text:
The MicroISV Show #13 - Dave Collins of SharewarePromotions.com
This week we talked to Dave Collins of
www.SharewarePromotions.com about how to choose, maximize and monitor your marketing efforts via online advertising via Google AdWords and other services. Dave and his company are masters at this complex art and he reveals some of his secrets and points
out how to find out if anyone is even searching for the keywords you might buy.
Google AdWords Management Service:
Google AdWords Report Service:
Competitive Edge Monthly Newsletter: http://www.sharewarepromotions.com/newsletter/
ORGANISATIONS: Association of Independent Software Industry Professionals: http://www.aisip.com/
Association of Shareware Professionals: http://www.asp-shareware.org/
GOOD INFO: Joel On Software's The Business of Software: http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/?biz
Webmaster World Forums - (free) registration required but highly
recommended: http://www.webmasterworld.com/
[intro music]
Michael Lehman: Hello, and welcome to another episode of the MicroISV Show here on Channel Nine. I'm Michael Lehman, Technical Evangelist for Microsoft, along with my co-host, Bob Walsh, Managing Director of Safari Software. Today we are going to be speaking with Dave Collins of Shareware Promotions.
Bob has his new book, "Clearblogging," which is just out, and he is also running a weekly series on his blog, MyMicroISV.com on which he is evaluating web sites. So if you would like to be a victim or, excuse me, a volunteer go to MyMicroISV.com and drop Bob a line.
Also, on the projectglidepath.net site, where I am running an evangelism program for Micro ISVs, we are now featuring the Project Glidepath Windows Vista Spotlight. If you are a Micro ISV and you have an application that runs on Windows Vista, please come and click on the link at right, and submit your application, and if you are one of the first 30 companies to pass our compatibility tests, you'll receive a free Zune. In any event, you'll get listed in the spotlight and covered on my blog, and in a number of other venues here at Microsoft, and we will promote your application as a MicroISV.
So now, without further ado, Bob Walsh and Dave Collins. Take it away, Bob.
Bob Walsh: Thanks, Michael. Today we have with us Dave Collins, who is the founder and Chief Bottle Washer and busy man around town of Shareware Promotions. Shareware Promotions is basically a MicroISV without software, based in the UK. What they do is they work with MicroISVs a la shareware authors and startup companies to get the word out about their product. They do software marketing, SEO, submissions, and Google AdWords, which is going to bring us to the topic today.
Dave can talk a lot about a lot of different things that are useful to MicroISVs, but for today we are going to focus on Google AdWords and what a MicroISV needs to know about them. We're going to start with the question of, let's say that you're just about to start selling your MicroISV product or web site, and you know that Google is out there at least, you should and now the question is, do you go for AdWords or not? That's the first question for Dave, here.
Dave Collins: Thanks, Bob. I think the answer to that really depends on the state of the MicroISV, if the company is ready to sell and if, specifically, the web site is really ready to, if you like, sing the praises of the software and really do a good marketing job and sales job; then absolutely, there is no reason to hang around. The sooner you can get your software, push it in front of the eyes of the people who are interested in it, on Google, the better.
But the web site does need to be ready in terms of doing a good job of presenting the product, the benefits, the features, and basically taking the user, the visitor, by the hand, leading them through the product and convincing them that they want to, at the very least, try it if not buy it.
Bob: Well you know, it sounds like besides putting forth your MicroISV user proposition, there may be some elements in there that you have to contend with in terms of search engine optimization and metawords and all those other good things that are out there. What would be the three things beside having a ready-to-show, good looking, intelligently designed web site that expresses your marketing position, what other things do you have to cover before you get into AdWords?
Dave: The main difference, I mean, if you are comparing regular SEO channels with AdWords, the two main differences are, first of all, with SEO it is a lot of work, a lot of experimentation, and especially new web sites can often wait six, nine, twelve months or longer before actually showing up in the index. The difference with AdWords is that it's up there more or less within minutes. You open your account, set up some ads, put in your keywords, and before you know it, it is up quite literally minutes after you open the account. The problem with it is that you're paying for it.
Bob: So probably AdWords comes before SEO.
Dave: Sorry?
Bob: It sounds like AdWords would be the thing you want to do before you get into the whole sort of SEO briar patch.
Dave: I'd say, for me, it's not a case of either or, it's a case of both. The advantage of AdWords is that it's instant, you can be up there immediately. The disadvantage is, whereas with SEO you learn as you go along and mistakes don't really cost you any more than ranking, mistakes in AdWords can end up costing you a fair amount of money. You do need to know what you are doing before you just start burning through your expensive clicks.
Bob: Well maybe the place to start, then, is, OK, if AdWords are the right thing to do when you are about to start selling, what would be your sort of two-minute view of what that is going to look like for that MicroISV? What sort of things can they expect to see happen there?
Dave: Assuming that the person responsible for the AdWords account had got a reasonable grasp, what you can get from AdWords is an incredibly qualified stream of visitors and traffic coming to your web site, in the sense of, you are in complete control, exactly what people are looking for. So you can say, "If they are looking for these precise things, show them the ads." The beauty of the system is, if they see the ads and they are not impressed, they are not going to click on it and you are not going to be charged.
So really, I mean, it is more or less unparalleled in the sense of, the company can direct the exact people they want to come to visit their web site and see their product or products. They are in complete control. Not only that, but that can even put the value on each and say how much they are actually prepared for each of these visitors. So there is an amazing degree of control there.
That is really quite different, in a sense, from regular SEO, where realistically you are always going to get a lot of traffic coming from Google and the other search engines through regular SEO who are, in fact, interested in what you are looking for. There are a whole host of reasons why, but really that costs you nothing other than bandwidth, which is, especially today, it is remarkably cheap.
Michael: Let's jump in here for a...
Dave: Sorry?
Michael: I just want to jump in here for a second, Dave, and ask you to define what SEO is, in case somebody doesn't know that particular acronym.
Dave: Sorry, yes. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It is basically a process of making sure in essence it is a process of making sure that the search engines can find the material that is on your site to read it and index it. And that the people looking for whatever it is, whether it is product or information, services that you may be selling from your site or pushing from the site, that they find it. It is basically making sure that your site is well set up for the search engines.
Michael: Great.
Dave: So as I was saying, the key difference with AdWords is you are not only in control of what it is that people are going to be looking for that brings them to the site, but you are even in full control of exactly what they are going to see when they arrive. There is no random factor where they may see certain pages of your site. You can make sure people searching for a specific phrase get to land on a page on your web site that is completely tailored around that specific phrase. If you get it right, it is pretty much the most targeted form of marketing that exists.
Bob: It sounds like, one of the things that I get by implication, there is that if you go out and you are spending money on AdWords, you should not just point them to the front page of your web site, you should be pointing them toward a landing page that is tailored to the word that got them there in the first place.
Dave: That's right. There are occasions when the main index page, the home page of the web site, will work very well for specific ads and specific keywords, but generally speaking, if you are maintaining an AdWords account, by default the ads shouldn't just all point to the same page. You're missing out, really, on a lot of the flexibility of being able to set up these tailored pages. So bearing in mind that you're paying for every single click, it is extremely important that you can do absolutely everything in your power to make sure that once they click on your ad that they find exactly what they are looking for and they stay on the web site.
Michael: Let me ask another question. Oh, go ahead, though.
Bob: On the keywords side, how does a MicroISV go find their starter kit of keywords?
Dave: The process is actually very simple. In a sense it is not dissimilar from the same process as regular SEO, the search engine optimization. The key mistake that people make is that they focus on the words that they think that users may be searching for, and in actual fact it can be very, very different from what it is that the majority of the people out there are searching for. So the good news is, there are a whole load of different sites and services out there that make finding these keywords very, very easy. Google themselves, within your AdWords account, actually have a keyword tool which is, it is better than nothing but it is very, very imprecise and it is very, very basic.
The couple of services that we work with and recommend are WordTracker at WordTracker.com and also Keyword Discovery at KeywordDiscovery.com. Both of these sites' services tap into massive, massive databases. So basically you put in a word that you think people may be looking for, and you get all the synonyms, the variations, associated words, and you can actually see for all these lists, you can see for each word exactly how many searches, to get a good feel for how much demand there is out there. So growing the keyword list is a critical part of the process, but with WordTracker and Keyword Discovery it is actually a very, very easy process.
