Newsgroups and conferences are very important if you’re a small software company. This is where you compensate for being outnumbered by your large competitors.

We strongly recommend for anyone to sign up and get involved. In a year you can learn the equivalent of 10 years research. You will also enjoy strong networking, and get to know some very nice people.

Association of Shareware Professionals (ASP)

The ASP is probably the best newsgroup for English speaking software developers. The yearly fee is used to support the newsgroup and this would probably be the best money you ever spent.

In addition the ASP newsgroup organizes conferences so you can actually meet and learn intensively from the members.

http://www.asp-shareware.org

ISDEF

If you are a Russian speaking developer than the ISDEF is something you would want to be a part of. You will have to contact them in order to get into this community, however, it’s a very strong and supporting one and like the ASP newsgroup it also has its own conferences.

http://www.isdef.org/en/index.php

European Software Conference

The European Software Conference is smaller than the ones above but we suggest you read a little about them on their web site, especially if you’re a software developer from Europe who can’t get into the conferences in the US.

http://www.euroconference.org/