Archive for August 2009

My husband and I went to Vietnam recently for a long weekend. We had an amazing time, experiencing the vast difference between bustling city life of Hanoi and the peaceful quietness of the ocean at Ha Long Bay.

Hanoi

We spent a couple of days in Hanoi, which as the capital of Vietnam is a thriving city, having experienced a rapid boom in industrial production since the 1990’s. It is made up of small buildings that seem to have been built on top of and around each other in a type of shanty town style. The streets are absolutely bustling, and you have to be careful when you walk not to get run over by bicycles, motorbike, cars, trucks, vans – actually any means of transportation – you name it, it’s on the streets of Hanoi. There are hardly any pavements to walk on, and where there are pavements they are packed with goods being sold or parked motorbikes, or places to eat.

Read the rest of this entry »

Next week on Friday 21th August, the Czech Republic will remember a sad anniversary. In 1968, the back then Czechoslovakia was invaded. The impossible became reality. It was a shock of such a dimension that many could not believe it. The country was being occupied by its liberator!

At the end of the World War II, Prague was liberated by the Soviets, although some other parts of the Czechoslovakia were liberated by the Americans. People were grateful. The Soviet Union, therefore, became a close friend of Czechoslovakia and soon afterwards Czechs had found themselves under the control of the USSR.

Read the rest of this entry »

Some background: many years ago Adobe launched Acrobat 6 and shortly after, the Creative Suite. At the time I was working for a systems integrator and some clever colleagues had developed an application designed to enable the concurrent collaboration of a PDF document by multiple users. The idea was you could open a pdf and use Acrobat’s built in commenting tools to review the document, it was possible for several people to simultaneously review the same document and see each other’s comments. We thought we were very clever and since we were launching a special training deal for the Creative Suite at Coventry University, we decided to show it (not fully developed) to a wider audience.

Read the rest of this entry »

Whilst our Customers are spending their days on the phone conference calling, the other guys in Sales and I spend our days chasing down new business.
We have a great business model and you would have thought it was an easy thing to sell. Well it is and it isn’t, we come up against a lot of resistance when we are trying to find the head honcho (the decision maker for conference calling), but then this is only half the battle.

When we finally find who the decision maker and talk to him we then have to convince him that moving over to Powwownow is going to be financially beneficial for his organisation. But when you manage to convince someone to move over to the Premium Access service and they send in the subscription form I get a feeling of real achievement.
However we are getting better and better and we are beginning to get larger and larger organisations, so the future for Powwownow is looking good.
However I think we are all getting better at identifying genuine prospects and at selling the Services. As a result of this, we are now landing larger and larger companies which is great for me and great for the business.
If anyone would like a run down on our recent successes please come over and ask.

If you are using Powwownow there’s a good chance that you’re doing so because we offer a quality service at  low cost – a great money saving move in these credit crunching times.

My boyfriend has recently put me on what can only be described as a ‘money diet’, he feels I spend too much on rubbish, for the purpose of this posting I’ll leave out my feelings on his opinion!

Here are my five top recessionista tips:

Read the rest of this entry »

I do love web developing, but at times it can be a very lonely experience; a work request comes in by email, you tap away at your keyboard for any time from 5 minutes to weeks, you close off the work request by email, then another work request comes in by email, you tap away at your keyboard for any time from 5 minutes to weeks, you close off the work request by email, then another work request comes in by email… you get the idea.

On many occasions the only time you have any feedback are one of two scenarios; 1: The person who created the brief has realised what they asked for is not actually what they want. 2: Your code is full of bugs and needs fixing ASAP.

Read the rest of this entry »

Here at Powwownow we work with a number of our competitors in the USA, supplying them with European telephone numbers for there conference call businesses.

Whilst most of the business with the USA is done using our Web and Conference Calling solutions, we need to travel to the USA once a year for a conference in Las Vegas when we get to meet all our customers over 3/4 days.

The conference normally means landing in Las Vegas on the Friday before the conference on the Monday so we can get over our jet-lag, giving us 2 days do do some different whist we are there.

On our last trip Paul Lees and I decided that Dune Buggies was going to be our weekend experience.

Read the rest of this entry »