Archive for April, 2008:
Posted by Commie B on April 30, 2008 at 11:15 am
There is a reason today why accounting for big business is so complex, tedious, and requires a large staff of people to manage; and you’d be surprised, it’s not because so many people are needed or because the work is too difficult; it is simply because most big businesses fail to utilize the tools available to them and are unable to maximize the efficiency and productivity that they can get out of such tools.
Over the years, I have consulted for several small businesses. Most of them were moving into that phase from a very mom-n-pop setup to becoming an established small business, where they were going to start implementing some formal accounting procedures, have proper policies, and were going to get organized because that it is what it would take for them to be able to keep up with the amount of business they were getting. It is worth saying that even in large businesses, it is the fallacy of management, as it is in some medium and small sized firms too, that each departmental head ends up treating his/her department like an individual business unit, and that’s a big deviation from what the goal originally was when any such department was setup. It is, therefore, imperative that businesses at all times keep in mind that the costs formal accounting, formal policy, statutory compliance, management accounting etc. are all overheads, and if they are not managed, they can seriously cut into the bottom line profit of any business.
So, why is there such a disconnect in accounting; costs are soaring high, compliance is becoming more and more difficult, and every year, the financial statements for public and private companies become more difficult to read and understand. You would think, that with all the state-of-the art software and information systems available to and affordable by such businesses, they can reduce the their costs, drive efficiency into their accounting policies and procedures, and efficiently produce GAAP, SOX or whatever-it-is-that-you-need-to compliant statements, and spend more time and resources simplifying the information for potential investor and outside parties with a vested interest. Of course, the latter doesn’t happen for a multitude of reasons, but we shall steer clear of that discussion. After all, the whole premise of this article is based on the Corporation not being evil, and what changes it needs to go through to harness the power of modern financial information systems.
There several ERP type solutions available to big business today. Oracle, JD Edwards (now owned by Oracle) and SAP are the three market leading ERP Solutions, and if they are used right, a big business can do wonders with it. The problem, however, is that just purchasing any of these solutions is not going to be enough. Hundreds and thousands of hours have to be spent on customizing and developing the blank platform that these solutions provide, and it is in this department that most big businesses fail.
You see, customizing JD Edwards, SAP or Oracle requires:
– Extensive Business Planning
- Serious Systems Analysis & Design Knowledge
- Minimum interference from IT Staff during these two phases
- Input and involvement of Accounting & Finance Staff
I have seen too many businesses that will purchase an expensive, fancy piece of software and pressure their IT Department to get it up and running in a week! It doesn’t work like that, and it will never work like that. Here is how, in a nutshell, an installation:
Once you’ve decided that your business is growing to the point where you need an extensive piece of software, it’s time to get your act together.
Map your business requirements, systems and workflows. This is absolutely the most important part of the process of implementing a massive information / financial system. If you don’t know where your data flows from, WHAT EXACTLY that data is, where it comes and from and where it will go, and how it is transformed from data to understandable information, you’ll never be able to utilize the software the way it was meant to be used. Most businesses that skip this entire process and take a “develop as you use/grow” approach toward customizing and evolving ERP software like JD Edwards or SAP will suffer massive problems, to the point where they will have so much legendary data of one sort, that they will end up hiring an extra person to manually manage every additional feature that they could have initially built into the financial information system.
Systems Analysis & Design. This is where your hardcore IT Department needs to stay out. Might I suggest that the purpose and goal of most IT Departments is to TECHNICALLY do and make possible what is asked of them, instead of taking on a more hands-on approach to changing processes to keep more control in their hands. You see, ultimately, the end user, who in this case is your accounting and finance staff, or sales staff, has to use the software, and the requirements should come from them, and should not be translated to what the IT Department thinks they are. That’s why you need a systems analyst, to map the business requirements with what is technologically feasible, and ultimately, what is more cost effective, letting IT have it their own way and hiring extra staff (and paying for the software), or just paying for the software and making do with existing staff? When I finished as a student and started my career, people used to laugh at the concept of a systems analyst, and the ultimate mockery of the system analyst profession was made of by the Computer Science geeks, most of who make up IT Departments. Although the culture has now changed, I cannot tell you how many gazillions of dollars this lack of analysis has cost Corporations around the globe. Somebody has to bridge the gap between business and technology, and I can assure you, your IT Department will never be able to do it.
