I hope this year the ASP will become even more popular (this is also the main 2010 goal of Jim Coutu, the new Chairman of the Board of Directors of the ASP) and will welcome more software authors.

A few changes have happened inside the ASP board: it has a new Chairman and 3 new members have joined the Board for a two year term. Jim Coutu from GatorData Inc is the new Chairman of the Board of Directors for this year. The three new members who have been elected for the board, that I wish to welcome wholeheartedly, are:

Don Waterfield, senior programmer/analyst at Aqumix, Inc.	Laura Look, project manager at Bitsmithsoft.	Michael C. Battilana, president of Cloanto.

A big thank you on behalf of everyone at ASP goes to the 3 members whose term ended in the Board of Directors, for all the enthusiastic work done in ASP: Henk Devos, Greg Weir and Dave Gjessing.

Get involved!

ASP depends on the commitment of professionals from the software industry. For the ASP to effectively represent you and our software industry we invite your participation. We are actively seeking passionate and capable professionals to join the ASP and serve as officers or committee chairs. Get involved at the ground level and offer your skills to help.

State of the Micro-ISV-osphere

For 2010, I think it would be a good idea to start with an assessment of your current software business situation, in comparison to the shareware industry statistics.

Our colleague Rob Ellison parsed through all the PAD files available in the ASP PAD directory (76,066 products!) and generated answers to some questions regarding the Micro-ISV-osphere state – do check it out, you might find something of interest!

So, what would you like to see ASP doing for you in 2010? Please comment below.

The ASP funded the development of a software certification service called Safer Downloads (SD) through the trial stage.
It now wants to divest itself of this property and is soliciting bids to transfer ownership.

Up for sale, as a package, are the:

• saferdownloads.com (.net & .org) and safeshareware.com domain names (4 total)
• USPTO trademark registration of the seals
• ownership of the proprietary software and content used to power the site
• activity and test records, as they exist on site

All funds offered by initial prospective customers (less than 10) have been returned. Most bank balances have been recovered by the ASP. An existing CD (time deposit) will be recovered soon and so there are no financial assets transferring to buyer under this sale.

NOT for sale are the domain hosting, and DNS, Corporation shell (negotiable), records, and PayPal account. Buyer will be expected to supply own legal, financial, and internet environment. The buyer will also be expected to operate the site independently of the ASP and not imply any ongoing ASP approval, involvement, or participation.

The ASP explicitly reserves the right to not accept any bid for any reason or apply arbitrary ranking offsets. Extent of cash payments to ASP and special pricing for ASP members are two anticipated ranking factors. ASP expectation is that bidding start at $1,000.

Contact VP@asp-shareware.org with SD4SALE anywhere in each email. Such email correspondence may be quoted in whole or in part among ASP officers, directors, and volunteers having access to ASP boardroom. We ask that you register your intent prior to Midnight Dec. 13, 2009.

ASP Member Wins ESWC's 2009 Epsilon Award

Emsi Software’s a-squared Anti-Malware Wins ESWC’s 2009 Epsilon

ASP member Christian Mairoll of Emsi Software has won the 2009 Epsilon Award for Software Excellence at the 9th annual European Software Conference. Emsi Software’s a-squared Anti-Malware application was awarded the prize earlier this month at the conference in Berlin, Germany. The Association of Shareware Professionals (ASP) was a sponsor of the European Software Conference.

Every year, the Epsilon Award recognizes the best software application from the European microISV and software community. Programs are nominated by software developers, a peer-review process that ensures that only the highest quality software is considered for the award.

In addition to receiving worldwide recognition for its software, Emsi Software was also awarded an artistic creation by a European artist, special prizes from the sponsors of the event and 200 Euros in cash which Emsi Software will donate to the SOS Children’s Villages organization founded in Austria.

The a-squared Anti-Malware Security Suite

The a-squared Anti-Malware 4.5 security suite for Windows features a double virus scanner plus behavioral analysis and stops viruses, spyware, Trojans, bots and rootkits from infecting PCs. In 2009, in seven independent head-to-head tests against other anti-malware software, a-squared Anti-Malware was chosen as the most effective.