Bob: Well let me kind of give you a hypothetical here. Let's say I do a MicroISV Web 2.0 service for nurseries, and it is basically an accounting package for nurseries so they can track what they sell, the plants, and the basic stuff, but of course it is on the Web so that makes it shinier and easier to use. And I'm going to charge, let's just say for the sake of argument, $30 a month, and I want people to come find this. So would a good keyword be "nursery" or "nursery software," or am I not going in the right direction there?
Dave: It's a good start, it's a very good start, but the point is that really in a sense the base, the starting point, for your searches are all common sense. So if it is nursery software then obviously you should actually be looking for that as a starting point, if nothing else, just to get the ideas, just to get an idea of what people may be searching for. The reason why you really need services like WordTracker and Keyword Discovery is I suspect there isn't a person in the world who can tell me off the top of their head how many people a day, or even a week, may actually be searching for the phrase "nursery software."
But when you run that phrase through these services, you not only find out it could be anywhere from literally zero to hundreds a day I suspect it is closer to zero but you just don't know. But you get a feel for how many people are searching for them, and you actually get a feel for what other phrases they may be searching for that are related. And while you were actually talking, I actually ran "nursery software" through one of these companies, and I see there is no one searching for "nursery software."
Bob: No?
Dave: But there are two searches a day for "tree nursery software" for the phrase "tree nursery software." In a million years I would never have guessed that that is a phrase that people are searching for, but services like this make finding these phrases very, very easy.
Michael: Let me jump in and also ask another question, partly because this is going to run on Channel nine here at Microsoft, and of course as everyone knows we also make a search engine, as do other people. In the process of thinking about these things, I guess I have two questions. One of them is, right now are there any viable alternatives to Google AdWords, and if so is it something that you would recommend a MicroISV be looking at right now.
I understand that the lion's share of the market is obviously, right now, in what Google is doing, but how would you advise people, if at all, to consider other search engines and other advertising things? What I believe is happening is that our adCenter product is now accepting advertisers, and in some future date will also accept something allowing people to put links on their blogs and so forth to drive traffic.
Dave: Right. In answer to your question, there are actually a lot, a lot of different alternatives that are out there. At the present time I'm sure 99.9 percent of people listening to this will already understand Google is by far the most dominant in terms of size and in terms of, really, return on time invested, in terms of how much you are going to spend on this and how much money and time, and how many people you are going to see at your website.
In the past, I mean really the first big one historically was GoTo, that then became Overture, that then became Yahoo! Search Marketing Net; and anyone who knows me and has heard me speak at the conferences knows that I am no great fan of Overture or Yahoo! Search Marketing as they are now, really mainly because they haven't evolved with time. Aside from fairly regularly changing their name, their actual system is still stuck more or less at the same place it was five, six years ago, if not more.
There are other options as well. There are a lot of pay-per-click schemes. You mentioned specifically Microsoft adCenter. We have dipped our toes in, we set up an account a while ago and played around with adCenter, and my theory on it is this is the one to watch in terms of if anyone's got the resources and the expertise to make a new scheme really work, then clearly Microsoft has got to be pretty much at the top of that list. I'm going to see what is going to happen with MSN adCenter. But at this point in time a problem that a lot of MicroISVs have is limited resources in terms of time, and at this point in time everything that we have worked with has suggested that, in terms of return, AdWords is the one to be working with right now, and at this point in time nothing else comes close.
Michael: That makes sense. One other question I had for you is: I'm a MicroISV, I have written an application, now I am thinking about doing AdWords. How much money per month should I be expecting to spend on AdWords, or what is a reasonable amount of money per month to spend, and what kind of return do I get for that? What are typical results, I guess?
Dave: OK, that was a variation of the question that I was dreading, actually, that I was hoping wouldn't be asked. It is obviously, it is a question that a lot of people ask me. The bottom line is if I take a step back, if you don't mind there are two ways to succeed with Google AdWords. One is with expertise and finesse, and the other one is money; and you actually can completely do, really, really run quite a good AdWords campaign with absolutely no expertise and knowledge, and just throw money at it, and you will do reasonably, you can do reasonably.
I'm sure you can probably guess, in many industries money wins over expertise hands down. But one of the things that is quite interesting about the MicroISV industry is a lot of these companies, they are not sitting on huge amounts of money, and they are not prepared to just throw X thousands every day, every week, or every month, into AdWords and just hope that it works. So they basically lean more towards trying to get the upper hand in terms of the control and the expertise as opposed to the money.
Now the bottom line of how much a company needs to spend, it is absolutely impossible to answer, because the factors that will affect the amount that you are going to have to pay per click will, first of all, be your competitors. If, let's say hypothetically, your company has five, six competitors, and they are all throwing a lot of money at their ads, and they are paying a lot of money per click, then realistically at least initially you are also going to have to spend a lot per click just to get towards the top of that list.
The other point is that Google sets an actual initial value of each keyword. It seems arbitrary but I don't believe that it is. I mean, it is essentially demand and supply, and they know if a company is prepared to spend $10 per click on a particular keyword, well why should they sell it for five cents. So there is Google and there is your competition. They are the two main factors that will actually set how much you have to spend per click. So when you add that together, you've got the combination of how much you actually, you want to spend per click, how much you want to spend per day.
So for instance, you've got a $10 budget, a $10 daily budget, but you actually have to spend $2 per click, it is not really going to get you very far. You are going to get five, possibly six clicks a day, and that's it, you have hit your daily budget and nothing else is going to happen that day. Whereas other people, perhaps they are going after keywords that you don't have to spend anywhere near as much money.
For the same ten dollars a day they could literally be getting hundreds of clicks for the same money. It really depends on the keywords that you're after, how much other people are prepared to spend on them and really most crucially, critically, in a way is how well you can work the AdWords system. Because if you can work the system, you can turn it around, you can actually get more traffic, more clicks, spend less.
But if you don't really know what you're doing then you're more at Google's mercy and you'll actually get less traffic and spend more. But the bottom line is that $1 a day might be enough to get a reasonable number of clicks or $200 a day might not be enough at all.
Bob: And how you do your job with AdWords can really have that type of a range of impact.
Dave: It can have a massive impact. A very important point to understand is that the Google AdWord system by default is unbelievably heavily biased towards Google. And it goes without saying, it's not going to surprise anyone that Google AdWords does work to the favor of Google. But by default the whole system sets up a whole series of defaults that are actually quite bad for the advertiser but very good for Google.
An example I often give conferences to try and get this point across, I give an example where fictitious companies spend a hundred dollars a day on their AdWord account and every single day they make consistently $120 worth of sales. So from their point it's spend a hundred, make a 120. It's only $20 profit but it's in a sense money for nothing.
So that company might consider the option of "Well instead of spending a hundred, let's spend a thousand, so that then we'll be $200 a day for nothing." In the example that I give, what may actually be happening in this example where they're spending 100 and getting 120 back, what they may not realize is that of the 100 being spent each day, only 20 is actually generating the 120 worth of sales. And the other 80 is thrown straight into the bin or into the pockets of Google depending on how you look at it.
And this is a farfetched example but it's actually a scenario that we're very used to seeing. So I quite absolutely take my hat off with utmost respect for Google for the genius that underlies the system. In a sense they're running a casino, and one knows the house always wins in the casino.
But Google's stroke of genius is that even though you are actually losing, you walk out of the casino with a big grin on your face and you think that you're walking away a winner.
Bob: OK. So it sounds like on my whole list that I'm making of how to do AdWords right, I've got two things so far. First-of I want to get a good healthy pool of keywords. If I can find keywords that aren't going to cost me an arm and a leg - as far as Google thinks the markets for those are - that's a good thing.
My clients needs don't have budgets where they can afford, typically, $100 a day ad buy, more likely they are going to be spending $15 to $20 a day, at least initially. If they spend $500-$600 in a month, that's a significant outlay.
The second thing sounds like they need to really bone up on how Google really works. Don't take the defaults as being in their best interests, but the time they spend there will be time well spent, learning how the system really works. So does that make sense as a recap?
Dave: That does make sense. Well one other point that perhaps I've not emphasized anywhere near well enough, is that the keywords are obviously very important, but what a critical factor is that the keywords have to be as tightly targeted as possible.
As an example, if the product that you're selling is a email client, specifically for businesses, then if you go and set-up and AdWord account and you're going after the keyword "email" it's AdWord suicide. You're going to be getting a massive number of people typing in "email" who actually aren't interested in your product.
