It has a fully featured browser, which will support Flash later in the year (meaning that businesses can develop applications in Adobe’s Flex rapid development environment – and there are a sea of applications in the Android store), making it ideal for data browsing and manipulation. It’s pretty robust too!

Key features:

• 800 x 480 Display
• 1Ghz Arm processor
• 5 MP camera and flash plus front facing web cam.
• Replaceable battery
• 3G and WiFi, as well as bluetooth.
• MicroSD memory slot (up to 32GB storage).

I think these devices make a huge amount of sense as a way to interact with data.

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• Behavioural Targeting
• Nailing down the Cloud – A Definition for Cloud Computing?
• A Cloud Computing Tour – London CloudCamp

What if a web site had enough information about a visitor that it could target ads towards a specific user? Arguably this is better for the user (less irrelevant adverts) and better for the advertiser (better yields from each ad). The sensitivity – and sometimes the controversy – is how that additional information is gathered.

VisualDNA takes a more visible (quite literally) approach to gathering data. Visitors chose from a selection of images. The result of their selections are saved as their ‘VisualDNA’. This is then used to provide more product recommendations from the VisualDNA store. The process is fast and just requires a few mouse clips. I’m trying it out in a couple of spots on some blogs and will track the results with interest. Having tried the camera shop, it figured me out as a Techno Pro pretty quickly. I have a few beta invites, so if you would like to try it out on a blog, go to http://shops.visualdna.com and click “Create a shop”. You will be prompted for an access code – enter benjaminellisvisualdnashop and you should be off.

The VisualDNA store so far include a camera shop, gadget shop,  mum and baby shop, phone shop, travel shop, computer shop, and entertainment shop. The shops exist as a widget that allows bloggers and web publishers to embed the function into existing sites, to provide personalised product recommendations. It also provides a new way to monetise traffic, with a percentage of every purchase made through the widget being paid back to the site or blog.

The shops are currently built upon Amazon.com. Imagini plans to also include products from sites such as eBay and Shopping.com in the coming weeks. The technology has a broad range of potential applications, but this first one should build the profile of VisualDNA in the Blogging community, which will be no bad thing for the company’s profile. There are product overviews on the VisualDNAshops site, voiced by none other than Stephen Fry.

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• Behavioural Targeting
• Nailing down the Cloud – A Definition for Cloud Computing?
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However, Joe advised some caution, per transaction costs can kill you (this is ironic given that the concept of “Free” – so popular with the Web 2.0 world – is based on infinitely low transaction costs). Remember, with cloud computing, you can’t touch the hardware or see it, so monitoring is more important, he mentioned Nagios and Monitis which are great packages for doing just that.

Another  big issue with Cloud Computing is the data problem – it takes  a while to get data up, even if you have lots of bandwidth. That means it takes a while to get your data out in a hurry. You also have to deal with high latency, compared to working with servers on site.

The dynamics of programing in the cloud is transaction based, so you need to be thinking dollars. Poor programming costs you real money, so unit tests need to include a cost value. Security also needs to be at the forefront of what you do. Joe described the “The Britney Spears Problem “- you can’t expose your end user data to risk. Client side encryption will be needed in the long-term, but is a usability challenge right now.

In summary cloud computing is a great adjunct, but don’t get rid of your main servers just yet. Be ready to deploy to any other grid at speed, so that you have a recovery plan. Also, watch those transaction costs.

Here is a talk on Cloud Computing by Larry Ellison (of Oracle – who are set to acquire Sun):

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Tagging makes navigating and organising large amounts of data significantly more efficient. Tactile CRM now even features a tag cloud, which makes a nice visualization to help you understand how your CRM tool is being used. As you’d expect, tags can be renamed, merges or deleted. 

I’ve blogged about Tactile before and we have given it a good try out here in the office. With the latest release, the number of sales opportunities supported in the ‘Micro’ and ‘SME’ versions of the service have also been increased. The team are very excited about the new functionality. I caught up with Jake Stride via Twitter earlier today, and over the course of a few tweets he said:

“It’s great to finally release all the hardwork the team has put into Tactile CRM based on our user’s feedback & suggestions over the last couple of months. We now have powerful searching and data maintenance, which even established competitors are missing and we’re not stopping there – we’ve already started on the next set of features which will see integration with other online services and some new graphing/reporting functionality”

For those wanting to dip their toes into the CRM water, you can sign up at http://www.tactilecrm.com/signup and use the code ‘redcatco’ in the ‘Sign up Code’ box, That will enter you into a prize draw for their business plan, which is worth £420. Sounds like a good deal!