In the latest test, run by the Malware Research Group, a-squared Anti-Malware 4.5 recognized 99.8 percent of the 554,891 malware files used in the test, a higher score than the other 21 applications tested.

While not as well-known as some heavily-advertised security solutions, a-squared Anti-Malware has a big and growing number of victories in independent tests.

The a-squared Anti-Malware 4.5 runs under Windows, costs $40 (US) for a one-year single-user license and may be bought securely online from emsisoft.com. You can download a 30-day trial version from the same web address.

10th ESWC to be Held in 2010 in Vienna

The 10th annual European Software Conference will be held in November, 2010 in Vienna, Austria. For additional information about the Epsilon Award and about the European Software Conference, visit euroconference.org or microisv.eu.

Photo Credits: Pictured above are David Boventer (left), the European Software Conference’s Executive Director and Christian Mairoll (right) founder and head of Emsi Software. Many thanks to Dave Collins of Shareware Promotions for providing photographs from the conference. Feel free to check more of Dave’s photos from the 2009 ESWC.

Download PADGen 3.1.0.41

ASP announced recently that a new version of PADGen ( 3.1.0.41) is available – utility that helps software developers create portable application description (PAD) files. This is the first major update to the PADGen™ PAD™ generation tool in over a year.

Does your software support Windows 7?  If so, you need to update to the new PADGen.  In addition to Windows 7, the new PADGen supports a streamlined and standardized list of Windows operating systems.

Are you switching to Mac? The new PADGen supports a standard OSX type rather than specific version numbers.  This future-proofs your submissions.  iPhone is new as well.

This support is based on the PAD 3.10, available to download sites for a few months.  While there will be some inevitable transitioning between old and new specs, the future appears to belong to Windows 7 and iPhones so we urge all authors to convert to the platform which supports them: download PADGen 3.1.0.41.

Special thanks to Oliver Grahl for the development of this update.

The October 2009 book selection is “How to Become a Marketing Superstar – Unexpected Rules that Ring the Cash Register” by Jeffrey J. Fox. It’s about using common sense and sound business practices to find and keep customers. It’s about marketing. Most of the concepts in the book apply directly to mISVs who are trying to increase their software sales.

Last month’s Book Club selection was “Then We Set His Hair on Fire – Insights and Accidents from a Hall-of-Fame Career in Advertising” by Phil Dusenberry. The title refers to the creation of the Pepsi ad in which Michael Jackson had an unfortunate accident. But the book is about insights, ideas, creativity, advertising, and business.

Phil Dusenberry is the former Chairman of BBDO North America, an advertising giant that managed accounts for General Electric, FedEx, Frito-Lay, Visa, Mars, HBO, Pizza Hut, Polaroid, and Apple Computers.

One of my favorite stories from the book is about soup. The lessons apply to the software industry, too.

Dusenberry’s firm landed the Campbell’s Soup account in the 1980s. Soup sales were flat. BBDO did some serious research, and learned something unusual – lots of consumers had kitchen cabinets full of Campbell’s Soup.

Campbell’s Soup had been advertised for decades as a safety measure. It’s virtually non perishable, and you need to keep it in the house for emergencies. There was a huge disconnect between the purchase rate and the consumption rate for Campbell’s Soup.

What about shareware?

Most software companies ask their prospects, over and over, to download their software. Lots of people listen to this message and act on it. About one hundred times as many people download software as buy it, so the “download” message is being read, understood and acted upon. Just as the buyers of Campbell’s Soup didn’t receive the “eat the soup” message, many shareware downloaders aren’t receiving the “buy it now” message.

How did Campbell’s address their problem of stagnant sales? They changed their advertising campaign to stress the benefits of consuming soup, and not just buying it and storing it for emergencies. People started eating the soup that they had been buying.

What might software developers do to get more people to buy the software that they’ve downloaded?

