Today my mailbox was full of mass mailings, all from Dell, all the same offer. Each envelope had the same address, business name and suite. The only difference: The person it was addressed to. If Dell could simply find a way for their database to know we are all from the same company, they could save 75% on their costs to market to me. Multiply that by the millions they send to and you begin to see the savings that are possible. There must be a smart young company out there ready to pitch Dell on their magical savings solution.
I ran into an interested problem with my month-old Dell Latitude E6500. It comes with an eSata connection which i was eager to take advantage of for high speed backups and disk cloning. I discovered that there is a lot more to getting this port working with an external drive (in my case a 1.5TB Western Digital MyBook).
There are a few things you’ll need to conquer to get eSata functionality out of the E6500. Although quite annoying, the 50+megabytes per seconds you’ll be able to transfer at are worth the wait.
1) Intel Matrix driver and software must be updated.
The SiL5744 chipset requires updated software from the dell support site. Download the software here.
3) You must enable the correct SATA support in the BIOS The E6500′s BIOS is initially set to use IRRT. The likely reason for this is that IRRT supports RAID1 setups, which in my opinion aren’t going to be widely used even in corporate environments. Tt must be changed to AHCI for an external drive to successfully connect. Some registry changes are needed to keep the system able to boot. (if you make a mistake you can switch back to IRRT to boot again.
4) CHECK TO MAKE SURE YOUR CABLE FITS THE CONNECTIONS – MODIFICATIONS MAY BE NEEDED. I bought a standard Belkin eSata cable at Staples for around 20 bucks. Turns out the plastic molded around each of the male ends goes too far down the plug, causing it to not actually make a connection. I cut about 5mm off with a razor blade and it made all the difference. This problem is well known (toms hardware article)and not too obvious to the average consumer.
I put a lot of the blame on Western Digital for making the case on their MyBook so damn thick over the ports. They’re no way most cables will fit into this drives without some modification. I would also recommend looking into other eSata drives, as I was less impressed that a $175 external drive came with demo/trial software. Disappointing considering how much great open source software they could have bundled with it.
So far I love Google Voice. It’s freed me from my annoying verizon voicemail that I never put the effort in to check. It also let’s you embed voicemails to share with friends. This makes being funny a whole lot easier.
Take for example this voicemail from my girlfriend (who i love very much!). It came in at 3am. Sounds like she’s having a good time with her girl friends. So much fun in fact that she thought the Google Voice robot was me!
I was browsing some competitor traffic stats today from the main players – Alexa, Quantcast etc. Although they are horribly inaccurate due to their guesswork. Just ask Matt Cutts of Google, Jason Calacanis or Grizzly.
A few months ago I tried out Quantcast’s tracking which gives you a Google Analytics like chuck of Javascript which is supposed to directly report your traffic to them. This appealed to me because I really hate when uneducated people comment about us “not having any traffic” when its really just a case of Alexa or Quantcast completely guessing our traffic. Niche sites targeting a demographic unlikely to install an Alexa Toolbar typically receive bad rankings on these sites.
I wasn’t overly impressed with the results of Quantcast (or loading another JS library) so I removed it. The funny part is that Quantcast still shows that our traffic is “Directly Measured” or “Quantified”, even though we haven’t had that code in there for months.
Subsequently we’re back to flat line on Quantcast. Alexa on the other hand keeps moving us up.
SugarCRM is definitely one of the most powerful CRMs available, highly recommended by many. I came across it after looking for something FREE for us to manage leads/sales/contacts at CampusLIVE. The time commitment for us to build something close to comparable in-house would have been greater than we could afford.
Their Community Edition is free to download – allowing us to use an Enterprise product sans-support for nothing. Since Google usually provides an instant answer to any application error I run into, this is easy to deal with. Their community forum is pretty helpful, with veterans answering almost any question you have.
Overall, I would recommend Sugar to any small business – as long as you have a patient and tech-saavy IT guy who knows his way around a Linux server through command line.
Pros
FREE
very powerful
lots of plugins available
extensible, through IFrames (We were able to build credit card processing into it for easy transactions for sales reps)
Lots of support available through online forums
Books available at Amazon for first timers
Cons
Fast, personal support is NOT FREE
Install is never as simple as advertised. Things went wrong 2 or 3 times.
For us, some dependant AJAX randomly stopped working, making the application useless until we hacked a solution out.
When something breaks you get a white screen with no output by default – not helpful.
Recommendations
Turn error reporting in php.ini (or .htaccess) to E_ALL so that you can get some info from the blank error pages.
CHMOD every single folder and file to 777. It will save you countless hours of errors because the app is picky about permissions.
Password protect you /sugarCRM folder with .htaccess so that you won’t have security vulnerabilities from the above tip.
I was reading an ironically timely post by Brad Feld titled “It’s All About The Faces”. He discusses an experience he had in switching his blog avatar from his personal photo to a graphic depiction made by a talented local artist. He experienced some positive and negative feedback on the switch, but his overall opinion of it is that “there is no question that photos make people feel more real and accessible.
Just a few days ago I was looking at our business card template. Although it’s visually appealing I thought it might be an interesting experiment to incorporate my face into the card, right above my name and to the left of our logo. I sent it around the office asking what everyone thought about a new business card concept.
Until the cards came in the mail from VistaPrint everyone thought it was a joke – Now they all want their own
I found a great new Torrent search engine that launched today. In my opinion it’s the best so far. The site is going to save me a lot of time because I often find that I need to search 5 or more popular torrent sites to find what i’m looking for. YouTorrent does an excellent job of combining searches of the 10+ major engines so that I don’t have to. I love anything that will save me time.
Essentially their servers scrape all the results and use this meta data to provide a really clean way of browsing torrents. There have been many attempts at this in the past, but I think YouTorrent has done it right.
I can see a lot of possibilities for more features to come out in the near future as well. Having a tooltip that displays comments on each result would be great. And how about linking directly to the .torrent? Not sure about the legality on that one.
Head over to YouTorrent.com and give it a try.
I got the point with spam where i was spending probably close to 20 minutes a day sifting through my junk mail box to make sure nothing important was deleted. I have about 10 different email addresses that are publicly posted on the various websites i’m involved in. The spiders of course sucked them all up and added me to the millions of Viagra® spambots. Thanks Viagra, but I’m 23 – i’ll get back to you later…
The solution I came up with was the filter all my email through GMail. You can add up to 5 POP3 accounts which GMail will download to your account and label them however you like. Sending email is simple too – any mail you reply to will be sent using whatever address the sender used. GoogleSystem blog covered this method a year ago when it was still Beta.
GMail also recently added IMAP support – allowing synchronous management of email across various clients. The reason this is nice for me is that I use my desktop at the office and then use my laptop on the road or at home. I now have identical contact lists, inboxes and sent folders, whether I’m at work, home, or on someone elses computer using GMail through the web browser.
Here’s an example of using IMAP with the IPhone.
Thank you Google. You just gave me 608.3 hours of my life back over the next 5 years.
