I stand before you here today, addressing all my fellow members of this great Association, with profound gratitude and great humility, I accept this nomination for a place on the Association of Shareware Board of Directors.

Many of you watching may not know this junior entrepreneur from England, and I'd like to spend a few moments to introduce myself.

My journey is an improbable one. Being born in England, of American parents, I learnt programming at an early age on a ZX81. I was schooled in art, and came to New York to participate in the great experiment that only America could forge, the dot com boom, and then inevitable bust. Born out of this I formed Iconico.com and set about to produce my own shareware tools and sell them over the web.

Now our economy faces a similar collapse, and during such times it's every member's responsibility to change, to think anew about the role shareware plays, and I believe that my skills learnt through hard times and hard work will help the Association through these dark times.

A year ago I took over the running of BitsDuJour.com and worked as a community organizer with developers, ISVs, and ecommerce providers alike, helping them to promote, market, and sell their products. We rebuilt the infrastructure, eliminated waste, and forged new partnerships whilst never pandering to the special interests, all in the cause of giving developers a global audience for their products.

As we stand at this crossroads in history the ASP has a choice. To continue the same failed policies of the past which have resulted year on year in falling memberships, or to embrace change. We must look hard at the $100 membership fee and find new ways to market the Association in order for fledgling developers to come on board in these tough economic times.

We must look hard at the ASP website, and our marketing efforts. Our organization is one that still produces a printed paper newsletter, when great financial savings and even greater exposure could come from blogs, rss feeds and wikis. We must embrace this change for the future, not in the quality of what we are doing, but in how we get our message out there.

I believe that despite our best efforts the ASP has lost respect amongst the professional software community. As a member of the board of directors I will be prepared to sit down with leaders of the OISV, and Joel on Software, at a time and place of my choosing. Isolationism in the recent years have only lost us members, and by negotiating without preconditions, and starting face to face talks with our competitors I believe that we can forge new alliances and regain respect for our organization on the world stage.

As small business owners and developers we all share a hope for the future. I've seen that hope in the developers who work long nights and weekends, with the dream that one day they can give up their day jobs and devote themselves to their business full time. I've seen hope in the eyes of people in conferences from Denver to Boston, and this great Association that we have built together serves that hope, that dream for a better future.'

Fellow members, we cannot turn back. We cannot walk alone.

At this moment, in this election, we must pledge once more to march into the future. Let us keep that promise, that independent Shareware promise, without wavering, to the hope that we confess.

Thank you. God bless you. And God bless the Association of Shareware Professionals.