Barking

Check out my guest post over at TechCrunch UK on using Collaboration Web Apps to Beat the Credit Crunch.

So after Twitter knocked SMS on the head people have been looking out for it.

We’ve got an initial attempt at it in beta. It’s called Tweeteroo and you can use the code barking to get some credits for the beta.

Please drop as a tweet, email, etc. with any feedback.

Today the inevitable happened. Twitter decided to stop sending out free SMS to users across Europe.

I’ve included the full email they sent to us (via the excellent Campaign Monitor I noted) at the end of this post (for those of you in Canada, the US and India who won’t have seen it).

If Twitter can’t work out a way to make money from their service then it was inevitable that the SMS service would go, a service that costs a company $1,000 per user per year is not going to fly. SMS in the UK is ridiculously expensive anyway and I for one will be able to live without it since my Twitter usage has evolved beyond the need for the SMS updates from it.

I’d imagine a lot of part time twitter users will leave the service, lots of people may try the alternatives such as Plurk and Identi.ca, but I don’t think this will be the end of Twitter as for many users it’s not just about the SMS usage. I’d have left before for a usable service with the people I follow on it.

I do feel a bit of an idiot - I was preaching the benefits of Twitter to two of my friends last night and a major one of those is now no longer available, my Using Twitter for Business blog post is now only useful for the US, Canada and India and I am sure there will be a big uproar from many users.

Hi,

I'm sending you this note because you registered a mobile device
to work with Twitter over our UK number. I wanted to let you
know that we are making some changes to the way SMS works on
Twitter. There is some good news and some bad news.

I'll start with the bad news. Beginning today, Twitter is no
longer delivering outbound SMS over our UK number. If you enjoy
receiving updates from Twitter via +44 762 480 1423, we are
recommending that you explore some suggested alternatives.

Note: You will still be able to UPDATE over our UK number.

If you don't want to receive news from Twitter click here:
http://twitter.cmail4.com/u/486439/6d3kjy6/
 

We recently won a place on the Digital Mission to New York so I’ll be at the Web 2.0 Expo from the 16-19th September if anybody is interested in catching up and finding out more about Senokian, Tactile CRM, or Resolve RM.

We’re always being told that breakfast is the most important meal of the day. So to get me started, I like a good breakfast sandwich. Here is the current version and how to make it. Any improvements please let me know:

Ingredients:

• Decent ‘plastic bread’. For me it has to be Warburtons.
• 2 good quality sausages
• 2 rashers of good quality bacon
• 1 fried egg
• proper butter
• HP Sauce (check out the discussion on why).

Stage 0: Cooking

Cook the sausages, bacon and egg to your liking.

Stage 1: Bread

You need three slices of bread for this sandwich. Butter two of them.

Stage 2: Sausage Assembly

Cut the sausages in half and put them on the first slice of buttered bread, as shown below.

Stage 3: HP Sauce

Put the second slice of bread (this is the unbuttered one) on top of the sausages and add brown sauce.

Stage 4: Bacon Assembly

Put your bacon on top of the brown sauce and get ready to add the egg.

Stage 5: The Egg

Get you egg on top of the bacon making sure not to break it.

Stage 6: Topping Off

Put the last slice of bread (this one should be buttered) on top.

Stage 7: Enjoy

Now enjoy your tasty breakfast sandwich by eating it. I like to wash mine down with a cup of strong black coffee but I’ll leave your beverage chose to you.

I sign up to, trial and test a higher than usual number of products on the web. Most are easy signups and not too onerous.

We’ve taken this to heart with our Tactile CRM product. You can sign up for the product for free, no credit card details required, and it’s free for as long as you like.

Here are the details we ask for if you sign up for the free version of Tactile CRM:

OK, it’s not the shortest sign up, but we need all those details to set up a new account - it’s not us trying to do data capture. The main point is we don’t ask for your card details on the free trial. 

We want people to start using Tactile CRM, try the product and give us feedback.

As a start-up this feedback and exposure is just as important as the people that sign up for the paying plans. We really do want people to use the product and actively pursue feedback and suggestions we receive, so giving users an extra barrier to entry, such as entering credit card details is a no-no.

So sign up forms like the following from Apple’s Mobile Me is silly in my opinion:

I wanted to give the Mobile Me ‘Exchange for the rest of us’ feature a try with my email (I already have IMAP and wanted to see if it improved on it).

The old .mac service let you have a free trial without this step and I gave it a go. However, I can’t be bothered to complete the above form as I am likely to forget to cancel the trial if I don’t want to carry on.

I’m sure Apple aren’t worried about little old Jake not signing up, but for some of the smaller fish like ourselves we want as many people as we can get.

I have been keeping this under my belt for a week or so, but I was really pleased that Tactile CRM has been accepted onto the 2008 Digital Mission to New York. Full details are on the Chin Wag website, TechCrunch UK have done an initial post on it (they are one of the media partners), and the press release is here.

