Business of Software 2009 Roundup

If you're interested in building a long-term, sustainable and profitable software business you'd probably be interested in the the Business of Software Conference 2009 which was held in San Francisco on 09-11 November.

• Conference Web Site: www.businessofsoftware.org
• Conference Network: network.businessofsoftware.org
• Conference Wiki: wiki.businessofsoftware.org
• Conference Crowdvine: crowdvine.businessofsoftware.org
• Conference Flickr page

Here's a list of the speakers along with the one thing I took away from each of their presentations.

Geoffrey Moore (Dealing with Darwin): Excel at the features that amplify your differentiation from the competition (your core) while just being good enough at everything else (context).

Paul Graham (PaulGraham.com): From a VC's standpoint, companies that provide super good company service are good bets.

Heidi Roizen (Heidi.Roizen.com): More than half of a VC's investments lose money while the top 3% of deals return 50% of their profits.

Dharmesh Shah (OnStartups.com, @dharmesh): Use social media tools to create user pull rather than the traditional marketing push - Inbound Marketing.

Mat Clayton (MatClayton.com, @matclayton): Be social, be relevant, and disintermediate.

Don Norman (jnd.org): Good design is all about the complete experience so build (or partner) to create an A-Z system.

Ryan Carson (RyanCarson.com, @RyanCarson): Make your company remarkable by being passionate, loving your customers, treating them like royalty, giving back to your community, making kick ass products, investing in good design, being more creative than you need to be, and begin good at publicity. (He says you must do all 8 to succeed which is why I listed all of them.)

Paul Kenny (Ocean Learning's Forum): Discover your sales story by starting with the customer's need behind the need.

Chris Capossela: Geographic based pricing (setting lower prices in certain countries) works as a hedge against piracy.

Neil Davidson (NeilDavidson.com, @NeilDavidson): When setting price consider your product's value relative to the customer's needs and then discourage comparisons that work against value.

Kathy Sierra (Creating Passionate Users, @KathySierra): Understand what the user does and help them, teach them to be awesome at it.

Jennifer Aaker (@Aaker): The pillars of happiness are autonomy, competence, relatedness, self esteem, and being part of something bigger.


Michael Lopp (RandsInRepose.com, @Rands): Learn how to make little decisions better and faster by developing improvisational skills, delegating, and knowing what you want.

Luke Hohmann (LukeHohmann.com, @LukeHohmann): True innovation comes from the things we don't know we don't know.

Joel Spolsky (JoelonSoftware.com, @Spolsky): Design is the act of making decisions for the user so they don't have to.

And here are the notes, summaries, and commentaries by other attendees (I'm certain there are more out there).

• Greg Kilwein
• Jurgen Appelo
• Kyle Cordes
• Martin Kleppmmann
• Marco Botton
  

Mark your calendar: BoS2010 will be held 04-06 October 2010 in Boston.

UPDATE [20 Mar 2010]: Video of Geoffrey Moore's talk on innovation from BoS2009.

UPDATE [27 Mar 2010]: Video of Mark Stephens' winning Pecha Kucha from BoS2009.

UPDATE [08 May 2010]: Video of Kathy Sierra's talk on social media from BoS2009.

UPDATE [05 Jun 2010]: Video of Paul Kenny's talk about sales from BoS2009.

UPDATE [26 Jun 2010]: Video of Don Norman's talk about design from BoS2009.

UPDATE [24 Aug 2010]: Video of Darmesh Shah's talk about building better software businesses from BoS2009.

UPDATE [24 Aug 2010]: Video of Joel Spolsky's talk about simplicity versus choice from BoS2009.

UPDATE [31 Aug 2010]: Video of Paul Graham's talk on trends for the future from BoS2009.

Tell me and I'll forget...

Don't you need a little Chewbacca right now? The ERCOFTAC nexus is a portal to fluid dynamics resources like experimental databases (can that sentence be any more indecipherable?). While I'm posting resources, here are a bunch for agile programming: NetObjectives, InfoQ, Mountain Goat. NASA has patented a technique for automated generation of airfoil performance tables using CFD.

The winner of the Pecha Kucha (look it up) competition at the Business of Software conference writes the Java PDF blog. Joining the Society for Technical Communication (STC) might improve this blog. All these people say Outlook is broken because it uses Word to render HTML. Use Get Satisfaction to create a web site where companies and customers can interact.

