Irie Tools (Business & Technology)

I was looking through the statistics for this blog today, and I noticed that someone had done a search on Google for “Irie Pascal” vista. So now seems to be a good time to apologize for the delay in updating Irie Pascal, and explain a little bit about why this is taking so long.

The main reason for the delay in updating Irie Pascal is that I have been working on a consulting project for the past few months. I am hoping to finish most of the work for this project by the end of this month (there is likely to be remaining work with integration, customer acceptance testing, and documentation for a few weeks after that). However the actual update to Irie Pascal should not take more than about two weeks, once I start.

Let me apologize again for the delay and ask everyone to bear with me a little longer.

See these earlier posts, Updating Irie Pascal for Windows Vista and Update: Irie Pascal, for more information about the coming update to Irie Pascal.

I have read about the value of promotions, where you hold contests and give away prizes as a way to generate interest in your business or products, but I haven’t really been excited by the idea. Well, today that changed when I came across this contest by Jeremy the founder of LinuxQuestions.org which is sponsoring the MySQL Conference and Expo 2008. Jeremy’s contest is a raffle for a free pass to the conference, and all you have to do to be eligable for the raffle is to post in this thread explaining how you work with MySQL or how you’re involved in the MySQL community along with why you’d like to attend the event.

I love this idea because it is focussed around the product being promoted. The prize is either the product or something directly related to the product (in this case a conference about the product), and best of all, the entries in the contest are basically product testimonials.

The Jamaica Business Development Centre is putting on the Small Business Expo 2008. See flyer below for details.

On the rare occassions (and by that I mean never) that I think about the recent Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA) signed between the European Community and the CARIFORUM countries, I think about big industries and businesses trying to gain access to the EU market and vice versa. I do not think about small businesses like mine. So, recently when I got an invitation to a seminar to clarify the opportunities and challenges for micro, small and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs), presented by the recent EPA, I was less than enthusiastic.

To make things worse, the invitation then goes on to say:

At this seminar, MSMEs will have an opportunity to meet and interact with representatives from
the Caribbean Regional Negotiating Machinery (CRNM), the Delegation of the European
Commission to Jamaica, European diplomats and members of the Consular Corps representing
European countries.

I almost fell asleep just thinking about it. I thought the idea of an invitation was to make people want to go.

Anyway, I wish I could ignore this invitation, but it is obvious that this EPA is going to be very important, and unfortunately nobody seems to be in a hurry to explain to the public what was signed on our behalf. So how can I turn down an invitation to find out more? By the way, that’s a real question, please someone, tell me how I can get out of this?

Even the text of the EPA seems to be a secret (or at least well hidden). How hard can it be to put the document on a website and link to it?

I got an invitation a few days ago to a Speaker Forum at the Technology Innovation Centre (TIC), where the guest speaker is supposed to be the Minister of Industry, Investment and Commerce. The invitation says to come & hear about:

• The Minister’s plans for the MSME sector.
• Policies that will address major challenges affecting business growth.
• Business incubation as a developmental tool.
• And much more.

I will admit that my first reaction to this invitation was “yawn, not another speech”. After all, why would the Minister say anything new about these important topics to such a small audience? But the more I think about it, the more curious I get. I have not heard the Minister say anything about these topics before, so anything he says will be probably be important (and some of it may even be interesting). I am also kind of curious to find out, exactly what is meant by a Speaker Forum. It sounds like a speech followed by a Q&A session, but maybe it will turn out to be something else.

The danger of course, is that I will go and get trapped at some kind of press conference that I would be better off watching on TV from the comfort of my favourite chair. Still, even that might be interesting (certainly it would be new for me). So on Monday I will see if I am not too late to accept the inivitation.

I just came across this article, Facebook Now In German - Thanks To 2,000 Generous Users on TechCrunch and I liked the idea so much I had to share it. Apparently Facebook has managed to get its users to translate their site into different languages. I don’t think this idea will work for me, but maybe it will work for your site or your product (I will let the idea roll around in my head for a while, who knows maybe a way will occur to me).

The great thing about selling software on the web is the fact that your market is virtually the entire planet. Your customer can come from anywhere and speak any language. For example, the top languages of visitors to Irie Tools over the last 30 days were:

1. US English
2. British English
3. Polish
4. German
5. French
6. Romanian
7. Italian
8. Hungarian
9. Dutch

That’s a pretty intimidating list for a small company like mine (and it changes all the time). I would love to be able to offer Irie Pascal to more people in their native language. One of these days, maybe I will.