Great site for Marketing !

A friend of mine recently pointed me to marketingsherpa, and having just embarked upon the perilous journey of marketing kadonk, I must say I am impressed.

marketingsherpa often have recent articles available for free for 7 days, and their blog contains an astonishing amount of tips and tricks.

Currently, we're in the process up fine-tuning our Google Adwords campaigns, and I've discovered it's quite a science... When I'm done I shall post what I've learned here.

The Fake reviews at microsoftprojectviewer.com

It is no secret that I am the President of KaDonk, Inc. As such, I am looking for other competitors, reviews, and blogs that are concerned with Project Management.

Today I came across an interesting one, microsoftprojectviewer.com. At first glance, this very basic webpage seems like a great place to compare project viewers, and get a recommendation on which one is best... However, after reading a little more, it seems to be rather doubtful this is anything else than a great promotion for Steelray. Let's analyze it a little deeper.

1. Obviously, Steelray is the highest ranked viewer.

This is fine if course, if the website is truly impartial. However it is also the only review with positive mention of... well, anything. All other reviews mention "doubtful legal territory", "unnecessarily complex, " or "doesn't feel finished." One of the other reviews even mention Steelray positively. Hardly fair. Read them and see yourself.

2. The reviews have many facts wrong, for instance, Seavus IS in fact a Microsoft partner (as far as I can see on the Microsoft partner sites). The UI comments are clearly off (I've tried several of these viewers myself, and they're pretty good). In fact, Seavus is a CLEAR winner over Steelray any day, which is clear for anyone who tries the two.

3. The fake form for contacting the non-existing editor of this seemingly objective 3rd party evaluation site always fails with a note about an empty "comment" field. It is almost as if no comments are wanted.

And of course the nail in the coffin:
4. The Domain microsoftprojectviewer.com is registered to Brian Leach at GoDaddy.com. Interestingly enough, Steelray.com is also registered to Brian Leach. Coincidence?

Now, don't get me wrong. I don't mind that you blow your own horn, or try to sell your own product. But presenting what looks like a 'fair' review, which is obviously nothing that a scam, that I don't like.

I've tried a number of free viewers, and compared them to ours (LiveProject). I urge you to make your own comparisons !

Brian, come on, take that scam down, it's embarrasing.

Thoughts on Google Docs

Tom Taulli asked me for the BloggingStocks interview, what I thought of Software as a Service. Like Google docs. My answer never made it to the article, but I kept thinking about the question.

I have a theory now, a litmus test of online services if you will. Imagine the following scenario:

You have spent 2 weeks preparing a huge presentation for a client. As you leave your office to meet the client, you have two options (you can't choose both, for the sake of argument):
1. You can store the presentation on your laptop and launch it directly from there, or
2. You can store your presentation in google docs, and launch it directly from there.
Which one do you pick?

Today, I cannot imagine anyone picking option 2. What if google docs is down? What if you can't get an internet connection at your clients offices? What if you forget your login? On the other hand, you run the risk of having a hard-disk crash, or having your laptop stolen. Yet, I think I know what choice I would make...

LiveProject 2.0 is out in the wild...

This week we finally release LiveProject 2.0. In that regard, we sent out a press release, and I got interviewed on BloggingStocks.

Release 2.0 was major for us, since we revamped large parts of our UI, fixed numerous bugs, and of course added major features such as the Gantt Chart. Now we'll go back to posting more frequent updates, every few weeks, with some cool features some of our customers have requested.

On the business side, we decided to offer up a free Microsoft project viewer version. The code is the same as the professional version, but users won't need an account, and they can use it as long as they wish. Our purpose is to get LiveProject on as many machines as possible. Once it's there, we hope that at least some customers will realize the great value we also offer with our collaboration features. Those collaboration features are what we sell of course, but a free project viewer is an amazing offer. Steelray and Seavus are our main competitors, and they each charge well for a project viewer.

It shall be exciting to see what the future brings, so far our downloads and response have been great.

And now, registered on Technorati see my Technorati Profile.