Categories
article ecommerce emarketing

Reading list for marketers – Stanford SMM 2010 + mine

I was luckly to participate to the Strategic marketing management class in Stanford GSB in 2010. and from this program I discovered a lot of references from various books. Because a lot of participants were interesting in such reading information, a reading list has been compiled by Stanford faculties. In the same time, I m adding some books I have found potentially interesting or suggested by other participants of the program. Unfornutly I didn’t read all of them, and I can’t make a review of each book for the moment.

Books recommended by BABA SHIV

Digital Marketing

Flip the Funnel: How to Use Existing Customers to Gain New Ones

Web Analytics 2.0: The Art of Online Accountability and Science of Customer Centricity

Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain

Phantoms in the Brain: Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind

Predictably Irrational, Revised and Expanded Edition: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions

Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness.

The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World

The Age of the Unthinkable: Why the New World Disorder
Constantly Surprises Us And What We Can Do About It

Suggested by JENNIFER AAKER

The Dragonfly Effect: Quick, Effective, and Powerful Ways To Use Social Media to Drive Social Change

Power: Why Some People Have It and Others Don’t

We Feel Fine: An Almanac of Human Emotion

Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard

Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us

Trust Agents: Using the Web to Build Influence, Improve Reputation, and Earn Trust

Suggested by Christian Wheeler

Influence: Science and Practice

Suggested by Dan Thomas Author of

Business Sense: Exercising Management’s Five Freedoms

Books about Positioning and Influence

Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind

Influence: Science and Practice

You’ve Got to Be Believed to Be Heard: Reach the First Brain to Communicate in Business and in Life

Words That Change Minds: Mastering the Language of Influence 2nd edition

Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die

How to Get Your Point Across in 30 Seconds or Less

Books about Problem Solving

Schools That Learn: A Fifth Discipline Fieldbook for Educators, Parents and Everyone Who Cares About Education

The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures

Unfolding the Napkin

Books about Business Models

The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail

Business Model Generation: A Handbook for Visionaries, Game Changers, and Challengers (The Strategyzer series)

Seizing the White Space: Business Model Innovation for Growth and Renewal

Books about Design Thinking

The Design of Business: Why Design Thinking is the Next Competitive Advantage

Glimmer: How Design Can Transform Your Life, and Maybe Even the World

Books about Digital Marketing

The New Rules of Marketing and PR: How to Use Social Media, Blogs, News Releases, Online Video, and Viral Marketing to Reach Buyers Directly

Inbound Marketing: Get Found Using Google, Social Media, and Blogs

Digital Marketing—Newsletters and Blogs – Written and compiled by Dan Thomas

There are literally hundreds of Electronic Newsletters and Blogs devoted to Digital Marketing. Here are just a few that may be useful to you, depending on your interests and type of business.

www.emarketer.com eMarketer provides a data rich update on developments in the use of emarketing tools. The company’s primary business is to sell an electronic database of marketing data on digital marketing to companies. If I remember correctly, it is about $30,000 per year.

www.mashable.com Mashable is the daily news feed about developments in the Digital Marketing world. It covers a wide range of topics and is a source that the people in the industry follow.

www.marketingsherpa.com Marketing Sherpa was one of the early entries in the field. They have a strong reputation and a broad set of resources on their web site. They do have a focus on B2B marketing.

www.marketo.com Marketo focuses on B2B applications for Digital Marketing. They have a marketing automation solution they sell. They also have a very good series of webinars that cover B2B topics.

www.marketingprofs.com Marketing profs started out as a group of marketing professors. It seems to have been going through a major transformation in the last year. The blog, however, is quite interesting, so you may want to take a look at it.

www.wdfm.com Larry Chase’s Web Digest for Marketers often has interesting articles and links to more complete data.

Categories
article emarketing SEO

QuadraCentifiable : a new SEO experience

If you don’t know what is Quadracentiable, let’s say you are not the only one.
After graphic battle, logo contest, photograph review, please take a look at that SEO contest experience ( SEO is Search Engine Optimization ).
You can find everything you need to know about Quadracentiable if you click on the link of http://www.nzseochallenge.co.nz/articles/
Actually it is a great demonstration about how efficient SEO works, this web site has been built by Michael Brandon a NZ SEO Guru. I worked with him while I was in VSO-Software, and he brilliantly succeed to place the company in the first sport of Google for competitive keyword sentences such as “avi to dvd”

QuadraCentifiable is not only a cool word but a ridiculous good sample of what any web marketer should to optimize their visibility on internet.

