Happy New Year 2007

Happy New Year to all of our current and prospective customers, friends, and readers.  We're excited to bring in 2007 as this year has many exciting things in store from NC Software.  We have new versions of our aviation software in the works for a mid/late summer planned release which is the first major release in nearly 10 years!  We recently upgraded our network infrastructure to provide faster downloads as you'll read about below and provide a more efficient connection globally to our worldwide customer base.

The year 2006 was a fantastic year for NC Software having released the 1.10 series of our Logbook Pro products mastering the integration of our aviation line of software in a new PDA Wizard system.  Our AVCataloger offering has been solid and popular among the global user base and our e-commerce add-ons have reach an all time high in stability, usability, and functionality.  We look forward to the coming year to continue our growth, improvement, customer service, and quality of service to our current and prospective clients. 

Thank you all for helping NC Software, Inc. grow to where it has come today.  We look forward to many years ahead and delivery quality, exciting, and useful software solutions to help you with your daily tasks.  Be sure to subscribe to our various mailing lists to receive product specific newsletters.  Our mailing lists are private, strictly confidential, and for NC Software's use only.

Frequently Asked Questions on our new Affiliate Program

Q:  Do I have to have a web site?
A:  No!  When you complete your application to join our affiliate program you will gain access to your affiliate management console.  Within this area you will see the option to create TEXT links.  You can then e-mail these text URL's to your friends, co-workers, post in newsletters, mailings, etc. and when anyone follows this URL, you will be credited for the referral.

Q:  What if the person clicks on my URL but doesn't buy today, do I get paid anyway?
A:  When someone clicks a banner image, text link, etc. that you created from the affiliate console and visits our web site, a cookie is created on their computer that our store will find when they eventually make their purchase.  So if they visit your URL today and come back two weeks later to purchase, such as after downloading a free trial, you will still get commission on their sale.  Cookies last for 30 days.

Q:  Do I have to be a registered customer of NC Software to become an affiliate?
A:  No.  We welcome anyone that wants to help spread the word about our products and we'll gladly pay you affiliate commissions on your referrals.

Q:  What are the commission rates?
A:  The baseline commission is 10% of the qualifying sale.  If you refer over 10 customers in a month, the remaining referral sales for the month will be credited at 15%.  If you further sell over 25 referrals in a month, you'll receive 20% commission on subsequent sales for that month. 

Q:  Can I refer others to become affiliates?
A:  Yes!  In fact when an affiliate you referred earns a sale, we'll even pay you for the same sale as we know it wouldn't have happened without you.

Q:  Can I use my affiliate links for my own purchases?
A:  No.  You cannot receive commissions on purchases made by yourself using your own referral links.

Q:  How do I sign up?
A:  Joining the affiliate program is simple, simply visit our affiliate page for more information. 

The Combo Deals are Sticking Around

We've decided to keep the combo deals running as they have been a big hit for our customers.  A great way to enter the realm of our products and enjoy a 15% discount with your initial purchase.  Click the combo deals magic briefcase at the right to view our available 15% off bundle deals. 

Combo deals cover our wide range of products from Logbook Pro flight log software, Airline Pilot's Daily Aviation Logbook airline pilot logbook software, FlightCentral's neat Route Browser add-in for Logbook Pro, Cirrus Elite high quality leather binders, AVCataloger media organizer for music, video, book, and software collections, and of course our e-commerce shopping cart add-ons.  We initially planned to just make this a one month promotion and opportunity for you to save big, by popular demand, we'll keep it around for a while longer so you can continue to take advantage of these huge discounts.

Our New Data Center - Delivering Performance

NC Software is proud to deliver unrivaled network connectivity around the globe with our new data center in the hub of the Internet - Ashburn, VA Equinix Internet Business Exchange (IBX) facility.  In late December we were offered a tremendous opportunity to place our network infrastructure along side some of the biggest names in the IT industry such as Microsoft, Yahoo (right next to our servers), Sony, Amazon.com, etc.  With our new Internet presence you will notice downloads multiple times faster up to your maximum Internet Service Provider's capacity anywhere in the world. 

We've been building up our infrastructure over the past few years to venture into a "Service Oriented Architecture" (SOA) as you'll see coming this year with our new online "connected" services architecture, now in development.  Many of our users now have Broadband high-speed Internet connections and we want to continue our growth and modernization to allow you to enjoy this capability in your home or business.

We hope you noticed the increased speeds of our web presence.  Thank you for your patience during our brief relocation of our network infrastructure last December.   

How to get support fast

Over the years we have been through several iterations of web sites and forum software, we are now established and have great resources at your disposal to find your answers quickly.  It also helps us out if you try to find your answers from the resources we provide as every question we have to answer takes away precious development time we could be spending on developing new updates and products to expand your software solutions.

Here are a few resources available to help answer your questions:

1. First and foremost, the product documentation.  Within our software applications you can click Help...Contents or view the documentation online from our web sites.
    
2. Search our forums.  Our community forums contain not only valuable questions and answers from other users but also our Frequently Asked Questions forum where we post how-to's to assist you with questions we think may come up.  We use a powerful forum system with great search functionality to help you find answers quickly.
    
3. Search our Knowledgebase (KB).  Not long ago we launched a new help desk system to allow easier communications with NC Software.  This system also allows you to review your correspondence at a later time should you need the answer to a prior question.  We transferred a lot of the Frequently Asked Questions from the forums as well as created new KB articles for you to read and help you with use of your software.
    
4. When submitting a new help desk ticket our systems will try to suggest the answer to your question from the Knowledgebase automatically.  Please review the suggested articles based on the submission of your inquiry prior to submitting your inquiry as you may find the answer instantly.

We don't want you to NOT ask questions, that's part of your software purchase, free support.  However, if you can help us and research your issue before asking, you are only going to benefit from our time saved as we can use that time to develop future software.  We put a lot of effort into documentation and online resources, please take advantage of them.  Thank you for your effort in help us help you.

Note:  If purchasing from Sporty's Pilot Shop, please do not expect technical support from them.  Sporty's is only a reseller of our products and we ask that any "how-to" or usage questions be directed to our free support services.  The people at Sporty's are very nice and will do their best to answer your questions, but please let them do their sales work and leave the technical side to us.

Windows Vista just days away - are you ready?

Windows Vista is coming the end of this month, are you ready?  We've been running Windows Vista since it was released to developers about 1-1/2 months ago.  Our software runs great on Vista and for those venturing down the x64 path, no problems noted there either, we are using x64 here. 

Unless you have a need to jump ship from XP to Vista, our recommendation is wait!  It will take time for drivers, primarily video, display, and sound to catch up, also anti-virus software and anti-spyware security products.  Some people have a rule of thumb that they only change Operating System's with a new computer purchase, this may not be a bad recommendation based on the hardware (video) requirements of Vista to really get the full effect.