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General n-Tier without tears
Building n-Tier apps can be difficult. Instead of a single monolithic application that can easily hide its imperfections, a client-server model traditionally means making an API, choosing a transport, and sticking to it.
It’s like marriage, but with TCP/IP settings. Throw in a wireless client and it can be difficult to find a solution that fits. XML-RPC? SOAP? REST? Each way of communicating has benefits and drawbacks.
This is what we’re doing for client X, a niche healthcare business.
Continue Reading…General Elevator Pitches aren’t just for your salespeople
Many people know about the Elevator Pitch, and people at companies that are succeeding have committed their company’s pitch to memory and improve it constantly to improve understanding and relevance.
We copy/paste the elevator pitch from the CoverMyMeds website many times per week. Not because it is easier, but because it is the best 15 word summary of our company that we can write.
But the best part about an honest and simple elevator pitch is that it can be used by others outside your company: your happy users, your partners, and the press.
And today, I received an email from HealthTechTopia that we’ve been awarded their #2 slot in the 25 Notable Startups that are Changing the Medical Information Industry. We’re listed among a number of very good companies, many of which I know, but something that struck me is that we had one of the only usable elevator pitches on our website out of the whole list.
Unfortunately, I’ll need to pick on someone to illustrate my point.
CoverMyMeds helps physicians and pharmacists complete Prior Authorization and other insurance coverage determination forms for any drug and for most drug health plans…
DOMA Technologies: This is a privately owned Virginia Limited Liability Corporation founded in 2000, which provides Software as a Service (SaaS) document management applications and services aimed across multiple vertical markets…
Assuming you even care about healthcare IT, which description is better? Without a good pitch, the nice folks at HealthTechTopia had to work very hard to describe what these other companies do-and it probably isn’t the very best explanation these companies could offer.
What we’ve done is improve our chances of being listed and described positively, with nothing more than a simple paragraph on our homepage (but lots of thought about who we are).
Let me close with a few simple metrics we have to evaluate our pitch. A good pitch is something that:
- A real person would repeat to their friend/colleague without feeling like a dork or shill
- A (non-paid) person can actually remember
- Describes why we matter and who should care
- Is differentiated from other pitches, but is relevant to problems to which the mainstream can relate
- Is copy/paste-able in an email or website
- Everyone in the organization is happy to repeat to open sales calls and meetings
General The Innova Team
We took pictures right before the annual holiday feast.
Chip, Eddie, Keith, Reva, Matt, Dan, Jon, Michelle, Scott, Amanda, Bruce, Mary, Kent, Brian, Robert, Chris. Chad, who holds court at the Oregon branch office not pictured.
General Visualizing CSS
Converting a Photoshop pitch to a static HTML/CSS layout is a fundamental part of client-oriented web development. It can be hard work, not least because it is difficult to simultaneously focus on the appearance of the site and its structural foundations.
The usual solution to this is to muddle through and keep tweaking a steadily expanding morass of CSS until the site resembles the original .psd. This way of working is unstructured, which makes it stressful and self-limiting.
Let’s look at a better way.
General More great opportunities at CoverMyMeds
CoverMyMeds is looking for entry level account managers.