My Errant Mind

Okay, if you have read any of my posts on open source, you know that I have taken issue with Suse and Novell for their Microsoft deal. However, I am curious to check out the upcoming release: OpenSuse 11.0 should be out Thursday, June 19th.

Why?

Well, while I don’t like that Novell caved in to Microsoft and bought into their fear-mongering tactics, I can appreciate the direction of the OpenSource distro and the progress it has made. One thing I can say from first-hand experience is that Suse will install more smoothly on more systems and has the polished look and feel that makes it a prime candidate for luring corporate/office users away from Microsoft’s ailing platform.

So, I’m going to take a hard look at OpenSuse 11.0, put it through its paces as I consider what distro I should recommend to folks. This is, of course, an ongoing issue/challenge when it comes to Linux as I look for a good SOHO distro that also has the potential to step up and handle the duty at the SMB and Enterprise levels…all while staying user friendly and easy to use.

And, since I am going to take another look at OpenSuse, I might as well give XandrOS another look (I had written it off as well since it climbed in bed with Micrsoft also). Then again, maybe not. I understand the need of businesses to work with integrated networks and can appreciate the difficulties and justifications of cost and ROI when facing the prospect of phasing out legacy systems…but some of the XandrOS licensing and pricing schemes/tiers are starting to look an awful lot like those that come out of Redmond’s greedy resident.

Others I’m about to test include Mandriva Spring 2008, Zenwalk Linux 5.0, Simply Mepis 7.0, Freespire 2.0.8 and the latest Fedora release (which I have put off trying out for some time because of lingering memories of how the Fedora project was being run).

I have run across a lot of fun distros, a lot of slick distros, and some really dismal ones as well over the past few years. A lot of distros have great potential, but there seems to be a common underlying theme of poor project management, lack of focused direction, and ego clashes…with far too little marketing and business sense in the mix. Just when you feel like one distro might make a nice home on the digital range…something comes along to spoil the idyllic moment.

It is my great frustration that I’m not a programmer or I would have started my own distro by now. In the meantime, it gives me something to do on slow days when caffeine levels are climbing, this constant installing and kicking around under the log-on prompt.

Available through Sedo.com, you can check it out here: http://www.fromsunlight.com/

It’s a brand protected domain with four other extensions available (.net, .org, .info, .biz) for a total of five domain variations. A great generic domain name that’s easy to spell and remember and can be put to a wide variety of uses. It is about to be a featured listing on Sedo’s USA and UK sites.

If you haven’t heard about the group of women from the small Spanish village of Serradilla del Arroyo in the northern province of Salamanca, Spain, who posed semi-nude for a calendar in order to raise money for their tiny rural school and its children, you have now. They ran into financial trouble after not selling many of the calendars and found themselves in debt.

Not knowing much about marketing or publishing, they missed the Christmas rush (extremely important in Calendar marketing it seems) and were left with about 5,000 unsold calendars. The printer has pressed the issue of their being behind on payments and media attention has put the spotlight on their efforts.

Their tiny village of around 400 has one teacher for its one room elementary school spanning four grade levels. The mothers decided to try and do something that would raise money for their children to have a recreation center. I certainly have to give them credit for trying. However, it wasn’t as easy as it was for the British women who did so—and whose story inspired these Spanish ladies. These concerned moms owe $16,000 to the printer.

You can help out by purchasing one of the calendars. Better yet, buy one for yourself and as many of your friends as you can. How often do you get to honestly say you bought a semi-nude calendar to help out children in a remote Spanish village?

Calendars can be purchased here: La Casa de Medico (Calendar is towards the bottom of the home page, Calendarios Madres de Serradilla)

You have an item you want to put up for auction with hopes for a big payoff, and the moment comes to make some choices about your pricing strategy. How do you price not only to sell, but to sell big?

Some items are obviously more suitable for a big payoff than others. Often, this is because they are unique items or standouts in a particular niche market. Examples might be a rare musical instrument, a highly modified (or meticulously restored) muscle car, a hand built wooden sailboat…or a cornflake that looks like a state.

