Jim, like most men, will watch or play any sport. Lately the big sport around our house has been baseball, which probably has something to do with our 8 year old joining a local league. I’ve been to pro games before, and I get bored very quickly. When it’s your own son up at bat, the game is more interesting. Another way that you can take baseball up a notch is by joining a
fantasy baseball league. I imagine this would be right up Jim’s alley. He’s participated in a fantasy football league for several years, and has won his league several times, so why not try baseball? I’d even give it a whirl, considering that I can actually follow the rules of the game now.

Of course, I have limited knowledge of the players in pro baseball, and Jim isn’t much more informed than I am. Fantasy Sports Prophet’s Fantasy Baseball software can help you make picks for your fantasy baseball league! The program is web based, so you can access it from anywhere. Helpful indeed, considering Jim has done drafts for fantasy games from our hotel room on more than one vacation! The rankings for the players are based on stats and predictive modeling - heavy duty stuff to help you pick a heavy hitter. All of the stats, injury reports, and player info are right in the software, so you don’t need to seek out extra information to make an informed decision. It’s definitely more scientific than picking the cutest player, or the one with the best picture on his trading card…which is how I usually pick my players.

Winning a fantasy league can equal big money - some fantasy leagues pay thousands of dollars out to winners at the end of the season. You can get $10 off the fantasy baseball software with promo code BMC2000 - maybe you’ll be the big winner!

The 2008 budget hasn’t been approved for my department yet, so until it is, no one is traveling anywhere. Doesn’t sound like a big deal, right? Well, I just completed my annual review, and one of my goals was to attend a certain training by 4/1/2008. Our budget should be approved sometime in February, but if it’s not, I need to figure out another way to get that training in, without the expense of airfare and a hotel in another city.

We’ve done web conferencing a few times for various meetings, but I’ve never set up my own web conference. According to the trainer at work, the software makes it easy and it’s all self explanatory. Sounds good to me - with the pressure of the training I’m planning to take, I don’t need my web seminars to carry a big learning curve!

Alltel Cellular is testing out a new feature that I wish At&T had! Alltel users will now be able to have their voicemail messages turned into text messages, using voice recognition software. Instead of calling your voicemail, entering a password, pressing 1 for new messages, pressing 7 to delete messages…you can just read a text message. I love it!

I can see how this will have issues though - if you don’t speak clearly, or have an accent, your voice mail to text may not come out as intended. “Meeting at 5″ turns into “Beating is live” and all that!

My company recently decided to give our salespeople another CRM software to use, and one of the names mentioned was that of AIMpromote. As the person who ends being the first level support person for whatever software we end up using, I like to keep tabs on the options and upgrades available for each. AIMpromote has recently made some big changes to their CRM offering:

Traverse City, MI October 19th 2007 — AIMpromote, provider of lead management and customer relationship management software, has launched a significant upgrade to their CRM offering. The newly added white-label CRM software feature enhances the value that lead aggregators can offer to their lead purchasing customers. The enhanced reselling functionality provides an intuitive interface to completely manage the selling of a privately labeled CRM as their own.

Lead aggregators operate in the highly competitive B2B space, and need ways to add value to their offerings. Michael Myles, President and CEO of AIMpromote said “The significant added value provided by the AIMpromote white-label customer relationship software gives lead aggregators a way to differentiate themselves in what has become a highly commoditized market.” He went on to say that “this product also provides an easy way to leverage existing client bases to more rapidly increase sales.”

The close tie-in between the selling of leads and the powerful sales management functionality of the AIMpromote customer relationship software enables the end-users of the system to easily purchase leads that are then available to be worked directly in the system. There is no importing necessary. Billing is also consolidated, providing an easy way for the end-user to manage their funds and billing profile. The system has been designed from the ground-up to offer high levels of customizability and advanced functionality for everyone involved, while requiring little investment in time.

The CRM reselling and lead sales functions functionality includes the ability for lead aggregators and CRM software resellers to completely customize pricing, including setup fees, discounts, and free trials. This flexibility empowers the resellers of the system to enhance their profit margins as they see fit. The CRM reselling system allows lead aggregators and consultants the ability to brand their system with their own logo and contact information. Integrated Authorize.Net payment processing gives an interface to take credit cards automatically, and have the funds deposited directly into their bank accounts. The advanced accounting and reporting pages in the AIMpromote system give a top-down view of the business as a whole, as well as for each individual account.

