manage

Concerned about what your customers say about you online? Well, you should be.

You probably think you have your bases covered by allowing product reviews and client testimonials through your Web site, but the truth is that the blogosphere can make (or break) you as a company if Google includes a customer's blog post in the SERPs (search engine results pages).

Prominently positioned customer blog posts in the SERPs that either love you or hate you can be more powerful than product reviews for several reasons, the most obvious one being that many blogs act as word-of-mouth advertising when … Read more

I recently spoke with Sigurd Magnusson, the intrepid chief marketing officer for Silverstripe, a New Zealand-based, open-source content management company. Silverstripe is a programming framework similar to Ruby on Rails, but for PHP5, allowing developers to quickly write website features using modern programming practices that are gaining popularity through Ruby and Python but not often used yet with PHP.

In a large crowd of open-source web publishing tools/content management systems, Silverstripe prides itself on an innovative and intuitive editing interface (and a prime slot in Google's Summer of Code last summer). It's also a finalist in Packtpub's CMS awards.

Silverstripe has an uphill battle, however, due to its location. New Zealand, home to hobbits and beautiful landscapes, is not the center of the software industry. Or any industry. It's simply not cost effective to hire a direct sales force in a country as spread out as New Zealand is, which leads to open source:… Read more

Migo Software has announced a new, beefier version of its PC-to-device syncing software slated to unveil in beta form in January 2008. I got to preview the Windows app, code named SlingShot, at the CTIA Wireless conference.

The slick new interface will bring together back-end tools of smart device and format detection that will operate at every stage of the media transfer experience. It will include, for example, a smart setup wizard that helps configure your cell phone or external hard drive to play your music and video, and on-the-fly format conversion for your cell phone or external hard drive.… Read more

There's a great scene in Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy saga; I think it was in The Restaurant at the End of the Universe. The lead characters find themselves on a spaceship full of middle-managers from the planet Golgafrincham. (No, I don't know how to pronounce Golgafrincham.)

According to the hapless, half-witted middle-managers, their home planet was doomed and they'd been sent off on this spaceship to escape certain death. The plan was to rendezvous with two other ships - one of which contained the planet's leaders and scientists, and the other containing all its useful workers.

In fact, the planet wasn't doomed and the other two ships didn't exist. It was all a scheme to rid the planet of its useless populace. And the middle-managers were clueless.

Contrary to the book's satire, middle managers are useful, especially these days. There was a time - the 80s - when bloated companies had three or four more layers of management than they needed. That was ridiculous. The great management-layer purge of the 90s took care of that.

Still, there is a stigma attached to middle-management. But is it deserved? Let's see.… Read more

Whenever a big project is at hand, making sure that you follow through with important details takes planning. Whether it's as mundane as cleaning out the garage, confusing as organizing your daughter's soccer team, or complex as reworking the goals for a team at your company, an outline, a list, or a strategy can help you focus on the over-arching goal. It might be because it's easier to have visuals of bulleted lists or linear strategies to easily convey the steps necessary to complete a project. Think of it this way: Not having a plan of action is kind of like going to the grocery store without a list; sure, you'll remember a lot of stuff you need, but once you get home you're bound to smack yourself in the forehead saying, "Butter! How did I forget butter?"

I recently came across a great program for both Mac and PC that helps make the planning phases of a project much easier. MindManager helps you map out your thoughts and ideas using an intuitive graphical interface. You can start your own mind map with a central idea to work outwards from, or you can choose from several premade templates that focus on a specific task.… Read more

SAP announced on Wednesday that it is snapping up Yasu Technologies, which creates business rules management software.

The India-based company was founded in 1999 and has about 120 employees.

The deal is designed to boost SAP's business process management (BPM) offerings and will be tucked into SAP NetWeaver, which channels the ebb and flow of data to software applications via SAP's back-end middleware.

The Yasu announcement comes just a little over a week after SAP announced that it will acquire Business Objects in a deal valued at more than $6.8 billion, its largest acquisition ever.

SAP, however, … Read more

Anybody who downloads software knows that the size of the file is going to effect the time it takes to download. The bigger the file the longer you wait, right? For those of you who are on a dial-up connection (I know you're still out there), the size of the file can be the difference between downloading and moving on to something else. Even with a fast connection, some of the popular game demos and larger software apps can mean an all-night download party for your computer--particularly when that download is in high demand.… Read more

While GrandCentral may have been stealing headlines lately, there's another suffix-sharing phone call management service called RingCentral that can make small businesses look and function like larger ones with some pretty neat telephonic tomfoolery. The service has been around since early 2004, and today is introducing a slew of VoIP plans called DigitalLine that give users the option to use VoIP instead of, or on top of their existing landlines.

So what can you do with RingCentral? Small business owners will love it, since you can set up a ridiculously extensive set of rules to handle incoming calls, or reroute them on the fly with a virtual phone call manager called SoftPhone. The idea is to take a single or multiline setup and spread it out intelligently, while putting all the options online for you to manage and tweak while away from your office.

Like GrandCentral, you can set up calls to be routed to different phones or line extensions, there are also handy business-centric settings to tweak the response people get when they call at off-business hours. For fans of GrandCentral's multiphone ring system, RingCentral has also gone the extra step of letting you add three-digit passwords to an incoming phone call to keep unintended pickups from happening. This feature actually stemmed out of users wanting to keep their children from answering a business phone call when they had forgotten to turn off the home forwarding options off, or couldn't get to their own phone in time.

The new VoIP implementation is fairly straightforward. All incoming calls can be set to be received via VoIP, letting you receive and manage phone calls while away from your landline. You can also get various minute packages to use VoIP to make outgoing calls, including an all-you-can-eat plan of outgoing VoIP for around $25/month. In contrast to consumer VoIP services like Vonage, Skype, or Comcast's DigitalVoice, RingCentral isn't aiming at cheap outgoing long distance providers, as much as the multi-line business crowd who's looking for a way to handle several lines without the hardware or staffing.

For a shot of the call log interface, click the read more link below.

… Read more

Into a sea of online personal financial services wades billQ, a bill management service that promises to store your one-time and scheduled bills and alert you before they're due.

Unlike competitors like Mint, Wesabe, and others, there's no bill pay engine, no money-saving deals, and no hot financial tips. For now, billQ is strictly positioned as information management, and for a lot of folks that's the right load.

Add and manage bills The site is visually appealing in Google-esque minimalism. Adding and viewing bills is intuitive on billQ's clean, user-friendly interface. Tweaking account options and adding from a noble menu of additional tools are also easily done.… Read more