From the Financial Times comes an article concerning the coming UK budget.
The chancellor will announce plans to tackle elements of the tax system used by the private equity industry; the super-rich taking advantage of non-domicile status; and small family businesses that distribute profits among relatives.
After so much furore about IR35, this can only mean more contractors seeking to maximise their profits by working elsewhere.
Lifehacker points to a new web 2.0 site called Mango (although the url refers to trymango). It’s free and includes 11 languages so far.
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This is really cool. It’s a map of Helsinki showing the current locations of some buses in the city and updating their location as they travel around. No more waiting ages at bus stops if you live there. And are on the routes of the buses covered of course. But very cool.
The future of CRM as reported by the New York Times? I wonder how soon Siebel/SAP/Salesforce will be changing their interfaces to suit this model?
In fact, Paul Johnston has remade his company on the idea that business software will work better if it feels like a game. Mr. Johnston is not some awkward adolescent, but the polished president and chief executive of Entellium, which makes software for customer relationship management. Businesses spend billions of dollars on such software to try to track their sales staff, their marketers, their customer service — anything that connects them with customers. Unfortunately, most of the software is the business equivalent of calorie counting. No one does it gladly. Worse, the software has a Big Brother aspect to it.
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No surprise there then speaking from dial-up land. My poker career is going to *HELL*.
Just ordered a new laptop from Dell. Was impressed by how fast it took for them to deliver it to the west of Ireland. Now looking at transferring my files from my old laptop to the new one using my external hard drive and then discover that there is no firewire port on the new laptop. I had assumed that it would be part of the normal configuration. My options are to either do the transfer using my usb mp3 player as a hard drive, order a new external hard drive that uses usb or get a firewire pcmcia card. This is irritating as I am nowhere near a tech shop and can’t just drop by and pick one up somewhere.
Found a truly enlightening and dynamic site, Trizoko (nice name) with great writing and clearly expressing dynamic solutions to business (and sometimes personal) issues. It’s a keeper.
So Simple, Yet So Rare
If we could pull a number out from our behind, we’d say not more than 1 out of 5,000 companies actually focus on solution selling.
They’re:
1. leaving lots, and lots of money on the table
2. leaving customers needs unfulfilled
3. destroying their true-badass potentialIf you’re looking to increase your sales after a purchase, do this shizzle:
1. Understand what need your product fulfilled.
2. Seek ways to fulfill that need even further.
3. Congratulate-yo-self.You just doubled-tripled-quadrupled-blabupled your sales, and made your customer super-duper-oh-my-mutha-gosh happier with your business.
To start upselling:
Fulfill sexy needs — further.
or how about
How to Rock Your Business
1. Set a goal.
2. List the means to get there.
3. Focus on those means.You’ll amplify your chances to rock the world.
Form = Sexy.
comes this quite detailed feature by feature look from Yahoo and how much it would cost taking features available in alternative products into account.
From the Guardian comes a link to BBspot’s handy guide of whether to upgrade to Vista. They include a nice pdf flowchart to help one reach the right decision.