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Jake Stride of Tactile CRM (photo: Benjamin Ellis)

It’s is fair to describe CRM as mainstream these days. It doesn’t take much convincing to get business managers and the sales team to see the value of tracking customer interactions.

Salesforce.com transformed the industry with their SaaS model (software as a service), but whilst they have wandered off to the shiny new pastures of PaaS (platform as a service) others have arrived to snap at their CRM heels. 

Most businesses need a finite set of features in their CRM system, and want something simple and usable that fits with their existing processes. After all, the whole point of Customer Relationship Management is to be able to understand customer behaviours and shepherd in repeat business. CRM is as much about process as it is about technology. One of the reasons new entrants are thriving is that users want something that is UaaS (usable as a service)!

A UK vendor that is on our radar, helped by their larger-than-life CEO’s presence on the recent Digital Mission, is Tactile CRM - They will be exhibiting at the upcoming Future of Web Apps in London.

Tactile CRM takes a pragmatic and open approach to CRM. They publish a roadmap of upcoming features, which is a good move for a SaaS player, especially as the SaaS model allows you to take advantage of new features as soon as they are released – no waiting to upgrade servers or desktop software, just fire up the web browser and go. 

It is free to sign up and try (pricing goes up to £75/month for 100 users) and provides an easy entry into the world of CRM. Contacts can be imported (and just as importantly, exported) easily to get you started and there is apparently an API in the pipeline.

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Why is that so bad? Well, it moves the security boundary for the corporate e-mail firmly outside of the corporate firewall. Hackers have recently had quite a bit of fun with a certain vice presidential candidate’s email (for the full back ground check out Michelle Malkin’s “The story behind the Palin e-mail hacking“. There are many different services out there, and the way that they handle authentication (the usernames and passwords) varies widely. A wily hacker could have access to a mailbox for months if not years before anyone realised.

What to do? The immediate sensible reaction might seem to be a big crack down, but actually it would be more productive to look at employee’s needs and provide mobile e-mail access. Monthly costs are now very low (on a par with line rental or a broadband account). It might also be time to take another look at a corporate webmail solution for laptop-based remote users.

You might not want users stuck in the office, but you don’t want their email running free!

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Nokia has been pushing the envelope on the Fixed-Mobile Convergence front for quite a whole. For those who’ve missed out on the wild excitement of FMC and UMA, it is a vision that would see fixed and mobile voice coming together. Something that would actually be an exciting development for office telephony. The architectures usually employ Wi-Fi to bridge the final gap between the fixed office LAN and the mobile handset – which also opens up the potential for using public Wi-Fi hotspots (QoS permitting).

Image seemlessly switching between a GSM Mobile call and the same call via Wi-Fi onto the office LAN. Of course there is a fly in the ointment: It is a touchy subject for both mobile operators and business users. Calls over the LAN to another user on the network are free, obviously. Calls over the GSM network aren’t. As is often the case, one person’s cost saving is another’s revenue loss. In this case, the mobile carrier, and that is one of the potential big issues with FMC. And the man in the middle? Well, unsurprisingly it is the handset vendors. Back to Nokia.

Handsets like Nokia’s N95 enable VoIP  as well as GSM calls. It’s not as seemless as it could be yet, but there are some very interesting apps out there. Take Fring as an example, it also includes instant messaging capabilities and Skype. Before you it out of the window as too consumer, think about the cost savings of IM and VoIP against your business mobile bills.

However, it seems that new Nokia handsets, like the N78, are missing this functionality. Garrett Smith, VoIP insider picks up the story:

This is a sticky situation for Nokia (and other handset manufacturers) since both the carriers and the carriers customers are Nokia’s customers; each of whom want something different. Nokia obviously played it safe with this move, siding with the carrier…

Garrett posted a further update today, after Nokia’s PR company touched base with him. The whole situation is complicated further by the desktop telephony vendors, who will want a slide of the action too. Cisco has Wi-Fi handsets and others are making a play for the convergence space too. Somehow all of this has to glue together, and suddenly you are bumping into the world of unified communications. It’s a big piece of pie to swallow.

