Elastic Path Sales Director Mark Williams and Get Elastic host DaveO sit down in a neighborhood coffee shop to discuss the art of consultative selling in this podcast.
Mark offers anecdotal examples of how groups make decisions and offers practical tips and processes to help companies make the right decision when purchasing an ecommerce solution.
[Photo of Wark Williams by Kris Kurg]
With four Elastic Path developers along for the ride, Get Elastic host DaveO listens to accounts of progressive knowledge gathered at the No Fluff, Just Stuff symposium in Redmond, Washington.
Topics include: Selenium, Java Script, AJAX, AOP, Agile along with other developer tools and techniques plus other roadtrip high-lights from poker games to border guard software education.
Elastic Path Professional Services Manager Frank Chin (featured on Get Elastic Podcast #4) led a rag-tag team of developers down to the “No Fluff, Just Stuff” symposium in Redmond Washington. Here is his blow-by-blow, “stream of consciousness” account of their learning adventure and roadtrip hi-jinks.
Dateline: Sept. 15th, Interstate 5
Note: THE NAMES OF THE CHARACTERS HAVE BEEN CHANGED TO PROTECT THEIR IDENTITY, FOR EXAMPLE RALPH IS IN FACT SEAN, ELVIS IS IN FACT MARKY MARK AND SO ON:
Friday Sept 15
6:45 AM - Time to wake up pickup the professional services people and head to the No Fluff just Stuff Software Symposium in Redmond.
9:50 AM - Crossed the border and are awaiting Ted and Elvis who had to stop at the border
10:25 AM - Where are they? Are they getting interrogated or worse?
10:30 AM - Nope, it’s all good, they are here. What happened?
Border guard: “Where are you going?”
Elvis replied: “To Redmond for a software conference.’
Border Guard: “Oh, with Microsoft?”
Elvis replied: “No, Java” {Elvis then proceeded to explain the difference between Java and C# etc.}
No wonder they got detained. The question is, “Is the border guard now a .Net fan or a Java fan?”
11 AM - Who would have known one of calm developers is a big rap/hip hop fan and that Einstein guy, is he speeding ;)
12:30 - We arrive at the hotel, register and jump into the first track. Some are off to Javascript exposed, me to Practices of an Agile developer. Venkat has some great advice and horror stories to share.
3:15 PM - JavaScript Exposed Part 2 offered insight into the bowels of JS. Kinda felt like a university computing course.
5 PM - Open Source Agile Dev tools - Some great stuff. Dev, testing, performance, automation, modeling and PM tools. We need to try some of these. I hope someone went to the code auditing tools, the ACEGI security or the Ajaxian faces.
6:45 PM - Dinner and keynote speak on DSL - Domain Specific Languages - the next best thing. Looks really cool, but by the time we finish (8PM) I’m tired from driving and learning; my level of learning and retention is shot.
9 PM - Good thing we stopped at the Duty free because there is nothing to do in Redmond. The bars close at 10 pm. I guess all the nightlife is over at Microsoft :)
11 PM - Marky Mark is the king of Texas Holdem. We’ve played 2 rounds of poker for fun and he’s got Horseshoes in his deck. Elvis, Sean, Joanne, Maveric, Einstein and finally myself. Einstein loses to Marky Mark, but he’s determined that tomorrow he’ll have revenge. Sean was 2nd to leave and must wear the Burger King crown to tomorrow sessions.
12 midnight - We are still sitting around talking about cool things we’ve learned today and any topic under the sun.
Like many companies, at Elastic Path, we keep an eye on what our customers are up to. How are they using Elastic Path? Which features are they using/not using? How are they finding success? What features can Elastic Path add-in to help them maximize their efforts?
Occasionally, we come across customers “in the wild” and sometimes through press releases, analyst reports and public relations blurbs making their way around the web.
Household Goods Retailer Grows up Big and Strong
Internet Retailer magazine (9/19/06) ran an article about Electric Shopping’s success using Elastic Path. We keep an eye on this UK-based retailer as an example or “test case” for measuring the benefits companies can reap when using EP. Indeed, as a mid-sized online retailer selling a selection of household goods direct to consumer, they are right in our target market.
Like many growing companies, they seek to maximize their limited resources to efficiently process orders accurately and they seem to have succeeded, as the article points out,
“Within eight months of implementing the new platform, ElectricShopping.com increased order accuracy by 150% and is now processing about 200-300 online orders per day, a 200% increase from its maximum daily order processing capability on the former platform. The new software-based platform also has afforded the retailer the ability to track, segment and reward repeat customers, while adding the ability to scale technology as operational requirements dictate.”
