Category: Uncategorized

Beware of these guys — they’re the used car salesmen of B2B marketing.

About once a month for the past year, I’ve been receiving emails from various seemingly mid-tier enterprise technology magazines offering to feature my company in a “Top 10” or “Top 20” list of B2B companies…for a price. In exchange for that price, which is always $3,000, they promise to feature us in an article listing the best players in a particular B2B space. If you’ve ever received a similar email, you’ve probably wondered if it’s worthwhile investment.

The email usually comes from someone with a white-bread name, typically something like “Amy Smith” or “Chris Miller”, but writes in that clunky, awkward way that people do when not working in their native tongue. If you visit the magazine’s site and go through the articles, you’ll find that most of them seem to be “advertorial” pieces whose feature photo is a head shot of the author. The magazine sells for more than $10 an issue, but if you visit the “subscribe” page on their site, they’re more than happy to offer a FREE (it’s always in all-caps) subscription to “qualified readers” who provide them with contact information.

The invitation always follows the same template. Here’s the latest one I received, which should give you an idea of how they generally read:

Hi Joey,

Great to be connected here,

As mentioned below, we shortlisted your company to be featured in “Top 10 [players in my company’s space]” which we are covering in [crappy site name redacted] special edition on [space that my company is in].

You can also go through the following media kit link.
[Link redacted]

Investment: $3000

SPONSORSHIP BENEFITS:

• Recognition of your company as “Top 10 [players in my company’s space]” is indeed a great honor and you can utilize it effectively for several of your marketing campaigns.
• This honor can effectively be used by your business development/ sales team as an additional tool to win clients.
• Top 10 [players in my company’s space] will have a shelf life of one year.
• Logos of “Top 10 [players in my company’s space]” can be used in all your marketing collateral and also prominently displayed on your website. This will enhance the brand visibility for your company.
• We will provide the full digital re-print rights for one full page profile in the print magazine and online magazine about your company, along with CEO picture.
• We will provide you a quote from our Managing editor. You can send out a press release to local media and also put up the press release in your website.
• Your current customers will also be a lot more comfortable doing business with you as you are recognized by a media company.
• Your prospective customers will be more than happy to work with you as you will be projected trust worthy player in the market.
• You can promote this recognition and honor in social media (Facebook/ Twitter/ LinkedIn)
• The certificate of honor can be utilized to be displayed at your office lobby, which indeed will motivate your employees as well contribute towards your company growth.

Once you confirm your participation we will schedule an interview call with your CEO to feature in the magazine.

Please review our opportunity and let me know your interest to take it forward.

Looking forward to hear from you,

Regards,
[Editor’s name]

I’d already rejected the idea after reading the email, but I thought I’d back my gut-based decision with some empirical data. I did a quick check of their site’s ranking on Alexa. Here’s what I found:

Their global rank was below 10 million. To give you an idea of how tragically, pathetically, hilariously poor this ranking is, consider Alexa’s ranking for this site, which I’d admit could use a little more of my love, attention, and promotion:

Global Nerdy’s Alexa rank is 336,874 globally, it’s in the top 200,000 in the US, and in the top 100,000 in India and Australia.

Even my personal blog, The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century, does better than their site, with its Alexa ranking of 342,151 globally, and 84,883 in the U.S.:

Looking at the difference between my sites’ numbers and theirs, the people from these magazines should be paying me $3000 to promote them. I suspect that most of the pageviews for these magazines’ articles are from framed copies on the authors’ office walls.

If you have an extra $3,000 in your marketing budget, there are far better ways to spend it than on a vanity piece in a “pay-to-play” magazine.

Last Saturday, Angela Don and I gave a well-attended presentation on getting started with iOS development using Swift. It went so well that we decided to make it a regular thing, and thus the Tampa iOS Meetup was born. We’re having our inaugural gathering next Wednesday, October 28th at 7:00 p.m. in South Tampa at 3825 Henderson Blvd., Suite 300, and if you’re interested in getting started with iOS development and Swift, or if you’re an old hand looking for another get-together of like-minded people, come join us!

Me and Angela presenting at BarCamp Tampa Bay 2015.