Whereas if you target the more obscure phrases like "email application for businesses" or "email application for small businesses" or "email application micro ISV" All these smaller, more obscure combinations. You're not going to get anywhere near as many people searching for that, but those that are should be a lot more interested, really, in what it is that you're selling.
It's a very important factor that your list of keywords has to be very much tightly focused.
Bob: So you want to tie you keywords back to how tight you focus your marketing segment. In other words, if you've got a product out there that's an email productivity application, it might be nice to say, "Well I'd like to sell it to everybody in the world who uses email" but the reality really is you need to start with maybe the 25 to 35 year old people who run their own businesses in the IT industry in the Northwest part of the United States, just to segment that down and then focus on those keywords.
Dave: Yeah, exactly. And, again, this goes back to understanding how the system works I don't want to get lost in the specifics but basically Google has what is called "matching options" by default for keywords, any keyword that you add by default in Google is "broadmatched." Now what that means all this is information that's available online on Google AdWords help if you bid on the word "email" for instance which we've already established would be a bad idea by bidding on the word email, if someone searched for "free email program" they may see you ad, that will trigger it.
If they're searching for "Mac email software" they are going to see it because the word email is in there, if they look for "free email" or for "send email" or for "email server" or for "email client" or "email protection," "email viruses" all of these things have the potential to trigger your ad, by default.
So, again, I'm just using this as an example to reinforce how absolutely important it is to really learn how the AdWord system works. Before you even think about actually dropping any money onto it, other than sort of dipping your toes in as an experiment at the beginning.
There are so many mistakes that you can make in a Google AdWords account, and there are so many mistakes that we see people making time and time again, that really cost them a lot more money than they need to spend.
Michael: Dave one of the things we heard when we talked with Joel Spulsky and we've heard from other guests and obviously we've talked about it at conferences is the fact that Micro ISVs, in general, their skill sets are biased in the technical direction and not in the sales and marketing direction. It sounds to me like some of the things you're saying are sort of basic marketing thinking.
If you had a Micro ISV come to you and wanted to get some help, is there any particular websites or books or courses or anything that you might recommend to one of them to beef up their knowledge of sales and marketing before you start to work with them on AdWords so they can start thinking in the sort of proper viewpoints of where they need to be. Because obviously if they're not even looking at things from the right place, and you said, they could waste a lot of money and even if they used your service they could they could chew up a lot of time and not get the results they wanted out of it.
So do you have any recommendations of things that people might do prior to spending money?
Dave: Yeah, there's actually a lot of information as I'm sure you can imagine the problem is really differentiating between the good resources and the not so good resources.
There are a huge number of different forums, some of which are very worthwhile; the Joel on Software Forums are a good source of knowledge, the Association of Shareware Professionals. There's a book that quite a good introduction, some guy called Walsh according to the cover, "Micro ISV from Vision to Reality" I suspect the name rings a bell. Which covers a lot of the basic and the not so basic.
But the bottom line is there is no shortage of resources, that really in a sense... The issue isn't the lack of information that's out there; the issue is how to actually recognize the good information and how to find it, and really very often the best option is simply to look around, use common sense. I mean, we can all spot a good forum, one that is really worthwhile and filled with good information, from the one that people are perhaps not quite in tune and not quite the vision to take their businesses where they want to go. But if we're talking specifically about AdWords, the marketing basics are absolutely, absolutely critical.
There are a lot of very good developers out there who need to really polish up their marketing skills because the two really do go hand in hand. And when it comes to AdWords you have got to have these marketing basics and with AdWords you have to know how the system works. Both of them are equally important. I mean, I would never name names, but nowadays our companies turned away. We actually turn away more companies than we choose to work with and send a price quote for simply because we don't believe that the product or the web site or the company is ready, if you like, to actually start spending money on the marketing.
Michael: One of the things that Joel was saying, and I wanted to see if you would corroborate this based on your experience with your clients, is that he said his almost number one rule is never start a company by yourself because you can't wear both hats successfully, both the marketing and sales hat and the technology and support hat. What do you think about that?
Dave: Oh, I couldn't agree more. I mean, it is a beautiful connected, wired world that we live in, and selling software on the Internet, on the Web, has literally has never been so easy. The problem is, these massive doors have been thrown open to the whole world, and the bottom line is that unless you are incredibly lucky there is a lot, a lot of competition out there. And unless you are unbelievably lucky and you actually are a talented businessman, a good marketer, you are good with figures, you can handle the accounts, a fantastic coder, a fantastic web site designer, your graphic design skills are superb and none of us, none of us at all can actually I mean it is not really about wearing two hats, it is more like wearing 15 or 20 hats none of us are in a position to do that and hope to excel at really any of them, never mind all of them.
So I completely agree. The problem is, small businesses don't like spending money. We don't like spending money. We would rather pay ourselves a salary rather than pass it on to a third company who are going to handle different things on our behalf; but it is just one of those realities of doing business. A reality of doing business is you do have to spend, whether it is spend on your AdWords account, spend on someone to handle your AdWords account, pay an accountant to do your admin and your paperwork, you just have to spend. Trying to do everything on your own is a pretty much 100 percent guaranteed way to make sure that the potential of your company is going to be capped.
Michael: It sounds like that is a guaranteed way to make that old adage true about, "The way to make a small fortune in the software business is to start with a large one."
Dave: Right, yeah. Very, very true.
Michael: It sounds like maybe what we need is the equivalent of Match.com except for programmers and marketing people and salespeople and so forth.
Dave: I think in a sense there are these forums out there. I mean there is the Association of Professional and Joel on Software. And all these places, in a way, if you use them correctly, that is what they do, they put the marketing people in touch with the developers because if you have a great product and someone who really knows what to do with the marketing and the sales, it is a fantastic combination. But aside from skill sets, I mean, how many of us are sitting around each day wondering how to fill the last three or four hours of our working day?
Bob: Well when I counted up the number of hats you have to wear when I wrote the book that you, by the way, nicely quote, thank you I got to 47 and then I stopped. And I agree that obviously it really helps if you have two people who have different skill sets, one more technical, one more toward marketing and people and that sort of thing; but I would just like to say for all the solo MicroISVs out there, it is possible to do both. It is not easy, and you will wish to God that you had more time every day, but there are ways of getting somewhere with this and it is possible. But I have to say it would have been easier, at least for me, if I had had a partner who could have dealt with either the coding part of things or the marketing part of things, instead of having to really deal with all of those things.
I want to come back, though, to AdWords for a second because so far we have been talking about, you are going to start selling a product. Well, what if you already are, you already have an AdWords campaign or two or three and now the question is, well, I have gained some results. How do you know if $80 of those $100 you are spending are actually going to waste, and if they are going to waste, how can you take your AdWords campaign up a level?
Dave: It's a very good question. In terms of knowing whether it is going to waste or not, just the simple answer is tracking. You absolutely have to have some form of tracking in everything that you do in your AdWords account. The beauty of the system is, it is more or less set up for this. It is heavily geared towards you being able to track. Whatever you may be interested in tracking, you can.
Now, the two things you need, you need some form of tracking that, personally, I would stick with the simple, stick with the basics; or you could go for Google's option, which they actually have built into the AdWords system, the conversion tracking. The problem with the conversion tracking is it is very, very limited. It is cookie-based and it expires after 30 days, so for a lot of people selling software that might be very far from ideal. But there is nothing whatsoever to stop you tracking, putting a different tracking referral code into each of the ads that you do, each of the ads that you're running, and then to actually follow this in your raw server logs, using web log analysis software to actually see which of the ads are working.
You don't need to get bogged down in the technical side of things but if, for example, you see that one ad may be sending 100 people a day to your web site. If the average time spent on your web site is two seconds, then you know something really isn't right with that ad. On the other hand, if the same ad is sending 100 people a day and the average time spent on the web site is one-and-a-half minutes, and they are looking on average at two or three pages, then you can say something is actually working quite well here. It is very, very easy. Really all you actually need is to add the tracking, and you need the log and AdWords software to actually handle that.
In terms of the other part of your question, how to expand an existing campaign, really, in a nutshell there are two areas that you focus on: you focus on the keywords and you focus on the ads. In a sense, the process is the same for each of them. It is a three-part process where you research, you carry out the research, you then expand what you already have in your account, and from there you track and purge. What I mean by that is track in the web logs, keep an eye on how these are actually performing. The ones that are not good, you just throw them away, delete them. The ones that are good, you leave there and you build on them. So you're sort of basically demolishing the weaknesses and you are building on the strengths, and that is really an ongoing process that you need to be carrying out within your AdWords account, both for keywords and the actual ads themselves.