The answer isn’t obvious or simple. You have to address each of the decision points where consumers are currently dropping the ball:

• Some prospects download and forget about your application.
• Some developers have named the program “setup.exe” so prospects have no idea how to find the program after they’ve downloaded it.
• Some people install it, intending to try it later. And they forget about it. Or when they try it a month later, the trial version has expired.
• Some developers have no quick-start guide or tips of the day or sample files that can get their prospects using the software quickly and easily, so the application is abandoned in frustration.
• Some developers use registration incentives that aren’t very persuasive, so people using the trial version rarely purchase it.

Again, you have to identify every decision point where users can either buy the application or not. Find a way to entice them into making a buying decision.

Campbell Soup’s new tag line was “Reach for the Campbell’s. It’s right on your shelf.”

What’s your solution to break out of the one-percent download-to-sales conversion rate?

These are the type of topics that we talk about in ESC’s Software Marketing Book Club. You can read more of these discussions in the “Learn More About Marketing, and Sell More Software” article in the September, 2009 issue of ASPects, the monthly newsletter of the Association of Shareware Professionals.

Learn more about the ESC on their website. Be sure to follow the Book Club announcements in ESC’s public blog.

In many cases, they show a beautiful virtual 3D box shot, but somehow neglect the same eye candy on their product screenshots. What I am talking about here is the use of various artefacts such as not properly clipped window borders, weird shadows or the most obvious “dirt” on background.

So it is important to have pixel perfect virtual boxes (which don’t even exist in reality), but the quality of screenshots of products itself doesn’t matter ? Or are there some other obstacles that make producing nice screenshots a hard task ? Lets have a look.

New Windows 7 & Vista Aero theme look

With the arrival of the new Windows Aero theme, new problems related to taking screenshots emerged. The new see-through Aero Glass windows with rounded corners look really cool. But in the moment you capture images of your software with traditional print screen tools, you will also capture everyting you see beneath the glass parts of window. A new term was coined to name this – “a dirty background”. Dirty backgrounds may look weird, out of context and act disturbing. We all know having additional links on shopping cart page may distract customer from the buying act, so why should we tolerate distracting elements on images whose main purpose is to persuade potential customers to buy as well ?

Have a look at this screenshot:

I just grabbed the above screenshot, while writing this article, from the current website of one well-respected ASP member (hope it’s ok Andy ).

Notice the “dirty background”. Also, the corners of the clipped window look tufty. Looking at this real example makes my eyes wander to the dirty background area trying to recognize what was beneath. I think this is distracting, because I should be considering the quality of the help file window and not puzzle dirty backgrounds.

So I made one small improvement:

And, because Perfect TablePlan relates to organizing ceremonial events, I themed the same screenshot on a background with wedding table image plus one reflection effect for the screenshot itself. Have a look:

However, in the last example, the background is back again, which may distract users from the screenshot objective. I think in this case we have a better kind of distraction, because the wedding table image background  relates to the screenshot itself, while the previous window with random dirty background was completely unrelated.  The screenshot in this example can be further improved by putting more focus on the captured window itself, while keeping related background image present.

For this purpose, I made the original background image as half transparent against solid black background producing the following result:

Does it matter ?

Now that we improved Andy’s real-world screenshot, the most important question still persists – does it matter? Would it improve the overall perception or even increase sales? The fact is Andy is successful even with dirty background screenshots. So what, would he need it ?

Looking for an answer I have found following articles:

1. Bob Walsh in his “Why Hammers Sell Better Than Your Software” article wrote “A really good screenshot… this one screenshot sold me on this task management application”, (referring to culturecode .com). Really, this Mac-shot is very clean and the magnifier effects help emphasize the focus even more.
2. Stephen Anderson in his blog post claims that “Eye Candy IS A Critical Business Requirement“. My favorite slide from his presentation shows very nicely that eye-candy is also about trust.
3. Brandon Staggs on his web design service page claims: “Everyone knows the power of a first impression. The first judgment a visitor makes about your web site is how it looks”. So here is a question for Brandon: What influence does have screenshots made with various “artefacts” on the “first impression” factor ?
4. Apple – absolute perfection in design. If you look at any Apple software website, you can clearly see only  artistic crafted screenshots created in 3D space with shadows and reflections. Apple claims “design is function”.