The folks at exosphere have made a highly accurate graphical reproduction of Flight 1549 from take off to unplanned air-water interface with the Hudson River. Acresso Software is now Flexera Software (would've been nice to have heard about this in advance guys). Trying hard to get my head (ears?) around the music of MMW and Grizzly Bear.

The edible bacon lamp is both illuminating and delicious. Couldn't agree more: befriend the apostrophe or risk writing stuffy, dull, awkward prose. While we're on the topic of writing, when you write product requirements thou shall not write "the product shall" but rather "the user wants to..." Turn your entire wall into a dry erase white board with IdeaPaint.

News about your favorite CAE products:

• XYZ Scientific released TrueGrid V2.3.3 for FEA meshing
• FloEFD is envisioned as providing concurrent CFD
  

How much do you know about influence and persuasion? Take Robert Cialdini's quiz and find out. (Me? apparently not so much, only 50%.) Fortune magazine named Apple's Steve Jobs the CEO of the decade. New York's Animazing Gallery has a blog. Does your web site have Feng-Shui? Use Feng-GUI to find out.

ANSYS is number 75 on Software Top 100. I was sitting next to the guy who took this photo of Steve Hackett playing at SUNY Oswego in 1981. There's a blog for SolidWorks. What indeed is going on at Adobe for 3D CAD? Ars Technica provides this introduction to wikis in the workplace. An interesting essay on Harold Budd's Perhaps ("...his music derives its singular potency not from the new materials added to his sonic palette but from Budd's relentless process of subtraction and refinement.").

Try Google Swirl, a new way to search for related images. For example, search for Rothko. This blog is a public service announcement for the Society to Prevent Internet Posting After Two Margaritas.

...show me and I may remember, involve me and I'll understand.

Doing difficult things takes time...

First there was the Snuggie and then there was the Slanket (or is it the other way around?). But why limit your appendage-friendly linens to lounging? Now there's the Dreamie.

What makes good information design? The NSSE reports that a variety of colleges and universities have shown steady improvement in the quality of undergraduate education, as measured by students' exposure to and involvement in effective educational practices.

From the events calendar:

• RAPID 2010 (additive manufacturing aka rapid prototyping), 18-20 May 2010, Anaheim, CA
• COFES 2010 (Congress on the Future of Engineering Software), 15-18 Apr 2010, Scottsdale, AZ
  

A couple of videos for you: What's New in Patran 2009 and David Allen on getting started with GTD. If you're a contractor you can figure your hourly rate using John Soer's technique or try eLance.com. I'm sure you've all heard by now that NASA found water on the moon.

Go Mustangs!

...but doing the impossible takes just slightly longer.

Education is what remains...

The folks at Lehman Brothers sure had collected some nice modern art before going bankrupt. Texas-based Armadillo Aerospace collected a cool $500,000 from NASA's lunar lander challenge. Do not confuse an engineering adventure with an engineering mind.

For fine Lebanese and Italian cuisine, try Chadra Mezza. This is supposed to be a photo blog about epic kludges, but it looks like my home workshop. My son thought this was cool, but I didn't get it. Maybe it doesn't work with bifocals. Animazing Gallery, featuring animation and fine art, has a blog.

From the CAE newswire...

• ANSYS released an academic bundle for Ansoft.
• Symscape published their November 2009 newsletter.
• OpenFOAM and Fluent are virtually tied in Symscape's favorite RANS solver poll.
• Exa released PowerACOUSTICS.
• ANSYS' revenue is up about 7% YTD over last year.
  

City Journal asks "What Happened to the Work Ethic?" Cadalyst provides this interesting overview of history versus explicit modelers. How much does Google know about you? Try their privacy dashboard and see. The do's and don'ts of modern web page design.

...after you forget everything you've learned. -- Albert Einstein

Art is an experience...

If you're a fan of David Allen's Getting Things Done, you'll appreciate this list of free GTD resources. Read all about domestic and commercial robots, like iRobot's Roomba, at Robot Reviews. It's a bit of a misnomer, but VizUp decreases polygon count in faceted models. The official web site of guitarist Steve Hackett.

I've finally found my calling: Baragami, the ancient Welsh art of toast arranging. Who whould've known that changing your socks would provide a burst of energy. ITI Transcendata released Proficiency Collaboration Gateway v8.1. Subscribe today to the International Journal of Fluid Dynamics and Aerospace Engineering, IJFDAE.