Bob: One thing I would just add to that, Dave, is that as you delete those items that aren't working out, it might be a good idea to enter them in your business or development journal, just so you don't make the same mistake twice. It is very easy, as we process all this information, to forget that we have actually gone down a particular road. That is one of the things that I mentioned in a post a while ago at MyMicroISV about programmer productivity, and that is having a log of what you decide to do, and that is the sort of thing that would fit right in there.
Dave: Right. I agree. However, with AdWords there is a catch there. There are two catches to that approach, specifically with AdWords. The first is that with time there is going to be a massive amount of data that builds up there; but more importantly, the second problem is that people's searches and search patterns actually do change with time. So what doesn't work tomorrow might actually work fantastically well in three months or six months or twelve months, and you just don't know.
Something that is important to remember anytime you are over looking at one of your ads is that you've always got to remember unless your ad is the only ad being displayed on the page in Google search results, your ad is always going to be next to or surrounded by other people's ads.
So how your ad actually appears and how well it actually works can be massively influenced by the other ads. As an example, let's say you're, again we'll get the same example, let's say you're selling some sort of email client. Let's say there are five other companies all bidding against you. So anyone searching for email clients for businesses will see five ads and yours. If the other five ads are all displaying the prices and yours isn't that could actually work against you, in quite a big way.
If, on the other hand, the opposite's true. You're the only person displaying the price, and let's say hypothetically they think your price is quite high, they actually may be put off by that and the other ads that aren't displaying the price may be more appealing, and can get the clicks.
So in a way there's a catch. This is part of the beauty or, I suppose, the evil of the AdWords system, depending on how you look at it. You're absolutely forever chasing your tail. And there's no shortage of information. There's no shortage of data more or less on tap, but it's one of these examples that really the deeper you actually dig, the more confused you can get. And sometimes you just got to weigh it up, make a quick decision and throw it out there and see.
Bob: Well, let me ask another question kind of turning on that particular point. How often should I be monitoring my AdWords campaign? How often should I be in that dashboard looking at this information? How much of my time in life should I be spending on AdWords after I get it up and running?
Dave: In terms of how often to check it is a very, very important question actually. At the absolute least, I would recommend a very bare minimum that someone be checking their AdWords account spending some time there every two weeks. But really it should be weekly.
The other important point to consider is when you actually make changes to your AdWords account, whether it's adding keywords or deleting them, or adding or deleting ads, it doesn't matter. The point is, you've always got to allow these changes time to actually work and kick in and produce the results and data before you make any decisions. So you can't go the other extreme and sort of add five ads into your ad group tonight and tomorrow night be checking, see how it's working and deleting the three of them that aren't producing anything.
We generally recommend a seven-day cycle. The reason for that is once your ads are up, give it at the very, very minimum, seven full days to really work. The reason that we say seven days, is that you may well see very, very different patterns over a weekend and the week probably almost certainly you will. Some companies choose not to display their ads over the weekend some choose only to display their ads over the weekend. But you have to have a full seven days, or blocks of seven days in order to make an informed decision about what's working and what isn't.
Assuming you're going to be checking your AdWords accounts once a week and working on it, the amount of time you're going to be spending there really depends on how much money you're spending there. I mean, there's a common sense approach, if you're spending five dollars a day, so $150 a month, you don't want to be logging into your AdWords account once a week and spending four or five hours there.
If, on the other hand, you are spending, let's say $100 a day, so you are looking in the reach of $3000 a month, you also don't want to have your weekly AdWords session only being five minutes it just not enough. You need to get that balance, but it's roughly in proportion to how much you're spending there.
Bob: Any final advice for microISVs when it comes to Google AdWords?
Dave: Yeah, I'd say to sum it up more or less, I always say that AdWords is usually a moneymaker but not always. And the important thing to make sure that you are making sufficient return on your AdWords is simply to track. You absolutely have to track. It's absolutely critical.
It's equally important to keep up to date with what's actually happening. Now, Google has this fairly irritating habit. They add changes on a continual basis to the AdWords system. They don't have a "what's new" page on the website. They don't have a "what's new" location that you can go to see what these actual changes are. They do have their "Inside AdWords" blog, but they tend to only focus on the big changes. They make a lot of subtle changes that can make quite a big difference and it's never written up anywhere.
So I would also recommend keeping up to date with the news on Google AdWords. It's very, very, very important. Some of the changes that they make can actually have a massive impact on your bill, on your monthly bill and on the return that you are making. Inside AdWords is a good, definitely a good place to start. We actually have a blog on our website that only deals with AdWords changes. That's at www.sharepromotion.com/AdWords. You may go for a week or longer where we don't post anything there, because the only time we add something is when AdWords actually applies a change to the system. We will come across it quickly and tend to put it up very quickly as well.
The bottom line, I do like my analogies now when I say that AdWords is in a sense, to look at your AdWords account like you should be looking at a car. That you need to actually look after it, keep it safe and productive. If you have your car and it sits in the driveway and you never go anywhere you're not going to gain from it, but equally leave it in the driveway with the engine running and no one sitting in the driver seat is an invitation to disaster.
You need to treat the account well. You need to really, really learn how to use it. Really invest the time in learning how the AdWords system works. As long as you do, as long as you know how the system works, you track all of your assets, it's more or less impossible to lose.
Bob: Okay, Michael, any last questions?
Michael: No, I think it's been a great show. Dave, I want to thank you very much for coming on the MicroISV show.
Bob: One thing I want to point out to our listeners before we go here, is that sharewarepromotions.com has a newsletter and there are a lot of things we haven't covered about Google AdWords. For instance, the actual headlines that you write and how to write them. But I just got my nice February 2007 issue of Shareware Promotions Competitive Edge newsletter here. There's an article in here about copy writing for developers. So I would recommend everyone listening to this podcast, if you haven't already signed up for this free newsletter that Dave is doing, do it.
Dave: Thank you very much. I would add the address as well which is http://sharewarepromotions.com/newsletter. And all the information is there. It is similar to our AdWords blog in approach. It only goes out once a month and it's 100 percent unique content, which is all too rare nowadays, I think.
Michael: All right and we will include on the channel nine post, of course, links to all the things we've been talking about and Dave if you have other links besides the Joel on Software forum and the other forums you were talking about marketing, please send them along and we'll put them in the post.
Dave: Great. Thank you very much I will do.
Bob: Thanks, Dave.
Dave: Thank you very much, Bob and Michael.
Michael: Thank you. All right. So this is Michael Lehman, co-host of the MicroISV show here telling you that's the end of our interview with Dave Collins of sharewarepromotions.com. And come back next week for another podcast here on the MicroISV show. And check out Bob's new book at clearblogging.com. And don't forget to check out the Project Glidepath Windows Vista spotlight opportunity if you're a MicroISV to get your application featured and promoted by Microsoft at projectglidepath.net and for all of us and the MicroISV show see you next week.
The Discussion
Sounds interesting, when will the transcript be available?
Transcript now posted.


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Rain that began Friday morning flooded and closed roads in Okaloosa and Walton counties Saturday, with more wet weather expected to return late tonight.
Rain that began Friday morning flooded and closed roads in Okaloosa and Walton counties Saturday, with more wet weather expected to return late tonight.
South Okaloosa had gotten 3 to 4 inches of rain since Friday, while some northern areas measured 5 to 6 inches, Don Shepherd, senior forecaster with the National Weather Service in Mobile, Ala., said late Saturday afternoon
An 8-foot-wide sinkhole closed Okaloosa Lane between Earl Kennedy Road and Serenity Lane in Crestview, said Randy McDaniel, the county�s emergency management director.
In Walton County, 2 to 4 inches of rain fell along the coast while 7 to 8 inches drenched the some areas in the north end, Shepherd said.
Natural Bridge, Penn Williams Road from Punchbowl Road to BA Kelley Road, Woods Road and Padgett Road from Scott Road to County Road 183B were closed Saturday afternoon, according to Walton County Sheriff�s Office spokeswoman Wendy Ammons.
The National Weather Service also issued a flood warning for the Shoal River in Walton County. At 2:30 p.m. Saturday, the river already was at 16 feet, 2 feet above flood stage.
This morning should be cloudy but dry, Shepherd said. However, strong thunderstorms will resume tonight.
They could become severe, with high winds, hail, and possibly tornadoes, according to a news release from AccuWeather.com.
Those who live in flood-prone areas should keep an eye on the forecasts, Shepherd said.