The tiered approach that AIMpromote has taken to the reselling of their powerful customer relationship management software gives even the end-user clients the ability to also resell the system. The billing and accounting system automatically takes care of everything for them, even automatically setting up accounts. “The ease of use and flexibility of the AIMpromote CRM for those providing business-to-business consultation services and those selling leads has created an opportunity to significantly improve the bottom line, with very little time or expense,” said Matt Wolfe, Vice President of Operations for AIMpromote. Wolfe added, “The service and functionality of the system is unique in that customers are supported through an integrated support ticket system by their parent account. The end-users of the system will never know that the service they are using is being resold, or that the company from which they are licensing the software are not the actual manufacturers of the software. To them, it won’t be AIMpromote at all, it will be ‘ABC Software Company CRM’, or whatever name the company reselling the software chooses.”

About AIMpromote
AIMpromote leads the market in growth and technology for on-demand lead management and CRM reselling solutions. AIMpromotes enterprise lead management software empowers companies in any industry to more effectively generate, delegate, and report on leads and the teams that manage them. AIMpromote is the only solution that integrates detailed web analytics with sales and marketing analytics to provide a complete closed-loop view of the sales process. The AIMpromote lead management software offers a completely customized solution that can be tailored to fit any organization’s customer acquisition workflow. The unique combination of having the most functionality, and the lowest total cost of ownership, AIMpromote is the most cost effective solution for improving close rates and marketing efficiency.

Each month, I get comments and emails from bloggers and blogger wannabes asking me for advice on how to set up websites or new blogs. I can set up a new Wordpress blog in my sleep, but it’s been a long time since I’ve set up a non-blog website. Try ten years! And back then, I used FrontPage or hand coded my HTML pages. My, how times have changed!

Now there are site building programs that work with a PC or a MAC that allow you to set up your own website in a matter of minutes, for less than $25. StirSite, for example, gives you a free website builder software trial so you can see if you really like the program before you buy. Set up a website for your business, start a store, create a team homepage, or give your non-profit a web presence quickly and easily. You’ll find features within StirSite like:

• Easy to change layouts
• Links page
• Photo albums
• Multimedia - upload videos or music
• Custom feedback form
• Message board
• Calendar
• Mailing list
• And more!

Those things may sound simple to set up to those of you who have the know how to do so, but if you’re new a techie, a product like this gives you a professional looking site quickly!

I’m doing a second charity walk this weekend, and I received an email from one of the walk leaders with information and directions. Instead of using the BCC feature, she had included all of the emails in the “to” field, which means once again, 100+ people who didn’t need access to my email account now have it. Since this group is likely to be not so computer savvy, I’m not that worried about it, but I normally get steamed about this sort of thing. I get enough spam without my email being added to random address books all over the internet. The Atomic Bulk Mail Sender is a cool tool that all professional, or wanna be professional organizations and groups should be using.

It’s not JUST a secure bulk mailer, it’s…well, it does it all. The bulk mailer, along with the Atomic Email Tracker gives anyone the ability to send professional looking bulk email and track all sorts of things on the back end. Want to know which emails were opened? Which campaigns were the most appealing to recipients? The tracker reports give you all sorts of options.

The Atomic bulk mail sender allows you to send an unlimited number of emails through the programs own internal SMTP server - NOT your ISP mailbox. The Atomic Mail Sender accepts mailing lists generated in Excel, Access, DBF, Word, made in ASCII text files (.txt, .lst) as well. That’s great news for those of you who have a huge file of customers or contacts to reach. Choose from templates, use HTML to insert images - this is a multi faceted program that allows you to do it all.

Right now, you can try before you buy with a shareware version that has a few features locked. It’s a great way to see the power of the program before you buy!

I heard about some cool news out of California today. Barracuda Networks has signed a license agreement for OIN (Open Invention Network). The purpose of OIN is to protect open source software. The patents owned by OIN are available royalty free to any company that agrees not to assert their patents against the Linux System. If companies wish to use Linux to create their products, they are free to do so, whereas Microsoft might hunt you down and chase you

This is a huge boost for developers and software vendors, and will continue to drive innovation and discovery through the Linux community.

