Ken Levy's Blog

Even though I recently joined EPS Software (which is also the company that owns CoDe magazine and VFPConversion.com), the relationship is as a partnership through my company MashupX, LLC and not as a full-time employee at EPS.

I am the President and founder of MashupX, LLC, with EPS being one of my primary clients. MashupX will have some additional partnerships to announce in the near future, while some of my clients will not be disclosed on my site or blog due to confidentiality reasons.

MashupX specializes in consulting for community building around products and services, guerilla marketing techniques, multimedia creation, and software technology.

Just announced today is my MashupX, LLC company partnership with EPS Software. More details to follow soon on my blog here…

http://www.eps-software.com/PressReleases.aspx.

Ken Levy joins EPS Software Corp, VFPConversion.com, and CoDe Magazine

9/3/2008 12:00:00 AM

Houston, Texas, – September 3rd 2008 – For immediate release:
Ken Levy is joining EPS Software Corp. in the role of an Evangelist for several EPS brands. Ken is the founder of MashupX LLC, and through his new partnership with EPS, Ken will focus on EPS’ VFPConversion.com effort as well as CoDe Magazine (the leading independent magazine for .NET developers) and EPS’ custom software, mentoring, and consulting efforts around .NET and Microsoft server products. Ken is a renowned industry expert and was formerly at Microsoft driving community growth and evangelism for Visual FoxPro (VFP), Windows Live (developer platform), and Visual Studio Extensibility (VSX).

For more information, contact EPS at info@eps-software.com

About EPS Software Corp.
EPS Software Corp. is a multi-national corporation founded by renowned industry expert Markus Egger. EPS is headquartered in Houston, TX (USA), with offices in North America and Europe. EPS specializes on consulting, mentoring, and custom software development based on the Microsoft developer platform, including Visual Studio (.NET), SQL Server, and other Microsoft server products, such as SharePoint. EPS is well known for its involvement in various community efforts. EPS is involved not just in sponsorship and trade shows, but also in the organization of various special interest groups. Many EPS employees are well known presenters at events of all sizes around the globe. EPS employees have received more Microsoft MVP awards than employees of any other company. EPS is also the owner of brands such as CoDe Magazine, VFPConversion.com, Milos Solution Platform, and Xiine (among others). – www.eps-software.com

About CoDe Magazine
CoDe Magazine is the leading independent .NET developer print and online publication. CoDe Magazine provides in-depth articles for professional .NET developers. CoDe Magazine has received numerous industry awards. In addition to the main publication (which is printed on a regular schedule), CoDe also publishes CoDe Focus Magazine, which is a series of special issues focusing on specific technologies in each issue. Furthermore, CoDe includes various online properties that can be found on the CoDe Magazine web site. – www.code-magazine.com

About VFPConversion.com
VFPConversion.com is a community portal and service offering for current or former Visual FoxPro (VFP) developers with an interest in adopting newer Microsoft technologies such as Visual Studio, .NET, and/or Microsoft SQL Server. The VFPConversion.com web site offers a wealth of free information such as articles and blogs. In addition, the VFPConversion.com team can assist developers in assessing their current VFP applications and in converting them to, or enhancing them with the aforementioned new technologies. – www.VFPConversion.com

In late July when I was doing research online for creating my new MashupX company as an LLC in the state of Washington, I found a great resource online by author and CPA and MBA Stephen L. Nelson, at his website: http://www.stephenlnelson.com/.

Stephen is the author of QuickBooks for Dummies, Quicken for Dummies, and Excel for Dummies, and has sold around a half a million books worldwide over the past years (just click on Books on his web site to see a list of some of his publications).

One of the great resources on his website is a Do-it-yourself LLC Formation for all Fifty States eBook offering. I ended up buying the eBook version for the state of Washington, the premium version (PDF and Word files) for $49. While I could have stepped through and eBook and created my own LLC online, I realized that Stephen’s office is in Redmond, WA and only about 4 miles from where I live in Kirkland. I had some questions about various company formation options as well as questions preparing general accounting and taxes, so I setup an hour with him a few days later. It cost $235 for the hour with him, and I not only left with every one of my questions answered with additional great advise, I also left with my application all filled in online for applying for the new LLC. The next afternoon, I received a confirmation email from the office of the Secretary of State in Washington approving and confirming the formation of my LLC. I then had to register my new business which was easy with the included document in the LLC formation kit.

I also bought Stephen’s book called QuickBooks 2008 for Dummies (rated with 5 full stars on Amazon) in the Kindle eBook format since I recently bought a copy of QuickBooks 2008 Pro.

Stephen is the type of CPA who helps people as much as he can with his website content and books, and tries to focus on having clients who he can help the most. For example, he encouraged me to do as much as I can myself and then just hire a tax accountant for tax purposes. He said he would be best used for taxes if I were to ever convert my LLC into an S Corporation which requires more complex tax consulting.

Even if you are not located in the Seattle area or in the state of Washington, Stephen’s website has a ton of great resources for businesses, accounting, and taxes including a great FAQ page. If there was some type of MVP program for CPAs for contribution to the self employed business community, Stephen would get my nomination.

For many this week is back to school. For me this week is back to work. After taking some time off and working on getting my new MashupX  company started as an LLC in the state of Washington, I’m back to start to be active on my blog here with some announcements and other blog topics I’ve been archiving to post.

I just updated my blog’s RSS feed to use FeedBurner. So if you’ve already subscribed to my blog here, please delete the existing reader subscription and re-subscribe using an RSS feed at http://feeds.feedburner.com/mashupx/klevy.

Update: The URL above goes to a FeedBurner page with various types of methods to subscribe. You can subscribe directly to RSS XML at http://feeds.feedburner.com/mashupx/klevy?format=xml.

Update: I’ve you’ve encountered any RSS XML errors from my blog here, it is due to some WordPress blog bug summarized in the WordPress forum post RSS Doesn’t Work – XML Parsing Error. It has to do with some WordPress plug-in files with extra spaces outside of the PHP code block definition. It appears I was able to fix it after making recommended in that forum thread.

Update: Thanks to a tip from Steven Black, I was able to auto-update the blog default RSS feed to auto redirect to the FeedBurner URL. This means there is no need to unsubscribe and re-subscribe as I indicated above. The information on how to do this with WordPress was at the blog post The right way to redirect a WordPress 2.0 feed through FeedBurner.

Update: I think this will be the final update on this, finally. I did have to install one more WordPress plug-in to get the auto RSS feed redirect working, the FeedSmith Plugin. The trick to get the blog source RSS feed to always work properly was to remove one blank line from the Yahoo plug-in for WordPress called Customizable Permalinks. it took several hours to track down this tiny bug, but in the process I learned a lot about the folder/file structure and architecture of the open source WordPress application.

For my first blog post here, I’ll just link to the About page with my bio.

For a reference to the blog I posted to from 2004 to 2008 while working at Microsoft, refer to http://blogs.msdn.com/klevy.