Association of Software Professionals

It’s a difficult time to be selling software. Today’s economy has made a lot of buyers afraid to spend money. And many end-users are afraid that buying software online will result in their getting Internet malware on their computer.

Making things worse is Microsoft’s Internet Explorer security warning each time a Vista or Windows 7 user starts to download software from the web – “The publisher could not be verified. Are you sure you want to run this software?”

You can sell more software if you eliminate this frightening message. All it takes is an Authenticode code signing certificate.

If you sign your downloads, your prospect will still see the “Are you sure you want to run this software?” part of the warning message. But they won’t see the “publisher could not be verified.” portion.

And, with a single click, end-users can view your certificate and feel comfortable that they’re downloading exactly what they expected to download. The code signing certificate ensures that the downloaded file has not been tampered with after the original publisher created it.

With a code signing certificate installed, software developers can sign EXE, CAB, DLL, COM, OCX, JAR, VBA, Mozilla object files, Silverlight files, Active X controls, and MacOS 9+ files.

Code signing is an effective way to increase software sales by minimizing the risk associated with downloading files from the Internet.

To learn more about buying an affordable Code Signing certificate from K Software, visit http://codesigning.ksoftware.net/. K Software is an authorized Comodo reseller, and offers Comodo Code Signing Certificates at significant discounts. Join ASP and receive even more attractive discounts on code signing certificates.

Mitchell Vincent Articles Authenticode, code signing, software sales

For most software developers, Amazon.com represents an untapped marketplace. Is your software sold there? Your software can be listed on Amazon, but most software developers do not know how to list a product there. This marketing channel is totally separate from your normal internet driven sales so it should not compete with your current sales.

Amazon.com only sells physical products. They do not sell software downloads. To sell a product on Amazon you need to have a physical version of that product. A physical product can be as simply as a CD in a case, or more likely, a CD or DVD in a standard DVD case, with a printed insert surround the DVD case. (You can print this insert on any inkjet or laser printer.)

Basic Amazon requirements include:

• A physical product that will be shipped to a customer
• A unique UPC or EAN bar code number for each product
• A “sell-a-lot” developer contract with Amazon
• Credit card and a bank account capable of receiving ACH deposits

Every product sold on Amazon needs a UPC code assigned to it. You can not make this UPC code number up, it must be an authentic code assigned by gs1.org, or another legal assignment agency like My Bar Code Store. GS1.org charges a yearly fee of at least $750 for a minimum of 100 UPC codes. Other firms like My Bar Code Store charge a one time fee of from $20 – $50 depending on the number of UPC codes you need. Unique UPC codes are required to list all products not currently found on Amazon.

Amazon charges a monthly fee of about $40 to host your merchant account. You must sign a contact for a minimum of 3 months. For software Amazon takes a 15% commission on the purchase price (not including shipping). From an economic point of view- if you can sell at least $50 of your software each month on Amazon, you will break even. If you sell more than $50 a month, the extra sales are extra income.

Gary Elfring Articles amazon, marketing, sales

Here’s a new marketing resource that I’ve designed to help software developers sell more desktop/laptop software, SaaS services, and Android and iOS apps.

The Software Marketing Glossary includes tips and tricks about software marketing, reviews of marketing books, great quotations, and lots of attitude.

There are even feature length articles covering topics such as creating brand extensions, working with troublesome customers, generating impulse sales, crafting effective sales messages, upselling, cross-selling, and selling more site licenses.

It’s huge – 65,000 words on 135 pages.

It’s free. It’s fun. Use the Software Marketing Glossary to quickly learn more about a software business topic, or read it from cover to cover.

- Al Harberg, the website review and press release guy from DP Directory, Inc.

Al Harberg Articles software marketing

Any visitor using an iDevice can bookmark your website onto their desktop. However, this distorts, shrinks and colorizes your site to produce something ugly and undistinguished. What you want is to supply your own icon.

The icon for an iPad is 72×72 pixels and 57×57 pixels for iPhone and iPod touch. You do not need separate icons. Indeed you cannot specify them separately. The icons will be re-sized. Let’s say you start with an 800×800 original. You could resize this to 72×72 to optimize for iPad and post this on your web site. The 72×72 will be resized on iPhone.

Instead, what I do is resize to 144×144. For iPad, a second resizing is done to 72×72 within the iPad and a second resize to 57×57 on the iPhone. This improves the icon on the iPhone since the resize is based on a better image but slightly degrades the iPad since a second sizing is introduced. Whatever. I want you to be aware that you have a choice in what size image to post.

Let’s say the image you post is called iicon.png. The name is pretty arbitrary and I am guessing that the format is not confined to PNG but I have not verified that. If your image is in your web site root path, then you would add the following to your web site head section:

Of course you give the complete path (or absolute URL) and change the name to reflect what you actually call it. Note that it is not necessary or possible to specify the dimensions of iicon.png. The browser will figure that out.

