What in the world is an Applied Innovations?

I frequently get asked “Why’d you name your company Applied Innovations?”  Well there’s a couple reasons for that:

• I wanted to be first in alphabetical indices so I wanted a company name that started with an A (yes, it’s an old yellow pages trick)
• I wanted something somewhat generic that if I decided to switch the direction of my company that I wouldn’t have to change my company’s name.
• I knew that shared web hosting on Windows was new, innovative and somewhat complicated and I was looking to apply this innovation in a way that made it easy to use.
• My engineering background taught me that when you deal with technology you are always learning and the speed of innovation is so fast that can be quite challenging and that we’re going to frequently be revamping our services and re-innovating our offerings.
• Lastly, I wanted to help businesses succeed online. I knew by helping them grow their company and prosper, my own company would do the same and I felt that this name helped convey that.

So the name Applied Innovations seemed to make sense.  The idea that we’d take new technology to market early and not only apply this innovation to our company but allow our customers to do the same thing in a way that was easy to use and affordable to deploy was perfect.  Oh and someone else had registered just about every other name I could come up with.  Here’s a couple things I learned when naming my company though:

• Always try to get the .com. If you can’t get a domain with .com in it, find another until you can. It’s less important today as it was back then but it’s still pretty important.
• Don’t abbreviate unless it’s a word people can pronounce.  I hate people saying “Is this ap-lid-e?”  I thought “applied eye” was intuitive .. I was wrong!
• If you’re set on a specific name and can’t get the .com then make sure people can say your name.
• Beware of typos and buy them all.  If you go to appliedeye.net, apliedi.net, applied1.net, applied.net (just recently got this one) or any of a few dozen common typos you’ll get 301 redirected to my site.
• Spellcheckers are evil.  Make sure whatever you name your company that spellcheck doesn’t auto replace it with something else.  You’d be shocked how many links and emails went to applied.net instead of appliedi.net because of this and the applied.net domain wasn’t all that cheap to acquire.

So why all this talk about Applied Innovations?

Well, Recently at the Microsoft BUILD event (www.buildwindows.com) our awesome.net elastic cloud hosting platform (which is still in preview) was spotlighted in multiple sessions as well as our WebMatrix hosting offerings (https://appliedi.net/webmatrix) was spotlighted by Vishal Joshi in his session announcing the WebMatrix 2 Beta. The idea of WebMatrix and how it’s evolving and how it’s ultimate goal is to make working with open source applications like DotNetNuke, WordPress, Umbraco, Joomla and such really easy on the Windows platform got me thinking about how we apply innovation here at AppliedI.  At BUILD they also announced the first “Developer Preview” version of Windows 8 and Windows Server 8.  Of course, we’re heavily involved in all things Windows Server 8 and have been for nearly two years now so this past week I was thinking about that and how all of this work contributes back to just who Applied Innovations is and that’s what led to the blog post.  I believe Windows Server 8 is a testament to Microsoft’s commitment to being the software the cloud is built on and I can say without a doubt we’ll be right there with them.  Windows Server 8, IIS8 and Hyper-V to name a few will all play into how AppliedI will continue to provide cloud hosting.  If you didn’t attend Build then you can still see all of the presentations online at: http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/BUILD/BUILD2011

Finally, one last thing. I want to apply this to you.

In November, the DotNetNuke annual convention DotNetNuke World will take place in Orlando, FL (literally our backyard).  As a platinum sponsor of the DotNetNuke project and the DNNworld event I’ve been asked to speak on a customer success story around DotNetNuke and Applied Innovations.  I know of a couple customers that would make great candidates for this story but I thought this would be a great chance to open the opportunity up to the customer base as a whole.  If your company is using DotNetNuke for your website and it’s hosted here at Applied Innovations, please leave a comment on this blog post or reach out to sales@appliedi.net and provide us your details. We’re looking for volunteers that use DotNetNuke today and would like to be spotlighted at this event and part of our presentation. We’ll build a full customer success story around your business and promote you and your company at the event.  What does this have to do with “Applying Innovations”?  Well, it goes back to the whole reason I started the company in the first place and that was to help our customers succeed by providing them the latest innovations and technology in a way that’s easy to use and affordable and I believe the DotNetNuke platform is one such innovation.