I’ve used a variety of different CRM (Customer Relationship Management) software, from the very simple programs, like Act, to the very complicated…like PeopleSoft. CRM software is absolutely necessary to stay on top of the needs of your customers and improve the bottom line of your business. By allowing each person at your business who comes into contact with the customer to add to that customer profile in CRM software, you’re ensuring that the information you have is accurate, complete, and up to date. It eliminates the need for paper in some cases, and improves your ability to cross sell and upsell across departments.

The team behind AIMpromote, well, they’re a confident bunch. They’re confident that you’ll see their CRM software as a way to increase your sales, and they’re offering a free trial version so that you can see what it can do. The software has a significantly lower cost of implementation and total cost of ownership than the competition. You won’t need to hire consultants to integrate it with your existing web applications, or to install mods for you, because AIMpromote will do it free of charge. It’s got a fast learning curve, so you won’t need to put your salespeople through weeks of training to learn how to use the system.

Other AIMpromote features include:

• Return on Investment (ROI) reporting
• Lead Reselling
• Next-in-queue (Round-Robin) Lead Distribution
• User, Group, and Organization Specific Rights
• Dynamic Lead Forms

From big business to small start-ups, you can use this CRM software to manager your leads and increase your close rate. The trial is full featured, and good for 14 days.

I consistently have issues with Adobe and opening PDF files on my computer. I’m asked to upgrade to the newest version of Adobe Acrobat about once a month, or I’ll have printing issues, or the PDF will lock my whole laptop up. And in my office, I get a lot of PDF files (typically resumes - I’m not sure who thought putting those in a PDF format was a bright idea!) that need to be changed, and that requires sending them off to someone else who has the full version of Adobe, and not my free version that doesn’t allow edits. I learned tonight there is software that will perform a PDF to Word doc translation, so to speak, giving me a file I can edit in Word, instead of a PDF that I can’t edit.

Right now, those of you reading this are probably gearing up to leave a comment telling me about the “save as text” feature in Adobe Reader. Have you used it? The more complex your document is (formatting, graphics, and elements), the more useless this “save as text” option in Adobe reader is. PDF to Word doc conversion software will preserve the layout of the PDF, and elements within the text, including bulleted lists, headers, footers, and other formatting. You don’t want to convert a PDF into a Word doc and then spend half your morning reformatting the whole document!

The best part about these conversion programs to turn a PDF into a Word doc is that they’re cheap…to the tune of $30 for one, which in an organization like mine, can go a long way towards saving my sanity. They won’t solve the problems I have with Adobe, but they do solve a major headache I’ve got with PDF files, and for not much dough.

But seriously, don’t put your resume in a PDF file. I’m just saying.

This is a sponsored review.

The local schools put out the call this week for parents to donate their old computers. The donated PCs are mostly used for the younger kids, who don’t require a lot of bells and whistles and processing speed, but I suppose they could also end up being used by the high school and middle school kids, depending on the needs of each school.

Now, I don’t know about you, but regardless of who I’m donating my old computer to, and who it may be used by, I’d want ALL my personal data removed off that computer before I make such a donation. I thought that reformatting the hard drive would be enough, but then I read this online:

Despite popular belief, simply deleting files or formatting a hard drive does not get rid of the files that are on there. Files are recoverable by anyone who possesses the knowledge needed.

This is the reason why, even though a computer says there there is x amount of free space available, it’s a good idea to do a free disk space wipe.

Whenever a file is deleted on a computer hard drive, instead of being gone, it is now just available space. which means the file remains until it is written over by another file. There are plenty of products available for disk wiping, and to be safe the drive should be wiped three times, not just once.

The amount of time it takes to wipe depends on the size of the hard drive. If you are only wiping a small amount of space, such as with a free disk space wipe, it’s a good idea to make a temporary partition for the space. This way only that part of your hard drive is wiped out, and not the whole thing.

You learn something new everyday…at least, I do. Think about it - do you want to take any chances? You may think you’ve deleted every trace of your 2004 tax return, and those naughty pictures of your wife, and your stored passwords, but can you be sure? When you perform the
wipe disk / file shredder combo, you can be sure that your private and personal information is truly gone. The file shredder also allows you to clear chat transcripts, temporary internet files, and even clipboard date. Definitely a good tool for those of us who may be using a “borrowed” PC!

Wiping a disk is the only way to ensure that your information is truly unrecoverable.

This is a sponsored review.

