Smartpen website launches with full range of Livescribe products

I’m pleased to announce (belatedly) that we finally launched the Smartpen website yesterday. We got the site live with a full set of products and accessories along with our own database of knowledge and FAQ to help our local customers.

We still have a couple of minor quirks to iron out – namely getting the software to display the sales price consistently and updating some of the images to be better quality – but overall, we’re live and taking Livescribe orders in a more automated fashion.

The team put in some long days to get us to this point and we were really pleased to get some early positive feedback from visitors and customers – specifically the feedback from Rob Vos and Anita Swift.

As we’ve communicated to everyone who’s found us, we’re capturing every single piece of feedback and using this to fine tune how we engage with our customers and also how we ultimately engage with BigAnt and Livescribe as to where the Livescribe Smartpen is going.

What changes are we working on?

1.       On the site, we’re working hard to iron out a really annoying glitch as to how the RRP is displayed. For reasons unknown, the software “might” show a price that is ex-GST, or it “might” show a price that is inc-GST – we’ll have this resolved by the 3^rd November.

2.       Some of the product images are a bit ordinary. We’ll spend some time over the weekend toying with these so that we can display really nice, clear images.

3.       How we account for delivery is still clunky. The software allows us to create a complex formula that “might” generate a more balanced delivery fee charge. This clearly needs more work and more data as to our actual freight charges. We’re probably going to move away from Australia Post due to the limitations as to what we can package and send.

a.       Just so you understand – we treat delivery as cost recovery. But this gets hard  to determine as we have items that are cubically large but light, items that are smaller but much heavier, and some small items that are also light.

I suspect we’ll default to a delivery fee that is blended for the larger and smaller items.

What else will we put on the site?

1.       We’re working to expand the product descriptions so that we can give a better indication of what each product set comprises

2.       We will be updating the FAQ to include some specific content to help Mac users understand how to use the product.

3.       PayPal as a payment option – I was convinced we wouldn’t be asked to accept PayPal but go figure day 2 and someone enquires as to whether they can pay via PayPal…

Your feedback is important. If you have any comments or suggestions please drop us a line or add a comment to this post.

Livescribe Smartpen – As featured in The Age

We’re starting to see more and more traction from our social media efforts in relation to the promotion of the Livescribe Smartpen. We’ve been advised that the Livescribe product is going to be featured in Melbourne’s The Age newspaper. We’ll post a more specific link tomorrow.

Great news but with a slight dark cloud hanging over it…

The story came about after Age journo Charles Wright contacted us about the Livescribe Smartpen product that he’d heard about. I always appreciate it when people (be they users, prospects, or customers) can see beyond the shallow dazzle portrayed by the big box retailers and seek out suppliers like ourselves who focus on customer service and customer experience management.

So we took the time last week to catch up with Charles for a coffee in St Kilda and to supply him with an evaluation pen. I won’t seek to quote Charles but he’s clearly impressed with the product; so much so that he’s referred a number of friends to us so they can purchase a Livescribe pen for themselves.

It’s really good to see respected journo’s of Charles’s calibre picking up the Livescribe pen and ‘getting’ the potential so quickly. The story is likely to generate some nice demand for us (and the evil empire) though given we’re in the twilight zone of current stock vs. fresh supply at the higher purchase price we’ve got a tough job to manage tomorrow.  Bear with us if you find us out of stock…

Livescribe – Applying the lessons of Tim Martin

As a TEC member, I’ve had the privilege of hosting Tim Martin from 2 Sticks Digital Marketing as a speaker at my TEC group earlier this year. Tim gives an engaging, yet simple presentation where he talks about all things digital marketing.

Here at Smartpen, we’ve taken all of Tim’s advice and applied them to the launch of our Smartpen website. As we prepare for the official launch of the site we were really pleased to see our efforts pay off with the site achieving the top organic listing on the Google search term “Livescribe Smartpen”.

Smartpen achieves #1 ranking in organic Google results

You can contact Tim at 2 Sticks (03) 9018 5672. He’s got some really interesting stuff on his blog. I recommend Tim to anyone looking to get their heads around the Web 2.0 world.

Here’s some of Tim’s work from YouTube

Livescribe Smartpen – The inevitable price rise

With the recent decline of the Australian dollar, we’ve received news from our partners at BigAnt that a price rise is imminent and most likely to come into effect from 1 November.

As you’re all no doubt aware, the Australian dollar has been in decline since around April of this year. The following graph gives a good indication of this:

This graph shows the decline of the AUD over the past 90 days - Thanks Uncle Sam

The cost of importing the Livescribe product range has subsequently increased quite dramatically. We’ve worked really hard with BigAnt to get as much stock into the country as possible. However, from 1 November, prices will increase. Check back on the Smartpen website for updated price details.

We still have stocks available of the 2GB pens, A4 notebook packs, ink refills, and A5 journals.

Livescribe Smartpen comes to the fore

I’ve just left Chicago having had the opportunity to attend the Selling Power Sales Leadership conference on Monday. Selling Power assembled a brilliant list of speakers including Neil Rackham – author of SPIN Selling; and one of the founding fathers of modern sales thinking.

With such a stellar cast of thought leaders, I was really looking forward to the event and also using my Livescribe Pulse Smartpen to capture the audio. Starting with Gerhard Gschwandtner’s opening address, I was able to capture each session and across the day captured over 6 hours of notes and audio. Each session has its own page and includes key comments, illustrations and audience questions. In a large room, distant from the speakers, Livescribe really shows its worth.

Given the uncertain times we’re faced with and the climate of fear being propagated by the press mongrels from around the world, Gerhard gave an inspiring address to the audience. It’s a fantastic example of the power of positive leadership – something lacking in political leaders everywhere at the moment. I’m going to upload the opening remarks of Gerhard to the Livescribe website and make the file available by invitation. If you’d like to listen, post a comment and I’ll add you to the access list on Livescribe

Three of the presentations really stand out as being incredibly valuable and I’m extremely happy to have captured them:

1.       Malcolm Rees – Global Head of Sales for DHL Express. Managing a sales group of 6,000 is not without it’s challenges and Malcolm gave a really interesting, detailed insight into how he extracts maximum performance from his global team

2.       Mary Delany – CSO at CareerBuilder.com. Mary chaired a panel discussion on Coaching Salespeople. Her opening remarks were a real highlight of the conference and she went on to chair a very interesting panel discussion on coaching.

3.       Neil Rackham – Author of SPIN Selling. Neil is one of the founding fathers of modern sales leadership thinking. Neil’s comments were very interesting an quite an inspired take on the current situation we’re all facing.

The audio is a bit scratchy at times, primarily as I was on a noisy table, but overall, the quality is sufficient for someone to create transcripts if required.