Sunday night�s storms could have rainfall rates of 2 to 3 inches an hour, according AccuWeather. Anyone traveling on Interstate 10 should prepare for slow travel and standing water.
The severe weather will move east throughout Monday.

subset: commoncrawl


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Notre Dame LB Manti Te'o staying strong through tragedy (CORRECTED)
SOUTH BEND, Ind. (AP) -- The profile page on the Twitter account of Manti Te'o doesn't say he's a Notre Dame linebacker, that he's being mentioned as a Heisman Trophy candidate or that he's a Sports Illustrated cover boy.
Instead, it features a quote from "The Count of Monte Cristo" by Alexandre Dumas: "Life is a storm. You will bask in the sunlight one moment, be shattered on the rocks the next. What makes you a man is what you do when that storm comes."
Te'o has been through a storm.
In a Sept. 15, 2012, story about Notre Dame's college football victory over Michigan State that highlighted linebacker Manti Te'o's performance, The Associated Press erroneously reported that he played in the game a few days after the death of his girlfriend, who had a long battle with leukemia. Other AP stories through Jan. 3, 2013, also contained references to the girlfriend's death, including some directly quoting Te'o and his father, Brian Te'o, about how he played through personal grief. On Jan. 16, Notre Dame officials and Manti Te'o said there was never a girlfriend or a death, and that Te'o was victimized in a hoax. Others have since come forward to say Te'o was duped in a series of phone calls and online messages purporting to be from a girl he never met in person.
His maternal grandmother, Annette Santiago, died in Hawaii after a long illness on Sept. 11 and his girlfriend, Lennay Kekua, died in California of leukemia several hours later. Te'o didn't miss a practice that week, choosing to be with his teammates as the Irish prepared for their game at then-No. 10 Michigan State, even though coach Brian Kelly told him he didn't need to be there.
Te'o calls it the hardest thing he's ever had to do.
"To be able to operate, and to be able to try to continue with my daily routine, but knowing that I just lost a woman that I truly loved, that was the hardest thing," he said.
The task was made even harder knowing he couldn't attend her funeral in Carson City, Calif.. He said Lennay had made him promise he wouldn't miss a game, instead asking him to honor her with his play.
Te'o did that. He had 12 tackles, one for a loss, and broke up two passes in the win against Michigan State. A week later, he had two interceptions, leading to a touchdown and a field goal, in a 13-6 win over Michigan in which he had eight tackles. The Irish defense didn't give up a touchdown in the two games.
The performances caught the attention of his teammates, his classmates and college football fans across the country.
"At that time he may have been a little weak inside, but he never showed it out," defensive end Stephon Tuitt said. "He stayed strong. Watching him kept us going strong."
Te'o has been the driving force behind the best Notre Dame defense in at least a decade, leading the Irish to their 4-0 start and their No. 9 ranking. He has played a role in seven of the 13 turnovers forced by the Irish, intercepting three passes, recovering two fumbles and hurrying the quarterback twice on passes that were intercepted.
Defensive coordinator Bob Diaco believes the 6-foot-2, 255-pound Te'o is the finest football player in college, saying he can power his way through blocks, but moves like a much smaller player.
"He's a unique blend of being able to be kind and good and courteous and warm and friendly when he's not inside the gates or inside the stripes, and then when he's in there he's an absolute warrior," Diaco said.
Te'o's father, Brian, believes part of that is it's a Polynesian trait, citing Junior Seau and Troy Polamalu as examples. He also believes it's partially related to Te'o's Mormon upbringing.
"He understands that his actions have a direct impact on those who are watching him, and also the fact that his actions and decision-making does have a direct reflection on the family, on both my wife and I," he said. "We both remind him constantly."
His father said Te'o also works hard at his craft because he knows another talented athlete is working just as hard.
"He knows when he meets that person he's going to have to be at the top of his game in order to compete with him," he said.
Te'o has 362 career tackles and is on pace to finish third on Notre Dame's all-time list behind Bob Crable (1978-81), who had 521, and Bob Golic (1975-78), who finished with 479.
Crable calls Te'o one of the best players he's seen at Notre Dame.
"He has great speed. He knows where the football is," he said. "Unfortunately for him, as far as the tackling record goes, the game has changed so much. I don't know how anyone can get the tackles some of us old guys got just because they don't run the ball as much."
Kelly said what separates Te'o from other stars is he knows the names of every player on the team, even the walkons.
"He doesn't call them, 'Hey, 42, or 57.' He knows each of those guys. ... That's pretty unique," he said.
Student body President Brett Rocheleau said classmates love Te'o because he's one of them. He takes part in campus events, he's seen walking around carrying his backpack and talking with other students.
"Every story you hear about Manti is that he is genuinely nice guy. He's one that is easy to talk to. He goes out of his way to carry on conversations," he said.
The students showed their love for Te'o by chanting his name and wearing leis at the Michigan game and pep rally. Te'o jumped up in the crowd to celebrate the victory with them.
"I felt a sense of peace knowing that so many people cared about Manti instead of No. 5," he said.
He was able to get home for his grandmother's funeral during the bye week and said he feels rejuvenated as the Irish prepare to play Miami (4-1) Saturday in Chicago.
"I've never felt so strong; spiritually strong," he said. "I could never thank the student body and the fans around the world for their all love and all their prayers and support. I truly felt all of that, and it's helped me to get past, help me get through these past three weeks and I'm truly grateful and I'm truly humbled."


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text:
Compiled from selected police activity reports.
Buckeye Lake
• March 17: A Walnut Road juvenile reported his skateboard stolen.
• March 19: A Central Aveue man was cited for failure to stop at a Highland Street intersection.
• March 19: An Alexandria man was cited for driving the wrong way on Union Street.
• March 21: A driver was warned for speeding on Mill Dam Road but cited for not wearing a safety belt.
• March 21: A driver was warned for speeding on Walnut Road but cited for not wearing a safety belt.
• March 21: A driver was cited for going 54 in a 35 miles per hour zone on Mill Dam Road.
• March 21: A driver was cited for going 51 in a 35 miles per hour zone on Mill Dam Road.
• Feb. 25: A Lakewood school bus driver reported that a vehicle passed her bus while travelling in the opposite direction on US 40. Police told the driver that passing in the opposite direction is permitted on that portion of US 40.
• Feb. 25: Police were dispatched to the Lakewood Drive apartments on a report of male in the courtyard screaming and holding a knife in his hand. Police found a 16-year-old boy who admitted having the knife and placing it at his neck during an argument with another tenant. He was taken to the hospital for evaluation.
• Feb. 26: A driver was cited for a stop sign violation on an Ohio 79 exit ramp to US 40.
• Feb. 26: Police on patrol at 2:49 a.m. checked out a suspicious vehicle behind a South High Street business. A note left on the windshield said the battery had died and the vehicle would be removed the following day. The building checked secure.
• Feb. 26: Police took a report after a driver left the Duke station without paying for $20 of gas.
• Feb. 27: Police were called to a South High Street home on a report of an 18-month-old child locked in a vehicle with the keys inside. Police called a lock service that was able to open the door.
• Feb. 27: Police were called to a Canal Road apartment on a report of telephone harassment. A woman there said a named woman had been continously texting her and her children. She told police that a man had been arrested and jailed for not paying her child supporter. That man is the caller's boyfriend. The complainant said the caller told her that she would pay the $2,500 due to get her boyfriend out of jail. The caller then wanted the complainant to give her back the $2,500 once she got it from the court. The complainant said she refused to promise to give it back and that's when the texts began. When she changed her phone number, the complainant said the texts were sent to her daughter and son. Police contacted the caller and told her to stop or face.
• Feb. 27: A driver was cited for a stop sin violation on West 2nd Street at Cumberland.
• Feb. 28: Police checked out a report of two dogs running loose behind Lancer's. They didn't see the dogs.
• Feb. 28: A Lakewood Drive apartment resident said her brother threw a Lysol can at her boyfriend and hit him in the leg during an argument. The two were separated for the night.
• Feb. 28: Police were called to the Kroger store by store security who had detained a shoplifter.
• March 1: Police were called at 1:51 a.m. to a Forest Ridge Drive home on a subject refusing to leave. A woman outside told police she was there to speak with her ex-boyfriend about being late on a vehicle payment. Police spoke with the boyfriend who said the woman was upset because he had another woman at his home. The boyfriend owns the vehicle but his ex-girlfriend makes the payments and drives it. Police told him she was trying to tell him that this month's payment will be late because she lost her job. He told police that was OK and he just wanted her to leave. She left.
