In the midst of all that has been going on here I have been meaning to post some links and info that I have found interesting. The first was an article about the trends in Social media and the growth in advertising dollars being spent. According to eMarketer, advertisers spent an estimated $920 million on social networking sites in the US in 2007, and are projected to spend $1.6 billion in 2008. Thisis encouraging news for folks getting in to growing their online communities and
This is just one example, Social networking is expected to grow to a 5 billion market by 2012 as per the graph I found in CRM magazine.
The other stuff I wanted to post this week was some cool utilities and web tools that we have just started using and found to be very powerful in our business processes. The first was http://www.makanasolutions.com/ they have a great new tool suite for developing and calculating compensation plans for your sales teams. Another is http://www.mindjet.com/ which is a mind mapping tool that has a desktop version which integrates with MS Office, MS Project and Visio in addition to sync with a web based tool for real-time collaboration on mind map diagrams. Since we work with so many folks in different time zones I have personally found http://www.qlock.com/ useful to keep track of world times.
Other news on the development side, we are going live with http://www.bavc.org/ tomorrow which is a fantastic new social networking community for the Bay Area Video Coalition. We partnered with Airbag Industries and developed not only the Joomla Portal Framework but also a complex and well designed custom template. Real Life Radio just launched this week at http://www.realliferadio.com/. This was a partnership with Canonball Creative and is a good example of a simple JoomlaCRM installation. Our JoomlaCRM social networking CRM 2.0 portal will be officially released in the couple weeks. We are excited to be one of the first to bring to market what will be a common business framework of the future for integrated customer communities. You can learn more by visiting http://www.joomlacrm.com/ to see a live demo of the community portal or http://www.infoathand.us/ to learn about the Infoathand CRBM system. We also just started a new project with Pro-Link this week. Exciting and busy times ahead and we are thankful to our many customers. Ahhh... that reminds me of my favorite quote of the week "Great companies are built by great customers". We are glad to offer and be part of great collaboration teams...
There I got it out... clear head...now back to the grind :-)
This past week Sony and I had the great pleasure of participating in the Entrepreneur Launch Pad program sponsored by the Providence Rhode Island Chamber of Commerce. This educational series kicked off with a three day “boot camp” led by Jack Derby and George Simmons from the Derby Management Group and is part of a 6 month program designed to educate and introduce startup businesses to the Venture Capital and Angel investor funding community. This initiative is intended to stimulate economic growth for the RI business community. Perhaps I am bias as a participant but what an excellent idea on behalf of the chamber.
I have to say the program was excellent! We took away a lot of valuable information and met some wonderful folks. This was set up as a workshop where the lectures by George, Jack and others provided insider information on how to hone our pitch and fill in the voids of information required to improve our focus and solidify the vision and factual information in our business plan as it relates to the funding community. What helped make it powerful for me was the workshop setting with 16 other startup businesses that are going through some of the same strategic and growth challenges that we have been going through. I know there will be a lot of homework over the coming months since they unraveled so much great info to digest and apply but well worth the effort. This program has the potential to be just as it is intended by its very title, a “Launch Pad” for growth and success.
Quick overview:
Through six months of intensive coaching, the Chamber will provide entrepreneurs with hands-on, real-world specifics and answer the vexing questions that keep them awake at night. Entrepreneurs will also have the opportunity to meet investors from throughout the New England region who are specifically interested in generating deal flow from Rhode Island.
Among the topics to be covered in Entrepreneur Launch Pad:
• How to successfully raise venture capital? • How to craft a winning business plan? • How to ramp-up sales? • How to recruit an "A" level team? • How to protect intellectual property? • How to get to the next round of financing? • How to land the next meeting? • How to meet the right people? • How to negotiate a term sheet?
