Avangate is in Moscow this week, at ISDEF Autumn (Sep 30th – Oct 3rd). Wow! It’s the 11th time we are attending this event, by far the biggest software event in Russia. Avangate is the Special Sponsor of this edition and, like every year, we are proud to take part in the event, meet so many people passionate about software and exchange ideas on how to sell software worldwide in a way that is efficient, secure, locally relevant.

Avangate eCommerce consultants will make presentations on hot issues that impact software companies today – developing trust and optimizing conversion rates – and will also be available for one-to-one discussions throughout the event. So don’t miss them:

Unless you’ve been on holiday these past weeks, I’m sure you know by now that we are off to China again. Yep, we loved it so much last time and the feedback was so good, that we’ve decided to re-visit this fascinating culture (one of the oldest in the world!) that just happens to have to offer some of the best dishes on the planet :).

This time we are heading to Shenzhen, an area considered “The Valley” of China. Yep, that’s the center of the Chinese IT & software market.

So on Saturday, 5th of June, I’ll be sharing the conference floor with Tina, Avangate’s finest Asian market sales consultant;) and Andy, our coolest Chinese colleague. What am I saying here… if you are a software vendor from China, you might know these guys probably even better than me.

The debate topic this year: Conversion Rate.

Just in case you missed it, we are organizing our first Software Selling Conference in China that will take place on December 5th at the Park Plaza Beijing Science Park.

If until now China was just a very big country or a very fast developing market, now it’s getting personal:  I’m going there and join for a couple of days the Avangate Chinese sales team. Well, I should say we are going there, as 3 geeks and one lady are going to play a very serious and challenging role of the host at the event :) We are going to try to make it fun.

What is this event all about?

For a start I am looking forward to meeting some of our clients I’ve been working closely with on web analytics implementations or a/b testing.  Talking about testing, this is going to be the main focus on my presentation: Effective and tested ways to increase conversion rates. I will also try to make things interesting and hold a workshop just after the presentation, analyzing a website from the audience… depends on who will volunteer. Nothing staged there.

Almost 2 weeks ago we got back from the 18th edition of the Software Industry Conference held this year in Boston, Massachusetts. I know it’s taken me a while to write this, but I can explain. It’s called jet lag plus hundreds of e-mails.

It was a busy and successful participation for us: 3 presentations, 1 hospitality suite where we met with the participants (some of them our clients and partners), exhibit night, nice parties, and networking with beer, chocolate and sea food (OK, I’ll admit it, this was my favorite).

I really enjoyed presenting, thanks to Paris Karahalios for inviting us on the (you can download the presentations): Social Networking Media panel (I got a lot of friends on LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook, so I think the presentation reached its goal), as well as the Effective Advertising & Marketing panel.