Categories
article facebook photography software review

Easy photo uploader for Facebook

Lazy guys, Easy Photo Uploader for Facebook is a software which allows you to send directly pictures to your albums from the shell menu. Select one or several pictures from the Windows file explorer, then right-click to display the popup menu, and select the option “send photo(s) to Facebook”

The program will resize and upload to your Facebook photo Albums. it is much easier and faster than using the integrated dialog of Facebook to select pictures.

The program also convert to jpeg if the source file is a RAW ( .CR2 , .NEF, .MRW etc.. ) you just need to have the codec installed, or you can also consider to download FastPictureViewer WIC Codec pack or the genuine codec from your digital camera manufacturor

Download Easy Photo Uploader for Facebook

Categories
article ecommerce emarketing

Avangate E-commerce reseller and Affiliate platform for software publishers

Avangate is a e-commerce platform based in Europe and with Offices in USA and Asia. They provide solution for software publishers to register the products, so basically it is like a bank service but specialized in the software market. This way you can focus on the product and no waste any time to build a shopping cart, customer back office and database.
You will be able to support a lot of different paiment methods :

Visa , Mastercard, American Express, Paypal , Wire Transfer, Alipay ( Chinese method ), Solo , Trialpay .. all in one.

You can open a publisher account easily and it’s free, but you need to have a web site already done

Open Avangate publisher account

If you have any question please feel free to ask any question about it, I have worked with them as a publisher for VSO and as a consultant for other companies.

Categories
article

Most used programming language and stats

What is the most popular developing environment between Java, PHP or C, but also Delphi and other Objective C ? If you wonder what next language to use for your development, I suggest to read that excellent report ( updated May 2010 ):

http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.html

Nice graph and stats, to check the trends of users of Delphi ( I have a one-day event with Embarcadero tomorrow so I was looking at the market share for it ), or Objective-C which is used for iPhone and iPad developments.

Categories
article photography software review

WIC Codec to display and decode RAW photos – .CR2 .NEF .DNG….

What is a WIC codec ? it is the acronym for Windows Imaging Component. It has been introduced in Windows XP service pack 3, and by default in Vista and 7. It is an interface definition ( and SDK ) to “add” to Windows the ability to read and write ( Codec means Co-der and Dec-oder ) new image format.
It is something more and more popular with the new DSLR digital camera and the “pro” format RAW format ( .CR2 for Canon , .NEF for Nikon, .DNG for Adobe, and much more other formats for Sony, Minolta, Mamya.
If you have the correct WIC codec installed, you are able to see the raw files in explorer, but also in any compatible client using a WIC interface, such VSO Photo Gallery, Windows Live Photo Gallery, Windows Media Center, and more… so finally it allows the computer to understand how to display new and proprietary photo format. By the way, can you imagine the famous Picasa still can’t read supported WIC format ? Picasa is still using DCRAW which is a nice library to read RAW photo but unfornutly the color and speed isn’t as good as genuine WIC codec when it is delivered by digital camera manufacturors.

Thats all the problem, Canon ( I m a Canon user so I don’t know very well for the other manufacturors ) is quite often late to update the software part, forcing any new digital camera buyers to use the software delivered as a bundle with the camera. It is just software !!! but for unknown reason, they are quite slow to update the required drivers and .. that’s not all…

Let’s talk about x64 bits version of WIC codec, and you will find Digital Manufacturors are really hardware oriented. Is there a solution…. hopefully there is one now, that I want to share today :

http://www.fastpictureviewer.com/codecs/

It is a all-in-one, hassle-free solution to support all the major RAW files with one package, even if you are using mainly only .CR2 or .NEF you can consider this option as you could tune some options that the original manufacturor doesn’t allow to do. You need to know the .RAW files often contains 1 to 3 differents thumbnails size and a copy of the raw files as an embedded jpeg version ( using the default settings of the digital camera for the white balance, sharpness, creative mode ). Using that file stream you can greatly speed up the display of the raw files within Windows Explorer and see thumbnails of raw , as you are used to watch .jpeg or bitmap files. It is one of the only solution to get your raw files supported with x64bits edition of Windows !

Not only FastPictureViewer is providing support for x64 bits version that the original manufacturors don’t want to do, but it offers to any users the best performance, and extra features. A must have !

This codec offers a few other options and the development is going fast to implement new features, for example it will have a better and more accurate rendering than Windows internal codec itself, by rotating the picture correctly, or removing the black bar which adjust the size of the thumbnail to the regular aspect ratio of the windows thumbnails.