Archive for July 2009

Jul
30

July 2009 Newsletter

by Hieu Bui

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Hi everyone,

I can’t believe that 2009 is now over half way over. It seems like just yesterday that I was writing to you to discuss our goals for the full year. As I look back over the past couple of quarters, I’m really proud of what we’ve accomplished and am really looking forward to the exciting developments we have in store for you for the rest of the year.

One of the most exciting things that happened over the last quarter was our introduction of PowerCMS to our line of solutions. PowerCMS has become already become our fastest adopted solution as content management was a feature request that we have long heard here at WebAssist. For those who haven’t tried one of our solutions, they are pre-built PHP Scripts complete with functionality and design that get you up and running out-of-the-box. You can modify and customize our solutions with any editor or use our Dreamweaver extensions to make customization easier.

Suite Value Chart

I also wanted to take this opportunity to highlight our new lineup of suites. In the past, we had Web Designer Suite, Web Developer Suite, and Super Suite. What we have done now is to break those suites up into more targeted suites according to the type of customer you are and what you are trying to accomplish.

  • CSS Design Suite is for customers who want to be able to build standards compliant, CSS-based sites with rich navigation.
  • Dynamic Suite is for customers who want to build robust dynamic web sites with data base functionality and commerce.
  • Essential Suite is a combination of both CSS Design Suite and Dynamic Suite and is the best option for customers who want to build both great front-end and back-end features in their website.
  • Super Suite is still our best value as it includes all of our extensions so that you can build any type of website you want.

Not only does Super Suite give you the most value with the most features, Super Suite customers also get the best deals moving forward. We always give Super Suite customers special pricing to all new products, all new upgrades and we will be rolling out other incentives for investing in our most popular suite.

The past quarter has also seen WebAssist evolve in how we communicate with you and give you the best support and service that we can. We continue to focus on giving you the best information possible as soon as possible so please be sure to keep tabs on our blogs, forums, and follow @WebAssist on Twitter for real-time updates. We have also noticed a great surge in traffic and activity on our forums. Therefore, we are going to modify the way we do support by using the forums as the primary support channel. Our support team will actively monitor all forums along with members in our community. One of our support engineers will create a ticket for you on our current ticketing system only when the support issue requires private messaging or transfer of files. This change will allow our entire community to benefit from the vast amount of great information available on our forums – this information not only applies to our products but to web design and development in general. For more information about our upcoming support changes, please keep an eye on the support section of our website.

In closing, I want to thank you again for continuing to give us feedback and encouragement. Please keep all of the comments coming as we take your suggestions very seriously. We know that our success is directly tied to your success and we appreciate the opportunity to help you build better websites, faster.

Best,
-Hieu

Hieu Bui
President, WebAssist

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Categories: WebAssist Notes

Jul
23

PowerStore v2 Now Available

by Hieu Bui

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We just released the second iteration of our PowerStore solution. PowerStore v2 is a complete PHP based online store that you configure in a few steps, upload to your hosting account and you’re done – no coding needed.  The key updates to this version are:

  • Support for product options (i.e. small, medium, & large t-shirts)
  • Support for Authorize.net merchants (in addition to the existing PayPal support)
  • Support for UPS and Fedex shipping (in addition to the existing USPS support)
  • Professionally redesigned look and feel

Existing PowerStore v1 customers and our Super Suite customers get a sweet upgrade price of $99. New customers can purchase PowerStore v2 with a $50 launch discount until 8/7. For more information, check out http://www.webassist.com/solutions/powerstore.

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Categories: WebAssist Announcements

Jul
22

Google Voice Starting to Roll Out

by Justin Nemeth

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Google has started sending out beta invites for their new Google Voice service. I just signed up last friday and so far I’m loving it! The basic concept is Google will give you a phone number for free (they bought over 1 million numbers all over the US) with the idea of using it as your single point of contact. Google Voice supports voice and SMS through a streamlined web interface, but it also uses your existing phone lines transparently.