Well, I’ve said enough about this, haven’t I?
Yes, please! These are the people who will be using your financial information system. They know what is needed, and they know WHY they need it too. So, when you buy software and develop it for them to use, shouldn’t they be the ones directing the development of such a software. I cannot believe how many businesses simply leave out the end user when planning on making big changes to their accounting and finance software systems, and to efficiently make such a change and plan for growth and more of this tedious accounting work, it would do good to solicit these users for advice before making the blunder and hiring 15 extra staff members!
Remember, the teams that design, implement and support need to be separate from each other, because if they’re not, the on single team will ultimately try to make it’s life easier and profitable in the long run. That means you’ll waste thousands on software, get crappy design, and will end up paying to hire people to do things manually. Might as well skip the ERP software purchase.
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Posted by Commie B on April 25, 2008 at 11:02 pm
I recently wrote an article about why London will never be New York. The article was met with lots of positive and negative criticism; some love London, and others love New York. One gentleman was so furious he dubbed me an American who doesn’t know any better, because New York is nothing but a concrete jungle (as opposed to Liverpool Street or Holborn?). Of course, we are all entitled to our opinions.
As some of you may already know, I have spent a couple of years in Dubai. Although my experienced, possibly jaded opinion says that London will never become New York, I can comfortably tell you why, and how, Dubai may one day actually become London, and take away a good chunk of the tourists that come to London (that’s great for some Londoners, eh!).
Living in Dubai made me quite Anti-Arab, and on many occasions, anti Muslim. Ultimately, I was extremely frustrated with the general incompetence of systems, the bad quality of service, general lack of common sense and common courtesy, and people’s undying, inevitible ability to do everything wrong an average of three times before getting it right. Hoarding money, overcharging, ripping off residents and immigrants, lying, cheating, deceiving, and not thinking through what the hell it is that they’re doing are among some of the common mistakes they made in Dubai. I’m sure they still make them. When I lived in Dubai, I compared everything, civil infrastructure, Information Technology, shopping experience, quality of life, cost of living, etc. with the US, and Dubai lost on practically every ground. I was never sure where the Arabs & Muslims had come up with their system, their costing & pricing, their inefficient ideas, and their con-like way of life in Dubai. I used to blame them and their kind for it.
And now, I realize, that on some level, I owe them an apology for criticizing them for making Dubai the way it is. Well, maybe not. But what I have realized is that comparing Dubai, or any other part of the world for that matter, with the US way was a mistake. I knew nobody in the Muslim world (except maybe Iran) would make effort to reinvent or recreate the wheel, but I always assumed that Dubai was trying to mimic New York (with Sheikh Zayed Road being their pride and all), but they failed miserably. Well, that was my mistake. I hadn’t experienced London yet.
And now that I have, well, Dubai is really not that bad. When I compare the way of life in London to the way of life in the United States, I see the same fallacies that I saw in Dubai. The same traditional cultural hoardiness, sticking to culture and tradition (which nobody really knows much about, in London or Dubai – don’t get me wrong, there are people who do, but most are pretty lost), sitting on money, enjoying other people’s misery, lying, deceiving the public, being overcrowded, etc. etc. My, I thought, am I making the same mistake that I did in Dubai?
Probably. Comparing London and New York is not necessarily fair. The cities emerged differently, were built by different people with different visions and served different purposes in different cultures for different people with different mentalities and ideologies. But Dubai, gosh! Dubai is a hotter, modern, dusty, inexpensive, (maybe) glamorous (dare I say), cleaner (definitely!) version of London. How, you ask?
Well, London is built with one aim and one goal in mind: impress those who visit and take as much money as you can from them. But what you build is what you get, i.e., that is also the mentality of the people who live there. I’ll continue this attitude of the people later, but Dubai does impress a lot of tourists, and with the certain allure it has created, people spend a lot of their money in Dubai, which what their ultimate goal is.
Dubai is ultimately built by the British. You see British civil engineering at work in the Dubai road infrastructure, you see the British bureaucracy/systems in place when dealing with most day-to-day things (getting a landline telephone – the equivalent of BT in Dubai is Etisalat, getting a mobile phone, paying your bills, banking, etc.). Basically, Dubai is a carbon copy of British systems, and that’s because it’s built by the British. In that British re-creation of Dubai, you see some efforts to rectify the mistakes in London, and as a result of that, the wow factor that Dubai offers for some people may be more than what London can offer. Of course, Dubai doesn’t really have a history, and it will always fall short of London in that department.
