The World isn't quite flat; use your location to your advantage

Globalization isn't a force to be reckoned with. As the World has shrunk in size due to the lowered cost of shipping, the Internet, and formerly 3rd world countries investing in their infrastructure, suddenly companies no longer joust with just their local competition, but are pitted against firms in Argentina, Indian, Mexico, China, Lithuania, etc., where the labor is significantly cheaper for a variety of reasons. Outsourcing, whether it be manufacturing, software development, call centers or even tax form processing, has been the rage for the last decade. Writers such as Thomas Friedman have expounded on this phenomenon at length, and most authors on the subject have a philosophical/socio-political agenda such as the evolution of US labor laws, the enforcement of WTO labor laws in our trading partners, the idea that the US has to retain its status as the knowledge leader in emerging technologies, or other issues of the day.

Bakery Normand, a Blog of Note!

Since moving into our location in downtown Northampton we've become huge fans of and friends with the owners of Bakery Normand. This cute and friendly neighborhood bakery has been selling amazing breads, pastries, cookies, etc. for over 30 years... and until this past August, never had a website!

Working with the proprietors' son we undertook the creation of the bakery's website. The goals:

• Provide store location and hours to customers
• Tell the story of the bakery
• List the products, product ingredients and baking days
• Get peoples' mouths watering

And our own goal: to encourage Bob the Baker to start writing a cook book!

We weren't quite sure what to expect when we turned the site over to the baker; would he use it? Would the site stay with just the first article? Would he start blogging?

Within the first 2 weeks the Bakery posted 4 articles, wrote content for all of the web pages, added a few web pages, and posted photographs for almost every product they make.

Today Bakery Normand was featured as a Blogger "Blog of Note"; we couldn't be more proud.

A website solution for a tough economy

Our company headquarters is in Northampton, Massachusetts, a town with a very strong culture of "buy local" ingrained in the social fabric. Walking down Main Street you can count on one hand the number of chain stores found here and the local banks greatly outnumber the Big Bank entities. Small businesses dominate.

You can do some amazing things with Blogger

Confluent Forms LLC specializes in creating gorgeous, engaging websites with custom content management systems (CMS, software that enables easy management of your website content without a web developer), but we’ve found that Blogger can be a great platform for web development when a custom CMS isn’t needed. Blogger provides a ton of functionality and design freedom for our clients, and not just for blogs!

Job Search Made Easier, Cheaper Through Crowd-Sourcing

Innovative RFP Database Offers 100,000 Users $Billions in Project Opportunities

Northampton, MA, July 18, 2011 – Five years ago, entrepreneur David Kutcher got sick of searching fruitlessly for Requests for Proposal (RFP) to respond to.  He knew that hundreds of thousands of other vendors were also wasting valuable time and energy looking for RFPs, while at the same time, organizations releasing RFPs were getting far too few responses to make bidding competitive.  To solve this problem, his company created the RFP Database (RFPdb).  Based on crowd-sourcing model, the RFPdb supports both RFP issuers and their respondents, and more and more businesses, government agencies, and non-profits are turning to it as a key resource.  In fact, last week the site reached a landmark 100,000 registered users, outpacing all competitors in the field.