Derek Gallo

Donna Dowless came in and spoke to the NFi team on friday. Donna has lead an interesting and successful life in the entertainment industry. She has worked directly with The Beatles, James Brown, Prince and many other legendary people. She has served as the director of many top venues. She was also a Senior Vice President of Ticketmaster and helped build and grow it starting from working off of her kitchen table in the beginning. Donna Dowless has received a Lifetime Achievement Award in the Entertainment Industry and she is the only woman ever to receive one.

Donna told us the story of her life and the various lessons she has learned along the way. The basic moral was to work hard and don’t reject change. When it is challenging just know that you will figure it out. I usually don’t go for motivational speaking but I particularly enjoyed Donna’s story because it was just that, a story. She just told us about her experiences and the various setbacks she had along the way and how she persevered. I enjoyed her story because it made me remember more about how far I have come instead of where I am not. Listening to the problems she faced made me remember similar problems I have faced and how I have figured it out.

Thank you Donna. I enjoyed meeting you and hope to see more of you in the future.

The Lehman Associates have released a study on the use and satisfaction of AMS systems among large associations in North America. iMis ranked at the top among the available solutions out there. iMis holds a 37 percent market share and ranked at the top in implementation experience and product satisfaction. The study was done using national and international associations in North America with budgets greater than $2 million. iMis rated higher than others in stability/reliability, cost and ease of implementation, time, upgrade path options and performance.

Personally, from a developer’s point of view, I think iMis has plenty of room for improvement but I am probably inserting opinions based on areas I view as more important being a developer (like structure, simplicity, etc.) and not on how it is actually used by an association. All in all, it actually provides a pretty strong back-end to a CMS for an association’s website. Since it contains all the data for an association’s events, members, products and finances, and it provides a decent COM API into that data we can setup websites to be administered directly from iMis for the most part. We are actually in the process of integrating the ACTE Website directly into their iMis system. Integrated features include, membership management and registrations as well as registration for events and conferences. Check out more that NFi can do with iMIS

Cory, Chris and I attended the monthly Likeminds Orlando meetup for July. Overall it went well, although we couldn’t stay the whole time. Damn those work from home guys not having to be into the office at 9:00am. Topics ranged from college stories to industry news to even hunting. There were some cool new faces and returning visitors as well. Its always great to get out and meet others in the community and I am looking forward to next month. Thanks to Alex for organizing the event. Maybe next month we can switch up the location to a Starbucks? I like their coffee better hehe. Also, if anyone has a contact list of everyone at the meetup I would much appreciate it.

We have returned from the ACTE conference in Miami. Overall the conference was a success, both for ACTE and for NFi Studios. ACTE reached every goal they aimed for despite a few setbacks due to inclement weather. The nQuest Event Browser supported decent usage and great feedback from attendees, particularly on the newly released features.

The Green Movement is catching wind among many associations and events. Due to this they are not releasing conference collateral or presentations via printed hard copies any more. nQuest was equipped with a new Paperless Portal allowing attendees to insert their USB flash drive to easily select and download some or all of the conference presentations. The process is almost completely automated. Overall we received tremendous feedback from users on how quick and simple the process was to grab the presentations.

Usage of the Event Browser was consistent with previous events although usage of the Messaging component was down. This was most likely due to the conference location being in the United States with a large amount of U.S. attendees that all had working mobile email devices. We tend to see higher messaging usage at overseas conferences that still have a large U.S. attendee base. Usage of the new Paperless Portal was very good despite attendees gaining knowledge of it not until later in the conference. We now look forward to future events in Singapore, Munich and Washington D.C.

Tomorrow Tom, Sterling and I head down to The Doral in Miami for another ACTE Educational Conference. Chris will be meeting us down there on Sunday. We will be heading down there to help support website updates and technology during the conference. We will also be providing our Meetings Connect solution including the nQuest Browser.

This conference will have the largest attendee count in ACTE’s history. We will be hosting 10 kiosks. It should be good times as usual at the events. We will be launching a couple new features and the skin for this conference is by far my favorite so far. I can’t wait to get some feedback on the new look.

Top 10 Reasons Why Proposals Fails. A great, concise list of tips when writing a proposal. Some are obvious and some are not so obvious but all of them make perfect sense. Most sales professionals should already know these things but its always good to refresh them to the front of your mind at times. These are especially good for the techies like me. It is not my main responsibility to write proposals but I often must help out with them since I am the expert in the technology area.

Hopefully my next proposal at NFi will knock their socks off!

So I am finally back from Barcelona where we went on business. After resting from 26 hours of travel and catching the Flu pretty bad I look back on the trip. We were there providing and supporting our MeetingsConnect NQuest Browser for ACTE at their European conference. Overall, the conference went great. Attendees were very happy with the programming and education at the conference and it seemed to be the least stressfull out of the 3 that I have been to. The NQuest Browser performed well and we recieved many compliments by the many users. This year the International Bussiness Lounge was sponsered by Iberia Airlines and they were especially pleased with our product. Our product is centered around sponsorship branding and they recieved tremendous exposure through it. We still need to crunch the data that we logged but I am sure that the numbers will prove Iberia’s investment to be worthy. We only came across very isolated problems with a couple of attendees’ webmail systems but gethered the info we need to fix them. We also gethered many ideas for additional features and improvments we hope to rollout by the next conference which is in six months in Miami.

Outside from the conference, Barcelona proved to be a very beautiful city. The architecture in that city is like none I have seen before. Hardly any of the buildings take a traditional shape. Barcelona is also home to one of the greatest yet primarily unknown architects, Atoni Gaudi. I was able to experience several of his works first hand. La Casa Batllo is what looks like another apartment building in the middle of the city. The outside architecture stands out however with curvy lines instead of straight and balconies that are shaped as skulls. The next that we saw and probably most amazing was the Templo de Segrada Familia. This is a beautiful cathedral that is still under construction (the only one in the world that still is). The design is amazing and hard to explain. They are currently finishing the main central tower that will stand over 500 feet high with a huge cross on top of it. The last place we saw was the Park Guell. This is a large park designed by Gaudi. One rarely makes a connection between a park and an architect but after visiting this spot you will believe that much design can go into an outdoor park. The feeling you get here is such tranquility and peace and after hiking up the side of the mountain you get the most amazing view of the city and the sea.

We had a lot of fun in Barcelona and some good beer stories have come out of it. There were 2 things I did not like about the city though. It always seem to have bad smell. A smell like stagnant water. You would get gusts of it here and there and it was pretty strong. The other thing was the food. Almost everything there was tapes(many small plates of different finger foods) and seafood. I liked very few of the spanish meals. I can’t remember the last time I was so happy to eat at McDonalds. All in all though the trip was very good and one I will remeber for a long time. I am definatly glad to be home though and resting.

“Not all online social networks are the same, according to new research released this week. Internet research firm, comScore Networks, said on Thursday that significant age differences exist between the user bases of these websites.”

“While the top social networking sites are typically viewed as directly competing with one another, our analysis demonstrates that each site occupies a slightly different niche,” commented Jack Flanagan, executive vice president of comScore Media Metrix.”

This is very true in my opinion. That is why we believe that Racing Kids and MyBabyPortal will be successfull. There is no reason why people wouldn’t want to create accounts in multiple social networks. Social networks are based on connecting with other who share your interests. What better way to connect than through a more specific network than something like Myspace? Instead of competing with Myspace focus on something that is more targeted and just give your users ways to market themselves more. That is what I feel most people like social networks for, to market and display what they are doing with their lives.