But where Dubai really succeeds is in having used the American system to successfully market. It seems like they may have solicited the British and other European nations for help when it came to developing their city, but the Arabs know and believe that no one is better at positive marketing than the United States, and this could be the one biggest factor why Dubai can cause quite a dent in London’s tourist revenues.
So, how does Dubai compare with London?
Just Visiting?
When you’re visiting or passing through, be it for leisure or business, you want it to be cheap, efficient and fun. You want to be pampered and you want to feel important, and you definitely want to make the most of it, right?
Hotels
Okay, London has a fine line of great hotels, but then so does Dubai. In fact, with the Burj ul Arab, Jumeirah Beach Hotel, Madinat Jumeirah, Royal Mirage and a plethora of others, Dubai has a collection of modern five star hotels with a traditional touch that will dazzle just about any visitor. What else? Dubai offers add ons with your hotel service like buttlers, which will make even the most seasoned traveler feel like a king. Dubai can do this because they’ll charge you over GBP 500 per night for your hotel room, while the guy who will carry your luggage, clean up, and do all the dirty work will get paid less than GBP 300 a month! That may be a violation of human rights on some level, but it certainly works well for visitors and tourists. I remember an uncle of mine telling me about his visit to Grosvenor House in London in the 80s, and how he had to carry his bags up to the room himself. In Dubai, you’d never do that.
Shopping & Fashion
There were days when the world came to London for shopping for the latest fashions and gadgets. People still come to London for that, but I’m not sure they come with the same expectation or enthusiasm anymore. Dubai has successfully marketed and built itself several world class shopping centres, and interestingly enough, some products may even cost you more in Dubai than they would in London. But that’s not true of all the products, especially once you learn the right areas and the right places to shop in Dubai. Even though I’ve seen that the same shops in Dubai don’t get the latest products that they would stock in London or New York, Dubai has definitely entered this market, and quite possibly has a much better pricing position than London for a multitude of reasons (no tax, no excise and customs etc.).
We know that the fashion headquarters of the world are London, Paris, Milan, New York and maybe Los Angeles. Dubai has made a serious effort to enter this market, and they’ve certainly gotten somewhere. Dubai regularly hosts fashion shows, and the biggest designers do not mind hosting and displaying their products in Dubai. That’s a big attraction for tourists and visitors, as trivial as that may be for some of us practical people.
Living or Working in Dubai?
If you move to Dubai from London, you won’t find much of a difference in the culture. Neither of these places are by any means American in Corporate Culture, and that may very well be a cultural and traditional gap for the best. Londoners will not find it very different in Dubai, except that if you go to Dubai from London, chances are you will get VIP treatment and your quality of life may improve, although for someone who is well settled in London, the kind of life Dubai offers may very well be trivial.
The area Dubai lacks in professionally is, well, professionalism. There is a serious lack of professionally competent people in Dubai, and although London has its fair share of incompetence, it generally has a much better employee set than Dubai. So, naturally, for the striving, aspiring person, London has more to offer: access to a bigger market, access to more resources, better facilties, etc. etc.
Education, you say?
Education is certainly a developing area in Dubai, but it’s no where close to being acceptable at this point. I won’t say any more in this section, except that London and it’s surrounding areas house some of the world’s best educational institutions. Dubai doesn’t have any decent higher education yet, but I believe it is in the works.
Cleanliness
Well, Dubai takes the lead here easily. It’s very clean, especially the areas all the tourists and western people visit. All such areas are practically spotless, although they come at the expense of slave labour. Of course, most people are oblivious to things such as slave labour, so this is a big plus point for Dubai. Parts of London have become extremely filthy, and I needn’t comment more on this. I said plenty about it in the article that compared London with New York, and there’s no point in repeating myself.
Traffic
What can I say? Both London and Dubai suck. Road tax is killer. Tolls are killer. London has better public transportation, but Dubai intend to roll out their fancy planned metro in 2009. That will certainly create cultural and class issues in Dubai, the effect of which remains to be seen. This blending of the racial discrimination of the east and west sides of the Dubai Creek could make or break the comfortable working class of Dubai.