I’ve been trying to stalk follow people on Twitter that are going. So far I have found the following - companies & people with Twitter accounts first (those with two people have the person representing them on the digital mission first):

• B View
• Headshift - Christoph Schmaltz
• Huddle - Alistair Mitchell & Andy McLoughlin
• idiomag - Andrew Davies
• KMP - Bill Darling & Paul Fabretti
• Mippin - Scott Beaumont
• Quick TV - Nick Bell
• Smarkets - Jason Trost
• Sweemo
• Tactile CRM - Me (Jake Stride)
• Tempero - Dominic Sparkes (not sure this is the right Twitter account, could be this one [update: it's not!] too)
• Ugame - Sam Matthews
• UnLtdWorld - Albert Nardelli
• Veedow - Fabio De Bernardi
• World TV - Alx Klive
• Harvest Digital
• Head London
• Market Sentinel
• Littleloud
• Slicethepie

DM on Twitter or email me jake dot stride [at] senokian dot com if I have missed you off.

For those of you that are already on Twitter it will come as no surprise that I am a big fan:

For those of you that don’t know what Twitter is, it’s a website where you can easily update your ’status’ (i.e. what you are up to etc.). You can check out what I am up to by following my Twitter user jstride.

Although Twitter current has millions of users, it still hasn’t reached mass main stream adoption in the way that sites such as Facebook and MySpace have. However, it can still be a valuable business tool.

At Senokian we use Twitter in a few ways to try and make our lives a bit easier:

1. We created Twitter accounts for Tactile CRM (tactilecrm), and Resolve RM (resolverm), currently in beta, and post news and updates to them. It’s a central location that gets automatically updated using TwitterFeed, doesn’t take any extra work from us, but gives us another channel to customers. We’re not the only people that do this.
2. Resolve RM, our easy web-based customer care product integrates directly with Twitter. Whenever anyone raises a Senokian, Tactile CRM or, Resolve RM support query we get notified. This is great as we can get direct SMS updates and decrease our response time to queries.
3. We’ve recently launched a new website called Senokian Telephony. One of the features we have added is a ‘Call Me Back’ page so we can call customers back if they don’t want to call us. It only took five minutes, so we integrated it with Twitter. Now whenever somebody fills out the form we get an email, and a ‘tweet’ so we can jump straight on it.

Twitter has had some stability issues of late. They seem to be on top of it now, but I think for those of you who can think outside the box a little, it has some great uses to help your business.

My first task at Senokian was to research project management applications to try to find something which would help us organise our project more efficiently and effectively.

When looking for a system I was considering the following key criteria:

1. Support for multiple projects
2. Support for multiple users
3. Flexible management of milestones, to-do lists and tasks within a project with the ability to add dates to each
4. The ability to track time against tasks
5. The ability for clients to interact with the application

This list of criteria may appear relatively simple, however I was surprised that not one of the 10 applications I looked at in detail fulfilled them all.

Most surprising of all was that none of the applications appeared to allow a date to be added to milestones, to-do lists and tasks. You might wonder why all of these elements need a date, however on complex projects you cannot assume each to-do list or task within a milestone can be completed in any order. Without the ability to add these dates, you are left with the option to either not schedule every task or group of tasks as finely as you would like, or to create hundreds of milestones and to-do lists to try to gain this granularity of planning.

We eventually narrowed the choice to three potential systems:

• Intervals
• ActiveCollab, and
• the dreaded Basecamp

Intervals appeared to have good planning and time management capabilities and provided a high level of configurability. Their main product focus is clearly time recording and the provision of management information to be used for invoicing, however it did appear to over complicate the application and took the focus away from the project details. Furthermore there didn’t appear to be any provision for client access which was a desirable feature.

ActiveCollab looked very shiny and feature packed, again with good planning and time management capabilities. However their pricing model was different to the majority of the applications as it followed the more traditional model of licensing the software rather than paying a subscription for a hosted service. Moreover, it results in the hassle of having to organise hosting for the application and paying extra for updates and support.

Basecamp is probably one of the most well known online project management applications providing good all round functionality. Some of the task planning features did appear slightly illogical, for example not being able to assign dates to tasks, however their model does appear to based around having many milestones with attached to-do lists which isn’t ideal. The time management elements are very well integrated into tasks which I can see being useful.

After considering these three options we reluctantly went for Basecamp. It is the best of a bad bunch in my opinion. It does provide a relatively painless way to do most of the things we want to get out of a application however it also tells me that there may be a market for a project management application which gives more flexibility in managing tasks.

We’ll be reviewing this decision over the coming months, but for the moment it ’scratches an itch’.

We’re growing at Senokian again - we recently appointed Paul Bain as our new project manager and he’s started to make some great changes to the way we do things. Now we need to take on a couple of new developers.

If you are interested, or know anybody that may be, please pass on the details. Drop us a line at hr [at] senokian dot com.

You can find out what it’s like to work with us here, and as always, no recruitment agents.