In my ongoing effort to wrangle various hosting vendors into a coherent strategy, I have come across a common problem.

Businesses don’t trust their employees.

I am not talking about clocking in and out, blocking web sites or inventorying each paper clip allotted to the cogs in the vast corporate machine.

How many times have you been told I have to check my manager?

When I call or email with a question, I do not want to hear that someone has to check with higher management.

I want an answer.

If an employee cannot answer the question or make a commitment that will secure my business, then I do not want to talk to them ever again.

Small businesses require direct communication with authentic and authoritative people.

You will fail if you put a layer of “filter” employees between customers and decisions makers.

From the janitor to the CEO, everyone in your company makes or breaks it, every single day.

This morning I got a phone call from Hostmysite.com whom read about my experience with Peer1 and Rackspace.

They wanted to offer their services, because they felt they stacked up favorably. The quote I received does stack up nicely and definitely merits consideration.

This happened before, I posted about my experience with Media Temple hosting, and received a flurry of recommendations in the comments.

I think its time to consider using the blogs as the first step in the process of finding solutions to business needs.

Perhaps a RFQ/RFP category or sub-blog that pings the various trackers like Technorati.

Or, should we have a microformat for RFQs and RFPs?

The Android platform will be made available under one of the most progressive, developer-friendly open-source licenses, which gives mobile operators and device manufacturers significant freedom and flexibility to design products. Next week the Alliance will release an early access software development kit to provide developers with the tools necessary to create innovative and compelling applications for the platform.”

(Via John Battelle’s Searchblog.)

Hopefully this leads to some compelling mobile devices. It is certainly less than consumers expected today.

By the second half of 2008, when they expect the first Android handsets to hit the market, we should have Nokia’s iPhone challenger and the second generation iPhone.

It will be interesting to see where the chips fall.

Today, most web content can be accessed on on mobile devices. Though you are at the mercy of how each site chooses serve mobile content - if at all.

Mowser cleans up and presents content for mobile devices in friendlier more efficient forms.

Mowser doesn’t just handle web sites, it also provides efficient access to RSS feeds and search engines in mobile friendly formats.

Mowser, which is developed by Russell Beattie, does it really, really well.

I don’t know the details of how Mowser works its magic, but its definitely more sophisticated than older efforts and a work of passion on the part of the developer.

After using it for a week, I prefer Mowser-powered browsing to regular browsing on my phone.

Content flies through the sluggish AT&T EDGE network, and the addition of Tech 100, Politics 100, Feeds and Search on the home page are awesome for casual browsing while on the road.

There is a lot more to Mowser than I have touched on and even understand after just a week.

I highly recommend it for anyone using a mobile device to access web content.

Big thumbs up!

Pricing web services is tricky and not always clear. This article food for thought.

In the world of free, pricing isn’t given much attention. But if you’re looking for a real, sustainable business, it’s unavoidable. Paul Farnell’s gone through it all with his app Litmus and breaks it down for you here.

Pricing is always somewhat of a black art, and a subject about which there is precious little written with regard to web applications. It’s something I’ve always been fascinated by. The question of how to price our web application, Litmus, was subject to countless hours of discussion. Here I’ll discuss some common factors and hopefully help spark some ideas which can help you decide upon the price of your own application.

(Via thinkvitamin.com.)

I am so excited, SideSale, one of my personal projects has finally come to life!

My partnership in MailTank keeps me busy, but I just had to take an hour tonight to put SideSale to work here on my blog. Sort of kick the tires, eat my own dog food, → insert web 2.0 speak here - you get the point.

Anyway, SideSale is a service designed to help website publishers, bloggers or just about anyone producing content sell things on their sites.

SideSale is not an affiliate e-commerce service that provides products to sell. It does one thing, it inserts a “sale” into web sites using a single line of code, very similar to how Google Adsense works. The products or services sold are up to the site owner - whatever they want to sell is up to them.

SideSale supports Paypal for payment processing, though once the doors are open I will probably add Google Checkout.

When I said SideSale does only one thing, well that is not 100% accurate. There is a roadmap that includes a few surprise twists on the traditional e-commerce system. The first is already evident in the pricing structure for this service - SideSale will have a simple per month flat price - say goodbye to commission-based pricing.

Anyway, you should see I am selling a used MacBook Pro using SideSale right now, so act fast I only have one for sale! In the next couple weeks I will be adding a few more products.

Let me know what you think or if you run into any problems with my site because of SideSale.

For those curious, SideSale is hosted using Amazon EC2 and S3, with Google Gmail for Domains providing email service.

If you are interested in trying out SideSale, leave a comment or drop me a line at lon@sidesale.com.

Technorati Tags: ecommerce, google checkout, web design, google adsense, blog, marketing, paypal

For more than a year a project has rolled around in the back of my mind. It is a simple online commerce tool with a deeply pragmatic attitude.

A little over 2 weeks ago, the last pieces fell into place mentally, so I dedicated some precious weekend time to working on it.

The results are nearing completion, but I wanted to post some thoughts on the fundamental pieces of online commerce.

Today, Sale Tax, or how I learned to give up.

The internet knows no boundaries, well except for the great firewall of China, and possibly some middle eastern countries.

Yet, in this century, why is there not a publicly available web service that provides the sale tax calculations for businesses?

Not, some fee-based for-pofit business that charges small businesses prior to them ever making a single sale.

But, the online equivalent to the sale tax charts handed out by every tax authority.

If governments wants businesses to charge sales tax online, they need to modernize their processes and keep up with online commerce.

The same can be said of shipping companies, but that is another post.

This type of move could get me to buy from Dell. I would love to have an decently supported linux laptop, but haven’t been thrilled with any existing offerings.