So the conclusion of the above examples is that yes, pretty screenshots matter. The main reasons are:

• It helps to better target customer FOCUS.
• Pretty screenshots build customer TRUST.
• Pretty screenshots (on pretty web page) make a good FIRST IMPRESSION.

How can you do it ?

Lets move on to the technical part – creating a clean and pretty screenshot in the new Windows Aero environment. My main concern here is to explain how to get rid of the “dirty background” problem. There is a myriad of screen capturing tools but only 2 and half of them are able to directly capture clean images of windows in Aero Glass environment (none of that tools is from Microsoft tough).

Note: Besides “dirty backgrounds”, another problem is how to capture gradual surrounding shadow of windows.

Without tools

Essentially, you don’t need any tools to make a clean screenshot in Windows Aero. The trick is to position the window being captured against some solid color surface, then capture it and crop it. Just follow tutorials like this one.

With this approach, to get the solid background, you can do any of these two:

1. Set desktop wallpaper to some solid color and remove icons in some greater area to make space for windows positioning.
2. Open an empty white page in any Internet browser and lay Aero windows against the empty white page.

After the capture, a cropping step is required, because you are capturing either the whole desktop or a greater region with traditional capture tools. Depending on the tool, some may have a built-in cropping function.

There is also the option to turn off Windows Aero theme. This makes windows non-transparent, but it doesn’t solve the problem with rounded corners and window shadows. Finally, you must position the window against a solid background to properly handle rounded corners and shadow.

Last but not least, cropping itself may become an aesthetics problem. In most cases, you will have to do it by hand, which will produce unequal margins on more screenshots. And it may look unprofessional to have multiple screenshots – each with slightly different margin around. Of course, you can crop right around the window border – loosing shadow and possibly producing tufty corners.

The final problem which cannot be solved through this manual method is the fact that the captured images are already combined against its background color. Further adjustments as shown in the  examples above (with wedding backgrounds) are due to the lack of Alpha channel information, almost impossible to do without a professional tools.

With tools

Another approach is to use a tool which captures clean Windows Aero image (possibly with Alpha transparency channel).  There are only a few options here. A total of 2 applications can capture the clean image of Aero windows with Alpha channel and 1 application can capture the clean image, but without Alpha channel in captured window.

As you can see, the lack of tools might explain why many vendors tolerate the lower quality of their screenshots. It’s logical – if it’s tedious or hard to achieve, they simply don’t do it.

The Tools (sorted by price)

1. Window Clippings by Kenny Kerr, price $18

This tool simply does it. Captures clean Windows Aero images with complete Alpha transparency channel and shadows around. You can capture multiple windows at once, add watermark or send resulting image to FTP. Images produced by Window Clippings can be reused in external tools such as Photoshop for creating more sophisticated compositions (eg. themed backgrounds, reflection effects, 3D perspectives etc.)

2. WinSnap by NTWind software, prices starting at $24.90

This tool only does half of the job. It captures clean Windows Aero images, but without the underlying Alpha transparency channel. It simulates the surrounding shadow, which is a consequence of not recording the Alpha channel itself. As a result, images produced with WinSnap cannot be fully reused in Photoshop for more sophisticated compositions, because transparent parts of windows are already combined against white color. WinSnap on the other hand offers built in effects – reflection, contour, rotate, resize and watermark. It also has a sophisticated function for capturing all application windows at once.

3. CrossGL Alpha Screenshot by MicroInvention Ltd., price $29.95

This tool does it too. It captures clean Windows Aero images with complete Alpha channel and shadow around. You can capture multiple windows individually and position them mutually in a built-in Image Composer. Images produced by CrossGL Alpha Screenshot can be fully reused in external tools such as Photoshop. The program has built-in reflection, rotation, resize and 3D perspective tools and can put an arbitrary image on background. Watermarking, FTP and Send by Email are also included.

