I admit that I’m not the most prolific of bloggers as I tend to enjoy constructing class’s more than paragraphs, but the last six weeks have been a poor show by even my own questionable standards. In all fairness though I have been extremely busy, as some of you know the turnkey web mapping software named Mango that the Aruna team and myself have been working on for what seems like a lifetime now was finally launched at the Map Asia 2007 conference in Kuala Lumpur last week.

The conference was amazing in many ways and our slightly ramshackle trade stand attracted far more attention than even the most optimistic members of our party were hoping for. Not only did we get to stand shoulder to shoulder with the big boys – Google, ESRI and Autodesk to name but a few, but we actually held our own and often had larger crowds for our demo’s than our fortune 500 neighbours, I’m not sure if it was the software or the free sliced Mango we were handing out, but whatever it was it clearly worked. 

I learned a lot of things at the conference on the marketing front, but the thing that really struck me was people’s response to finding out we were a Cambodian company. Before we attended the conference and were having Cade Creative do the branding and print materials for us, we had decided to brand Mango separately from Aruna and although we weren’t in anyway hiding where we were based, we were also not shouting it from the roof tops. But as it turns out being from Cambodia was far from being a hindrance and actually appeared to be a distinct advantage.

Being from Cambodia was a great conversation starter and really grabbed peoples interest, as soon as we realized that other people and companies didn’t have this pre-programmed misconception that anything created in Cambodia or other developing world is garbage, we started changing our tactics and heavily built Cambodia into our pitch. Our customers seemed to revel in our tales of $1000 per month broadband and other infrastructure horror stories with which we all do battle on a daily basis. We eventually coined some new catch fraises such as “If it will work there, it will work anywhere” and my other favourite, “tough conditions breed tough solutions”.    

For us as a small company this launch was a fair sized investment when you think of the costs involved in hiring marketing companies, sending half a dozen staff over to KL for a week and that’s without mentioning the cost of the trade stand but at the end of the day I think it was well worth and still would have been good value at twice the price.

You can find out more about Mango here – www.mangomap.com