Why won’t Dubai Compete with New York?
Quite simply, because Dubai isn’t marketing itself as an American city. It offers facilties like London, it offers services like London. The flat, housing and apartments feel more like London than they do like any part of New York or other American cities. But Dubai is using the grace of New York. It is painting itself the metropolitan image that London lacks, and it’s doing a fantastic job.
Fancy skyscrapers, a tube / subway system, big roads and highways, the world’s biggest businesses (even if they don’t any business and get rent free buildings to fool everyone else), and the image of success. It’s a very well told lie, and a perfectly created fassad, created by the British and Europeans for and by the Europeans, and you can see it has been a successful venture so far. How long it lasts will be interesting, but Dubai may never make it because it’s very difficult to gain a sense of ownership or ‘homeliness’ in Dubai. A place that will never call you its citizen, a kingship that will never treat you as one of its own, will never get the dedication of the people who reside there to make money; it’s that simple.
Where Dubai Fails?
Well, there are several pitfalls Dubai needs to overcome before it can consider competing with London. Among them, a legal system, decent education, more condusive laws for business people, and less lying.
Major businesss in Dubai were given free buildings to move in in areas like Dubai Internet City, so that other striving and aspiring businessmen follow and pay the outrageous fees. The fassad worked, but I don’t know when people will start to see it isn’t what it claims to be. Most of the businesses, even if they are functioning in other countries, fail to take off in Dubai because they’ve bought into this lie. This needs to stop; Dubai needs to help develop business inside rather than make it fail.
Laws are important. Company law that is 4 sheets of A4 paper typed in 12 point font with more grammatical mistakes than my 2nd grade english paper will not suffice for complex international business. After all, how long will businesses settle disputes in and according to the law of the United Kingdom in Dubai? Lawyers are full of crap, trying to offer you legal help on law that’s 4 pages wrong. Please don’t fall for this trap in Dubai. Lawyers are pathetic everywhere, but in countries where implementation of law is non-existent, and even worse, in countries like the UAE where law is non-existent, lawyers need to be booted.
Dubai needs to be less racist. The racism and discrimination is unacceptable at all levels of human decency; just because you’re brown or Indian doesn’t mean you don’t deserve to be respected; Arabs certainly don’t have the right to disrespect anyone; let’s avoid this discussion, shall we? But Dubai needs to be weary of this; once the metro in Dubai is complete, it could lead to a blending of the eastern and western population of Dubai, that could make the latter very uncomfortable, and I’m not sure Dubai has a ‘plan b’ for that.
There’s a lot more to be said on this, but it can’t be said without me not being nice. I’ll take up more issues in the future, but I think if Dubai keeps on the right track and focuses on the right things, it may very well compete with London. It is likely that Dubai will overcome its fallacies, although there certainly are no guarantees about when and how. Then again, given the level of competence in Dubai, London may not have too much to worry about.
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Posted by Commie B on April 23, 2008 at 9:54 pm
Folks, here are the new download keys for HP QuickPlay. Please, use the instructions provided on http://www.asifism.com/installing-hp-quickplay-on-your-laptopnotebook-vista-xp/ for installing QuickPlay Direct before posting questions and queries already answered.
To download QuickPlay, visit http://downloads.asifism.com and use one of the following appropriate keys. Also, DO USE the download of Winrar provided to extract the zipped version of QuickPlay Direct (HPQPDP.rar), otherwise you may get errors while trying to extract it.
Hp QuickPlay Direct 2.3: cbb6d22b102bb067b210ea32e0cbee0e
HP QuickPlay for Windows 2.3, 3.0 & 3.6: 24deb04c698239fdbd9863ac77232f8f
HP QuickPlay TV: 8268dae277b7fa34b8a445b120226881
Winrar 3.6.2: 595b90bcd5bb6a2294b4ba6abfd301a1
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Posted by Commie B on April 13, 2008 at 5:55 pm
Okay, so this month I’ve finally crossed the $100 mark in Adsense earnings. It’s been a long journey, after just a little over 2 years, my earnings reached US $100, at an unusually low rate of earnings per click of $0.16.
But here is the kicker, $ 57 of this $100 I’ve earned has come in the last 6 months, and i’ve been publishing adsense ads since March 24, 2006.
