Benji Smith is presenting 30 ideas (one each day) on his site. He’s currently at number 8 or so. You should read the relative post, 30 days: 30 ideas for his reasons.

Obviously Benji believes it’s the implementation and not the idea that matters.

The Chronicles of a Very Small Software Outfit is a blog by a mISV, sharing numbers (downloads, AdWords history etc) while staying anonymous.

Interesting article with tips for screencasting (uhm, online “movies of software”). Some of them are pretty good (e.g. “Bear in mind that the user’s eyes will follow the active cursor, so if you’re switching from clicking to typing, have the mouse pointer stop near where the text cursor starts”). Saw it on BoS forums.

Fluxiom, a digital asset management web application, has been released today. I’ll certainly try it and the reason is an incredible video they had released some months ago.

It’s amazing how I still remember that video. I wish I had the same skills in video making. I’ve tried making an introductory video for Magna CRM and discovered it’s harder than it seems. Things like Wink make the process easier, but real-time video with voice is tough.

PlanHack is a task management tool created by fellow mISV Jesse Kim (his blog is here).

Jesse is currently looking for beta testers, so if you’re interested download the beta and give it a try.

PlanHack is a downloadable web application, the same way Magna CRM is, so you need a Web Server with PHP to run it.

eZ Systems has released a new PEAR package (currently in alpha) to parse email messages. This tutorial by Derick Rethans shows how to use it.

I’m really interested in this as I want to implement email integration for Magna CRM (although there are a lot of features ahead of this).

Via PHPDeveloper.org

Sometime ago I was looking for an online service to catalog my books, CDs and DVDs. I even posted on JoS forums, but no-one pointed me anywhere useful (people mostly complained that we don’t really need another social application).

The good news is that I found LibraryThing and well, it is another social application. It even uses ajax, tag clouds and all that ;-)

Although it only handles books, it does so very well. It has great importers, good search capabilities and a great layout. You can have either a private or a public account (in which case anyone can surf your collection). Very impressive work, well done!

The other interesting fact, is that this is NOT a free service. You pay $10 per year or $25 for life, otherwise the free account only lets you manage 200 books. It has 28.000 users and 2.000.000 books. The mISVer behind it is Tim Spalding and he keeps a very interesting blog. He has many great posts on the problems he faced when the time came to scale his application (read the comments too).

Axosoft is doing a “social marketing experiment”, which basically consists of them giving 5 licenses of their software (bug tracking, helpdesk, todo management) for $5 instead of $495. The point being bloggers may write about it ;-)

The software looks pretty good, so I bought it even though I already have such tools. The nice thing is it includes Windows, Web and VS.NET clients.

If you’re interested check out the offer page. The offer will be valid until February 24th.

Overview is going to specialize in the development of reusable components for PHP developers.

The cool thing is they were inspired by some posts by Ian and myself.

Famfamfam.com has 3 sets of icons, free to use in personal and commercial applications and of professional quality. I was so happy to find them, I even submitted this to WorkHappy.net

Enjoy!

I just found this new start-up, JadedPixel. They are building an e-commerce application:

Shopify is a hosted e-commerce application designed from the core to be simple, fun and beautiful.

They keep a blog detailing the building of Shopify and their search for investors.

Building a hosted e-commerce system sounds tough (every merchant will want to make customizations to the way the software works) and dangerous (if they go down I lose money). I guess (and hope!) they have thought of these issues and have solutions.

Another mISV released their product! CaseDetective is a desktop reporting tool for FogBugz, Fog Creek’s bug tracker.

CaseDetective was developed by Ian and you can read more about it’s development process on his blog.

Congratulations!

Ian Landsman just released HelpSpot, a web based help desk application.

Ian has a very interesting blog, where he writes about his efforts creating HelpSpot and launching UserScape (his company).

The Flock team released a Developer Preview of the Flock browser. Flock is based in Firefox but adds some interesting features. The most notable ones are:

• Integration with del.icio.us
• Tagging
• Blogging from inside the browser (integrates with WordPress, Movable Type, Typepad, Blogger)
• Inserting images from Flickr to your posts

I’ve being following Michael Sica’s blog for many months now. Michael was building a Project Management tool named Unity. Recently he decided that it’s better to drop it and start over.

Along with his friend Jeff Marder, they intend to build a brand new product. Their efforts will be described on their blog.

Personally, I think it was a good decision and I wish them best of luck!