What’s the deal with all these new fantastic browsers and browser plug-ins? Are they all riding the “Mozilla wave” and hoping for their 15 minutes of fame?

My first thought was: YES! But then I tried a few of them out and discovered that some of them actually hold GREAT and USEFUL features!

In general I do not like features for the sake of features only. They are in general geek pleasuring inventions.

But take a look at Browster. It’s fantastic, absolutely fantastic! This feature is useful and eases my navigation. Not every day I come across that in a feature.

When I read blogs, or follow the discussions through various forums and need to see comments or the sub threads of a post, I simply use this feature to preview and scan if there is anything of interest to study more in detail. Without the evil “back and forth navigation” where everything on the pages is reloaded over and over again.

Check out the “How it works guide” here or go straight for the download of this really useful navigation feature.

With this new discovery I can leave the office for the day, and re-explore the www browsing this weekend.

Today I’m going to hear Mr. Steve Ballmer from Microsoft. Usually when I attend a conference as a part of my preparation I come up with one question, I would like to ask the lecturer.

I started up with a question about how Microsoft feels about the anti-trust problems with EU regarding both Windows XP and the upcoming Vista.

Then I thought about how he feels about the process of making Vista – it has been delayed for years, they had to remove functionality, they downscaled expectations, etc.

For the sake of doing it, I asked my girlfriend what she would like to know. She came up with the brilliant of all questions: How comes my printer isn’t working?

Software designed exclusively for effective marketing organizations.

What exactly is Headlight?
Headlight let’s you easily manage your marketing operations from Digital Asset Management (DAM), media planning and campaign execution to measuring the success of marketing activities – online as well as offline.

How can Headlight help you?
Marketing consumes a significant amount of the financial resources of most companies – and the demand for accountability, automated marketing workflows, and higher returns on investments are increasing.

This might seem impossible in an ever more fragmented and complex media space…

Headlight is designed to solve these issues. Just as finance has ERP and sales has CRM, Headlight brings order to marketing organizations through a comprehensive, integrated marketing-centric solution.

Want to take part in our private beta launch?

I’ve had the honor to be part of the private beta of www.shopify.com.

It’s been interesting so far. I’ve been looking for a decent easy-to-use yet professional/customizable etc. e-commerce solution for 2 years now - without any luck!!!

This project seems very promising and I’m looking forward to see how it develops during the next few months. I think Shopify could do to e-commerce what blogs have done to CMS/Web publishing …

I’d love to see Headlight and Shopify in some kind of collaboration / mash-up / integration. The match would be perfect.

And I thought e-commerce software was so much “last season” / “Web0.0001″ etc. Guess not.

A few days back I presented the logo for Headlight in a post on logo design inspired by the fuzz about the new Quark logo. Since then I’ve had some feedback on the logo, which made me realize I had to change it. My main reason to change it was that some people didn’t see the lit head shape with the brain in it, but an image of a man yelling from the top of his lungs. When I saw what they meant, I kept seeing the yelling man as well. It was clear; the brain had to go.

The brain was to complex a shape, and for obvious reasons, not one of those features that make us recognize a shape as the human head. Maybe if we had x-ray vision and could actually see each others brains, it would have worked. But until we mutate into Martians, I decided to stick with the one feature that sets our head apart from e.g. a ball, a melon, or a potato – eyes. If you want to be concrete sure that people will recognize a shape as a head, it got to have eyes.

So here it is the new and brainless, but at least seeing, head.

As the software it represents it has undergone a lot of changes since the original idea. But that’s the way we like it. Nothing is sacred; if it doesn’t work it has to go, no matter who thought of it, and how long it took to make.

With our upcoming release of Headlight, we want to provide the best possible support to our customers and users. This included a more modern way of looking for help on a website than we have used in the past. This is a brief overview of our new help system, Little Helper.

We had two main objectives with Little Helper

- It should be possible to find help yourself
- The users can suggest other solutions to the problem for others to read.

It became quite clear to us that letting the users interact with each other and suggest alternates solutions to the different help topics were the right way to go. This would over time make Little Helper much, much richer in information than we could ever write our selves, and at the same time provide more solutions to the same problems. This, in essence, puts the user in control and that’s something we believe in.

Dwelling over the idea for a while let to the suggestion that Little Helper should be more than a simple user forum or weblog. It was important that we could integrate the help topics and solutions directly into other software. So, we decided upon the idea of an XML web service API that lets you do just that.

So now we had both the Little Helper website/weblog and the API for integrating in other systems, but we weren’t done just yet. We knew we wanted a category of help topics called Tips & Tricks, which should contain relative short articles with productivity tips and that we wanted to update this category very often. That’s the perfect example of when to use RSS, we thought, so all categories now have its own RSS feed you can subscribe to.

We saw how this type of system could be beneficial to other than us self, and decided to make it open source and share it with anybody who is interested. That, of course, meant that we had to design the system to be easy to understand and use right away by almost anybody. All the data is stored in XML files so you don’t need a certain database installed on your web server in order to use Little Helper. You only need .NET Framework 2.0 installed and you’re ready to go.

The system is up and running right now, but still needs the last overhaul before we release it. Come back to check for the release soon. Little Helper will be free of charge and you can change it in whatever way you want.

There is a new acronym in town:

EMM = Enterprise Marketing Management.

Well, I’m not sure exactly how new it is. Rather new I think. But one thing is sure: It’s sizzling hot!

Companies are putting more and more pressure on their marketing organizations to outperform themselves - and their competitors of course. So, marketers need to do a better marketing job. Now more than ever it seems. By marketing I mean all the processes normally associated with marketing; from media planning to campaign execution to ROI measurement to workflow management to creative resource management etc. - the whole works! This is the focus of EMM; to streamline all these tasks and to integrate them into one single platform.

And this is also basically what we do in TraceWorks - one small step at a time. We tell the story like this:

“Just as finance has ERP and sales has CRM, we have developed Headlight in order to help bring order to marketing organizations. Headlight let’s you easily define, plan, execute, and measure the effectiveness of marketing activities – online as well as offline”.

So how hot is EMM? According to a recent study by forrester ”more than three out of four marketers say that marketing needs a comprehensive, integrated application suite to improve its effectiveness“. And with at least 75% of all marketers looking for EMM-like solutions I think it’s ok to categorize this industry “sizzling”.

Is TraceWorks an EMM solution provider?
So, do we belong to the EMM-family which to my knowledge includes companies like Unica, Aprimo, Siebel etc. My instinctive reaction would be: “DEFINITELY NOT”. Let me try and explain why that is.

We develop Marketing Management Software and we DON’T develop Enterprise Marketing Management Software. It’s a big difference to us. Enterprise has a specific negative connotation which spells trouble. It’s another way of saying that the software is uniquely complex and that it will in many cases take many months to implement and even longer to understand. This is not our way. I would simply hate to be associated with anything related to a long history of complex and extremely difficult to use enterprise software.

Our focus is to develop marketing-centric solutions based on these core principles; quality, simplicity, and beauty. Our main purpose is to reduce complexity and help marketers to get the job done – as quickly and easily as imaginable. We believe marketing organizations need less complicated marketing software to confront the vast complexity in modern marketing.

But I still would like to belong to such a sizzling hot new acronym in some way. So here is my compromise:

TraceWorks is an EMM’ish solution provider. Maybe that would work?