Sometimes when I sit in my office and hear the buzz of my co-workers behind me, all I can think of is the movie Glengarry Glen Ross. If you’ve never seen it, it takes place in a real estate sales office where the workers are obsessed with leads. That’s it - the whole premise of the movie is sales leads, and the robbery of the sales leads. My business revolves around leads as well. We’re constantly prospecting for new customers to sell to, and that’s why a CRM software offering lead management is so important to so many in sales. If you can’t maintain your leads, then you can’t sell. Following up with people at the right time is critical! Lead aggregation companies will be particularly interested in this new lead management CRM software from AIMpromote, because it allows for just ONE type of software to sell leads, manage accounting, and run reporting on leads and campaigns. With a price per user cost of just $33, and no set up free, you can’t beat this software. Compare it to the competition - you’ll find more features, and a huge savings, as well as the option for a 14 day free trial to decide for yourself before buying.

Let’s assume you’re not lucky enough to work for a company that offers you training and the airfare and hotel and all of that. And you want to take a MCSE certification training class, but you’re footing the bill. No problem! PrepLogic.com offers video courses that don’t require traveling to a class location and trying to stay awake for 2 days while an instructor drones on and on. Because the classes are done in a video format, they’re more affordable too, and you can take them on your own schedule, not someone else’s! If you’re not sure if video training will work for you, download a free demo and give it a whirl.

I mentioned previously I’m going to Dallas in September for a training course for work. Good thing work is footing the bill, since it’s a $1500 course! Add in my airfare, food, and hotel, and the company will spend about $2500 to educate me for 2 days. I’m worth it though.

eLearning solutions are definitely an option for many other courses that aren’t as software specific as the one I’m taking. And web based training makes sense for a company that has many different offices. A company such as mine can save the expense of airfare and hotels by providing web based training. In fact, you can customize the training specifically for your needs, providing new hires with courses and references libraries, and eliminate the need for a trainer to lead a hands on course. And the course modules can be easily created using PowerPoint

We do something similar for new hires, and it’s really a great tool, especially for new hires. We have an orientation package, and classes to brush up on Word or Excel, and then specific trainings for certain groups as well.

My mom got a new PC a few months ago, and she sure needed one. Her old PC was jacked up, beyond repair almost. See, she got on the internet without really knowing ABOUT the internet, so she downloaded every lame thing offered to her online. She clicked on every banner ad promising a free PS3 or $50 in restaurant gift cards. She downloaded all kinds of garbage, without knowing how much it could damage her system. I downloaded the free version of Spy Sweeper for her, and I was amazed at how much junk was on her system. Tons of hidden files that we didn’t even know were there, sending information off about where she was going online, and what she was doing. Scary, huh? After I saw that, there was no doubt in my mind that I was going to use it on my own PC, and that’s just what I did. I went home that night and tried out the free version, and loved it.

But of course, the free version is just that - free. It doesn’t contain all of the bells and whistles that the full version of Spy Sweeper contains. If you’ve ever swapped music files (who, ME?) you’ve probably got some spyware on your computer to clean up. Spy Sweeper will not only clean up the mess left by spyware, but you’ll be protected against future attacks with free updates. And if you’re a Vista user, not to worry - Spy Sweeper is compatible with Vista. Scanning your PC for spyware often is a smart move, and buying Spy Sweeper is the smart way to do it!

What do you do with your video? Do you take scads and scads of video at every family gathering, every birthday party, every preschool graduation…only to never watch it again?

::raises hand::

That’s exactly how I operate my video camera. Sad, but true. It’s just the once you take a movie, well, there’s not much else to do with it, right? Watch it on TV, bore your friends, the end.

With the new Movavi video converter, you can do more with your video. How about watching those family videos on your iPod? It’s possible with this tool, which acts as not only a DVD ripper but an iPOD video converter and much more. You can change the format of your video, capture video from a webcam, perform a video merge (very helpful for splicing together certain events). Put your video on your iPod, or even your Zune (MP3, WAV, WMA are the audio file formats supported). Or how about extracting audio from movies? Separate audio from video, do a little noise reduction or editing, and merge it all back together for a cleaner overall sound. Pull images from your video to be used as stills and save them to a gallery.

A personal license will cost you less than $30, and you can do a ton of things with your video!

This is a sponsored review.