The ideal applicant would look like this: • Revenue: 0 to $10 million • Number of Employees: 2 to 50 • Market Size: Would support company growth to $10 million in sales • Product or Service: Non-commodity • Growth Capital Needed: $1 million to $5 million • Market Sectors: Software, hardware, clean tech, alternative energy, health care, medical devices, preventive health, defense related, oceanography, financial services
If you want to learn more about the Derby management group check out their site: http://www.derbymanagement.com, if you want to learn more about the program visit the Providence chamber site: http://www.providencechamber.com/Launchpad.aspx or contact Janet Raymond, senior vice president/economic development/operations at jraymond@provchamber.com or 401.521.5000.
It has been a very eventful couple months. We are in the process of launching three NEW major portal projects based on our JoomlaCRM platform. Our JoomlaCRM platform features a large collection of built in social networking components and is integrated with a suite of robust eCommerce and Customer Relationship Business Management tools (CRBM). Our demo is live finally at http://www.joomlacrm.com/. Feel free to stop by and watch this presentation take shape over the coming months. We are excited about this new integrated bundle because it allows us to deliver feature rich systems, in shorted deployment times with a greater value and return on investment to the customer. Having a flexible framework pre bundled allows us to offer greater value in training, consulting and content configuration and development.
The first of our projects has come together in record time due to the great collaboration and synergy we were able to get between the customer the Client and our development team. Typically projecets of this magnitude can take up to a year to build out and configure content. However this project has been built in a fraction of the time. The new portal at http://www.bavc.org/ which will be live as of July 1st leverages many of the deep features built into our Joomla + CRM social networking community platform. This portal offers a myspace meets youtube type of user community since BAVC interacts with a diverse constituency but has many event registration and eLearning tools as well. This JoomlaCRM portal framework is complimented with a beautiful design by Airbag industries and solid template coding by our expert Joomla! development team. We built over 30 custom modules and will have two unique template designs once the second phase of the project unfolds over the coming months. In addition we integrated a unique class registration and event management system.
Bay Area Video Coalition, or BAVC (pronounced "bay-vac"), is a nonprofit media arts center that was founded in 1976 by a coalition of media makers and activists who wanted to find alternative, civic-minded applications for a new technology.
The second Joomla portal project we pushed out this last month was for http://www.realliferadio.com/ , a catholic radio station. This portal leverages media libraries and podcasts of their programs and they plan to build a web based community over time leveraging their enthusiastic radio audience. This was a partnership with the Canonball Creative agency and came together with compelling customer driven content.
The third portal project http://www.fredfriendly.tv/ will leverage not only our unique suite of social networking and media library and cataloging tools built into JoomlaCRM but will feature a robust CRBM system though the integration of Infoathand (http://www.infoathand.us/). This project framework will leverage the full capabilities and take advantage of the deep features in this portal bundle. The FFS team plans to utilize the project management features and campaign management tools to grow their constituency and manage their many productions. We met the Fred Friendly Seminar folks while attending a social networking seminar with Paul Greenberg in NY. The quality of their programs and nature of important topics they cover has been an inspiring project to participate in. In their words this quote says it all... "Our job is not to make up anybody's mind, but to open minds and to make the agony of decision making so intense you can escape only by thinking. " The http://www.fredfriendly.org/ redesign will be coming online for a pilot program in Mid June and will have a more formal public launch in August. If you are interested in getting involved in our pilot program to help us test and develop initial discussion for the site please contact me so we can get you involved.
We look forward to hearing from you. If you visit any of the links in this post I am eager to get your feedback.
CNP Integrations is proud to announce our partnership and VAR relationship with . This past week we moved our web properties and customers to a new state of the are IT infrastructure at The Planet's redundant data centers in Texas.
This partnership allows us to provide world's class, scalable, redundant business infrastructures and hosting services to our customers with a guaranteed 100% uptime. This is the same company that many of the major hosting companies use around the world. Combined with our security monitoring, data back up services and support contracts allow us to provide you confidence and ease of mind that your mission critical data is safe, backed up and secure.
