The Web Conferencing Blog

Xobni New Product Release

In January, I did a product review on an email management application called, Xobni, "inbox" spelled backwards. Loved the application then and loving it even more now.

Since that posting, Xobni invited me to this year's Sales 2.0 this past March in San Francisco where I was finally able to put names to faces: Eric Grafstrom: VP of Business Development and Matt Brenzina: Co-Founder, who happens to be a healthy 6 feet 3 inches tall!!! (Of course I could actually see their faces through the Xobni/Facebook integration but meeting them in person was great.)

The exciting news is that Xobni is releasing their latest version (v1.7) and removing the "beta" label! As any good company, Xobni has done a great job listening to end user requests, taking notes on feedback to ensure that the Xobni experience is super easy, fast, efficient and highly productive. The latest release focuses on SPEED and PERFORMANCE.

As much as I love Xobni, I did find that the startup time in Outlook took some time. The newest version dramatically reduces this startup time and loads much faster in Outlook. Other areas that were upgraded:

• Faster Message Loading: Xobni profile data is now cached, reducing delays between loading messages.
• Indexing Controls: users can now control how often and how much of their email is indexed.
• Sidebar Controls: users can now choose for Xobni to open automatically with Outlook or only open when they need it.
• Reduced Outlook Startup Time: as mentioned above.

The new version can be downloaded tonight after 9pm Pacific Time at www.xobni.com

On a side note, Eric Grafstrom also told me that Xobni has secured Round B funding from Blackberry Partners Fund, which focuses its investment in the mobile industry. If you are in the tech industry, you have heard of Blackberry Partners Fund, Blackberries and Research in Motion. (Could there be a mobile version of Xobni? I'll have to ask Eric and Matt but makes sense if I can access my Outlook from my Blackberry device why couldn't I access Xobni also?)

The Round B of funding only means even better things to come from this awesome email management application. Just when I thought it couldn't get better, Xobni gets more funding, which now means even the best can get better.

Thanks,
David Chao
The Web Conferencing Expert

RescueTime for Effortless Time Management

RescueTime is an great web-based application that helps you manage your time by providing real-time stats on where you are spending most of your time and which applications are you using the most. This information helps you optimize your day so you can have the most productive and efficient day possible.

To RescueTime's credit, they have been mentioned in The New York Times, Newsweek, US News, TechCrunch, PC World...and now The Web Conferencing Blog!

I have been using RescueTime for about a 1/2 year now and have found it very, very easy to use. It's typical of a web 2.0 application: easy, simple, no training needed, intuitive. I can modify and set my alerts and scoring parameters just the way I like them. For example, if I think email communication is a highly productive activity, I can assign a higher weighting to this category compared to another person who does very little email, in which case a lower weighting will be assigned. I can do this for every application that I want RescueTime to track. (Excel, Word, PowerPoint, Email, Google Searches, internal applications.)

Imagine, if you are in a sales role, how great would it be to know if your day was filled with revenue-generating activities or it was a day of Facebooking and reading articles from ESPN or CNN News. If you are in a sales role, RescueTime can tell you how much time is spent in revenue generating activites/applications: a CRM application, order entry system, email, Excel, etc. Same holds true if you are a financial analyst or in Operations...you are most likely going to be in Excel running numbers vs. a CRM, inventory tracking system, case ticket system, etc.

If you are truly looking to understand your day to day business activities, you need to try RescueTime!

There is a free personal version, as well as, a small business and enterprise version. For a team of 10 people, it's only $8.50 per person.

RescueTime Highlights:

• RescueTime scores group and individual "Efficiency" (a ratio of productive stuff vs. distracting time) and "Productivity" (a measure of the sheer volume of productive time)
• RescueTime shows total active computer time spent
• RescueTime breaks down application and site usage by category
• RescueTime gives flexibility to look at your data with tags
• Total time broken down
• Top applications and website tracking
• Unique individual scoring compared to the RescueTime community

At the end of the day, RescueTime provides me with real-time visibility on how my day is going. Simply saying, "I think I had a good day," doesn't cut it in today's competitive economy where companies are constantly looking for ways to increase employee productivity and corporate performance. If you want to be more productive, more efficient, and take your business to the next level, try RescueTime.