Use of these tools makes it quick and easy. They also automatically crop Windows Aero screenshots with constant margins, so your screenshots don’t suffer from the crop-by-hand variable margins problem.

We all know that we should be spending more time reading good books about business, sales and marketing. But it’s difficult to find worthwhile books. Here are some tips for locating the best business books, buying them affordably, and building a library that will pay dividends year after year.
Choosing Good Business Books
Amazon.com has more reviews than other book sites. But it’s often difficult to tell if the book being reviewed is relevant to the software industry in general, and to mISVs in particular.  Many times I’ll buy a marketing book based on amazon.com recommendations, only to find that the book is targeted at larger enterprises. Most of us don’t need to read about strategies that ensure that our marketing staff is communicating effectively with our manufacturing managers.

In addition, there are a lot of books whose principles simply don’t translate well into the world of software development. A better source of information is to listen to recommendations from fellow software developers.

• Read book-related threads in the ASP newsgroups;
• Read the Software Marketing Book Club postings in the Educational Software Cooperative’s (ESC’s) blog;
• There are more than 30 reviews of marketing and sales books in the archives of my Marketing Newsletter. All of them are written from the perspective of a mISV in the software development industry;
• Ask for recommendations from other mISVs, and share information about your favorite books with the community.

Finding the Books You Need
Once you’ve chosen a book, the least expensive way to acquire it is to borrow it through your local library. Here in the US, town libraries’ book catalogs are searchable online. I’m able to easily search the catalogs of 20-or-so nearby towns. All local libraries here in Connecticut have inter-library loan programs that allow you to borrow books from any library in the state, for just a dollar or two.

Online stores such as amazon.com offer discounts on most books. And you can find deeply-discounted bargains in the used-book category for many business and marketing books.

Local bookstores are a great source for recently-published books. Generally, you can spend as much time as you like checking each book, to ensure that it will be useful in your business.
Building a Library of Marketing, Sales, and Business Books
There are quite a few bookstores on the Internet that sell remainders. My favorite is Book Closeouts. Remainders are books that publishers sell at deep discounts because they printed too many copies. Or they’re books that have been returned by book stores to the publishers, and the publishers don’t want to carry tiny quantities of them in their inventories.  Book Closeouts offers more than 50,000 books at deeply discounted prices, including some really great marketing and sales books. These books are so inexpensive, it’s easy – and affordable – to build a library.

Here in the US, local libraries sell used books to raise funds. A small town library might offer 15,000 books at its weekend sale. Larger libraries can have up to four times that number. The typical mix of books is 95 percent donations from the people in town, and 5 percent library discards. While books can cost between $2 (US) each and $5 per bag, you can generally expect to pay $1 for each book you buy.

At each book sale, there are typically a dozen-or-so dealers with their handheld PDAs and phones, reading barcodes and making big stacks of books. But most of the books are bought by book-lovers and bargain-hunters. You’ll find books that simply aren’t available at bookstores. And you’ll be helping your local library. Don’t go to these sales expecting to find recent tech books. But you’ll often find great business books, and books in every category. To find book sales in your area, visit Booksalefinder.com.

Finally, there are book-trading clubs online. You list the books that you want to trade, and you’re given credit for each book that other club members request and receive from you. You use your credits to request books from other members. All you pay are the shipping charges to send your book to another member. Check out Book Mooch.
The Bottom Line
Programming might be the most enjoyable part of your business. But building a successful software development business requires a lot of knowledge about business, marketing and sales. Spend a couple of hours each month reading hard-hitting business books, and watch your business grow, year after year.

… if you had to start your software story again?

As a software industry enthusiast, I am curious to know how others see their business development and what they would change, in hindsight and with a set of brand new 2009 eyes.