This is an interesting move by Dell and speaks to the strides that open source is making in the OS space. This morning on the Direct2Dell blog, the company announced a partnership with Canonical to offer the Ubuntu distro of Linux on select machines. (Via jkOnTheRun.)

Unfortunately, nothing is available today. Companies need to capitalize on the speed of blog news by having products available when they make these announcements. Its guaranteed to drive sales when they do.

I just returned from what can only be described as a complete retail disaster.

So, I want to send a special message to the folks at Best Buy. You. Guys. Suck.

Today Best Buy lost me as a customer - forever.

You see, the black friday sale is a bit of a tradition for my wife, her sister and mother, and last year they coxed me into going with them to Best Buy, where I got a couple pretty good deals. Sure it was a mad house. People wandering everywhere, looking for deal, swooping them up and rushing to the cashier.

This year things were different.

We arrived early to improve our odds of getting the deal we wanted. 4:45 a.m. early at that. However, to my surprise a line wrapped around the building. This should have been a warning sign telling me to go home.

However, I figured with fire codes, they would let people enter gradually, and while lines might be long, it would be reasonable.

Nope. Within 5 minutes the entire line of several hundred people was unleashed on a store that was completely unorganized.

After 30 minutes talking with a clueless employee, whom could not figure out why our product was not where they thought it should be, I discovered a multi-pronged line winding towards the back of the store.

My booty lie at the end of that line, or so I thought.

You see, for those not privy to the local ads fine print, if you arrived at 4 a.m. you got a voucher, guaranteeing the product you wanted. This allowed you to retire to your home and return after the morning onslaught subsided.

But, why am I kicking Best Buy to the curb? Sour grapes over a lost deal? Nope.

• The advertisements made it clear that the deal we wanted was only good from 5 a.m. to noon. Yet people whom arrived at 4 a.m. got to purchase these products while the store was closed.
• They did not let people know that products had already all been sold out via the vouchers. So everyone wasted their morning waiting in line after line, until reaching the front of the line and being told they were sold out. Well, sold out except for the stack of products sitting on the shelf waiting for voucher holders to return.
• They openly encouraged people to try to buy vouchers from other shoppers waiting in line if they really wanted the product! I am at Best Buy, not some tailgate party for a Stone’s concert!

Over the last few years, I’ve spent thousands dollars at Best Buy, on computers and home theater goodies.

Never again!

I don’t really care about not getting this deal. I knew that possibility was the risk of going.

What I hated was the feeling I got while in their store. It felt so disrespectful. Almost as if they were laughing at the shoppers whom showed up expecting a normal retail experience, but were not savvy enough to have arrived early for the in-crowds pre-game voucher festivities.

As I said before, Best Buy. You. Guys. Suck.

But more importantly, you don’t get it.

My web browser just became my favorite sales man.

My FedEx driver just eclipsed you in terms of customer service.

You just lost a customer forever.

p.s. - Don’t even get me started on the sham that is video game pre-orders and new console launches.

Considering the iTunes juggernaut, why can’t I buy any of their software as a download?

Seriously, why not? Doesn’t make a bit of sense.

Sounds reasonable to me. Good for business. Good for the environment.

This appeared in a Business 2.0 article titled “5 secrets to a successful launch”.

To avoid creating a gizmo, ask yourself, “Would this be a natural fit in the Sky Mall catalog?” If the answer is yes, you’re probably creating something with limited innovative value.

This has to be a joke. Everytime I fly across country, Sky Mall is where I look to see how people are wasting their money.

As I got to work yesterday, I noticed the paint literally rubbing off the bevel beneath the command key on my new MacBook Pro. Those that know me, understand the sense of dread this triggered in me.

No. I am not some compulsive freak.

Its just that I pride myself in keeping my business hardware in near perfect condition to maintain the resale value.

The paint flaking off coupled with the irritating CPU whine my machine has been exhibiting from time to time, and scalding hot temperature it reaches finally gave me the incentive to head off to the local Apple store for some TLC.

The experience was pleasant, but a complete waste of time. They would not address the CPU whine issue until I could get the machine to produce a sufficient enough volume to allow them to take action.

I explained that I have done the research, performed all the firmware updates and given the MacBook time to break in. But that the issue tends to occur after some intensive work followed by idling, and once started goes on until the machine is either taxed with some heavy lifting or put to sleep.

After 2-3 minutes the genius headed off to help another customer and said he would check back once the MacBook had warmed up.

Well, over an hour later I gave up waiting. The genius was now helping 3-4 customers and the store was incredibly noisy. The MacBook was piping hot, but I couldn’t tell if the whine was my MacBook or the G5 sitting next to it on the counter, so I decided to go the old-fashioned route. I called Apple’s toll-free line explained the situation and a few minutes later was on my way home with a DHL box en-route.

The nice guy, playing the part of the genius, explained that is was company policy and his manager insists that they personally confirm every issue before anything is shipped out for repair.

An understandable policy considering the flood of complete novices I encountered on this trip. One insisting her iPod was defective because it wouldn’t play Window Media files.

DHL will be here momentarily to pick up the MacBook Pro and hopefully in a few days it will be returned better than ever.

Moral of the story. Don’t go to an Apple store if you know what is wrong. Call Apple instead.

of Martin Fowler’s keynote at the RailConf is great stuff.

I took away the following, and have seen it in my own work since adopting Ruby and Ruby on Rails.

• Quick doesn’t mean dirty – anymore
• Opinionated software is good
• Do less better

Thanks to my partner I have access to a Virtual PBX with a toll-free number. He has been working with this technology for close to a decade and it is pretty cool stuff.

That said, with VoIP, Skype/Gizmo and Asterisk, does old fashioned toll-free numbers matter anymore for small technology businesses?

My gut say not for long. But then again, customers may not agree right?