Just in time for Christmas: meggings. Employers should ban worker-manager online friendships, or so say lawyers. When in San Francisco, visit the Cartoon Art Museum. Here are links to visualization talks from CaT 2009. Dassault buys from IBM their entire PLM sales operation. A gallery of CFD visualizations from the Institute for CFD in Tokyo.

ANSYS was named to Forbes 200 Best Small Companies list for the seventh time in the past nine years. Hanley Innovations cut the price of their multi-element airfoil software. A day too late: War of the Worlds was rebroadcast online. What are the world's strongest natural flavors? More than 100 tricks using Google.

As I type this, Freeman's is auctioning a great collection of modern art including some from Lehman Brothers' collection.

Things for your calendar:

• Numerical Analysis Techniques Using FEA and CFD, Ohio Northern U, 06-07 Nov 2009

...not an object. --Robert Motherwell

It behooves a father to be blameless...

Proof that one's perspective makes all the difference: see the Earth from Mars. Instead of looking at Earth from far away, let's see Saturn closeup. Get answers for your startup from OnStartups. The 4-Hour Workweek dude has thoughts about Google's web optimizer and vanity metrics. A truly remarkable aircraft: the XB-70A.

A guide to regional hamburger styles. (The "stacked" style reminds me vaguely of Charlies' here in Fort Worth.) Rheolef is a C++ finite element environment for solving partial differential equations. Siemens PLM Software blog. Neil Davidson has written a guide to software pricing. Here's a recap of IEEE VisWeek 2009.

Ever wonder what a nuclear detonation looks like after only 10 ms? Find out with these rapatronic photographs. Rare magnetic monopoles, particles with only one magnetic pole, might find use in computers if we can figure out how to harness magnetricity. Here's a shotgun blast of some of Seth Godin's web sites: Permission Marketing, Idea Virus, The Big Red Fez. Autodesk's Project Cooper: going after Google Sketch-Up?

From the CAE newswire...

• FLOW-3D CFD Software Version 9.4 Released
• CD-adapco Launches 2010 Calendar Competition (I've had one of these calendars on my desk for the past two years.)
• NcNeel Updated RhinoScript for Rhino V4.0
• Tecplot Updated Tecplot 360 and Tecplot Focus
  

Balloon artist Jason Hackenwerth goes way beyond making a puppy dog. With apologies to Frank Sinatra, "Fly me to the moon..." on the Ares I-X rocket which is set to launch on 27 Oct at 8am. I may be having a beer at the Thirsty Bear soon. Ever have text message regret? These people should. Here are some photographs of nothing more than light. European languages are mapped.

One might argue that all web pages are always under construction, but this page really is. The National Air and Space Museum has put its collection of aviation posters, called Fly Now!, online. Surgery on his neck vertebrae has left Phil Collins unable to play drums due to a loss of sensation in his fingers. Before you haters start chortling, I will remind you of Phil's drumming with jazz fusion group Brand X. (And now some haters can ask "Who's Brand X?" and "What does chortling mean?")

...if he expects his son to be. --Homer

He that can have patience...

I'm not certain that Good and Plenty belongs on this list of the worst Halloween candy. 37 Signals blogs about their products, including Basecamp. And Basecamp also appears on this list of free tools for running a small business. fusion29, visual communication studio, has updated their web site. If you have an iPhone and you use Solidworks, there's an app for that.

Open CASCADE is a geometry software kernel for 3D modeling applications. Jakob Nielsen applies the concept of powers of 10 to the user experience including the startling result that users can distinguish a web page's visual appeal in 1/20th of a second. From the "I can't remember why I bookmarked this" category, the NelsonQuick Group. If you use OpenFOAM, get your OpenFOAM Extensions.

We missed NVIDIA's GPU Technology Conference but keynotes and other presentations are online. Secure your home with Schlage LiNK. Research wages by area and occupation at the Dept. of Labor. ISV Community is a network for people in the software industry and On Startups is for entrepreneurs. All the GTD information that's fit to blog: GTDtimes. Exa added Spatial's InterOp CAD translators to their products.

For those of you with no time to read, see 50 years of space exploration in a single picture. Symscape's October newsletter is out. Read how product managers can use Twitter. The FOAM Documentation Project has been shut down.

...can have what he will. --Benjamin Franklin