I’ll tell you something, when you run a small business, people work hard.  Our group is no different.  I’ll tell you something else: I have never regretted a single moment that we have dedicated to spending time together out of the office.

So, on Tuesday August 1, 2006, we will not be answering our phone lines or replying to email until approximately 11:00 AM EDT.  Why?  We are human and we are going to be spending a little quality time as a group.

We’ll post some results later tomorrow (my money is on Joe), but I’d expect any scores we do report to be high…

UPDATE: 11:14 AM EDT - we’re back.  Call or email if you need us.  Levi brought home the bacon.  We played “One-Putt Poker”.  Basically you start with two cards.  You earn a new card for each green you one put, two cards for birdies and eagles.  Final results after 9 holes:

1. Levi: Flush on eight cards.  He had three aces too. [WINNER]
2. Daniel: Pair of 10’s on three cards.
3. Mike: Pair of six’s on six cards.
4. Joe: Pair of six’s on five cards.
5. Jeff: King high on five cards.

Kathy was sorely missed. 

Additional notes: Joe, Mike and Levi all registered a birdie.  Levi also got an eagle (wow!)…and no…we were not playing mini putt…

Thanks for following along at home, and congrats Levi!

Congratulations Nicabar, you are our 100^th user to sign up to our forum.  Our forum has been growing steadily since its June debut and we just hit 100 users today.  This is just a reminder to all our users that we still have 3 fantastic custom login pages to give out for our first three members to reach 100 posts on our forum. 

Here are the top 10 members in race for the custom login pages.

1. Slayer in the lead with 18 posts.
2. NorthIowaWebsites in second place with 16 posts.
3. Jvs in third place with 10 posts.
4. Mthorn trailing with 7 posts.
5. Niyogi with 6 posts.
6. Cemper with 6 posts.
7. Ilya with 5 posts.
8. Vmg with 5 posts.
9. Loewendbs with 4 posts.
10. Basquen with 4 posts.

As you can see, it is still a pretty open contest. If you have not signed up for our forum, just sign up here and you will automatically qualify for our contest.  Introduce yourself after signing up to get started.

In another example of how conventional wisdom about business is being upended, many companies are apparently jettisoning from the traditional function of “marketing”. In today’s New York Times, the results of some recent research by Strategy + Business suggests that “marketing” is being rethought, and recast as innovation:

[from Falling Short Of Greatness by Paul Brown]

The consultants note, however, that there is hope that the situation will improve.

Last year, Coca-Cola said it was eliminating the job of chief marketing officer and would be combining marketing, innovation and strategic growth into a single job.

The consultants wrote, “Coke followed Pepsi, Intel, I.B.M., Samsung and other pioneers in explicitly linking the marketing function and the growth imperative.’’

The erosion of traditional marketing — the end of conventional PR, the replacement of broadcast messaging with conversations, and the growing need for companies to be nimbler and more adaptive — is accelerating. This is perhaps more evident in small companies, where marketing has long been an afterthought: “We’ve built the product, I guess we better get Marketing involved and print some slicks for the trade show.” Rethinking of the functional organization is long overdue, and its time to get rid of the silo of marketing, divided from other functions, and move over to an organization that mirrors the critical processes in the business.

My experience is that marketing in many companies — as the researchers at Strategy + Business discovered — is lamentably bad. Let’s just put a bullet in it’s head, and focus on what should be pushing our businesses forward: innovation. It’s unlikely, however, that someone that has been acting as a “marketer” for years will be the right person to push innovation. The skills needed to be the head of innovation transcend marketing, and likely incorporate product development, strategy, and business development. In a large company, this innovator may be responsible for research, and handing off promising ideas to the larger company to turn into fielded products.

But no matter how this shakeup of the conventional organization is realized, one thing is for certain: the days of marketing are numbered.

What a great surprise. Today, Mike and I were on a call with a company that we are planning to integrate with (Pipeline Deals) when we happened across this action packed movie of FreshBooks Version 3.2.

Check it out if you have a moment (it runs about 2 minutes). Kudos to Molly (I think that’s who it is) at Screeniac.

The only downside to screening a web service is that things can change very quickly (we upgraded to Version 3.3 only a few days after this was recorded). We actually spent a lot of time putting together flash demo’s of our application last year and canned the project for that exact reason.