The icon will appear with rounded corners and a lighting effect applied:

I do not recommend that your try to duplicate the beveling and lighting effect. Rather, upload a flat image with no transparency:

and the effects will be applied automatically (and consistently!) in the iDevice. This flat image is much simpler to develop than trying replicate what is already there.

Dennis Reinhardt Articles

I recently bought a used laptop for travel (called TRV), hardware redundancy, and use as an additional screen. Since I only paid $150 for it ($250 after a display upgrade), I can afford the dollar loss if the laptop is stolen and because it is redundant, it would not be a crimp in my ongoing operation.

However, during travel, I want access to what I need for customer support (ecommerce, past email correspondence, etc.). I also want access to my telephone book and website passwords. For about a month or so, I have been running my TRV computer with these kinds of app running on it. However, I was at great risk if the computer itself got stolen because of the data on it.

A second issue has come up this month, with the release of the FireSheep program. This is a password sniffer which can pull passwords from an unsecured wifi access point. Even more, it can hijack most sessions in an unsecured wifi access point because only the logon session is secured and not the entire session. These are not new vulnerabilities but the ease with which this can be done is alarming.

Websites and wifi access points can resolve the FireSheep vulnerabilities. Open relays used to be widespread but now secured access to SMTP is the norm. So too, secured wifi will likely become the norm as well. In the meantime (i.e. now), there is a risk using any public wifi using protocols that pass information in the clear.

I have now resolved both issues quite simply. Now, all of my apps run on my main computer. This computer never leaves my office. I then use remote desktop (RDP) to connect and have access to *all* my programs. There are no programs a thief can use to compromise me.

I have deleted my previous programs on TRV and then copied over a movie file to overwrite the sectors holding previous data.

To run RDP, the target computer must have Remote Desktop enabled (Computer Properties >> Remote Settings >> Remote >> Remote Desktop. I have to allow the less secure version because I am connecting XP to Windows 7. Even so, I have used a network sniffer to verify that the login is secure. I have not yet locked it down and will use

http://www.mobydisk.com/techres/securing_remote_desktop.html

http://articles.techrepublic.com.com/5100-10878_11-6166676.html

as guides.

To run RDP, enter “mstsc” in a Run command from the Start Menu. You may also find it in the Acce4ssorries folder in the Start Menu Programs folder.

I have a static IP address for my home system and have given it a domain name. Rhino Software used to offer a great, free service called DNS4me to ASP members but has decided to stop offering it. They are advising people at http://www.dns4me.com/ to consider http://www.dyndns.com/index1.html or http://www.no-ip.com/.

A downside of the RDP approach is that my laptop has essentially nothing useful on it unless it is connected to the internet. In particular, I cannot work on anything in an airline seat unless the airline provides wifi. I don’t expect this downtime to be a problem as having people in front of you recline their seats makes airline seat computing a dicey proposition anyway.

Annother issue with RDP approach is if you are using sound. For example, you want to use Skype. With RDP, the sound will go to main computer and then to the remote desktop, introducing delays and consuming bandwidth.

Dennis Reinhardt Articles

Should you offer a free version of your software?

Two different perspectives on using free services to attract users:

• softwarebyrob.com/2010/08/18/why-free-plans-dont-work/

and

• gigaom.com/2010/03/26/case-studies-in-freemium-pandora-dropbox-evernote-automattic-and-mailchimp/

Usually, the “free” offering never times out and is usually limited with respect to the paid version.

The shareware trial model most of use generally times out, most commonly in 30 days. The trial itself is often full-featured, but not always.

The experience of ASP members is to emphasize sales over downloads. An immediate purchase with a strong money back guarantee is instead of the user thoroughly evaluating before purchase.

A free offering will satisfy many people and they will never upgrade. Many (it would appear disproportionally many) will want free technical support and it is a burden to either supply it or refuse. Rather than offer a free version, a paid, low-cost version will make customers out of those who would otherwise use a free version.

3 things appear to support using a freemium model:

• horizontal usage with scale and
• no prior demand
• web service

By scale, I mean that the app should be broadly applicable to a wide class of user. If you get 1000 free users, perhaps 1% of them will upgrade, giving maybe 10 paid users. This is rather low return on your development efforts. However, with 100,000 free users, that same 1% is 1000 paid. Thus, you need scale to get a good return. If you have targeted product aimed at a narrow niche, you are better off getting sales rather than free users.

No prior demand supports freemium almost by negation. If there is prior demand, people will search for solutions and your marketing is well served by making sure they find you. However, if people don’t even know they have a problem which your software solves, they will not search for you at all and search marketing is ineffective.

People expect web services to be free. It is hard to find examples of successful web services which do not offer free versions. Even Amazon offers a huge amount of purchase content allowing for comparison, user evaluation, search, recommendations, and other great resources. All that content is free. There no login or requirement to pay.

In summary: prefer sales to downloads and don’t undercut your efforts by offering a free version … with some exceptions.