We felt it was important to offer our info@hand CRBM and Joomla CMS customers not only affordable full featured social networking and web 2.0 application platforms but the speed and performance of high end hosting solutions. So far we have seen an average of 30% better performance and have been impressed with the tools and support they have provided us to serve you better.
In the comming months we will post several hosted service packages that compliment and optimize our supported application platforms and a www.cnphost.com portal dedicated just to our hosted services. If you are interested in a dedicated or virtual hosting environment for your business infrastructure please contact one of our project managers or myself for more information.
Well the past month and a half has been a busy time for us as we have been building out our Info At Hand training portal http://www.infoathand.us/ and working the final QA testing out on our soon to be released JoomlaCRM portal which offers a social networking/ecommerce "Super Joomla" Info At Hand enabled customer portal. We have also aligned ourselves with several partners to deliver world class CRM strategy consulting to accompany our internal training and technical support for the Info At Hand CRBM system. One of the great new features of IAH is the Quick Books Finance module which was a bit of an effort to get off the ground but we are starting to package services for supporting not only the deployment and training but ongoing book keeping support. With our resident Quick Books Pro Advisor Donna Frietas we hope to help small businesses cross the bridge from traditional eCommerce shopping cart to a full transaction life cycle management system that synchronizes with QuickBooks.
There is a new release of Info At Hand coming out shortly and we are excited about the new features. Check this out: http://infoathand.com/news_iah_5.3.html
I just wanted to let you all know what we have been up to and give you a preview of what is coming...
Thanks for dropping by our sites and we look forward to getting your input on these new products and services.
In late August this year CNP was contracted by Scott Williams Systems to support project management for his web properties and help facilitate the launch of a new Santa Barbara Real-estate portal; http://www.primevoyage.com/. The Prime Voyage project was well under way when the project manager had to step down and there was much to be done in a short amount of time. Well... with some changes here in personnel just as we began, I ended up taking this project on personally. Since September it has kept me pretty busy on top of wearing my many other hats. I am pleased to say this has been a great experience and it put me in the mix with some great new talent. In late October, Scott Williams held a successful seminar in Santa Barbara to nearly 200 relators were he released this great portal and his brain child of a unique set of home evaluation tools. It has so far been received with overwhelming enthusiasm.
I wanted to share a recient press release and let you know we are proud of this latest collaboration. There is talk of many great things to come on the 2008 horizon for this project and other Scott Williams web properties.
For Immediate Release
Local REALTOR® Home Evaluation Tool Out-Zillows Zillow
Santa Barbara, CA, November 22, 2007 - Everyone is curious about how their home stacks up against the neighbors, whether they plan on selling or are just plain nosey (be honest - haven't you ever wondered?). Now, thanks to Scott Williams of Prime Voyage, people in 16 Santa Barbara neighborhoods have a highly reliable way of doing so. Many will point to an online tool called "Zillow" to do this, but even then factors like desirability of the location and condition of the property could only be reflected in the value if the owner wrote a healthy check for a professional assessor to visit. Mr. Williams has masterminded the first automated home valuation tool that provides truly accurate, instant results because it allows the user to factor in relevant variables that directly and heavily impact a home's value.
"An accurate analysis of a property is the ‘holy grail' of real estate sites," says Mr. Williams. "No one else out there is offering this. Most websites are oriented toward people who are shopping for a home, but Prime Voyage is oriented toward the home owner who needs to answer questions about what the market is like today in the neighborhood. Customers and even other real estate agents who have used this tool are amazed at the accuracy of the results."
After taking Santa Barbara resident Michael Russer's (aka Mr. Internet®) Online Dominance program, Mr. Williams decided to focus on the needs of his customers to create a site that went from mostly advertising himself to being interactive and useful for visitors. He applied his personal knowledge of Santa Barbara, gained over 31 years as an agent in the area, and merged it with some nimble programming from Andrew Bidochko of MapBuilder.net, and Kalen Jordan of Sparcksoft.com, to deliver this free to use cutting edge tool that out-Zillows Zillow, which is insensitive to mixed neighborhoods or other fluctuating market conditions.