So, how have the earnings gone up, and as you can see, they doubled from February to March, and I think they should be hitting $ 25 this month, at least that’s where it seems the earnings are headed.
So, how did I get here. The truth is, like many, I’d given up on earning any adsense money at all, but that I am getting some traffic, crossing 13,000 unique visitors last month, there is something I would like to share with everyone about how, at least, I’m driving traffic to the web site, of which adsense revenue is a direct result.
Content, quality of content. You have to have content that is relevant, engaging and that invites people to come back to the web site. HP QuickPlay may be the primary traffic driving factor for this site, but lately I have diversified the content, and I now get over a thousand visitors a month here looking for information on accounting certifications, or shopping cart software, or simply people who enjoy whining about London, New York, and other odd topics. In addition, I think adding Polls has been of substantial help.
Here is a tip I’ve read elsewhere: if you focus your content on high paying adsense ads, which primary include financial institution ads, insurance, loan-related ads, etc., chances are you can get paid over a dollar per click. I’ve had days with more than 30 clicks where I’ve earned all buy 90 cents, then I’ve had days where I earned over $3 with just 3 clicks, and ultimately, the high revenue is driven by the kind of content. As the content becomes more diverse, the ads diversify too, and if you make your content diverse in a certain field, the ads change accordingly.
But I’ve seen blogs that have lost quality in content with aim to getting the high paying adsense ads, and I don’t hink that’s worth it. Ultimately, even if most your traffic is from search engines, you won’t see it increase if your content is useless.
There are hundreds of ways to monetize your website, and hundreds of website that cater to monetizing your website. However, since the topic of discussion here is solely adsese, here is an article that discusses on how to increase your CTR using adsense: http://www.quickonlinetips.com/archives/2005/03/increase-google-adsense-ctr-by-500/. It’s a well written article, that gives you rather decent guidance on how to go about placing adsense ads on your page. Ultimately, you don’t want your ads to be disruptive, because that will cost you readers, and google is working on cracking down bloggers who post ads inside posts, since you get clicks by mistake and it makes for untidy, frustrating, and a painful experience for the user.
Now, if you are interesting in trying out other things and truly developing a passive income from your website and by doing other things, well, here’s a comprehensive website for you to visit: http://www.livingoffdividends.com/2008/04/04/how-i-made-2667-in-passive-income/.
Happy blogging!
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Posted by Commie B on April 13, 2008 at 5:17 pm
Here are the download keys for HP QuickPlay. Please, use the instructions provided on http://www.asifism.com/installing-hp-quickplay-on-your-laptopnotebook-vista-xp/ for installing QuickPlay Direct before posting questions and queries already answered.
To download QuickPlay, visit http://downloads.asifism.com and use one of the following appropriate keys. Also, DO USE the download of Winrar provided to extract the zipped version of QuickPlay Direct (HPQPDP.rar), otherwise you may get errors while trying to extract it.
HP QuickPlay Direct 2.3: 820c49ac85d6cc6796eabf3531fdf7b8
HP QuickPlay for Windows (2.3, 3.0 & 3.6): d6ae918fa08da1465dfa87a883959b76
HP QuickPlay TV: a69a031d21c69879e9fda8c083b91b0e
Winrar 3.6.2: 0884de39d86c0a0a98e0702492d6da23
Happy Downloading!
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Posted by Commie B on April 6, 2008 at 1:57 pm
Hundreds of webmasters and web designers choose to use ZenCart of OSCart to set up their or their clients’ stores on the web. I myself have setup quite a few shopping stores, and I’m here to tell you that using OS Cart or Zencart just because they are free is not always the best decision.
My personal item of choice is eCommerce Templates. It’s not free, but it doesn’t cost you an arm and a leg, and it will get you everything you need for a shopping store, in probably half the time as OSCart & ZenCart will.
I’ve recently spent some time trying to play with and configure both ZenCart and OSCart, and they’re both quite a mess. The support is sketchy for both of them, as is the pattern in which support is provided. They don’t necessarily come ‘built-in’ with any payment providers, and you have to use add-ons to get them to work with different payment providers and different shipping providers, and finding and installing the right add on can be quite a hassle because, well, they’re written by the creators of zencart or oscart, but by other independent developers.