• March 1: Police took a report on a non-injury crash in the McDonald's parking lot.
• March 1: Police took a report on a $50 counterfeit bill discovered at Krogers.
• March 1: Police assisted two Children Services caseworkers emove two children from a Lakewood Drive apartment. Police ended up transporting both of them to the facility since the male was threatening to go to jail before he would go into foster care. Both had calmed down by the time they reached the facility.
• March 2: A Lakewood school bus driver reported that a driver had passed her stopped bus on North High Street. She provided a license number that did match her description of the vehicle. Police called the Millersport owner who admitted that he didn't see the bus until he had to slam on the breaks to avoid passing it. He was given a verbal warning.


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The Source
CIO Chat: Adam Buchwald
January 12, 2012
Hello world. I would like to introduce myself as the new CIO at Lewis & Clark. I've decided to use this space to share some of the technology issues that impact all of us, regardless if student, faculty or staff. Today I'd like to discuss the tension between you as an individual, and you as a Lewis & Clark affiliate.
My staff has heard me talk (ad nauseam) about the changing technology environment on college campuses. It used to be when you came to campus we provided technology you simply couldn't afford in your personal life. We provided you with a fast internet connection, powerful computers for research, high-end graphics capabilities and other similar large investments in technology. Today, it's almost the opposite. Technology is small, fast and relatively inexpensive. People come to our campus with as much, or more personal technology than we provide in their role at Lewis & Clark. Here on campus we have a lot of external factors that hinder our abilities, prevent us from being as open as we desire, and force us to make decisions between usability on the one hand and security, privacy and compliance on the other.
Beyond the devices, we also struggle with software as a service. Again, historically we purchased software centrally, installed it with administrative credentials, and doled out updates and new versions as we could afford them. Open Source and Software as a Service didn't exist – free software was called 'shareware' and would come on a CD inside a magazine or downloaded from a bulletin board. Today you can use the web to replicate most any desktop software. Spreadsheets, word processing, and presentation software can all be found online in multiple versions free for use. Larger software now comes as a hosted service without any need to install, nor even an IT staff. Just sign the contract and begin. How do you decide when to venture off on your own or when to involve the IT department? Is this for you, or for the institution (or both?). Technology is forcing new questions for us to address.
So this is our current landscape. We are facing new pressures never felt before and it is creating a schism between our individual selves and our Lewis & Clark personalities. The vendors who supply these services are making it difficult in terms of licensing as they prefer to work with individuals over institutions. Individuals have less influence and are easier to monetize with fewer regulations to take into account. Don't even get me started on Apple, who has determined that life will run through your personal iTunes account regardless if you want it or not. It's so bad even South Park has made fun of it. In IT we are working through the nuances of how we can support such an environment while still preserving both the security and privacy expected and needed. Eventually we seek to find that balance that will continue to allow intellectual curiosity and exploration with technology yet keeping us within the needed limits for safety, security and compliance. I look forward to working through these issues with the entire campus community.


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Watch Friday, July 18, 2014 at 8:30pm on WORLD
More than a decade after the inauguration of Nelson Mandela, South Africa is slated to become the host of the World Cup — a public affirmation of its break with its violent legacy of apartheid. But while the founding Freedom Charter of the African National Congress (ANC) outlined ideals for "a better life for all," harsh inequalities still exist, from xenophobic attacks to corruption scandals and township protests. As a new decade looms, post-apartheid South Africa is at a crucial and dangerous crossroads. With the 2009 presidential election as a backdrop, Behind the Rainbowgives a previously untold account of the country's political problems, struggles, and realities.
The film explores the transition of the ANC, from a liberation organization into South Africa's ruling party, through the evolution of the relationship between two of its most prominent veterans: Thabo Mbeki and Jacob Zuma. Exiled under apartheid, they were once brothers in arms. Under Mandela's administration, they loyally labored to build a nonracial state. Now, they are bitter rivals. Their duel threatens to tear apart the ANC and the country, as the poor desperately seek hope in change and the elite fight for the spoils of victory.
Featuring interviews with former and current ANC leaders, including Jacob Zuma and Thabo Mbeki, Behind the Rainbow is a behind-the-scenes look at South Africa's seemingly miraculous transformation.


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Simon Doonan: Eccentric Glamour: Creating an Insanely More Fabulous You
Mick LaSalle: Complicated Women: Sex and Power in Pre-Code Hollywood
Simon Doonan: Wacky Chicks: Life Lessons from Fearlessly Inappropriate and Fabulously Eccentric Women
Karen Dawn: Thanking the Monkey: Rethinking the Way We Treat Animals
Arianna Huffington: On Becoming Fearless...in Love, Work, and Life
Matthew Kennedy: Joan Blondell: A Life Between Takes (Hollywood Legends)
Martha Beck: Steering by Starlight: A Step-by-step Guide to Fulfilling Your True Potential


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Product Description
The Ultimate iPhone 5 Vehicle Air Vent Phone Mount (sku 16917)SKU: 16917
New BuyBits 'Ultimate' vehicle / car air vent phone mount for the Apple iPhone 5 smartphone.
This phone holder will accommodate a variety of styles of protective cases or skins while securely supporting your mobile phone investment.
Unlike other plastic vent mounts the BuyBits 'Ultimate' mount uses a metal jaw with a protective rubber liner to attach to the slats.
It is small and discreet and can be left in situ allowing you to add the cradle as required,
Vent mount is supplied with a universal cradle suitable for mobile phones and smartphones
Fits vent slats with a minimum gap of 6mm between slats.
Suitable for most vent slats.
Vent attachment can be rotated to fit vertical and horizontal slats.
Optional removable metal support foot with cushioned feet included.
Adjustable phone holder has spring action arms
Slide along support feet ensure power port access for charging.
Will accommodate the majority of phone cases or skins on the market.
Fits devices with a maximum width of 80mm
360º tilt & swivel.
How does it work?
The new Ultimate vent mount uses a small metal jaw which, when offered up to the vent slat and tightened provides a discreet, secure mounting base for the cradle.
The jaws are rubber lined to protect your slats.
The base is provided with an additional support foot which can be used when the air vent slats and slope of the dashboard require extra stability.
What's included?
'Ultimate' air vent base with support foot
Adjustable phone cradle
17mm ball adaptor
Instruction sheet
Additional Information
Additional Information
|Bullet 1
|New BuyBits 'Ultimate' vehicle / car air vent phone mount for the Apple iPhone 5, 5S, 5C smartphone. This innovative product is unlike other plastic vent mounts, the BuyBits 'Ultimate' mount uses a metal jaw, rubber lined for protection, which attaches to
|Bullet 2
|The mount is small, discreet and unobtrusive which enables it to be left in place when not in use, the cradle can be added when required.
|Bullet 3
|Fits vents with a minimum gap of 6mm (0.2") between slats; suitable for most vent slats; vent attachment can be rotated to fit both vertical and horizontal slats; 360� tilt & swivel.
|Bullet 4
|Mount is supplied with an adjustable, secure holder suitable for the Apple iPhone 5, 5S, 5C mobile smartphone. This style of phone holder will accommodate the device using a protective case or skin if required.
|Bullet 5
|What's included? 'Ultimate' air vent base with support foot; Adjustable phone cradle; 17mm ball adaptor; Instruction sheet.
|Fits Apple
|Apple iPhone 5
|Mounting Type


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Un ganador ha sido elegido entre 103 diseños de 11 diseñadores freelance.
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Descubre cómo funciona un concurso de diseño u obtén más información sobre nuestros servicios de diseño de logo.


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Remembrances of Ira Brilliant submitted by friends and members of the ABS
Henry Neiger
Ira was a model of Beethoven appreciation. No Beethoven project was too small to attract his sincere interest and support. Any friend of Beethoven was a friend of Ira's. He saw the need for a vital American Beethoven Society and he acted with imagination, generosity and a genuine affinity for the inexhaustible subject. He saw the value in collecting everything possible on Beethoven because he knew that Beethoven was a man for the ages. He knew that Beethoven's significance and the implications of his music would inevitably grow for all persons who care about the destiny of the human spirit. Ira Brilliant was a Beethoven heavyweight.
