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