meetings.  Why is this? Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 3% [?]

I recently had these thoughts and I’m documenting them for version 2 of the Stronico application.

1. Psychological profiling of contacts.  I’m thinking of a simple Type A, Type B snap judgment one can make after first meeting a person.  If I can think of working in the Myers-Briggs personality types that would be wonderful, but I don’t think the information is there to implement it practically.
2. A matchmaker feature – if two contacts have similar tags, friends, interests, life statuses, locations etc, but are not known to know each other, it would be a great thing to introduce them (as written about in the great book “Never Eat Alone” by Keith Ferrazzi.  I realize that Facebook has a similar feature, but this would make the decisions based on information that only you, the Stronico user would know.
3. Archetyping – this is related to point 1, but it would be useful information to store impressions about someone, i.e. is that person a drama queen, unflappable robot (much like the author…), sports fanatic, sensitive artist, and the like.  These would not be that accurate, but it could come in handy, particularly for those people with large networks.  The use of broad archetyping is useful as a sorting mechanism.

Popularity: 3% [?]

The Problem: You are trying to create a new website programatically via the Microsoft.Web.Administration.ServerManager and having no luck.  In fact, you are getting invalid binding errors at every turn. Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 4% [?]