Matt's Biztalk posts

Chicago Happy Hour?

I'm going to be traveling to Chicago in a couple of weeks and would like to spread the Biznik love to the Windy City. Anyone know of any good places to host a happy hour? I'd prefer a nice place but not over the top expensive.

Thanks.

Setting up Shopping Cart

I want to find a good shopping cart that I can integrate directly into my site. I don't want my customers going off site for their purchases. My total number of products are under 100.

I've looked at 1ShoppingCart and it appears pretty simple but I can't find any good documentation on how to install it. It also seems a little sketchy.

The other products I've looked at are OS Commerce and Zen Cart (both are very different than 1ShoppingCart). These look to require a lot more integration but the documentation looks pretty good (and I'm not too worried about the coding). What I'm worried about here is working with merchant services.

My question is, does anyone have much experience with either of these? Which would your recommend? Do you have a better solution? Thanks!

Marketing Books

I'm curious if anyone has any recommendations on good marketing books. The two issues I'm particularly interested in at the moment are internet marketing and word of mouth. An added bonus if the book highlights how to do these two things on a shoestring budget.

Thanks in advance.

Matt

Marketing to Suppliers

I recently started a new online site for independent musicians to sell their music and I'm facing my first big challenge: Getting musicians to sign up. This seems a bit different than traditional marketing to me because I don't have any product for them - just the promise of returns in the future.

In essence, I'm trying to recruit suppliers and I'm not sure my current tactics are working. I've sent emails, posted on Craigslist and MySpace, working on SEO, talking to musicians I meet, and even a small contest for the first 25 musicians to sign up. I've only been at it for about 2 weeks, but currently I'm stuck with only 3 bands that have posted albums and another 15 or so that have either signed up or said they'll sign up.

Maybe I'm just not patient enough, but I'd really like find some way to get musicians motivated to actually put music up on my site.

Thanks for any suggestions.

Logo Designers?

I'm looking for someone to help me do a logo for my business. I already have a pretty good idea of what I'm looking for but my artistic abilities are, um, lacking to say the least.

While I may eventually need help with website designs and other artwork for my business, for now, I just need the logo. I'm also bootstrapping my business so cost is definitely an issue.

Thanks!

Dedicated Hosting Recommendations?

I'm in the process of starting my own internet based business and I'm looking for a good recommendation on dedicated hosting. Right now I'm running my alpha version of the site on a shared server and this setup will not work for my actual release (in fact, it barely works for the alpha).

Here are some of my needs:

1) Linux based. 2) Significant storage capacity. (> 100GB) 3) High bandwidth capacity. (> 1TB) 4) Very high uptime. Need a company with history of this. 5) Full onsite support to handle any server problems. 6) Extensibility. If things are successful, I will be needing multiple servers (web servers, application servers, database servers). 7) Good site statistics management.

It would be nice if the hosting company was capable of installing some basic software for me. In particular, I'm using MySQL, Subversion, and running Ruby on Rails.

Obviously, I'm looking for the best value I can find (note that doesn not mean the cheapest service - but highly reliable, good hardware, and a reasonable price).

Thanks in advance for the help.

Matt

PS: I'm excited to have found out about this site. I'm impressed with it so far!