You can obviously still install 3rd party apps to give VoIP on the handset, providing the network operator doesn’t block VoIP, but that it far from an integrated solution. Ultimately, as a business user, minimum overall cost and complexity are key.

In Europe, especially in the scandinavian countries, mobile voice has existed in the office in the form of DECT phones for quite some time. Reduced wiring costs and increased mobility for users are just some of the benefits. The magic will happen when it all gets down to one handset. One that will work outside of the office as well as inside, giving the full deskphone experience.

That’s still a way off, and by the look of Nokia’s new handsets, it is potentially getting further away…

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Can a Lonely Bird Survive?

This little chap fell out of his nest outside of my office. He was ok, but it got me thinking about a long piece on Twitter over at The Go West blog. It references Adam’s fuller article in Fortune “The True Meaning of Twitter” from earlier this month. Both are a fairly representative taster of the swirl around the Twitter microblogging/messaging service: When will it make money? And how?

The reality is there are lots of ways that it could, but the one that interests me is the use of twitter for business communication. It is one that seems least likely. Twitter differs from blogging in that it restricts users to a single line of text at a time, think of the length of a mobile SMS message. It differs from standard enterprise instant messaging in that it is a one to many, rather than one to one communication method (think website, rather than phone call). It is also persistent, in that the messages remain after a user signs out or updates.

Microsoft have invested in persistent messaging technology, and it is something that has been around in the finance space for quite a while. However, it has uses in many other types of business. It is a great way for remote staff to keep up to date with the business buzz, or to keep in touch with contacts at business partners. Padmasree Warrior, Cisco’s chief technology officer is a keen Twitter user (see “Another view on Twitter“):

What I use Twitter most for is to share “What I am thinking” rather than “What I am doing.”

Instant messaging clients let users set a status message (as do social platforms like Facebook), but IM clients don’t usually keep a history of those messages. It is that journal (of thinking or doing) that is most interesting from a business communication perspective, since it allows staff to ‘checkin’ on each other actually disturbing their workflow. The sales team can know if there is a problem booking orders, or they can get a heads up about delayed shipments. It’s much more efficient than everyone phoning in and the same message being repeated 10 times – you can see my twitter stream, and Redcatco’s as examples (all be it outside-the-firewall ones).

The nice thing about the tool is that it is lightweight, fast to set up and easy to use. On the Twitter service, updates can be left as public (for all the world to read) or they can be set as private, enabling only people with permission to see the updates. I have heard of a number of early stage startups using Twitter with private messages as their communications backbone.

There is a fly in the ointment. Twitter has had a number of high profile outages. Also, what if you want Twitter inside of the firewall, rather than outside of it? Well there is an answer, but it isn’t Twitter.

Automattic, the people behind blogging platform WordPress, have produced a WordPress theme that enables you to turn a standard WordPress install into your very own Twitter-like microblogging service. It’s called Prologue. It also makes use of WordPress tags to enable messages to be associated with, for example, projects. You can see how Automattic have used it here.

Blogging and microblogging should be part of a business’s communication strategy these days, both for internal use, as well as for external (both marketing and non-marketing) use. Services are still coming and going, but the format is here to stay.

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• Encourage flexible working
  
• Hot desking and mobility
  
• Get rid of hardware you don’t need
  
• (Make) Lasting changes

They suggest getting rid of the office, or reducing its size by using hot desking and making use of hosted services for voice and other applications. For me it came as a gentle reminder of how mainstream these things are becoming. Certainly there is little reason for employees to be desk bound:

• Mobile telephony is more affordable than ever.
• Bandwidth is more than sufficient and affordable (both Broadband and mobile).
• VPN and/or hosted applications are simple to implement.

If staff are stuck in the office, its time to think about why. Getting them set free also helps with disaster recovery – they can pick up sticks and move to wherever there is bandwidth and space. It’s time to ditch the fax machine, throw the email servers out of the office and move on.

Beating the crunch is about saving money and learning how to use the resources you already have such as the internet, mobiles and email. Simple cost cutting initiatives won’t just save you now, they are the way of the future if any company is to expand beyond 2008. 

Technology has always been about better, faster, cheaper. As business is too, it should be a surprise that business technology holds the answer the dealing with tightening markets.

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