Their site is quick and nice to look at with a bevy of compelling products (I saw several espresso machines which would look great in our office ;-)).
In terms of improvement, I’d put forth that using EP’s SEO technology to make “clean” URLs would help generate increased organic search results. Perhaps we’ll head to England to lend a hand!
Who Loves Web 2.0?
I tend to avoid politics and religion as blog topics but this one is more about marketing and community building. So, … Redherring.com ran an article (9/18/06) called “Religion Sites Embrace Web 2.0” with the cheeky subtitle, “God might not have a MySpace, but He’s got the web’s attention.”
The article discussed several sites as examples of religious organization using technology to bridge the vast desert which exists between churches and 20-somethings. As such, churches are adding “web 2.0 style” online community building to their traditional marketing programs.
This isn’t a huge surprise as tech-savvy church devotees are often early adopters of new technology, e.g. Nederlander Catholic Priest Father Roderick and the infamous Hare Krishnas were among the earliest podcasters, plus TV is filled with religious programming beyond the cliche’d (to paraphrase Jimmy Buffet) “television preachers with bad hair and dimples” as churches pull out all the stops to attract youthful members to keep the doors open with slick production quality, guitar music and youthful hosts with trendy haircuts.
Anyhow, the interesting (albeit self-aggrandizing) part of the article is the mention of eBible.com as their new Elastic Path-powered site launched earlier this month. At their slickly-designed website - complete with oversized search boxes, tag clouds and blogged passages with comments - you can buy “Jesus Loves Web 2.0″ t-shirts and interact with other God-sters with your shared bookmarks and choose between the free and paid accounts.
In general, eBible’s getting a bit of attention with a well-Dugg write up by the (also infamous) Michael Arrington in Tech Crunch along with dozens of bloggers (ebible on Technorati) including some who posted pics wearing their free eBible t-shirts.
Optimizing for the Long Tail
Jason’s presentation at Bar Camp Vancouver (Technorati) about Search Engine Optimization and the “Long Tail” (a concept as well as a book by Chris Anderson) was well very received and a looks to be a great starting point for his participation at eTail MidMarket in San Francisco in October.
Andre Charland, Cap’t Ajax of nitobi (another Bar Camp sponsor and featured on Get Elastic podcast #6) posted some notes and thoughts from Jason’s gig along with a snapshot.
Jordan Behan, President and Creative Director of Tell Ten Friends Marketing wrote up a good synopsis of Jason’s strategies and offers up some relevant real-world examples of the specific search terms that people look for and somehow find him.
Jason of course, offered a recap and relevant links in the past two Get Elastic blog posts and, adding to his hectic pace, Jason recently spread his SEO knowledge via a couple of magazine interviews and quotes for articles so keep an eye here for announcement of future publications.
Blogs in the Wild
Turns out, Elastic Path Senior QA Engineer Peter Leung keeps a personal blog (not-affiliated with his Elastic Path work). He mostly writes about what drives his interest in software and technology and offers opinion on many tech memes, useful sites and emerging tools.
Even though Peter is usually the first person I greet when I arrive at the office, I had no idea he spoke at 2004 e-learning workshop sponsored by the World Bank in Nairobi, Kenya, and facilitated an on-line e-learning course sponsored by the Caribbean Tourism Organization - sounds like a podcast waiting to happen!
Photos and Bar-B-ques
Today is photoday for the EP executive team plus me, and we’re fortunate enough to have ace-photographer and new-web superstar Kris Krug coming by to snap our mugs for multi-purpose use (headshots, blog profiles, articles etc.). His shots of other local tech folk can be described as professionally hip and he manages to make everyone look a little bit rockstar. We’ll see how it turns out for us ;-).
Between that activity and a lunchtime Bar-B-Q + staff meeting, it looks to busy day in still-summertime Vancouver.
Sometimes I get a brief epiphany or visual that makes a concept very clear to me - I had one of those last night that I think explains the advantage of targetting the longtail vs the mass.
The concept of longtail is “selling less, of more”…okay, got it.
Imagine - if you had the choice to attempt to grow one or two VERY large flowers or grow a field of thousands of very small flowers.
What do you think is more viable for you?
The large flower option introduces lots of risk. If just one of them doesn’t bloom, you suffer a material loss of revenue. The skill, care, nurturing and such to actually grow it to become so resource intensive it is prohibitive for many.
The field is a much more accessible option is it not? Once you have mastered growing one small flower, it is much easier to roll that out and grow more and more and more…and more and more. It’s okay if lots of them don’t bloom, or aren’t the right color. You’re diversified.
The next time you are trying to explain the longtail, stop and smell the roses.