What is your pricing strategy? I’m asking you to chime in with a comment and share your thoughts on how you would go about pricing your item for sale.

You Online Auction And Pricing Strategy

We will use our example of a unique item for sale. It doesn’t really matter what it is we’re selling–it could be anything. However, since some people like visuals and something tangible to picture in their mind, we will say it is a muscle car. Not just any muscle car however. Here’s what we know about it.

It is in really good condition and just from the physical quality of the engine, performance carb, nice transmission, tires, etc, you know that if you were to part it out it would fetch a solid $10,000. However, due to its age and the great paint job and attention to details, it is more common to see similar ones go for $20,000. You could enter this baby in some shows.

However… Let’s say this car has something intangible attached to it. It was driven by someone famous, has a significant role in history (set records on the drag strip?) or was in a movie (not necessarily a blockbuster…we’re not talking Bond’s Lotus or the Batmobile here) for example. You have a feeling that with the right buyer, this car could fetch $40,000-$100,000.

So…how do you price it?

Prices To Consider

• Absolute minimum you will take.
• Starting bid price.
• Reserve price.
• Buy it now price.

We will assume that since we can part it out for $10,000 that we do not want to sell for less than that. Now, share your strategy for what you think will get you the biggest payoff!

What would I do? Hmmm…

Starting bid at $10,000…reserve at $17,000…and buy it now at $35,000? My own thinking is start the bidding low where it looks like a steal, but set the reserve about 15% under what we think it would do typically…and then encourage the chance of making more by pricing the buy it now so that it is under what its niche value might be, but not so far from the reserve that it doesn’t discourage–all the while suggesting a belief that it is unique and that it is worth a solid $35,000 which is more than similar conditioned models without its unique feature? Let its unique feature drive the market above that 75% markup from standard market value ($20,000) that your buy it now suggests…if it is truly meant to go there at all?

I don’t know, really. Which is why I want to know what YOU think!

Just a short post to suggest an interesting article I happened across on Red Herring about Fillmore Fuels and their new online auction site for biodiesel and related products. According to the article by Justin Moresco, Fillmore Fuels is hoping to create “a sort of eBay for the growing market around the renewable fuel.”

The company is hoping to build a community experience around the biodiesel industry and has some new forums that have just gone live. If you’re interested in helping the adoption of renewable fuels along I hope you will read the article on Red Herring and then visit the Fillmore Fuels website at: http://www.fillmorefuels.com/

[Note: The link to the company's site was miswritten in the HTML code in the article, so I have included it here. I sent a note to Red Herring about the link issue and am sure they will correct it soon.]

While I’m at it, there’s a great interview video on Red Herring with ZeaChem’s CEO, Jim Imbler, about their process for turning woodchips into ethanol.

[Note: I wish WordPress had better support for embedding videos from other sources besides YouTube, as I had tried to include the video here. Sorry.]

I’m interested in learning more about it since getting an inside glimpse into ethanol production. My hometown is putting in what will become the first ethanol plant owned and operated by a municipal government in the state of Oklahoma. I’ve been to the plant and had a look inside and it is fascinating to hear how the process has gone. The City has no real template for the whole process since no other municipal governments have done this, but things are coming together. There is already another ethanol plant here (not bad for a place with a small population) commercially operated, and the two plants will certainly put the place on the renewable energy map.

It is exciting to see rural economic areas embracing technology and creating renewable energy initiatives. The expected revenue from the plant will do wonders for the community. A lot of people have their eye on the project—people in important places (it might surprise you, just who). Anyway, enjoy the articles!

If it wasn’t before, it is now—thanks to the Dutch company Optiver. The company is “active in a broad range of arbitrage activities” according to their corporate website. Now they are also active in some sexy social marketing.

Any financial company whose business model depends on bleeding edge IT and constant innovation is likely to want to target young males. I discovered the ad the relatively new video site Break.com, which is aimed at the 18-34 male demographic. Did Optiver do a good job with it?

I think they did. The ad came out about a year ago, but I’m just now discovering it. I wonder how the ad worked out for them, financially speaking? Was it a winner?