I had the great fortune of meeting Angela at OpenHack Ybor, Tony Winn’s monthly gathering of local developers and techies who enjoy catching up over beer and tech talk in Ybor City, Tampa’s party district (Here’s my recent writeup about OpenHack Ybor). She was talking about doing a presentation at BarCamp Tampa Bay 2015, I told her that I’d been thinking about doing the same, and a couple of days later, we had a full-fledged presentation where we demoed a couple of quick Swift apps and playgrounds.

If you’ve got an interest in developing for iOS, whether you’re new to coding or an old hand at it, or if you’re a designer or entrepreneur who wants to make iOS apps, or if you’re just curious, you’re invited to come! We’ll talk about iOS development, go over what you’d like to see in upcoming meetups, and of course, talk about iOS. Bring your projects — we love show and tell! We’ll provide pizza and pop, too.

Once again:

• What: Tampa iOS meetup, a new gathering in the area that complements the Suncoast iOS Meetup and Tampa Bay Cocoaheads, both worthwhile gatherings.
• When: Wednesday, October 28th at 7:00 p.m.
• Where: The offices of Energy Sense Finance, 3825 Henderson Blvd., Suite 300 , Tampa

We hope to see you there!

Special thanks to Jamie Johnson, who’s loaning us the boardroom of his company, Energy Sense Finance, to hold these events!

Inspired by the recent scandal in which Volkswagen programmed the engines in their cars to detect if they were undergoing an emissions test and alter their behavior so that they’d pass, a couple of developers have created modules that enable your test suite to detect if they’re running on a continuous integration server , and if that’s the case, report all tests as passing. Think of all the time you could save!

PHPUnit VW Extension

If you’ve got a PHP project that absolutely, positively, needs to pass the automated testing phase because you’ll go postal if you have to deal with yet another bug, you want phpunit-vw, also known as PHPUnit VW Extension. Hugues Maignol, a developer based in Grenoble, France, made his initial commits of this project not long ago — September 28th — and it’s now his most popular GitHub repo.

phpunit-vw checks for the commonly-used continuous integration tools’ default environment variables, and ensures that all unit tests pass if it detects the presence of any of these:

• Appveyor
• Bamboo
• Buildkite
• CircleCI
• CodeShip
• GitlabCI
• Go CD
• Hudson
• Jenkins
• PHPCI
• TeamCity
• Travis

If your CI tool isn’t in the list, but makes use of environment variables commonly used by test suites (such as BUILD_ID), phpunitvw might work with it.

volkswagen

If your project is Node-flavored, you’ll want to get your hands on the Node package named volkswagen. Written by Kenneth Auchenberg and “heavily inspired” by phpunit-vw, it’s also his most popular GitHub repo. It can detect the following CI servers:

• Bamboo
• Buildkite
• CircleCI
• Codeship
• Drone.io
• GitLabCI
• Jenkins CI
• TeamCity
• Team Foundation Server
• Travis
• Visual Studio Online CI

…as well as any server that exposes an environment variable like CI or CONTINUOUS_INTEGRATION.

Why should Volkswagen have all the fun? Get these add-ons and start passing tests with flying colors today!

Found on Imgur. Click to see the source.

BlackBerry CEO John Chen’s demo of the Priv to BNN’s Amber Kanwar, their new Android-based QWERTY phone, should’ve been the bright spot in a bad news-filled day (they’d missed their 2Q15 target, for which the bar was already pretty low). Unfortunately, he was unprepared, improvising, and working with a device that hadn’t yet been fully set up and whose OS was unfamiliar to him.

The Android OS that the Priv runs on was so new to him that he had trouble launching Chrome, which meant that he couldn’t do a proper demo of the keyboard’s capacitive-touch scrolling, and the swiping motions he was using had no effect because they were BlackBerry 10 gestures. The most telling thing, however, was his saying that the Priv “runs Google“.

The “priv [rhymes with give] stands for privacy” line was also painful, and it telegraphs Chen’s general unpreparedness for Amber Kanwar’s questions in the rest of the video. I understand that he’s got a lot on his plate, but maybe it’s time for someone else to do these demos, and let Chen focus on his reputed turnaround magic.

If you take away just one lesson from this video, let it be this: if you’re expected to demo something that’s new to you (like a new product that uses an operating system you normally don’t use), you need to practice, practice, and practice again. If you want to take away an additional lesson, it’s that you should try to anticipate the questions you’ll be asked, and try to have some answers — or be ready to change the topic.

