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On Friday a lot of new people made it to the ISDEF conference. In the morning we had a presentation about doing business with Nokia. Smartphone/PDA software might just be a good development area in the next years.

In the afternoon I had a round table with other eCommerce providers where we answered questions about the software/shareware industry.

We have discussed about the differences between the affiliates and resellers, mainly explaining that affiliates work best when you only need online sales and promotion, while the resellers are better for longer term business developments and offline distribution.

The next question that came up was about the conflict when both affiliates and the software vendors are bidding on the same AdWords keywords. While the positions expressed where very different, the conclusion was that some niche affiliates (especially if you are talking about local markets) might be able to do better AdWords and take advantage of the long-tail. So the decision to let affiliates do AdWords should really be based on efficiency.

Me with the lovely ladies from SoftPressrelease.com

The Avangate team arrived in Moscow yesterday around noon. I soon found out that the traffic is very busy, and although this year the conference takes place at an excellent location at Holiday Inn, it’s still outside the city.  Hopefully we will have time to do some visiting – at least Moscow’s Red Square on Sunday evening.

Now, the conference started with the Barbeque party – a very good occasion to meet with some of our friends and partners (plenty of competition here as well).

For me, the highlights of the evening were meeting with the nice ladies from Softpressrelease and chatting with Anna – Affiliate Manager at Movavi. That reminds me I still owe her a beer! See more Avangate pictures from ISDEF Autumn 2008.

Today at 15:00 we will have the Vendors Panel, where we are going to answer questions coming from software vendors. I think it will be very interesting to see how things have evolved in the industry since the last year event.

We are preparing to leave for ISDEF (Independent Software Developers Forum) where Avangate will participate as a GOLD Sponsor. ISDEF is a networking and professionally enlightening initiative in Russia, one of the main opportunities for software professionals to share experiences, valuable business knowledge, and keep up with latest software market trends.

My colleague Eugen Rosca will have a presentation “True?! or False?!eCommerce Myths“. We will post it online if we will have good feedback on it, although it’s in Russian.