Luigi Bellofatto Italy
These are my words to remember Ira Brilliant:
Ruth Gordon
A little memory of Ira Brilliant came to mind when I read [Bill Meredith's] letter. One Thursday afternoon, docent Emily Lorraine and I were at the Center. Ira was there studying one of the collection's manuscripts. Emily and I played Mozart Sonata for Four Hands, K. 358, on the fortepiano that the Brilliants had commissioned in memory of their daughter and then donated to the Center. Ira stopped and listened. When we were finished, after a few words about the music not being Beethoven's, he said "it's always good to hear Mozart." Music was his love and he leaves a legacy.
Francois Payette, a member from the province of Quebec
It is not without a shock that I read the letter informing the members of the death
of Mr. Ira Brillant. I would like to offer his family and all who knew and loved him
my sincere condolences.
I live quite far from San José and do not have the chance to know any or the members there, but I know that Mr. Brilliant was one of the founder of the ABS and that makes his disappearance a sad event for me.
I had the chance to see Mr. Ira Brilliant in a documentary about the theory of the lead poisoning of Beethoven. I was touched by his comments on Beethoven's music, especially when he talks about "Les Adieux". I remember this with emotion.
Adriana Ratsch-Rivera
To the family of the late Ira Brilliant,
Please accept my deepest sympathy in the loss of your beloved husband, brother, father, father-in-law, and grandfather. Ira Brilliant was an inspiration to all people who love Beethoven. I personally feel very fortunate and thankful that we have the Ira Brilliant Center for Beethoven Studies and can't imagine my life without it. It is such a tremendous gift to America!
May rich and beautiful memories of music and discovery comfort you at this time, and may you know that he is remembered by all as a great person who shared the larger gifts of humanity in a kind and unselfish way.
Lisa Cox, Lisa Cox Music Ltd.
My first meeting with Ira was just a week or so after Princess Diana died, though we had been corresponding and I had been selling him Beethoven material for several years. We had lunch in London in a typical English hotel where we ate smoked salmon and roast beef. It was a happy occasion, where we talked about Beethoven and the business of Beethoven as well as many other numerous subjects. Since that time I enjoyed so much keeping in regular touch with Ira on a personal and business basis.
He will be sorely missed in the antiquarian music field. His passion for Beethoven achieved so much and the Ira F. Brilliant Center owes much to him for its outstanding international reputation. I am proud to have known and worked with him.
Bonnie Jo Dopp
I'm just now reading the thoughtful obit of Ira Brilliant, posted to the MLA e-list. I offer here my deep sympathy to the staff of the libraries at SJSU, especially the Brilliant Center. I had the privilege of reviewing the video, "Beethoven's Hair" for Educational Media Reviews Online recently and I watched it so many times I felt like I got to know Mr. Brilliant-and certainly got to recognize how much he gave us all by donating his 'stuff' and his passion for Beethoven to SJSU.
I hope his wife and family will feel some comfort by recognizing that there are many of us who never met them but still deeply appreciate all Mr. Brilliant, with Irma at his side, did for the world of music scholarship.
Joan and Paul Kaufmann
Ira's foresight and energy brought Bill Meredith to the Beethoven Center. His legacy will live on through Bill and many of you who have worked so very hard to make the Center nationally and internationally renowned. It was our pleasure to get to know Ira and Irma, and we will forever be grateful for our introduction to Bill Meredith and the Beethoven Center.
Roberta Pili, Italian pianist
With these few words I would like to express my close participation with the family
and with the Beethoven Center in San Jose for the tragic loss of Mr. Ira F. Brilliant.
As a pianist and interpreter of Beethoven's music, I had the pleasure to share with
Mr. Brilliant the passion for one of the greatest classical composers.
Unfortunately, I had only one single opportunity to get in touch with Mr. Brilliant last year. I wrote him a message, congratulating him for his great devotion and support of the Beethoven Center in San Jose, and expressing my thanks for this tribute to Beethoven and his music.
Mr. Brilliant wrote me with great enthusiasm: "All your thoughts concerning Beethoven's value extending much beyond his music runs very parallel with mine. It creates strong bonds with people all over the world."
He encouraged me to visit the Beethoven Center in San Jose. I was unfortunately not able to come until today, and I am very sad about this, because I will not have the privilege to meet him and share with him personally my infinite passion for Beethoven.
Mr. Brilliant's work in supporting and maintaining the truthful message of Beethoven was extraordinary. The American Beethoven Society lost a unique person.
My deepest condolences go again to his family and to the Beethoven Center in San Jose.
Toutes mes condoléances pour ce grand ami , qui, par son lien marqué avec Beethoven,
me met en sympathie totale avec lui.
A son tour il aura été rejoindre l'étoile chaude de ce musicien, non pas comme on va, tout entier, rejoindre quelqu'un à l'instant T de sa vie à lui mais comme on va rejoindre quelqu'un tout entier, à l'instant T de sa vie à soi.
Cette sympathie qui le conduisait , de lui à Beethoven , a été un lien, puissant conducteur entre des hommes de bien.
Barry Cooper
I was greatly saddened to hear of Ira's death. Ira was a lovely man, whose goodness and generosity touched so many lives, including my own, and he will always hold a place of warm affection in my heart. His contribution to our understanding of Beethoven was immense, and the Ira F. Brilliant Center for Beethoven Studies will stand as a lasting and living memorial to him. My deepest sympathy and condolences to everyone at the Center, and to Irma and all his family.
Dominique Prevot, chairman, Association Beethoven France et Francophonie
I and all the ABF members are deeply touched by the saddest news we have received. Our warmest thoughts go out to his family and his friends.
All Beethoven's "lovers" are mourning.
Didier Durand-Bancel, Directeur du Patrimoine et du Musee
To Mr. Brilliant: We always will remember your dedication and passion to our beloved Beethoven. You are said to have passed away while listening to the 7th Symphony. Well, I think that you can talk with him about the interpreters, now. Beethoven's life was difficult but ultimately, his music will always bring us fraternity and belief in a better life.
Thank you, Mr. Brilliant, to have been such a dedicated person to Ludwig's fame and
May God be with your family today. I know you are with Him now.
From France,again, a warm "thank you."
Tom Bailey
Decades ago Ira Brilliant put into motion his extraordinary vision that has had a profound effect on countless lives and will continue far into the future. He shared his passion with infectious enthusiasm. Ira was an exceptional man, loved and revered by all who were blessed with his presence in their lives.
Dick Sogg
A force of nature has just left us--much as Beethoven himself was a force of nature and Ira's passion. Ira had as his model a man who could persevere in composing sublime and cosmic music that he could only hear in his brain, and Ira could continue his work for the Center while his own body was failing him. We shall all miss him.
Hans-Werner Kuthen
Please [accept our] condolences on the passing of the founder of the famous Center for Beethoven Studies, our esteemed friend and passionate patron Ira F. Brilliant. Annette and I received this sad news after a very long absence from Bonn, returning from a sojourn in France, sequenced immediately by a longer stay in Bavaria. And it affected the two of us deeply. Our warm thoughts go to his wife Irma, who has to suffer this great loss, and their son Robert and his family. And we sincerely hope they will bear it with faith and confidence. Please tell them of our affection and condolences, particularly to Irma Brilliant, of whom I have the most exquisite remembrances, meeting the Brilliant couple personally at last during the international conference in honor of Lewis Lockwood at Harvard in 1996.
It was a great pleasure for me to see both of them in "Beethoven's Hair", which has been a fabulous tribute to both Ira and Beethoven. That Ira saw this documentary in his last days was really an appropriate pleasure for him (and Irma) ... We all have to be most grateful to him because of his passion for the composer and the help he was able to offer us with his appointed engagement. I am very pleased that the institute set a memorial service for him on the campus.
In this context I offer you my modest contribution: a re-edition (Titelauflage: Wien, bei Tobias Haslinger / VN. No. 2581) of the original edition of Beethoven's Sonata for Violin and Pfte, Op. 96 (cf. Kinsky-Halm, S. 270, below) - as a donation in memory of Ira F. Brilliant with our most affected greetings and grateful for your transmission of our condolences.


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Welcome! Explore this area to access resources including Pastor Rick Warren's Daily Hope free email devotional, 42 audio messages for you to learn your purpose, and leadership courses that will take you deeper into a purpose driven life.
Welcome to the Diving Deeper area where you can learn more about Worship.
Worship is expressing your affection to God, focusing your attention on God, and using your abilities for God.
Refer back to this page for sermons and resources that can further develop your life long journey through Worship.
"O Lord, now I have heard your report,
and I worship you in awe." (Habakkuk 3:2a LB)
If you want
to hear God speak, then worship God.