* There is no financial compensation for this blog.

Thanks,
David Chao
The Web Conferencing Expert

Act On Software for e-Marketing Programs

Act-On Software is a spectacular e-marketing application that enables marketers to create and manage programs for demand generation and lead qualification while working in conjunction with WebEx Event Center, a webinar-based delivery platform solution.

With any demand generation and lead qualification system, the goal is to generate demand/leads, qualify prospects, and close deals. The challenge for marketers is that one needs to manage multiple data systems and manually transport information from one system to another system. There is zero integration across systems and there is no real-time dashboard to track and measure results easily.

Running insightful, real-time analytics is next to impossible. Seeing if the sales team has followed up on the leads never happens because there is no accountability measure in place. Spending too much time on the wrong leads is common place for sales since there is no prioritization or lead scoring in place.

Shawn Naggiar, Director of Sales and Business Development, echoed similar marketing challenges, "Prior to Act-On, advanced marketing capabilities like lead scoring and behavior tracking were only available to large corporations with huge marketing budgets. Furthermore, the systems themselves were very difficult to use and took months to implement. Act-On is demystifying these advanced marketing concepts by offering a complete solution for as little as a few hundred dollars a month, which can be up and running within minutes and requires no technical expertise. If you can surf the web, you can use Act-On."

In short, Act-On Software solves these common and tough business challenges for marketers with a turnkey and fully integrated e-marketing solution.

"When prospects see our online demo, they get very excited.  The interface is so user friendly that people feel very comfortable and quickly realize how easy it is to be a better marketer using Act-On. Customers often tell us they don’t know how they ever managed their prospects and lead flow without it," stated Shawn.

Act-On Software Highlights:

• Email campaigns and email marketing
• Demand generation
• Lead nurturing
• Qualification and scoring
• Web forms
• Landing pages
• Prospect tracking
• Activity history tracking
• Website analytics
• Drill-down reporting
• Salesforce.com and WebEx Event Center integration
• Microsoft email connector

Shawn summed up the Act-On Software highlights by saying, "Internet marketing practices have created a new breed of prospect that will travel further along the sales process on their own before they are willing to engage with a salesperson. Prospects essentially self qualify themselves by responding to ad campaigns, attending webinars, visiting your website, downloading documents, opening emails and filling out forms. The key to successful lead management is being able to track and report on all of these marketing channels collectively to determine which leads are ready for sales and which require further nurturing. This is one of the key values behind the Act-On Marketing Service."

When I communicated with Act-On Software Founder and CEO, Raghu Raghavan, this is what he had to say about his company's value proposition and its position in the e-marketing space:

"We built the Act-On Marketing Service around the premise that every business with a web presence needs a lead management service. We have created an affordable service that is unusually easy to learn and to use. Our service is the only one to truly recognize that webinars are a staple of marketing departments everywhere. We have taken special care to build in tight integration with the best of breed webinar service – WebEx.

Our Cisco/WebEx Connect partnership holds huge potential for our company. With Connect, customers will get the convenience of a bundle of integrated communication and collaboration services for a single monthly fee from a trusted vendor, Cisco/WebEx. We know that every business needs marketing and sales. Connect gets our marketing and sales services in front of Cisco/WebEx’s prospects and customers with Cisco/WebEx’s implicit stamp of approval."

If your MBO's are tied to lead generation, cost per lead, market awareness or market share, the quickest way to achieve your marketing MBO's is to use Act-On Software. There is not another more powerful and complete e-marketing application that I can think of in the market today. All other solutions only offer pieces of what Act-On Software delivers.

Easy to use, tight integration, real-time analytics to measure your marketing program success.

* There is no financial compensation for this blog.

Thanks,
David Chao
The Web Conferencing Expert

Evernote

 

Evernote CEO, Paul Libin likes to call Evernote the "external brain," where things that you typically cannot remember on a day to day basis can be automatically stored and retrieved at a later time, thus never ever forgetting anything.

 

Evernote is an easy to use application that enables you to quickly capture data, pictures, information, virtually anything you can think of or see and store it for later use. Evernote works on Windows, Mac, on any web browser, camera, or mobile phone. Super flexibile with usability.

