AI-powered podcast

If you have a website with an RSS-feed on it, you're just 2 clicks away from converting your feed into a podcast. Odiogo is a cool service that "reads your feed aloud", making a podcast from it. The quality is surprisingly good (check out the demo).

Why would you need it? Cause it's another way of promoting your blog/website: create a podcast, submit it to podcast-directories and get traffic and a backlink.

Some podcast directories:
Podcast.com
Podcast.net
Podcastalley
PodcastPickle
PodcastDirectory
Odeo

P.S. Don't have an RSS-feed yet? Try our RSS Feed Creator software.

Test your website in different browsers

BrowserShots makes screenshots of your website in different browsers, even in exotic ones, like the Konqueror browser for Linux.

Photo Picker

A cool web-service that every web-designer was waiting for: the Flickr Color Picker. You set the background color and it picks some "relevant" photos from Flickr.

7 rules for writing sales emails

Recently we've received several proposals from a well-known eCommerce provider asking us to switch to them from Plimus (our current online payments processor). Their somewhat insistent email has induced me to write this post - 7 simple rules for writing sales emails, that we follow here at Jitbit:

1. No questions. "Please tell us your sales volume, and we will send you our rates". No way! Send out your rates table in advance. When a recipient reads your email, he is not deciding whether he wants your services or not. He decides whether he deletes your email right now, or after a while. So no questions.
   
   
2. Create a USP (a unique selling proposition) and place it at the top of your email. Give your recipient one good reason why he should spend another second reading your email. Give him, what Bob Walsh calls "the Hook" - your initial statement which differs you from all the other junk.
   
   
3. Know your competitor. Visit their website, look through their features and prepare a short list of your features that beats them, before offering your services. When you ask someone "please switch to us from XXX", be ready for the appropriate question - "why the heck do you think you suit me better than XXX?".
   
   
4. Make it short. Be succinct and make your email clear.
   
   
5. Read it aloud. This is a great tip from professional editors.
   
   
6. Don't CC multiple recipients. Instead, send multiple personalized emails (for example, by using our MailJet email marketing software).
   
   
7. Don't send it! Save your email as a draft and re-read it in the morning. If you still like it - send it.

Interesting finds for today:
-Gavin Bowman talks about Idiotic Version Numbers
-Don't listen to your users by Jeff Atwood

Quote of the day and interesting finds

Awesome quote:

Don’t be stupid. Borrow more. At $20,000 in debt, if your business model doesn’t work, you are in trouble. At $2,000,000 in debt, if your business doesn’t work, the bank is in trouble.

(via foundread)

Interesting finds for today:

• Amazon has announced that it's MP3 download service will be available for non-US customers in 2008. This "iTunes killer" offers DRM-free music (unlike iTunes) from all four major record labels (unlike iTunes).
• Google Docs, which I was so skeptical about, is testing offline access to its services via Google Gear (a browser extension).
• Google is testing new experimental search features like keyword suggestions, different search-results layouts and other. You can become one of the testers.

New HelpDesk, Mac-Dongle and ReadBurner

Yesterday we have added two new languages to our web-based Help-Desk product: Norwegian and Portuguese. Also the new version comes with a great new feature: when Jitbit HelpDesk works in Windows-authentication mode and detects a new unregistered user, it tries to connect to the Active Directory to get the user's email and save it to its' database.

Some interesting finds for today:

• Jeff Atwood thinks that Mac is just a giant hardware dongle that allows you to run OS X programs.


• ReadBurner.com is a new "social" website which counts how many people have shared an item in their Google Reader, sorting items in a Digg-like way. Very nice idea.


• Neil Davidson talks about what does a recession mean for the software business. Nothing, actually. Don't panic.

Time management tips

Max Kraynov of Kraynov Investments must have read my mind: he shared a great time-management tip, which I use in my daily work too. Here it is: when I open my notebook and start working on a task, I simply turn on the timer on my watch. That's it.

The timer works like a charm: I don't want to pause it and go fill my coffee mug, or pause it and read an email message. The timer makes me more productive and less distracted. And what's more, I'm not afraid of complex tasks any more, since the timer revealed, that even most complicated tasks take 10-15 minutes to complete.

Interesting links:

• Google has announced the winner of the Adsense Story Contest today: it is http://www.hometips.com/ - a site that features free articles concerning home improvement, remodeling, repair, redecorating, and do-it-yourself projects. For example, tips on how to make your Christmas tree last for weeks.
  
  The owner, Don Vandervort, says that the AdSense-revenues went from paying for coffee to paying for lunches to paying for all salaries, overhead, and business development.
  


• The owner of cdbaby.com tells 7 reasons why he switched back to PHP after 2 years on Rails. He rewrote his website back to PHP after 2-years struggling with Rails. With the help of a Rails "professional" who quit after all.
  
  Love his last point: "PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES ARE LIKE GIRLFRIENDS: THE NEW ONE IS BETTER BECAUSE YOU ARE BETTER ... the main reason that any programmer learning any new language thinks the new language is SO much better than the old one is because he’s a better programmer now! You look back at your old ugly PHP code, compared to your new beautiful Ruby code, and think, “God that PHP is ugly!” But don’t forget you wrote that PHP years ago and are unfairly discriminating against it now.."

Christmas Sale

We are happy to announce that our Christmas Sale has started. From November 28th to December 26th we offer unconditional 10% discount on all our products.

http://www.jitbit.com/christmas-sale.aspx


Link-List:

• Scott talks about naming a company or a product and mentions some good online naming tools.
• a very nice tool at iwantsandy.com - a robo-secretary. You can talk to Sandy through email or web. After registering on the website, you get an email address for sending commands to Sandy. Like "Remind me to drink beer on Friday". Sandy will understand and send you an email, an SMS or a Twitter ping on Friday. Sandy understands tags, CC-emails, remembers things in its database and many more. Check her out.

Why should you buy from a small software company

Today's link-list - a list of interesting links

• A very nice post by Andrew Butov I've stumbled on - why should you buy software from a small company
• Rice field art by Japanese farmers, check it out
• Patrick McKenzie talks about deceptive AdSense techniques. If I may put my two cents in, don't use the "Content Network" at all. Stay with the "Search Network", Patrick.