From a marketing perspective, some have said that you should be looking to beat your competitor to the punch. By being the first to market with a particular type of product, there’s a good chance that you’ll attract the early adopters and get them to buy your product even before your competitor has something comparable available for sale. It’s important that you work hard to promote these kinds of products, because you don’t want your launch to be overshadowed by your competitor’s hype.

One industry where we can see a lot of this jockeying for position in the wireless phone market. This applies not only to the service providers, but also to the manufacturers of the cell phones themselves. There are some very heavy rumors that Apple will be announcing a new version of the iPhone some time next month and this has come with a fair bit of hype from the online community. At the same time, the Palm Pre smartphone is also getting a fair bit of attention, but Palm knows that it has an uphill battle ahead of it.

Up until recently, Palm and Sprint did not come forward with a firm release date, possibly waiting to see what Apple had planned. Possibly based on some of the prevailing rumors, Palm and Sprint have now announced that the Pre will launch during the first week of June. Will this be able to take the wind out of Apple’s sails? Maybe, maybe not, but they have a greater chance of attracting some new customers during that window of time leading up to the next iPhone. After the new iPhone hits the market, Palm could be pushed into the shadows, so they need to establish the Pre in the marketplace before that happens.

Similarly, the Canadian cell phone market will be shaken up by some new players in the next couple of years. In addition to Telus, Bell, and Rogers, a few other “major” carriers will be entering the game and they’ll likely going to offer some very competitive price plans. As such, I’ve noticed that all three of the current major service providers have put out a much bigger push to get their customers signed to contracts. This locks them in, proactively reacting to the pending lure of the increased competition.

In marketing your company, keep your eyes and ears peeled for what your competitors are doing and how things are changing in your end of the market.

WordPress.org hosts a Plugin Directory that allows users to browse through and download thousands of open-source WordPress plugins. If you create an open-source Plugin, you can also get it listed in the Plugin Directory.

Having your plugin listed in the Plugin Directory has many benefits. The Plugin Directory can give your plugin more exposure than it would normally get if it was hosted on your own site. You’re also provided with a Subversion repository to host your plugin in. On top of that, it also enables automatic upgrades to your plugin for your users.

Over the next couple of articles, we’ll be talking about hosting your plugin in the Plugin Directory. This week we’ll be talking about submitting your plugin to the directory.

Submitting your WordPress plugin to the Plugin Directory is simple, and has very requirements. Basically, your plugin has to be licensed under the GNU General Public License, and not do anything illegal or morally offensive. There is an approval process on the submission, which can take anywhere from a couple days to a week or two to get your plugin approved.

You can submit a request to host your plugin in the directory here (you need a WordPress.org account).

You probably want to encourage your readers to leave their mark on your blog through comments, because this kind of input can further the discussion and help you improve your blog posts. That much is clear. However, spammers and other evil-doers can ruin the party for everyone. In general, Akismet is able to catch most of the spam that comes through your blog’s comment form, but it won’t catch everything.

One of the simpler ways to get past the spam bots that may visit your blog is to install the simple SI CAPTCHA WordPress plugin. Chances are that you are already familiar with the CAPTCHA form from other websites. The image of text is shown in the comment form and a real person must enter this text perfectly in order for their comment to get approved. This won’t prevent manual spam, but it will be quite effective against most bots.

The SI CAPTCHA plug-in can be implemented in the comment form, of course, but it can also be inserted as part the registration form on your blog if you have one. Trackbacks and pingbacks bypass the CAPTCHA deterrent, so if those contain spam, they’ll still get through. You can also set it so that the CAPTCHA does not appear for users who are logged in or for admin users. JavaScript is not required.

For more information and to download the plug-in, check out the WordPress plugin directory.

Last week we asked if Web Hosting has become a commodity industry and 67% said yes. Sad that this is the state of the industry because hosting is a service not a commodity. This weeks question is…

Last week we went over how to check types in PHP. However, what happens if you have a different type than you require for your script? Well, it’s also possible to convert a variable to a different type.

Since PHP doesn’t support specifying the type when creating a variable (like other programming languages require), it is possible that you will end up with a variable of the wrong type. Converting a variable to a different type is simple, and there are two possible ways to do it.

The first method of converting a variable between types is called type casting. Here’s the basic syntax:

[code='php']$foo = 'foo';
$bar = (type) $foo;[/code]

Where type could be int, bool, float, string, array, object or unset. Basically, this would convert $foo to the type in parenthesis that precedes it in the value of another variable. Let’s look at an example, converting a numeric string to an integer.

[code='php']$number = '10';
var_dump(is_numeric($number)); // bool(true)
var_dump(is_int($number)); // bool(false)

$number = (int) $number;
var_dump(is_int($number)); // bool(true)[/code]

The other method of converting between types is by using the function settype(). You pass the variable you want converted, and the type you want it converted to, and it will convert it. The first parameter is the variable you want to convert, the second parameter is a string, of either int, bool, float, string, array, object or null. Let’s look at the above example again, except using settype() instead of type casting.

[code='php']$number = '10';
var_dump(is_numeric($number)); // bool(true)
var_dump(is_int($number)); // bool(false)

settype($number, 'int');
var_dump(is_int($number)); // bool(true)[/code]

There you have it, two viable options for converting variables to a different type.

It could be partly because this generation is being raised on the Internet and our attention spans are shorter than ever, but it seems that there has been a definite push toward microtransactions in recent years. his business model has infiltrated all sorts of digital delivery channels. While each individual purchase does not yield much in terms of profitability, the volume can easily make up for this. With our short attention spans and disposable income, we seem inclined to indulge in a lot of impulse buys. It’s only a buck or five, right?

Take the iTunes Music Store, for example. In the past, you may have taken a little more time to consider what music you would buy. This is because you’d have to make the effort of going to a physical store and spend $10-$20 on a CD. That’s a small purchase, to be sure, but parting with $20 can take a little bit of thought. By contrast, you can hop on iTunes and buy a single song for 99 cents. For many people, there’s no real thought involved for a sub-dollar purchase. You want it, so you get it.

Moving forward, we’re seeing the same kind of phenomenon with the App Store for the iPhone, the BlackBerry App World, and other similar solutions. Buying that $200+ cell phone takes some serious thought, but now that you have it, spending $1-$10 on an app is still very much an impulse buy. The developers recognize this, since the application can be relatively simple to develop and, thus, does not take much time. If popular, an app can be downloaded and purchased thousands of times. We’re seeing the same kind of thing with the Xbox Live Arcade, Wii Shop, PlayStation Network, and so on.

The emerging business model of microtransactions appears to the wave of the future. Bigger purchases can make for quite a bit of competition and quite a bit of comparison with competitors. By contrast, a person can just as easily buy a handful of apps for their iPhone that all do the same thing, only to see which one works the best. It’s far too easy to indulge in purchases two dollars at a time.

What do you think? Should we expect other industries to partake in microtransactions as well? After buying a DVD, maybe you can buy the special features at a dollar each?