Please note that my goal here is not to undermine the pros of open-source, as I am a big fan of open source, despite being a microsoft partner. But read on, and I shall tell you why I think you shouldn’t waste too much time troubling yourself with either ZenCart or OS Cart, when you can be up and running with eCommerce Templates in a few hours.
The Pricing & Income Factor
Okay, so OS Cart and ZenCart (I’ll be calling them OSC and ZC from now on) are free. eCommerce templates may run you round about $ 150.00. My experience? On average I can have a shopping store up and running on eCommerce Templates to MY design in less one, inefficient working day. With OSC and ZC, it was a painful operation, and it took me a few days to wrap my arms around the template. In addition, I think the coding model for both OSC & AC is rather sketchy, especially when compared with eCommerce Templates.
Now, let’s do the math. A client hires you to put together a shopping store. You choose one of the free solutions to make an extra $150.00. It takes you three days to make the store, and you’ve fixed a price of, say, $ 1,850 with your client. Three working days means 24 hours, which would be mean that you made an average of $77 per hour, which really isn’t that bad. Now, let’s say you used eCommerce Templates, you can have the same store ready in 8 hours, and if it is your very first store, it really shouldn’t take you more than 12 hours, or you shouldn’t do this for a living. Now, let’s do the math here. You pay $ 150 for an eCommerce Template, and spend 12 hours designing the store. That means you made a whopping $ 142 per hour, which is practically DOUBLE of what you would make if you used OSCart or ZenCart. If that isn’t incentive to sway away from these two packages, I don’t know what else is.
Avoid Tedious Coding, anyone?
There are many of us out there who don’t mind spending time digging into the code, because for some of us it’s actually productive. But i really don’t like to do that when I could be using my time more efficiently, i.e., completing the work that I’m actually getting paid for. With eCommerce Templates, you have one big plus that you don’t with the others. You do not have to be familiar with PHP or ASP templating in any way, shape or form, because their templates come built in for the piece of software that you want to use to do your design, be it Dreamweaver, GoLive, Frontpage, and if you’re not faint of heart, purely CSS & XHTML compliant templates too. That makes it much easier for those who like to stick to familiar territory to “edit” the design.
In addition, if you like to use photoshop to do your design work, you can continue to do that with eCommerce Templates, and simply integrate the “ecommerce” portion of their template/design into yours. You can choose their simple template design for this, and when you’re done slicing up your own design in photoshop, open the files up in your editor of choice, and paste the no more than 3-5 lines of code to get the shopping cart functionality on your pages. It really is that easy. The store at Asif Nawaz Consulting, on http://www.asifnawaz.net/consulting/shopping_store/ is a prime example of something like this, and although it’s not the most flashy of designs, it is a perfect example fo the functionality you can get with eCommerce Templates.
Adding a payment provider
Well, let’s say you’ve been using authorize.net for a long time, and now you want to add google checkout functionality. Well, with OSC or ZC, you’ll have to look for the add on, download it, upload it via FTP (and this isn’t that simple, because you have to replace like 5 files over 15 folders), and then, maybe, if all goes as planned, you’ll have the google checkout functionality. With eCommerce Templates, it is much simpler. You sign up with google, log on to the administrator panel at your online store created with ecommerce templates, and simply enter your google API and Account #, and you’re done. It is actually just that simple.
Shipping Options
This is my biggest difficulty with OSC and ZC. With eCommerce Templates (eCT), you can use UPS, FEdEx or USPS. I haven’t seen Royal mail here yet for UK, but I hope to see that addition soon enough. You can also use weight based or flat rate shipping, depending on what you sell. I’m not sure if you’ve ever made the effort to integrate FedEx or UPS into a web site yourself, but I’m doing it now with DesignerPottery.com, and I can tell you, it’s note a whole lot of fun. Using eCT, you can sign up from inside your admin panel and have UPS shipping up and running in a few minutes. BEWARE, though, if you are hosting through GoDaddy or a Wild West affiliate. You will need to add a couple of variables to your includes file for it to work.
Documentation
The benefit here is that the manual and documentation is detailed and orderly. With OSC and ZC, that was one of my biggest problems. Help online is very sketchy, and nobody wants to spend time weeding through a massive PDF manual to see how something works. The HTML manual and help is easy to use, and you have access to a forum, which discusses almost all of the issues with the product.
