Adriana Iordan,
Web Marketing Manager, Avangate

Welcome to the 2nd year Anniversary edition of Avangate Digest!

So it's been 2 years! I want to thank you all for being loyal readers. Thanks to all the subscribers but also to our unsubscribers (yes we have them as well, unfortunately they won't see this) for pointing me what we need to improve along the way. While our first year of Digest was certainly memorable :) (OK, at least for me), our 2nd year has been exceptional, especially because of all the new friends we have made. The feedback volume increased and the subscribers list doubled each month.

To celebrate this anniversay, I invite you in return to share your best practices and experiences about your software business on the Avangate blog, in a guest post. Needless to say, we will promote you and make sure you benefit from this (drop me an email to tell you more).

Let's see what else we prepared for this issue - many of the ISVs wonder if they should use resellers to distribute their software products, what are the pitfalls to avoid and the best practices. Andy Brice wrote recently a blog post about The two types of reseller and my colleague Delia interviewed Ken Beam, an expert in channel sales development to answer to all these questions. Ken consideres direct sales as "a weekend on the town while Channels are a long-term commitment... a partnership marriage! Not everybody survives the post-Honeymoon period." To make sure you are well prepared, read his answers.

Claudiu continues his web analytics tricks series of posts with a list of tools you can use to find out what people click on. Roxana walks you, as usual, to some cool places to hang out online.

We welcome your feedback. If you would like to share your thoughts, please don't hesitate to email me directly at adriana.iordan@avangate.com.

I hope you enjoy this newsletter!
Until next time,
Adriana Iordan

TED.com is a website with an impressive collection of videos of no longer than 18 minutes discourses and talks given by "the world's most fascinating thinkers and doers" during the annual TED (Technology, Entertainment and Design) conference. More than that, it's a community where people discuss and most often add upon the "ideas worth spreading" presented in the videos. TED is refreshing, inspiring and it helps you keep focus on "stuff that really matters".

Blogrunner Technology - Another source of great technology news brought by the New York Times, but with a twist - it works like a news aggregator "monitoring news articles and blog posts and tracking news events as they develop across the Web". So what's cool about it is that you get access to the same story from several sources so that you get all the details and perspectives, or at least the most relevant.

TheRegister.co.uk - Every office/collaboration space has an evil character or a sufficient paranoid one that imagines the evil doers that surround him/her making resistance futile. And when all else fails, we of course blame tech sys admin :). This special section of The Register presents an age's old stories collection starring the Bastard Operator from Hell (BOFH) and his assistant, the Pimply-Faced Youth that do all sort of evil based on tricks such as deleting user's files or locking users in impossibly dangerous places.

I bet you will find at least one new idea from the articles and blog posts below:

The most important startup decision you may forget to make - a blog post by Bob Walsh
Picking a platform is the startup equivalent of marriage: some sense it’s the right match is more that a good thing, it's a must-have. In this post, I'd like to enumerate quickly what as of 2009 those platform options are and offer a few ideas about how to evaluate your platform options.

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Discount coupons for affiliates
How are discount coupons used in affiliate marketing? They are not a new technique for affiliate marketers, but in the near future we could easily foresee an abundance of promotions, discounts - let’s call them "deals".

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How is the software channel coping with the crisis?
we're doing a survey on how the crisis is impacting the channel distribution in the software industry. If you are an ISV using a partner network or a reseller in the software industry, take our brief survey and become part of the study - find out how your own challenges and solutions regarding the channel compare with those of your peers.

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What good is Partner Relationship Management to me?
We all use software applications, products, computer programs or whatever you want to call them to make our lives or jobs easier. But the same product will mean different things to different people. What good is a PRM (Partner Relationship Management system) to me or a 360 degree analysis of partner relationship management systems from the users’ point of view. Here follows.

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