Tomorrow — Tuesday, September 29th — at 1:00 p.m. eastern (10:00 a.m. Pacific), GSG and Enterprise Mobile will host a webinar titled The Secrets Nobody Tells You About Dark Mobile. It’s free to attend, and you can register here.

In this webinar, GSG’s Platform Evangelist Joey deVilla will talk about that area of an organization’s mobile telecom environment that goes, unobserved, unknown, or unmanaged — the terra incognita that we call “Dark Mobile”. We look at the negative effects it has on a company’s…

• spending,
• management,
• security, and
• efficiency

Join us in this quick webinar (it’ll be about half an hour) as we look at the four kinds of Dark Mobile and how we can shed some light into this crucial area of your IT environment.

My friend Sarah Baird is the COO of the Toronto-based startup VarageSale, an online, local-focused marketplace that competes with Craigslist by focusing on mobile platforms. VarageSale has expanded to cover all of Canada and most states in the U.S., and now they’ve got their eyes on Florida. In order to establish a presence here, they need a community manager, and they’re looking for one based in Central Florida.

VarageSale — that’s short for “Virtual Garage Sale” — is the brainchild of Tami Zuckerman, who came up with the idea out of frustration while trying to clear out her house by selling stuff through Craigslist and similar marketplace sites. She and her husband developed an app that helped her sell her excess stuff with her smartphone, and while they didn’t start out intending to create a business, the idea grew into one.

VarageSale connects people through their Facebook profiles, and uses volunteer moderators to approve new members. You post items for sale and an asking price, and the app lets prospective buyers comment, haggle over price, or say “sold”! The service has grown in popularity, the Canadian tech news site TechVibes named them Canadian Startup of the Year for 2014, and in March, they raised $34 million in venture money from Sequoia Capital and Lightspeed Venture Partners. So to answer a question you might have already asked: yes, it looks like they’ve got a future.

I’ll personally vouch for VarageSale’s Chief Operating Officer, Sarah Baird, as someone who knows how to get things done. I know her through my developer evangelism work in Toronto with Tucows, Microsoft, and Shopify, and through her work at Interactive Ontario (a not-for-profit industry trade organization that encourages the growth of the interactive digital content industry in the province of Ontario), the social game development shop Social Game Universe, and at various industry events in Toronto’s thriving tech scene. She gets stuff done, and my feeling is that so will any company that where she’s COO.

If you get the job, you’ll be working remotely from Florida and in regular communication with the team at the head office in Toronto, Canada, which you’ll have to visit from time to time (it’s a great city). You’ll be part of the Growth Team and the “face” of VarageSale in the Sunshine State, get people hooked up with VarageSale and building up the community of Floridians who use it to buy and sell things. You’ll be part of their global expansion effort and working closely with their Launch, Marketing, and Happiness Teams to kick off their push in Florida and building and nurturing Florida’s VarageSale communities on an ongoing basis.

Some things about the community manager job (these are distilled from their job posting):

• You’ll need to be able to communicate your passion and care for the community not just in person, but, more importantly, online.
• You have to be comfortable being the celebrity in the grocery store and the go-to online resource for all VarageSale communities. This is a job for someone who can get in front of a crowd, “shake hands and kiss babies”, and get them to take action — namely, using VarageSale and getting them to get other people to use it as well.
• Your job will be to grow VarageSale communities in Florida. This means building bases of users all over the state, finding and cultivating influencers to help get the word out, and organizing and hosting VarageSale events. That means showing up, which in turn means you’ll have to do some traveling.
• You should be comfortable working remotely in a startup culture, and you should have some marketing and/or community management experience. If you’ve ever had to be the “face” of a product or service, that’s even better. And you’ll need to know how to work a community.

If this sounds like your kind of gig, go to their Florida Community Manager job page and apply now! Tell them Joey sent you.

Links you might find useful

• Here’s the page for the Florida Community Manager job.
• Here are VarageSale’s apps on the iTunes App Store (for iPhones/iPads/iPod Touch) and Google Play (for Android phones and tablets).
• Here are a couple of articles on VarageSale:
  • Bloomberg: A virtual garage sales takes on Craigslist
  • Inc.: How this Kindergarten teacher raised $34 million from the firm that funded Apple and Google
  • Financial Post: Loaded with funding, VarageSale looks to be the world’s dominant mobile classified site

This article also appears in The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century.