It has been big in the US and elsewhere for a while, but in general the Americans are much more into their ‘networking’ and making connections than we are (you can see that from the regional split of my contacts).

However, I am now beginning to see the value in it. With a recession fast approaching/upon us/finished (depending upon when you read this post), many people are starting to worry about their jobs and future roles. The value of Linked In now comes from the fact that your network is all in one place, outside of the company you work for, and you have access to it when you are no longer there.

Linked In is CRM for people, if you want CRM for an organisation, can I suggest you try our excellent Tactile CRM. I’m on Linked In, but don’t have any plans to leave Senokian/Tactile CRM!

Whilst Team Tactile have been working on the underlying code, we’ve also been contemplating some interface changes. Now we don’t mess around with mockups in Photoshop, with some of the excellent plugins available for Firefox, including the Web Developer Tool Bar, Firebug, and Stylish, we can quickly and easily work on the interface and see how it actual works in the browser, so we can have some user testing thrown in for free.

One thing we’ve been thinking about is moving to a fixed width design. Mocking this up with the plugins in the browser took about half an hour and the result is below. This may never make it into production, but we’d love your feedback as to which you prefer.

As displays get bigger, presenting text in a fluid layout becomes more of a challenge as it has a tendency to spread out onto a single line. Working with a fixed width also gives us more potential when working on reporting/graphs.

The screenshot below is the current layout for comparision.

What are your thoughts, and which do you prefer?

When it comes to pricing this couldn’t be more true, and is often an area that is overlooked. At Tactile CRM we’re currently simplifying our pricing structure, to make it easier for current and prospective users to understand our pricing bands. We think this is important from a ‘user acquisition’ point of view (please excuse the buzzwords) as it will help us to sign up more paying users.

However, not everybody has the same reasoning. I recently tried to join the local gym when I moved to Oxford, and nowhere on their website do they display pricing (correct me if I am wrong, but I haven’t found it yet). As a result, Esporta made me give up some of my weekend to visit the gym where I was still not able to find out the costs – two people on reception didn’t know them, and after a 15 minute waiting to see ’someone’ I still hadn’t got any further and left.

I was quite happy to make an appointment to see somebody but nobody seemed that clued up – maybe a simple CRM system like Tactile CRM would have been a help.

Obviously I don’t know their pricing, but I’d imagine they are currently down about £1,200-£1,500 a year as my partner and I are now looking elsewhere. Hopefully my situation will have been a one off, but I have written to the manager out of courtesy to let them know what happened and given them a chance to redeem themselves.

I’m very much a believer that ex-customers are as important as those you currently have, as you can learn from them how to make your product/service better. That’s a blog post for another time though!

British Rail (or whatever they are called these days - National Rail, it turns out) are a great example of how this should work, the recently updated their ticket pricing from lord knows how many down to 3:

Thanks to Kai and Craig for the photos.

Thanks to Sun and their Startup Essentials program, we have a lot of shiny new servers to go in our data centre. Due to popular demand, here are some pictures for you jealous types to drool over.

We met a lot of people interested in Tactile CRM, and the general consensus was that an API would be really useful; we caught up with the Soocial guys and would love to put something together with their product when we have our API in place, and many more.

As always Ben from Redcat Co was on-hand to take my blog photo for the day (see below)!

Highlights for me where Andy from Huddle, talking about life outside Silicon Valley, and Jason Calacanis with Tom Nixon talking about work/life balance.

One thing that caught my eye (as I was reading my RSS feeds) was that a competitor has recently rolled out a long overdue feature in their ‘CRM’ product called deals. As a CRM veteran (I’ve been doing this for over 10 years), the concept of deals/opportunities is one of the key features to the CRM concept as it helps to manage and maintain your sales pipeline. Without this a CRM application is not so much a CRM solution, rather a complex address book.

Now the folks at 37 Signals have done a nice job in rolling out deals to their product - one thing they are often criticised about when talking with people is the lack of a roadmap (we have one at Tactile CRM) since people have been requesting this feature for a while.

However, on this occasion I feel they have missed two fundamental features. Firstly, their is no due date on the deal to help you build your pipeline, and secondly, there is no pipeline (graphs/reporting/etc). Without these features I feel they have missed the point. We’ve had these features since day one (see the screenshots below).

At Tactile CRM, we talk with our users, actively encourage them to leave comments and suggestions, and take on board what it is they want.

37 Signals know their market, and create some great applications for their customers, however at Tactile CRM we are after a difference market and hence why, although we like to keep our applications simple, we have a more featured product.

So to the 37 Signals team, congratulations on the new feature, and lets hope we can all help our customers get through the current economic mayhem with some apps to help them streamline their businesses.

“Hi, I’m Matt Galloway and I’ve joined Senokian recently as Systems Engineer. This is my first time working in this industry, well actually it’s my first time working after having a year out doing fun things like a ski season in Whistler and traveling around New Zealand and Australia.
I’m really enjoying working at Senokian and I hope that I can learn new things and help Senokian to go from strength to strength.”

So there you have it! We’ll be hearing more from Matt over the next few months as he undertakes some major infrastructure upgrades with Richard and Matthew.

We’re part of the excellent Startup Essentials program from Sun designed specifically to help startups get off the ground rapidly and at lower cost. We’ve taken advantage of some of the excellent discounts on hardware, and are going to be looking into to their expertise when it comes to some nifty hardware/software configuration/optimisation too.

We’ve won a stand to exhibit Tactile CRM at FOWA London next week and are now busy planning what to do on the stand. Our neighbouring stand, Fav.or.it have an awesome Lego Death Star to build, and I am hearing rumours of some beach and hawian shirt action from Stewart at Sun. So what do we have?

We’re still planning at the moment, but needless to say Denver the Tactile CRM dragon will be making a reappearance, we’ll have some beer, a demo of Tactile CRM, and more. So watch this space!

‘Harvest Twestival’ is collecting food and money for The Connection at St Martin-in-the-Fields, to help the homeless. Following the tradtional Harvest Festival format of collecting tins of food, it’s being brought into the 21st century by being organised via the social networking site Twitter to bring together people from all over the country to help support this worthy cause.

Jake Stride - Managing Director, said “We’re really pleased to be involved in the World’s first ever Harvest Twestival and hope more people are able to leverage the Internet, and the friends they make online to try and make a difference to those less fortunate than themselves.”.

On Thursday 25 September, over 200 people who know each other through Twitter.com will descend on Doon, an exclusive venue in Trafalgar Square, for Harvest Twestival, a tweet-up with a social conscience.

The event will bring together fun people, fresh ideas and a few surprises for what promises to be an unforgettable event. All profits from the night will be donated to The Connection at St Martin-in-the-Fields, a community centre based in Trafalgar Square that works with homeless people.

Amanda Rose, one of the organisers of Harvest Twestival, said “We’re expecting the who’s who of the UK Twitter scene to attend. Social tweet ups like this are a great way to meet the faces behind those avatars while raising lots of money for a fantastic cause.”

The event is sponsored by UnLtd World, Huddle, Diffusion PR, Tactile CRM, Winston & Strawn LLP and Just Giving.

To find out more about Harvest Twestival, go to the official event website at www.twestival.com or follow @harvesttwest on Twitter. For more information on The Connection at St-Martins-In-The-Fields, go to www.connection-at-stmartins.org.uk.