The product is a “category killer,” having no obvious competition, so he’s struggling with determining a sale price. At this stage, the price is a pivotal part of his business plan. Since his designs aren’t yet legally protected, using quantitative tests in the marketplace isn’t an option.

When setting prices without exposure to the marketplace, the best practices set out by John Hogan in his book “The Strategy and Tactics of Pricing” are the strongest approach.

Determining optimal prices is one of the most underrated and strategically important aspects of marketing. It dictates what marketing strategies and tactics are financially available, defines market segments and determines how to approach each. This requires a in-depth understanding of the users, the industry itself, the market segments and the way customers use the product.

Whether or not your product is a category killer, your customers survived without you before, so there is always an alternative. Hogan’s approach starts with this alternative and then works through the potential markets, determining the added value of your product.

It then covers strategies on managing complex pricing, value communication, and segmentation – all based around the added value of the product for each specific application. This pricing approach doesn’t leave money on the table – customers who derive more value willingly pay more. Creating campaigns is also much easier for these types of segments, because the value has been clearly defined and articulated for each market.

If you’re an entrepreneur with a new product, this method of pricing is extremely helpful throughout your business. If you’ve been using a cost-plus or directly competitive approach until now, this book will be an eye-opener.

HTML is a “markup” language, in that you mark up content with tags. It takes text and adds machine code around it so the browser can make it pretty.

Then XML came along, which looks like HTML in that it’s a markup language, but has nothing to do with making things look good. It’s for structuring data.

At the same time, HTML was getting really ugly because it was trying to handle making things pretty and separating text into meaningful bits like XML, so they came up with CSS. CSS is a way to describe how structred data should be displayed. So the HTML can concentrate on structure, and the CSS on prettiness. When the HTML is only structure, it can be formatted as XML compatible, so that’s XHTML.

PHP is an old-fashioned language in a way. It’s a language that actually does stuff, like calculations or communicating with other servers. This is known as a procedural language. So PHP does the work like calculations and reading databases, and then generates the HTML to be displayed in the browser.

This will be a key tool for developing place-based social media. For example, this will be used to automate a local news feed for a hotel websites and message boards.  News sources selected by management – such as the BBC, Londonist or your preferred local blogs – can be filtered through Placemaker to only show stories that are relevant to your area.

The possibilities are not limited to news either. Any content feed can be examined and filtered, so look for new location-specific services to be designed to use existing content. Also look for existing location-based services, such as review sites, to have much more content on offer.

This is a big step as thus-far, there hasn’t been a service that does this type of place identification for free on a mass scale.