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

it just shows the value of Social networking even if you do not push ads in the face of your visitors. http://www.mediapost.com/ommasocial/

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 :-)

CN

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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.

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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.

Sincerely, CN

 

 

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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.

 CN

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