Forum Support & Updates
This may be the only downside. eCT periodically releases updates to fix bugs and add functionality, and the updaters cost about $ 25, and they include a 6 month membership on the support forum, where you can directly communicate with their team and other members/users to get your questions resolved. Even if you don’t pay the support fee, you can view everything on the forum. You just can’t ask for help directly. If you don’t want the updaters, you can buy a support subscription, which costs slightly less than the updater, but it’s worth it, because when you’re adding functionality to your client’s store, you will be charging him/her too.
International Compatiblity
Okay, eCT stores are compatible in the US & UK, and I believe elsewhere too, but you do need to check this before you purchase it. In my experience, it works okay for UK based stores too, and it is the only solution that has worked for a UK based store for me without causing me too much heartburn. I’d recommend it to others.
In Conclusion
One thing you must keep in mind is that I have now been using eCT for 5 years, so i am very comfortable with it. Of course, as a new user, there will be a bit of a learning curve, but what I can tell you is that that learning curve will be, at worst, half of what it may be with OSC or ZC. There are solutions out there like CubeCart and XCart, which are free to a point and then they charge you per your requirements, but I don’t have much experience with them.
I’ll be very honest with you: I haven’t tried another solution since I switched to eCT, and that’s because it’s simplicity and scalability attracted me. I highly recommend the product to anyone else.
If you have any questions about the solution, please feel free to ask and clarify them before you buy it, and if you do and it is not too much of a hassel, kindly use the window below to order:
Also, please share with everyone what software you use.
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Posted by Commie B on April 3, 2008 at 2:41 pm
Well, sort of. Apparently HP has now released a required new BIOS upgrade F.39 for owners of some of their fine line (sense the sarcasm) of notebook PCS, including hp pavillion dv2000/6000/9000 & compaq presario v3000/v6000 series laptops. Here is a reproduction of the email I’ve received from them. If you own a laptop in that series, I suggest you visit the link in this email and see what you can get:
HP recently released a required new BIOS, version F.39, for certain HP Pavilion dv2000 and Compaq Presario V3000 series notebook PCs.
To obtain important information about this new BIOS release, please visit the web site link at the bottom of this email.
HP Limited Warranty Service Enhancement
HP has announced a service enhancement program for certain HP Pavilion dv2000, and Compaq Presario V3000 series notebook PCs.
You may be entitled to a free repair.
HP records show that you have registered one of these products.
If you do own one of these products, HP suggests that you visit the web site below for additional details.
English Link:
http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/genericDocument?lc=en&cc=us&dlc=en&docname=c01087277
This can be potentially useful for some people, especially, I presume, if you are based in the US. I have yet to go through the instructions, but anyone who does, please post your feedback to share with the rest of us.
In another event, a California judge has ruled against HP in another (I believe) class action lawsuit, whereby some dv2000 and dv6000 series had a defective inverter, where your laptop screen would turn black or blue while running on battery, thereby rendering the computer useless until rebooted or put to sleep and reawakened. I found information pertaining to this on the internet last week, but didn’t save it, so I don’t have a link handy to the law firm’s website. If anyone comes across it, please share the link. My notebook is one such notebook.
The sad part, which I believe triggered the reaction from the judge, was that HP knew about the defective inverter when the notebooks went on sale, and despite knowing about it, they charged customers in excess of US $ 650 per notebook to fix the problem. For the record, the inverter costs about US $ 20, according to the news post I read on the law firm’s website.
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Posted by Commie B on April 3, 2008 at 2:20 pm
Following are the latest download keys for HP QuickPlay. Please, use the instructions provided on http://www.asifism.com/installing-hp-quickplay-on-your-laptopnotebook-vista-xp/ for installing QuickPlay Direct before posting questions and queries already answered.
To download QuickPlay, visit http://downloads.asifism.com and use one the following appropriate keys. Also, DO USE the download of Winrar provided to extract the zipped version of QuickPlay Direct (HPQPDP.rar), otherwise you may get errors while trying to extract it.
These keys are potentially valid for 10 days.
HP QuickPlay Direct 2.3 (hpqpdp): a89f81ace85b6dbff9b5d95162628662
HP QuickPlay for Windows (XP & Vista): bc9829a1ffee7b6fa34f629ad88152df
HP QuickPlay TV: dc48696776d9526d32307cab463a78e7
WinRar: 7d37d5361d4e5a723a77b8e2e8c6434c
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