I installed WordPress on my sister’s new blog recently, and switched over her nameservers last night, then logged into her WP admin panel to poke around. It really made me want to upgrade my blogs to the newest version of WordPress, but I’m entirely too lazy to do so. I know upgrades never go smoothly, and I belong to the “don’t fix what isn’t broken” school of thought.

Someday though, someday.

My sister got called out of town unexpectedly last week. She doesn’t have a laptop, so until she was able to make her way to a computer with free internet access at the library, she was offline. And even when she got to the library, she didn’t have access to any of her bookmarks, so she couldn’t blog, or pay bills, or do anything that she’d normally take care of online. Now, if I was in the same boat, I’m lucky enough to have a laptop to take with me. However, we’ve got a computer upstairs, and more than once I’ve been up there (too lazy to walk down) and trying in vain to remember the correct URL for my online banking. This portable bookmark manager could solve that problem for me. With this tool, you can keep your bookmarks on a portable USB drive and share them between computers. You can install it to your portable drive or your PC, and the trial version (gotta love something for free!) allows you to try it and store up to 100 bookmarks.

I’m not sure if it would solve my sisters issue, because it doesn’t say if the bookmark manager offers you access to those bookmarks via a simple webpage. That’s what you’d need to access it from a free computer at the library, because I’m sure that they don’t let anyone plug in a USB drive there to access things….

For those of us who use two browsers, you can use the bookmark manager with any browser. And something I could use is the organizing and deletion feature. I don’t typically keep my bookmarks organized (again, for the same reason I don’t walk downstairs to another laptop - pure laziness) and I end up with a really long list that would be much more useful if it were divided into folders. Portable Bookmarks will sort out bad links and duplicates and remove them for you so that you’re not taking up valuable real estate with junk. That’s a nice little time saver!

This is a sponsored review.

At work, I deal with a lot of spreadsheets and reports - some that I create, and some that I maintain for other people. I’ve never deleted any of my Excel files or Crystal reports in error, but I’ve come really close to doing it. I know our IT department has a way for us to recover deleted emails, but I’m not so sure about deleted files. I’m so paranoid about losing something, that I not only store important files and folders on my own drive, but also our shared server for the office.

I guess I don’t really need all of those duplicate files, because you can recover files that you’ve deleted in error from your hard disks or floppy drives. (Do people even use floppy drives anymore? My last 2 computers didn’t even come with one!) You can also recover files from your Recycle Bin, even AFTER you’ve emptied it. Handy Recovery has a neat little browse function that allows you to browse your disk drive just like you do with Windows Explorer, but in addition to all of your regular files and folders, you see everything you’ve deleted as well. If you want to recover one of those files, just save it back to your hard drive.

The program is compatible with Microsoft Windows® 9x/Me/NT/2000/XP/2003/Vista operating systems. You can download a free 30-day trial version which allows you to recover one file per day, so you can give Handy Recovery a test drive. If you like it, the single user license is only $39, and they’ve got a discount program for volume orders, so those of you running businesses can get a deal in providing this software for all of your employees.

This is a sponsored review.

For the recruiters and salespeople I work with, one of the biggest issues is following up on leads and hot prospects. When you’re trying to sell someone on our services or features, you want to follow that lead until you know it’s dead. And you don’t want anyone to blow off a lead, or not follow up on a call from a prospective client…you might as well be burning money if you’re going to ignore people with a genuine interest in your product. AIMPromote is a CRM software product designed to give you complete control over the sales process. You can easily schedule contact visits, schedule follow up calls, emails, letters, and other mailings, and give your sales team an easier way to make the sale. Try it now with a 2 week trial version!

Let’s face it kids - while there is a lot of nifty software to be found online for free, sometimes you need to pony up and pay for the full version. Trial versions are intended to be just that, a trial. You don’t get fully featured software, and often, it stops working after a certain time frame has passed. And if you need specialized PC software, you can’t typically find it in stores like Best Buy or Circuit City. Take Crystal Reports for example…I can see that this is a newer version than what I’m currently using at work, so it might be time for e to convince the powers that be we need an upgrade. The price is right too, because I’ve seen the software retail for over $500 from our supplies.

For those of you wanting to see what Microsoft Vista has to offer, BuyPCSoft has the full version of Vista, as well as several different upgrade packages depending on what you need. Is the price low enough for you to make the Vista plunge? You’ll find lots of higher end software at this site, and the flat rate shipping is a nice perk, too!