Dennis Reinhardt Articles

Many ASP members have been in business for quite some time and have their programs up and running. But the times (and Windows versions) are changing and there are some things one might easily overlook, being so used to one’s own programs.

Here are 6 things that you should check on your programs:

Code signing

Signed executables are important at many stages nowadays. Even though the customers usually wouldn’t notice the actual signatures, they will notice the reduced warnings that a signed executable causes. This warnings do not only come from Windows during the installation, but also from antivirus programs and other security software which rate the “trust” of each program. That’s why you should not only sign your installer, but also all ‘.exe’ and ‘.dll’ files that you’re installing.

High-resolution icons

I never noticed this one myself until a customer told me. The 16×16 and 32×32 icons in my programs looked pixilated and outdated. You can add higher resolutions to your “.ico” file with the freeware IcoFX. Be sure to keep a backup of the old “.ico” file because not all IDEs allow linking the new “.ico” files. As a workaround you can use the command-line tool ReplaceVistaIcon (available on Codeproject) which can replace the “.ico” section in your executable with the new “.ico” file.

Common controls 6

The new version of the Microsoft GUI will allow applications to have a “nicer” look, for example the slightly rounded buttons. You can activate this by adding a manifest file with a “Microsoft.Windows.Common-Controls” section. You can either specify the manifest file in your project settings or use Microsoft’s manifest.exe command-line tool.

UAC

Many customers now have Windows versions with split rights accounts. In normal mode a lot of things will fail, like installing a service or creating a shortcut in the startup folder. If your program requires full admin rights for any of its actions, you should be aware of this. If the function fails you should either give the user a **helpful** error message or handle the UAC “elevation” to full rights automatically.

You can detect the type of account your program is running under with GetTokenInformation and TokenElevationType. It is not possible to elevate a running process. You have to start a new process with ShellExecuteEx, specifying “runas” as verb.

Progress bar

If your program includes any sections that display a progress bar for some time, then you should support the Windows 7 feature of displaying the progress also in the Windows task bar. The details greatly depend on your programming language. Use IID_ITaskbarList3 as a starting point.

Larger fonts

The screen resolutions have become so ridiculously high, that it’s difficult to read the text on the screen. That’s why many customers have activated larger fonts in Windows. This causes Windows to automatically scale up all dialogs. This works nicely with most standard dialogs but can cause problems with custom controls. Check your application while large fonts are activated.

Thomas Holz is the owner of ITSTH and the author of outlook tools to synchronize, remove duplicates and use boilerplate texts and writes in his devblog, if he still has too much time after optimizing the website.

Thomas Holz Articles product marketing, software, software marketing

A recent study of ASP membership may help ASP members and non-members alike.
As a benefit of ASP membership, member site URLs are listed in our site. Yet, something like 18% of our members do not take advantage of this benefit. Among that 18%, we think the rate of business failure is nearly 2:1 greater.

The chart shows year of joining ASP and records only those members not supplying the ASP with a URL we could publish. The expire/active determination was made as of Aug. 2010. So, for members joining in 2002, 17% of the expires did not supply a publishable URL whereas 9% of the still active members have not supplied a publishable URL.

This same pattern holds up year after year: the odds are greater that not supplying a URL to ASP when joining leads to lapse of ASP membership (the main contributor of which is business failure).

The message here is do not treat your site URL like a secret. Advertise it in all appropriate venues.

Dennis Reinhardt Articles

Today it is relatively easy to market your software (through a web site), distribute the software (via Internet downloads) and collect payment (using an online payment provider). It wasn’t so easy before the Internet existed. “Shareware” appeared in the 1980s as a way for small commercial developers to reach a large market.

Shareware was one of the surprises of the early personal computer industry. Who would have thought that you could make a living from software paid for on the honor system? Make it publicly available, invite people to make copies of it and give them to their friends, and base your income prospects on a little notice asking people to send you a few dollars if they found the program useful.

Michael Swaine, Dr Dobbs, January 2000

Early shareware pioneers including Andrew Fluegelman, Jim Knopf (Button), Bob Wallace and Marshall Magee proved the commercial viability of the shareware concept, reportedly making millions. Read more…

Andy Brice Announcements, Articles, Interviews, News ASP, News, shareware, software, try before you buy

When you start out with a new software product, you may find it difficult to get feedback from users. Here are 12 ways to get more feedback.

1. Release a Beta

Launch a beta release, either publicly or by invitation-only, to gather feedback before a major release. This helps you discover major problems before releasing major changes.

2. Ask other developers

If you hang out somewhere online with other developers, ask them for feedback or offer a free license in exchange for testing and comments. ASP members frequently get valuable feedback from knowledgeable colleagues in the ASP newsgroups.

However, keep in mind that colleagues are often more knowledgeable than your average user and may provide a different kind of feedback than a typical computer user. Read more…

Laura Look Articles product feedback, user feedback