I’ll be at the Northern Voice’s Kissing Ask The Expert Booth this Saturday from 2:00Â – 2:30 PM, answering questions on Joomla! CMS and Social Media development.
For more information visit the Northern Voice Wiki
To learn more about this event visit the Northern Voice 2008 website.
I think it is inevitable that many companies will be investing in building their own online communities. In fact I think a company’s community becomes one of the main criteria for the business entity to be evaluated just like the cash flow, knowledge capital, and technology infrastructure.
You might ask why an organization would want to have its own online community or social network? The answer is, because an online community of end-user and partners would provide a more cost effective and efficient way for the company to develop products or services, market them to the masses, and deliver related help and support with them too.
Let’s have a look: a company decides to develop a new product or service. They start with conducting market research. They send out surveys, organize focus groups, look at what the competition is doing. Sometimes that requires traveling around and going to hotels, trade shows, or seminars to gather intelligence data and stalk the competitors.
All of that cost money; lots of money! In fact sometimes only the very large corporations can afford such an elaborate market research.
Then they start making a list of features that this service or product ought to have. Basically they have to make lot of assumptions and often add everything under the sun to that list to make sure that the product appeals to the largest possible demographic out there. Let’s say they come up with a list of 20 features.
Then they go ahead and build it. Once the new product or service is out, and tested on focus groups (more cost), then it gets marketed using traditional methods: prints, media, online advertisement, an army of sales people which go around to stalk and harass potential buyers. ( more and more and more cost )
Now here is the big surprise! they find out that not all of those features are being adopted or liked by the end-users ( let’s say 5 out of 20 ) that means all the time and cost spent on developing the unpopular features was wasted. (more cost) so they have to push even harder to sell more of that product and or stalk more customers to generate enough sales and hopefully compensate the loss and make some profit. Large companies can use their monopoly and dominance over the market and make sure that end-users have no other option but to buy their product, however not all companies can do that.
In addition to that, this feature bloated product needs to be supported. They need call centers, 1-800 numbers, and people who can provide after-sales help and support (more cost). Not many companies can afford that either!
My good friend and business associate Arash from PeerGlobe Technology is organizing an awesome event about Adobe Flex, Rails, Air and the new Joomla 1.5 framework. This is supposed to be a fun get together of developers so you don’t have to be an expert in any of those to be able to enjoy the event. rmd Studio, Tazzu Community, and The Network Hub are 3 of the sponsors.
We’re going to have some really neat guest speakers such as Peter Armstrong (http://peterarmstrong.com ) which will be talking about his new book “Flexible Rails†(http://flexiblerails.com ) and Atul Nagpal who is an Adobe AIR and flex expert and will showcasing us some of his tips and tricks.
At the end Ash and I will be talking about the new Joomla 1.5 MVC framework and do a little comparison study.
When: March 19th 2008
Where: The Network Hub
To attend click on the button below
[tags]flex, air, rails, joomla, networkhub, tazzu, rmdstudio, rastin, peerglobe[/tags]
In the last few weeks I got a few phone calls from people who had their sites build using some content management system (open source or secret source!) and they were asking me if they could gain access to the back-end of their own site and update some of the content. After some poking around and asking some questions we learned that their web designers are not providing their clients the administrative access and still continuing to charge for every little website update which could easily be done by the clients themselves.
Hey guys … that’s not a fair to your clients!
And to the smart website owners: if any web designer is doing that to you, I think you should honestly give them the boot and seek professional service somewhere else!
Continue reading Clients who don’t get to update their own CMS powered websites!
It is finally here, and it took us 2 years to build it. After 2 exciting BugCamp and DocCamp events we finally managed to have a stable version of the lovely Joomla! CMS 1.5 released. Now we need time to upgrade all of our websites from the version 1.0 to the 1.5.
Joomla! 1.5 has been re-written from ground up using a new API and Model View Controller (MVC) architecture. It is not only a superb CMS, but also a great framework for building other variations of content managements such as Intranets, and Social Networking Management Systems (SMS).
Congratulations Joomla! team, and Joomla! Community. Today we have every right to feel proud!
[tags]Joomla, cms, content management, j1.5, joomla1.5, rmdstudio, open source[/tags]