Five new ways to help software firms hire, detect, e-mail, share, and raise $$
by Gordon Graham, Editor, SoftwareCEO		PRINT-READY VERSION (SITE MEMBERS ONLY)

This column is all about new services and new strategies for your software firm.

If you're hiring, here's a powerful new way to check references, with eight so-called "surprise attack" questions.

For any licensed software firm, here's a new service to help detect what's happening with your products in the wild.

For anyone who does e-mail campaigns or e-newsletters, here's a low-cost preview service, along with 30+ handy guides on every aspect of e-mail marketing, and some e-mail benchmarks for small software firms.

For any shareware writer or micro-ISV, here's a new go-to-market strategy that converts your software to SaaS for no charge.

And finally, for anyone in the video game sector, here's a new VC firm just for you.

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How to ride the tide of open source to profit: 14 tips, 3 perks and 2 cautions
by Sue Anderson, Writer, SoftwareCEO		PRINT-READY VERSION (SITE MEMBERS ONLY)

For most people, open source and commercial software are two opposed camps at opposite ends of the market.

Great things have come from the open source community (such as Unix and TCP/IP, to name just two), but we've always considered open source a little less ready for prime time — a little more prone to spaghetti code — than its commercial counterparts.

That is, until we met Zmanda CEO Chander Kant. Kant's been winning big with open source for more than eight years, with a foundation built on a long-standing open source backup project: The Advanced Maryland Automatic Network Disk Archiver or Amanda for short.

When we sat down with Kant, we were intent on learning tips other ISVs could use to gel open source and commercialism together, without compromising the goals of either. What we learned was eye-opening.

Kant's 14 tips reveal how he profits from open source, while staying true to the open source community.

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