Dog Days of August? Hardly

Posted by Al Perlman

It’s supposed to be the dog days of August, but not only is it quite chilly in New York, it’s also busy as can be for our team. This week Joe P. has been out at an Avnet reseller conference in Colorado and is heading to Los Angeles for a series of meetings with channel executives.

Gary will be in San Diego Thursday, moderating a channel-oriented roundtable for Tech Data. On the MuniWireless front, we are in the midst of releasing our first Business Models research report, which we think will be extremely beneficial for the industry. And we are starting our marketing for our largest conference of the year in Silicon Valley Oct. 21-23. Plus, we’re editing the next issue of TechIQ, compiling research for the MuniWireless Buyer’s Guide and creating some exciting new product extensions for TechIQ and MuniWireless.

Living Up to Our Values

Posted by Al Perlman

We had our company retreat last week at my house in The Berkshires and we certainly lived up to one of our core values: Fun. It’s nice that the company is still small enough—14 full time people—that we can all fit comfortably on my porch.

In addition to enjoying ourselves, we also covered a lot of business ground. Among that important things that you’ll be seeing from us, based on what we discussed last week: Our first MuniWireless conference in Washington DC next year; a new (but still secret) program to provide enhanced value to our TechIQ customers; and at least one more new business that we’ll be investing in over the next year, to support and extend our existing brands. We’ll post details on this blog as soon as we’re ready to announce specifics.

Our Interns

Posted by Al Perlman

Today I’m interviewing candidates for an editorial intern position we’ve created this summer to produce a new Buyer’s Resource Guide we’re creating for MuniWireless. This will be both a print and online product and the challenge will be to integrate them so that there’s value in both. On Long Island we’re fortunate to have several good local colleges, including Hofstra, Adelphi, C.W. Post and Stony Brook, which is just launching a journalism program. We’ve also posted the ad on the NYU Web site, but for $10 an hour it’s not quite worth it for someone to commute here from Manhattan.

If We Say So Ourselves…

Today we finally got to see the printed copy of the 25th Anniversary Magazine we’ve produced for CompTIA. A ton of work went into this, but it’s been a great project. It features an oral history from several of the founding fathers of CompTIA, plus views of the future from top executives at Lenovo, CA, HP, N-able, Cisco, Oracle, Red Hat and Kaseya. The magazine is available only to CompTIA members, but we have extra copies if anyone is interested. Just drop me a line at al@microcast.biz and we’ll mail it to you. No PDFs for this one.

Executive Roundtables: We’re Great at Them

Mike is in Fort Lauderdale today running a roundtable for Tech Data’s resellers. When we started the company, these executive roundtables were a major part of our business plan. But demand has declined in the past year or so and we find ourselves doing fewer than we expected. It’s too bad because they’re a great source of leads and information for the sponsors and, ahem, we happen to do them extremely well. It always works best when the sponsor has a targeted audience to tap into. Then we can shape the content and conversation to fit the sponsor’s needs and also to make it a pleasant experience for attendees.