In other
words, thank him for being a part of your life and for being interested in the
details of your life. Thank him for answering your prayers: "O Lord, now I have heard your report, and I
worship you in awe" (Habakkuk
3:2a LB). God gives you a vision. God gives you a dream. You know what
God wants you to do, so now you thank him for answering your prayer. That's
part of worshiping God.
What I want
you to do is to stop seeing your prayers as a monologue and start seeing them
for what they truly are: a dialogue. Prayer is a conversation with God. God hears
you when you pray, and he answers you when you ask questions. He wants to talk
to you every day. If you will faithfully talk to God every day throughout the
day, it will revolutionize your life.
Now, you
can't hear God until you know God, and there are three levels of knowing God:
recognition, acquaintance, and friendship. You may be at the recognition level;
you know God is there, but you don't really know him. Or, you may be at the
acquaintance level; you know God a little bit, but you don't know him very
God wants you
to live at the friendship level. He wants to be your friend, and he wants you
to be his friend. God wants you to talk with him all the time.
Talk It Over
Pray this
prayer today: "Dear God, I'm amazed that you would want me for a friend. I
really want to learn to have conversations with you. Help me to spend time with
you every day. Thank you that you care about every detail of my life. Jesus, I
want to know you more and more every day, and I want to depend on you for
guidance in my job, my family, my future, and in every other area of my life. I
invite you to be the manager of my life, my Lord and Savior, as I follow you
and trust you. In your name I pray. Amen."
Purpose Driven © 2012


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I have been asked to elaborate on my answer on Quora so here goes:
1. There is no efficient purely functional unsorted dictionary or set
Since the 1990s the use of dictionaries in software has gone through the roof. Dictionaries are now a stock collection type that every programmer expects to find in their standard library.
Purely functional or persistent data structures such as those found in Okasaki's fabulous monograph on the subject can be a great tool. In particular, the persistence they offer means you can reuse old versions of collections without having to worry about mutation. In many cases (particularly for some kinds of problems such as logic programming and compiler writing) this can make solutions shorter and clearer, partly because it makes backtracking trivial. However, persistence comes at a great cost in terms of performance: purely functional dictionaries are typically 10x slower than a decent hash table and I have seen them run up to 40x slower. For some applications this is just too slow.
Furthermore, most functional programming languages (OCaml, Haskell, Scala) are incapable of expressing a fast generic mutable hash table because they lack the killer combo of: reified generics, value types and a fast GC write barrier.
BEWARE: people who try to claim that Haskell's purely functional dictionaries are fast by comparing them with Haskell's mutable hash tables. The correct conclusion is that Haskell's mutable hash tables are slow.
2. There is no purely functional weak hash table.
With a garbage collected imperative language, the relationships between the vertices and edges of a graph can be expressed using weak hash tables. The garbage collector will then collect unreachable subgraphs for you. There is no purely functional weak hash table so, in a pure language, you must write your own garbage collector.
Note that this is a really fringe disadvantage with most developers never having used a weak hash table!
3. There are no purely functional concurrent collections.
By definition, immutable collections cannot support concurrent mutation. Consequently, if you want a shared mutable collection such as an in-memory database then there is no efficient purely functional solution.
4. Most graph algorithms look worse and run much slower when written in an FP style.
Purely functional programming is a great tool for some kinds of problems but graph algorithms are one place where I have noticed that pure solutions are often worse both in terms of speed and clarity.
Compare Prim's algorithm in 12 lines of Python with Prim's algorithm in 20 lines of Haskell. And why does the Haskell use Prim's algorithm? Probably because Kruskal's algorithm is built upon the union-find collection and there is no known efficient purely functional union-find collection.
5. The inertia of traditional imperative data structures and algorithms is huge.
Beyond graph algorithms, there are many parts of computer science where 65 years of published literature has focused almost entirely upon imperative solutions. Consequently, imperative programmers can easily build upon the backs of giants whereas purely functional programmers are often left starting from scratch. After all, just a few years ago memoization in Haskell was the topic of a PhD thesis!
I once challenged a group of Haskell programmers (several of whom had PhDs in Haskell) to write an efficient generic parallelised quicksort in Haskell and this is what happened.
6. All existing implementations of functional programming languages, both pure and impure, happen to allocate far too much by design.
Around 1960, McCarthy invented Lisp. The core data structure was the singly-linked list. Each list node was a separate heap allocated block. All modern functional languages evolved from this. In the 1970s, Scheme used essentially the same data representation strategy as Lisp. In the 1980s, SML added a little unboxing with tuples heap allocated as a single block of memory. In the 1990s, OCaml added a little more with unboxed float arrays. Haskell added the ability to unbox some data. But to date no functional programming language has unboxed tuples by default. Even F#, which sits on .NET which provides arbitrary value types, still uses .NET's boxed tuples. Consequently, all modern functional programming languages incur very high allocation rates for essentially no good reason. Consequently, they all stress their garbage collectors far more than necessary. This is a serious problem not just because it makes serial code slow but because the garbage collector is a shared resource and, therefore, stressing the GC impedes the scalability of parallel programs.
I should note that calling this a "disadvantage" is contentious. Xavier Leroy of OCaml fame regards OCaml's Lisp-like data representation as a good thing because it is the backbone of OCaml's excellent performance when running the Coq theorem prover. Here Xavier asserted that "OCaml's strategy is close to optimal for symbolic computing". Functional languages are often optimised for high performance purely functional collections at the expense of low performance imperative collections. Given that imperative collections are generally faster, this puts an artificially-low ceiling on the performance of almost all functional languages.
7. Purely functional programming is theoretically good for parallelism but bad for performance in practice, which is the sole purpose of parallelism.
There are two reasons to write parallel programs today. The first is to write objectively fast solutions. The second is to make a slow solution less slow. In most cases, parallel programming in functional languages is a form of the latter. Almost nobody in high performance computing circles (i.e. supercomputers) is running functional code directly. When most functional programmers employ parallel programming today they do so not to attain the best absolute performance but just to improve the performance they have.
Purely functional languages like Haskell are designed to abstract away space and time. This gives you a higher-level perspective of your solution but it makes it very hard to reason about the amount of memory or length of time a Haskell program will require to produce a result. In parallel programming it is always important to make sure that the gain from parallelisation outweighs the administrative overheads of running code in parallel. Haskell makes this very hard. So hard, in fact, that published research on parallel Haskell notoriously cherry picks the degree of parallelisation that maximises performance even though that degree could not be predicted before running the program many times. I have found that straightforward parallelization often yields reliable speedups in languages like C++ but not in Haskell where performance is unpredictable.
BEWARE: People who talk only about scalability and disregard absolute performance. You can improve the scalability of almost any parallel program by redundantly recomputing the Mandelbrot set after each line of code for no reason because most of the time will then be spent in embarrassingly parallel code. Scalability is necessary but insufficient. You must also look at absolute performance.
8. It took 50 years for normal people to dilute the smug weenies to the point where you can get a useful answer about functional programming on social media.
I've been doing functional programming for over 20 years now. For decades there was a social chasm between functional programmers and people who had real problems to solve. Thankfully this problem is now starting to dissolve away with functional languages like Scala, Clojure and F# being used for real work but for many years the predominantly-smug-weenies dominated the functional scene, making it hard for people to get real solutions to their real problems. Part of the reason for this was that, having languished in obscurity for so many decades, some communities (most notably Lisp) had highly evolved (but wrong) arguments as to why Lisp was good. It took me many years to figure out what was wrong with these arguments.
9. There is a huge amount of misinformation about functional programming in circulation.
If you criticise the performance of hash tables in Haskell (more recently here) then you get pure misinformation from the leading lights of the community such as someone advising people to effectively turn off garbage collection.
For years the functional programming community brandished beautifully short implementations of the Sieve of Eratosthenes and Quicksort algorithms. These were even taught to students for years. Only many years later did it emerge that their solutions did not implement those algorithms. Melissa O'Neill even published a paper correcting the Sieve of Eratosthenes in Haskell. In particular, her genuine sieve requires 100x more code than the original Haskell. Same for quicksort where Haskell's elegant two-line sort is over 1,000x slower than Sedgewick's Quicksort in C because the Haskell deep copies lists over and over again, completely blowing the asymptotic IO complexity of Hoare original algorithm.
See also "Why is Haskell used so little in industry?" for a thorough debunking of the Haskell in Industry page.


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