 

I have to admit that I have used Evernote in many of the ways that Paul Libin recommended:

• Taking a picture of a business card

• Capturing notes from a white board

• Copying a favorite web page

• Clipping a recipe for my wife

• Saving a Cakebreaad wine label last year when I was in Napa County

It's amazing how easy Evernote captures any form of information! Evernote is dummy proof!

 

On the backend, all your content is stored in the cloud on Evernote's servers which can then be synchronized across all your devices. Whether it's your iPhone, Mozilla browser, Mac OS, you have access to all your important data instantly.

 

I'm signed up for the free Evernote version but they also have a Premium version that's only $5 per month! It includes full file synchronization, 500 MB per month of storage space and SSL data encryption.

 

                          

                                                                     

 

* There is no financial compensation for this blog.

Thanks,
David Chao
The Web Conferencing Expert

Xobni Product Review for Email Management

 

Bill Gates called Xobni, "The next generation of social networking."

I have read about Xobni, inbox spelled backwards, in a variety of product reviews but never had the chance to download it and give it a try. There are just too many cool applications to try but with enough word of mouth, I finally decided to try Xobni.

Sooo impressive!

It was a super easy download process with a quick MSFT Outlook reboot. (Just an Outlook plug-in.) Xobni then automatically indexed my email folders. From the Xobni side bar, I access my email analytics. Very slick!

Xobni creates a profile for every person that emails you. Within the profile contains information like relationship stats, contact info, social connections, threaded conversations and shared attachments.  So if I can't remember the name of a document but remember who sent it to me, I simply pull up the person's profile in the Xobni side bar and locate the document in the "Files Exchanged" section. The same is true for email exchanges. If I can remember either the person I had the email exchange with or can remember keywords of the conversation, Xobni will do a comprehensive email search to help find the threaded email communication. (The Xobni search piece works like Google Desktop and very effective.)

Another interesting email analytic that Xobni provides is the time of day when you are most productive with inbound/outbound emails, what these ratios are, as well as, how responsive people are and when they tend to reply back to your emails. I can also see when my emails peak during a given day, week or month and who sends me the most emails in that timeframe.

Xobni is also integrated with Linkedin.com, Facebook, Yahoo email, Hoovers and Skype. This is where the social networking aspect of Xobni comes into play. I can promote updates on my Linkedin profile, allow people to see new pictures I added to Facebook, look up company information from Hoovers all from the Xobni Profile that was created. I can also quickly check to see if the person has a profile on any of these sites and if they do, quickly add them as a connection.

Overall, Xobni is a great application to have. If you have issues with email management, want to capture back countless hours of searching for information that you never end up finding, download Xobni now!

Xobni Video Intro:
http://www.xobni.com/learnmore/

Interesting Xobni Stats:

·         232.5B corporate emails sent and received daily, 72% are spam

·         133 emails sent and received per day by corporate users

·         701M corporate mailboxes worldwide

·         MSFT Exchange has 59% market share in corporate email

·         Next four years companies will spend $17B in email software

·         Enterprise email costs an average of $435.85 per user per year

 

 

* There is no financial compensation for this blog.

 

Ribbit Telephony and Salesforce.com

Ribbit, an internet startup company that specilized in telephony services, has integrated its telephony solution with Salesforce.com's CRM application. With this integration, users can push voicemails from their cell phones into SFA and attach the voice mails to a specific customer record/opportunity/activity. Voice messages can be converted into text for greater efficiency compared to typing in notes. Voice messages can also be searched by keywords.

Customers can opt to use their own cell phone or make outbound calls within SFA via Ribbit's software-based phone. This provides flexibility to customers.

Ribbit is priced at $25 per user per month. This includes unlimited voice messaging, storage and inbound calls to the software-based phone, and five voice to text transciptions. Voice to text transcriptions is an additional $10 per user per month for 40 messages. Unlimited ouotbound calling in the US through Ribbit's online phone is $15 per user per month.

The Ribbit application is still in beta across some 70 different companies. Learn more about Amphibian by clicking on the "Watch the Amphilbian Video."

Thanks,
David Chao
The Web Conferencing Expert