Neil on Business of Software Network asked the community a similar question (If you could wave a magic wand…) related to the marketing of software. Answers such as focus on usability, better knowledge of customers poured in (the discussion is still open).

Some even expressed their wish to get into their customers heads completely, or even in their competition’s financial reports, to see if it’s worth outrunning them anyway.

When asked the same question, some ASP members mentioned for example the need to have had a team right from the start or outsource the skills they did not have, instead of doing it all by themselves.

“If I were to start my software business again, I would find teammates and split the ownership. Or, I would have come to the realization much sooner that my dream of bootstrapping my own sweat investment into a good rate of return was not succeeding” – Mark Walsen, from Notation Software.

S Gupta from SSGIndia agreed on the necessity of partnership and even stated willingness to find such partners inside ASP “I would have started with partners with equal stake, commitments, diverse capabilities and Networking abilities“.

Riaz Faride from UpClick also stressed some interesting points on the ASP discussion lists, such as the need for community building even before the product launch and better security assessment:

“I would start working on a thin client less than 5MB in size, which will be managed by a central network (same as Cloud Computing approach). The thin client would be distributed free of charge. All the features of the software would be subscription based or pay-per-use based. In this way, I would’t have to worry about protection, because we all know that no matter how hard you try securing a software, crackers always find a way around. Most importantly, I would be able to generate recurring revenues“.

I think the “what if” question is useful even if all it does is making you stop and evaluate where you are or if it makes you admit your mistakes along the way.  Some of the mistakes and pieces of advice I frequently hear from some ASP members or other software business professionals I have interviewed are:

• Bob Walsh mentions problems that microISVs often have, such as not having a clear USP (Unique Selling Proposition) on their website, the lack of customer testimonials, being coy about the price and not presenting real contact information on the website;
• Eric Sink’s advice is to make sure, first of all, that your software is needed out there, that people will want to talk about it and that the current customers are your top priority, even before getting new ones;
• Dave Collins warns about the failure to focus on marketing. He also recommends software authors to outsource the activities related to graphic and website design, press releases, SEO, AdWords, accounting and so on and to concentrate on development;
• Marty Cagan says that the biggest mistake is confusing customer requirements with product requirements and often speaks about good product management – I recommend taking a look at his articles from time to time.
• Nico Westerdale as well says one of his regrets is not moving faster in business development from the beginning and mentions the need to take high risks.

Andy Brice, another ASP member, even got a full presentation on the top 10 mistakes microISVs frequently make, that I warmly recommend watching.

So, what would you do differently if you had to start your software story over again? Please share your experience and lessons with us. It would be greatly helpful.

… the idea behind it:

This new resource is intended to help you as a member of the Association of Shareware Professionals share your experience and learn from others on various topics of your interest.

… main benefits you can get from the blog:

I’m sure many of you are advocates of blogs in general. What’s in it for you on this one?  First of all, you will know how others handled various aspects of their business, what was successful and what went wrong. You can learn from their know-how and calibrate your strategy in the right direction, avoiding pitfalls.

Secondly, you can benefit from important advertising / promotion opportunities via the ASP Blog. Don’t get me wrong, we won’t encourage or accept blatant advertising. We encourage real knowledge, tips, ideas. The more you contribute, the more your name will be associated with Software Industry Professionals.

… contributing to the blog:

Any ASP member can post on the blog. You just have to send your request to blog@asp-shareware.org and you will get further details via email.

… what you will read about:

Apart from official organization announcements, the blog’s content will be entirely generated by ASP members, so the topics and posts will reflect the subjects you consider to be important -  software development, marketing and distribution a.s.o. This said, we look forward to receiving  your suggestions regarding blog categories or any other issue related to the blog.

Last but not least, I want to renew our invitation to drop by the ASP Hospitality Suite at SIC (July 16-18, 2009 in Boston, Massachusetts). Be sure to come where you will be able to talk to us and to other members over a cup of coffee. For a more elaborate discussion and schmoozing, you can join us at the ASP Lunch!

Welcome.