McFilter

ESWC Roundup

This is the last of my posts on the European Shareware Conference 2006. There might be the odd update to the posts if I find links to the presenters slides. I'm missing notes from two sessions - on the first day I missed the start of Tony Edgecombe's talk on Trust and couldn't take notes as my laptop was stranded at the other side of the room on charge. Gavin Bowman's has published his notes for that session. Then on the second day I skipped Thomas Wetzel's presentation about protecting your application (again, Gavin's notes are available) because I was being interviewed.

Mike Dulin had converted one of the rooms in the hotel into something resembling a radio studio and was quizzing me about tedium and the conference for his podcast - Shareware Radio. It was my first ever interview, but Mike does a great job of keeping things moving, and we'll have to see what it's like when it gets aired. Watch this space...

Here are the links to all of my notes from the conference:

Day One

• Bob Walsh: Keynote address
• Search engine Optimization
• Gary Elfring: On selling software
• Robert Martin: Marketing - it's what we do
• Panel #1: Marketing - what are the opportunities in 2007?
• Marcel Hartgerink: Next-generation software protection tools
• Panel #2: Technical issues
• Sinan Karaca: How to build extreme installers
• Thomas Wetzel: Grow your Google AdWords account successfully

Day Two

• Dave Collins: Websites that sell
• Panel #3: eCommerce advances and advantages
• Dave Collins: Google AdWords - taming the beast
• Panel #4: Supporting your users
• Michael Lehman: Project Glidepath
• Website critique

Final Thoughts

I thoroughly enjoyed the conference. There was lots of information to soak up from the presentations, which covered a full range of topics useful to anyone running a business online. As a direct result of the conference I'm going to be ditching Google Analytics in favour of another web server log analyzer (not exactly sure which yet, there are two I want to try), and I'll be trying out Infacta's GroupMail for managing my mailing lists (I've been looking for something to do this for a while, and this looks good and there was a conference offer of a free Personal Edition copy!).

It wasn't just the sessions that were good. I met all sorts of interesting people over the three days (I'm including the evening spent in the pub on Friday as part of the conference).

It was nice to meet both Bob and Gavin after trading emails with them in the past. Plus there were some locals attending who I hadn't met - Tony and Stephen, and one (Martin) I used to play footie with but haven't seen in a while. Then there were all those I met for the first time. It was great to meet you, and illuminating talking to you all.

As always seems the way when I attend conferences, I came away from the event buzzing with ideas and thoughts. Now I need to sift through them and start working on some of it.

Postscript

A final note about my note taking during the conference. It was the first time that I'd used my tablet PC in anger, and it acquitted itself well. The battery lasted half a day before it needed recharging, so I could just leave it to charge over lunch; and handwriting my notes in Microsoft OneNote was much less intrusive and distracting than typing would've been. The handwriting recognition has also been pretty impressive - by which I mean that the process of converting my handwritten notes into what's been posted up here has been: convert the handwriting to text in OneNote; then check the text against the original handwritten version and make corrections. There's generally been something to correct on every line, but I think it was quicker than typing them up manually would've been.

I'll leave you with some of the more amusing mis-conversions I've encountered whilst writing up the notes:

Original

Auto-converted version

Taming your visitors

Gaming your visitors

How many customers

Have mangy customers

FAQs are good

Torsos are gout

Analyze your logs

Downcast your loss

If you're lucky with an engineer

If you're bully with an engineer

Adwords

androids or bywords or woodworks or pollards

Windows

windups

~8000

igloo