Already people are wondering why we chose the name “Strong Arm Tactics” for our blog. So, I figure we owe an explanation. We’re the little guys. We like to support other little guys, and we’re not exactly huge fans of those massive software companies that roar and beat their chests and drive little companies out of business.

That said, let me tell you a little about our company. Our parent company is called Manaccom, which is a small cap stock listed on the German and Australian stock exchanges. Manaccom has traditionally been a software publisher focused on delivering boxed software to retail outlets. In 2007 Manaccom and another company merged. This other company, Jumbo Corporation, has been in the e-commerce business since before broadband was invented. Currently they do some cool stuff in the online space selling lottery tickets and running a nifty little affiliates program (Jumbo Affiliates) and a cool rewards site (Jumbo Rewards).

Our little division doesn’t actually fit into any of the departments above, but kind of works side-by-side. Our group is nominally called Sellerbyte and we started off with a network of online stores mainly selling software. ZoneAlarmStore is one of our flagship software stores and it incorporates our unique selling point - the shopping cart. Most of our development time has gone into making the shopping cart the easiest to use online payment system around. Go ahead and visit ZoneAlarmStore and go through the motions of buying a software download. Of course you don’t need to actually buy it, just have a look. I’d love your feedback about its ease of use.

So there’s the first part of what Sellerbyte does. The other focus of our business is to build online tools to make the life of small business people easy. Our first product 2Large2Email is billed as the simple way to send large files. No more bounced emails, no more FedEx, no more having to get the tech guys to setup an FTP server (that you can’t use anyway). Just a plain vanilla, even-my-mother-can-use-it way of sending those large files that you really want Mary Jones to have today. It’ll be up and running in July and we’ll be asking for a monthly subscription for people who want to use the product. Although, I should point out that we have a dozen premium accounts to give to people who would like to test it out and answer a few questions about performance and ease of use.

We’ll be releasing other products soon too, all designed to make operating a small business easier, more efficient and sometimes even fun. So stay tuned and drop by every now and again. We’ll be blogging about what’s new on the web, tips about how to run a business efficiently (yep, that’s my background) and cool developer tricks. Nige our Web Chef will comment on the tech stuff, Ben our Web Marketing Guru will write the about-once-a-week article on marketing (when he can drag himself away from his SEOing) and because I really am not a technical person I’ll make observations about business.

Oh yeah, and that brings me back to why we called this space Strong Arm Tactics. It’s basically the antithesis of our business ideology. We’re the little guy working for the little guy, battling against the megatron companies of the world, just trying to eek out our little market niche. Why not help us?

My friends will tell you that I used to be one of the most anti-Mac people in the world. I would tell people that I hate them and that PCs will dominate my world forever. About 2 months ago I got an iPhone. I loved it. I love it more now. And, much to the disbelief of my friends and co-workers, and the utter astonishment of my wife, I just bought a MacBook (2.4 GHz, 2G RAM for the geeks out there). I was on the net in 5 minutes and receiving email in about 6. I couldn’t believe computing could be this easy! But for those Mac users in the world who make up the 10% (and growing) user base for the Mac, it’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking we don’t need to watch out for viruses, spyware, malware, hackers, etc. We do, so keep your eyes open and be sensible. The Mac user base presents itself as a growing target for the hacking world - 10% of the world’s computers totally unprotected by security software. Just watch out, these hackers are pretty smart… (and yes, I’m keeping my Compaq, just in case…)

Welcome to Strong Arm Tactics - the occasional weblog about what’s happening on the internet and everything to do with online marketing, web applications and other interesting little tid-bits.

To start with I want to introduce the three of us who will be contributing to this blog:

Ben, our Web Marketing Guru (yes, that’s his actual job description) will be writing posts to do with Search Engine Marketing and Optimization. Ben knows everything about the world of Google and their AdWords. Ben looks after our network of online stores and manages our cool (and we think unique) shopping cart system. But more of that later…

Nige is our chief Web Chef. In other words he does lots of cool stuff designing our sites, implementing the latest and greatest techniques and wonders and generally keeps our sites operating at optimum efficiency and improving them as required. Nige will write about coding and development trends that he spots, and anything else that he thinks is worthy of mention.

And I’m James. I’ll be writing about marketing, trends, entrepreneurialism, selling, customer service, online gossip and all the rest. The next few years is going to be quite exciting in terms of developments in the web world and we’ll ride that massive pipeline wave into the great unknown, pointing out some interesting things along the way.

Thanks for reading - I look forward to hearing from you.