Every young male investor who chose to give up his dream of being a rock star to work in the financial sector will remember this ad for years to come.

I submit that someone in their marketing department has both a sense of humor and firm understanding of two principles: (1) sex sells, (2) keep it simple. I think the company managed with this ad to project the edgy attitude that a young male investor can relate to. If nothing else, it should make rounds in a lot of offices.

For your viewing pleasure…and any future marketers taking Rock Star Marketing for the Financial Sector 101 this semester…

NOTE: For some reason the embedding of the video from Break.com doesn’t want to work so I include the link below. The video above is from YouTube.

Who Wears Short Shorts? - Watch more free videos

There is a great new service available to musicians that offers a way to permeate the digital marketplace with their music. It is called TuneCore.

What makes TuneCore so fantastic is the centralization of the distribution of digital music, making it much easier for musicians to market their songs and albums. Best of all, you get centralized payment collection and distribution to go with that.

What that means is that you can upload an album in once location and have it sold on iTunes, Rhapsody, GroupieTunes, Napster, MusicNet, eMusic, Sony Connect, and Amazon MP3. Payments from each service are consolidated through TuneCore.

It is not a free service, charges a tiny fee for hosting your album. You chose which services you want to sell your music on ($0.99 per song, per service), so you can sell through just one or through several. Check out the TuneCore FAQ for complete details.

The only negatives I perceive with the service are: (1) they do not offer Ogg Vorbis formats for your music and (2) a vendor might sell your music for a higher price and keeps the additional money rather than passing it on to the artist(s).

However, for those musicians who can be satisfied with the standard fee paid for their downloads, it is a fantastic opportunity to get your music spread through the digital marketplace and reach more potential fans.

You can sell music videos through the service as well. That, combined with the distribution and payment centralization may make this service an indie music standard in the near future. Check it out and see what you think. I would love to hear from any musicians who have tried the service.

Now, if you’ll excuse me…I think I’ll go record some music.

I thought I would share a script I cooked up recently for dynamic menus in WordPress. It allows you to create menus two levels deep that will show the sections of your site, and child pages of a top level page when on the parent or any other child pages in the same category.

You simply style your “page_item current_page_item” and “page_item” classes appropriately in order to get mouseover and ’selected’ links to appear differently.

Here’s a link to the text file, which contains the PHP code: wp_dynamic_menu.txt

You simply tweak it to suit your needs and then copy and paste it into ’sidebar.php’ where you want your navigation menu to show up. (This means it is for use with your hosted WP installs, and not WordPress.com blogs…sorry.)

You will notice that menu item ‘3′ is a hardcoded link for ‘Blog’ in the script. This script is designed to use WordPress as a CMS, so the blog link is hardcoded. What you do is create a different template for your blog pages, and for your sidebar include a modified sidebar.php file…perhaps called sidebarblog.php.

In that file, you would need to hardcode the links for ‘pages’ in your navigation menu and where the ‘blog’ link goes, insert the default PHP code for generating post categories between opening and closing ‘ul’ tags, like so:

ul
php wp_list_cats(’sort_column=name&optioncount=0′); php
/ul

[I am leaving out the < and > and ?'s that should obviously be included.]

It seems to work without slowing things down up to about 10 main menu sections (or slightly more). Beyond that, and results will vary depending on your hosting account. I hope you find it useful.

[NOTE: This navigation menu is designed for use with static pages, but with dynamic menus for those pages. It is designed to show child pages of parent (main) categories in your navigation heirarchy. It helps WP manage your navigation more like a website. You still need to do some tweaking for your blog post navigation. Alter the link paths to suit your blog's navigation setup. And really, the menus are sort of pseudo-dynamic...]

I have plans to develop the domain, but distractions seem to keep me from it. I’m actually hoping someone will buy it so I don’t have to develop it. I have my mind set on some travel and adventure, and the last thing I want to do is try to launch another new site (I’ve got three in varying stages of development now already).

Make me an offer…

(You can either contact me directly, or submit an offer through Sedo.com if you like.)