So, if you are curious about your home's value versus your neighbor's (for whatever reason) visit www. PrimeVoyage.com, email scott@primevoyage.com, or call (805) 563-4031.
Renouned author and CRM expert Paul Greenberg had some nice things to say about SugarCRM and the info@hand tool suite on his blog.
"From what I've seen of info@hand, it seems to be a very robust application and certainly more feature rich than the basic SugarCRM program and that's a good thing."
Feel free to pass by and take a lookat the full review.
This is another great resource for information and talent for implimenting CRM.
Hey, this week we received a nice full color brochure for info@hand that we collaborated on with our Swiss Partner UNICUM. This is a nice easy to understand overview of the info@hand system. Feel free to call or drop me an email if you would like coppies to hand out at a group presentation on CRM or to share with associates.
We just issued a new press release today and the buzz about 5.2 IAH is getting out. We have had a chance to upgrade our IAH to 5.2 and Customer Portal to V2.0. I have to say I am very impressed with the capabilities to sync the eStore cart add-on with our customer catalog in IAH. The new version also allows customer to review invoices and quotes. Combined with the case management, bug tracking and project tracking features, this realy makes the portal much more versitile and useful for a broader range of customer interactions.
We installed our TrixBox VoIP system this week so you will now be prompted to our departments and individual VM boxes for each of our team members. It also has music on hold, advanced routing capabilities and many great features that will really improve our telephone communications. We are augmenting our analog phones with "Soft" Phones and they are really neat. We are using the x-lite SIP phones: http://www.counterpath.com/ if you want to check them out.
We will be turning on the click to dial integration with IAH and Firefox next week... I can hardly wait.
I talked with Michael Whitehead today and he anticipated the release of QB Finance 1.1 on Monday and this will be our next big project... getting our IAH wired up with quickbooks... should go smooth and we are realy excited about the potential this offers for transaction lifecycle management.
More to come... CN
PS this was released on PRweb and eWire on Sunday Nov. 4th. See track back link for more info.
Hey, I just ran across a great article about opensource CRM. They review several vendors (including SugarCRM) and make reference to Michael Whitehead's book Implimenting SugarCRM. Perhaps this offers a good case for considering the advantages of the info@hand tool suite which is built on top of the SugarCRM open source platform. If you review info@hand's extended features andconsider our value added supports services combined with the flexability offered through access to the source code for customization and low cost of entry, info@hand is a powerful solution for small to mid sized businesses.
Take a look at the article and give me your feedback.
After a very exciting and informative training program last week centered around Social Neworking and CRM 2.0, it seems only fitting that I get to return home and announce the launch of Info@Hand Version 5.2 through CNP Integrations Inc.. This new release, scheduled to launch 10-22-07, is enhanced to utilize many of the next generasion features of Web 2.0.
CNP Blogs 
In the midst of all that has been going on here I have been meaning to post some links and info that I have found interesting. The first was an article about the trends in Social media and the growth in advertising dollars being spent. According to eMarketer, advertisers spent an estimated $920 million on social networking sites in the US in 2007, and are projected to spend $1.6 billion in 2008. Thisis encouraging news for folks getting in to growing their online communities and 
This educational series kicked off with a three day “boot camp” led by Jack Derby and George Simmons from the 
It has been a very eventful couple months. We are in the process of launching three NEW major portal projects based on our JoomlaCRM platform. Our JoomlaCRM platform features a large collection of built in social networking components and is integrated with a suite of robust eCommerce and Customer Relationship Business Management tools (CRBM). Our demo is live finally at 
. This past week we moved our web properties and customers to a new state of the are IT infrastructure at The Planet's redundant data centers in Texas.