Here’s an example. My friend calls my Google Voice number. Google then routes this number to my cell phone where I answer. After seeing the caller ID and hearing a voice announcement of who is calling, I have a few options. I can answer the call like normal, send it to voicemail, or even listen in as my friend leaves a voicemail. To my friend, they just called my Google Voice number. For me, I have the option of forwarding the call to any of my phones (cell, home, work, etc). This is the beauty, its a single phone number I give out to everyone, but behind the scenes I have full control of how a call gets routed to me.

Some other really cool features of this free service include free SMS messaging, voicemail transcription (which can then email me the text of the message), and the ability to mark unwanted callers as spam (which ultimately blocks them from calling again!). Another very powerful feature is grouping users and performing actions with those groups. I can make a group for my friends that forwards the call directly to me. I can make another group for my co-workers that sends them direct to voicemail, complete with a custom greeting that makes more sense for my colleagues.

There are lots of cool scenarios when using Google Voice, so I suggest signing up for an invite and giving it a test run. Navigate to http://google.com/voice to request an invite. They have started rolling out the invites, so you should hopefully get one soon.

In the meantime, check out some good posts on lifehacker for more info. And if you are using an iPhone, definitely check out GV Mobile in the app store! Android and Blackberry phones have native apps as well.

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Categories: Tech

Jul
16

Silverlight 3 and Expression 3 Launch

by Hieu Bui

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Sorry that this post is coming about a week late but I finally found time to get this post out. I was at the invite-only launch event for Silverlight 3 and Expression 3 last Friday up in San Francisco. There were a few hundred partners and media folks there for the event and they talked about the new features and functionality of this next version of the product line.  There were some interesting tidbits and here are some things I noticed:

  • For the first time, I was one of the few folks at an event with a Mac laptop – I guess it makes sense being that it was a Microsoft event
  • Even though almost everyone had a PC laptop, a large number of folks were sporting iPhones
  • Web video and rich internet applications are the future (or the present according to some folks)

So what does this all mean?  Well, my big takeaway is that Microsoft is very serious about competing in this space. Many of the features they showed and the direction they are moving are pretty interesting. Similar to how Adobe wants Flash to be the platform for web and desktop app development, Microsoft seems to want the same thing for Silverlight. Microsoft is playing catchup – they are only on v3 while Flash is on v10. The net result should be good for the rest of us as competition should help drive innovation.

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Categories: Tech

Jul
03

Authorize.net Down

by Hieu Bui

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Many eCommerce vendors use Authorize.net (including us) to process credit cards and it looks like their entire system went down some time last night. You can follow @AuthorizeNet or @WebAssist at Twitter for real-time updates . Your credit card was not charged if you received an error over the past 12 hours or so on our online store. In the meantime, you can still purchase from our online store using PayPal.

Update: July 3, 2009 11:27AM PDT – It looks like global processing capabilities are back up even though the website is still down.

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Categories: WebAssist Announcements

Jul
02

To Bing or Not to Bing

by Hieu Bui

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Many of you have probably heard about Microsoft’s new search engine Bing and their $100 million campaign to promote it. Initial reviews about the search quality have generally been good and more importantly for Microsoft, it looks like the traffic volume to Bing has been pretty good – at least according to this Techcrunch report.  I’ve tried out Bing a few times myself and the biggest difference I have noted is that Bing seems to be re-indexing much more frequently than Google.  Only time will tell if Bing helps Microsoft in the search engine wars (not quite as cool as the Clone Wars). Either way, competition in search is only good for us both as consumers and advertisers.

My real question is this – will Microsoft be able to turn Bing into a verb like Google has been able to?  One year from now, will folks be saying “Bing It” or “I just Binged it” (or is it “I just Bung it”?). I can only imagine the interesting dialog in the marketing meetings that led up to the launch of this service.

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Categories: Search Engines