I first discovered John Gunning’s ISV blog, SmallISV, back in February. I was interested in his blog then as he is a fellow Aussie ISV. However, at the time, it seemed like he lost interest in posting to his blog, but now I know why: he’s been busily coding his first product, which has launched recently: Bi Documenter.
Congratulations on your first launch, John!
Here’s an old, but interesting post, on writing blog posts when you are picked up by a planet:
How to blog for a planet…
It may be interesting to those who are picked up by our friendly MicroISV planet.
“Skypecasts are live, moderated discussions that allow groups of Skype users anywhere in the world to discuss shared interests, from classes to computer support to cultural or political debates. They amount to the conversational equivalent of Web blogs, complementing the written interactions of blogs.”
Read the full article here [via ZDnet] and also this [via the Skype blog].
A few minutes after reading this, I started wondering if this could be something useful for our Micro-ISV community. Kind of like a virtual uISV conference - but no travel expenses! Especially convenient to those of us, like myself, on the other side of the world from the U.S.
I think this could be worth a go. Anyone agree? Feel free to post topic ideas for a first Skypecast in the comments here and I may just see if I can get something going…
…if there’s enough interest I’ll try and pick a convenient time for those interested and announce it here and the relevent forums. Now it’s over to you…
Looks like someone else is taking the Micro-ISV plunge!
John Moody is currently pondering his situation and thinking about what direction to go in. It sounds like he’s leaning towards the ISV route.
It appears his first product will be some kind of GTD-oriented task list manager app and he’s currently thinking through whether to develop for the web or desktop. I’d recommend, if he goes the web route, having an option to generate nice on-the-fly PDFs for printing.
As I’ve been doing some screen and site mockups, I have been looking around at the various icon libraries that are available.
I thought I’d share them here as others may find this a useful list (it’s a good starting point, anyway):
| Library | URL | License |
| FamFamFam | famfamfam.com/lab/icons/ | Free |
| GlyFX Free | www.glyfx.com/free.html | Free & $ |
| iconaholic | iconaholic.com/downloads.html | donation? |
| IconBuffet | iconbuffet.com | $ |
| Icon Collection | sourceforge.net/projects/icon-collection/ | BSD |
| iconexperience | www.iconexperience.com/collections.php | US$129 |
| Nuvolo | icon-king.com/?p=15 | ? |
| Tango Desktop Project | tango-project.org/Tango_Icon_Gallery Here’s another page with all the icons laid out. |
CC Sharealike |
Ben, from over at the BRK Studio blog has released a payment component for Authorize.net. Hopefully this means that isvManage, his main product, will not be far behind.
I’ve been looking at options for packages like this for awhile now and am quite interested in having a closer look at it. I am hoping it supports a variety of software products, such as web subscriptions…
Another new Micro-ISV blog begins…
smallisv.wordpress.com… is by John Gunning and, although he’s only got two posts up at the moment, I’ll be interested in following his progress and his perspectives on starting a business from my side of the world (him being a fellow Aussie).
At this stage, I’m not sure what type of business he’s developing as he has even less details up than I do! 
This is last week’s news I know, but I thought it was worth comment. VMware Server now being free is a huge gift to the Micro-ISV community, methinks.
I’ve downloaded it and given it a quick test, and it looks great so far.
I have recently been evaluating both VMware Workstation and Parallels Workstation with the view to using one of them to setup development web servers for my own Micro-ISV; instead this has saved me quite a bit of money with no loss of functionality. Cool!
I’ve been doing a bit of reading tonight and came across this article from Evan William’s, of Blogger fame, on “Ten Rules for Web Startups“…
“No. 6. Be Self Centered - Great products almost always come from someone scratching their own itch. Create something you want to exist in the world. Be a user of your own product. Hire people who are users of your product. Make it better based on your own desires.”
A good point, and one that I’m actually following with my own service/product. I plan on following the “eat your own dogfood” idea and building stuff that I would find useful and want to use often.
It’s an old post, and many of you would have read it already but if, like me, you missed it, go read the rest of the points sometime.
From Wired: Vaporware: Better Late Than Never
The lesson for all good Micro-ISVs? Never announce product release dates!
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