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Magento Go

By Guido Jansen on February 8th, 2011 / E-commerce / 2 Comments

wpid 2011 02 08 09.39.08 Magento Go

This morning, Magento Inc. announced their new product ‘Magento Go‘ (formerly known as ‘Stratus’), as an addition to the current Magento product line including Community, Professional, Enterprise and Mobile at the first worldwide Magento Imagine event in Los Angeles.

Magento Go will be Magento’s software as a service (SaaS) solution for retailers looking for a hosted e-commerce solution, much like WordPress.com is a hosted blogging solution. You ‘rent’ the softwafe a pay for it with a monthly fee.

There will also be a Magento Go Platform (Platform as a Service or PaaS) solution so developers can also work with Go and create extensions from it through OpenSocial and OAuth). Magento Connect will also get a relaunch to support Go. Great to know, is that extmensions made for one Magento version, will also be compatible with Go, so no need for time consuming/expensive addaptions for this new solution.

It will (probably) be available to the public within a month and Magento is giving away 1 milion dollars worth of product accounts.

Here’s the website introducing Magento Go.

Magento Go even has a dedicated Twitter account for you to stay up-to-date with the latest developments: @magentogo.

Interview: Rhonda Rondeau

By Guido Jansen on January 22nd, 2011 / Magento Interview / 1 Comment

m 78c971ab2f37466dac52e26425b90098 Interview: Rhonda Rondeau It’s time for another Magento interview! This time we have the honor to learn more about Rhonda Rondeau, our international Magento Community Manager from Magento Inc!

Rhonda lives and works in Los Angeles, USA. You can connect with her on LinkedIn, Facebook, Myspace (where she worked before Magento) or Twitter and of course on the Magento forum as rondata where she is one of the moderators.

What did you dream of becoming as a child?

I always knew I’d end up doing something technical. I was fascinated with electronics. I was the kid pulling apart her first IBM AT computer at 14 years old and trying to figure out how it worked with a “Know your PC” book. I think I took out the power more than once at home messing with rewiring. ;)

My philosophy on life is…

The glass is always half full. Glasses are created empty and if there’s anything in it whatsoever someone put forth the effort to get it there and you should damn well respect that effort ;)

What is your average day like?

My day starts at 4am and doesn’t end until about 11pm. It’s a mixture of work and family and believe it or not very random. At work – I focus on tasks as they come up prioritizing them in my head until someone with a more important agenda needs me.

The ideal night out is…

A night out? What is this strange concept that you’re speaking of?

I’m good at…

Mostly everything technical. I just have one of those mechanical minds ;) I taught myself how to program on dbase at 16 and continued taking jobs learning everything from configuration management to IT (networking, system admin and security) and back again. I also talk a lot. ;) It’s both a blessing and a curse.

Exclusive discount code for aheadWorks Magento extensions

By Guido Jansen on January 19th, 2011 / Other / 7 Comments

One of the more popular Magento extensions developing companies is aheadWorks and they just turned 2 today, so congratulations to Artyom Rabzonov and his whole team!

A healthy 3rd party ecosystem is – in my opinion – one of the most important factors of the success of an open source platform, Magento included. So it’s great to see more and more 3rd party companies sticking to Magento and becoming more and more successful in providing Magento services!

In order to celebrate the aheadWorks Anniversary, they allowed me to offer you a nice discount! The offer is for 35% off on the first 30 orders made after the publication of this blogpost. You can use the discount code GXJANSEN35OFF to save up to $350* for a single aheadWorks product!

Let me know in the comments what you’ve bought from the shop with the discount code and where/ for what you’re using it!
* when you buy the Subscriptions and Recurring Payments extension for Magento Enterprise.

Make it fun!

By Guido Jansen on January 12th, 2011 / Psychology in E-commerce / 2 Comments

Psychological Theory:
We respond well to small delighters.

Application idea(s) for E-commerce websites:
Can you create some small and unexpected pleasurable things to delight your visitors? It can be a small game, a video or maybe you can trigger the gatherer in your visitors and let the collect points or badges or other stuff on your website. Don’t go overboard though, it’s all about the small things. You don’t want to distract people from actually buying stuff on your website.

An example of a fun delighter in the Mailchimp interface:

Dashboard MailChimp Make it fun!

4570275327 fbc2fa388a t Make it fun! This post is part of my Psychology of E-commerce tips series where I present you with a psychological theory and suggest how you can apply this within your e-commerce website.

Interview: Brent Peterson

By Guido Jansen on January 9th, 2011 / Magento Interview / 1 Comment

It’s time for another Magento interview! This time we have the honor to learn more about Brent Peterson.

Interview: Brent Peterson Brent lives and works in Minneapolis, USA and works as a Software Developer at Wagento Data Consulting LLC. You can connect with him on Skype (creativedata) and of course on the Magento forum as Brent W Peterson where he is one of the moderators.