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Top 5 free online marketing tools (that are simple and effective, too!)

Everyone knows that marketing matters. What they don’t know is that given the right tools, marketing isn’t expensive, time consuming, or difficult. That’s great news for small business owners strapped on cash and time. Here’s our list of 5 easy to use, well tested, and free online tools that help manage small business marketing. Give [...]

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Baloney Biz Dev and Real Business Development For Your Company

In New York, everyone “does Biz Dev.” It’s the magic thing that people do that turns little companies into giant empires. It’s what makes great CEOs and revolutionizes whole markets and companies. But what is it?I meet plenty of Biz Dev people who “don’t do marketing or sales because they’re focused on biz dev.” These [...]

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There’s you, there’s your customer, and there’s tech

VM Associates is a New York City cloud computing consulting firm. We help companies transition into newer, better, smarter software. Contact us to talk about your business, the cloud, and how we might help.

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The Gorilla and the Spiderweb: Two Competing Approaches to Small Business Software

I speak with small business owners every day. Most of the time, we’re speaking because they have problems – workflow problems, software problems, scaling problems. Solutions aren’t obvious. If they were, we wouldn’t be in business. Thing is, it’s not just that solutions aren’t obvious – it’s that solutions may solve the same problems (inventory, [...]

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3 Reasons Why VARs, Vendors, and Clients Need Waking Up

It’s a tough time to be a Value Added Reseller (VAR). For those who don’t know, VARs are a breed of IT consultant popularized in the 1990’s and still near-ubiquitous in certain channels. They’re hard to miss: Without going into too much detail, the VAR model is one of selling software licenses for the margin, [...]

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Why the new Basecamp refresh is a sign of things to come (and why that’s good)

So, the new Basecamp is out, released with much applause (and yes, a few groans). We reviewed it last week and found it super promising. Exciting stuff. What’s more exciting than the sexy new project management tool, though, is how it was released. 37signals, the company behind Basecamp, basically rewrote the rules of software releases. [...]

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Community feedback is good. Kinda.

Yes, this is a repost, but it’s just so good we couldn’t help ourselves… The Support, It Is a-Changin’ In the good ‘ole days when software still need installing and executives regularly printed their emails, software “support” was a strange thing. Sure, Microsoft had helplines you could call, and Quicken came with a manual, but [...]

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Thinkfuse, Basecamp, and the Tyranny of Features

A few days ago we received a trial invite to Thinkfuse, an up-and-coming piece of software focused on group communications (read: project status reports). Without going into a full review (Thinkfuse is still in testing mode), suffice it to say that Thinkfuse represents exactly what we *love* about good new products: simplicity, focused innovation, and [...]

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We’re teaching a class!

Cloud Computing: What It Really Means for Your Business Monday, December 12, 2011 from 8:00 PM to 9:30 PM Buy your tickets here. Having worked for years in the exciting space between business and cloud computing, we’re happy to announce a new class on the subject at New York City’s General Assembly. We’re teaching, meaning [...]

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ERP and Misalignment (or why Brightpearl rules and how we lost a client)

We work with dozens of clients, big and small, every month.  Sometimes – say once a year –  there’s a client whose situation perfectly encapsulates all the tensions involved with cloud computing. We just had that client. Here’s their story. Small company, big needs The company – lets call them Fisher’s Piers – is a [...]

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