CRM Update – Feb 29 : 4:04 pm

Here’s my ‘live’ FAQ with all the Windows 8 Consumer Preview, Windows Server 8 beta and Visual Studio “11″ tidbits from my contacts and around the Web.

1. Properly Identify Your Audience
Before you commit yourself to a select group of invites, make sure you’ve considered every possible source.For instance, while email mailing lists offer a solid starting point for your online survey, make sure you’re looking at the various online communities and potential newsgroups that could directly influence your niche.
2. Keep your email invitations personalized
Ensure your emails contain a personalized greeting, over the generic templates available. By personalizing your emails, you’re showing your target you care about them enough to write their names…

Gorilla of daily deals expanding in Asia
Groupon has officially launched Groupon Thailand making a concerted effort to expand in Asia. All customers need to do is to log into mygroupon.co.th, choose English or Thai and let the good times roll. Right now, in order to promote the new launch, Groupon will be offering one lucky winner the Ultimate Groupon Experience:
An incredible all expense paid weekend trip for two in Hong Kong. That’s worth about $1300! The Raffle winner will be announced on Groupon’s Facebook fanpage and personally contacted by Groupon Thailand’s CEO on Wednesday, February 29th…

Facebook Timeline has arrived for brand Pages. As expected, it’s a radical departure from what brands are used to on the network. The update incorporates a plethora of new features for Page administrators to take advantage of. But there will be a learning curve, and plenty of trial-and-error along the way.
So the question is: Will Timeline help or hurt brands?
Mashable recently sought out an expert to learn more. Ian Schafer is founder and CEO of Deep Focus, a highly regarded interactive marketing and social media agency…

Jim Belosic is the CEO of ShortStack, a self-service social media platform that allows users to create custom Facebook tabs. Its easy-to-use interface provides small businesses, individuals, graphic designers, agencies, and corporations with the tools needed to build mini-websites within their Facebook pages.
Facebook has officially announced Timeline for brand pages after dangling the carrot in front of page admins for some time now. The pages will be pushed live to everyone on March 30, but for now, you have some time to preview the new look and review your page before the changes take effect…

Get the most out of your loyalty program.

Mobile commerce has come for America’s favorite cookies.
Forget the cash or checks the next time a friendly neighborhood Girl Scout rings your doorbell. Girl Scout Troops in 23 States can now accept mobile payments.
So before those legendary thin mints can pass through your taste buds, they must first pass though Sage North America’s mobile payments platform.
On Tuesday, the company announced a partnership with numerous Girl Scout Councils to deliver mobile payments as an option for cookie sales…

The Handbrake Project has announced an update to its open-source, cross-platform video transcoding utility. Handbrake 0.9.6 includes new and updated codecs, improved filters and demuxers, a new “Normal” preset promising faster transcoding times and improvements detecting DVD discs.
There are also a number of platform-specific changes, including various user interface tweaks spanning Windows, OS X and Linux. OS X users also lose support for DVD encryption using VLC 2.0 due to a lack of support from the latter…

Not since Windows XP has Microsoft promised so much and delivered it so quickly. Today, in Barcelona, Spain, Microsoft officially announced what we all knew was coming: Windows 8 Consumer Preview. The software is available for anyone to download and try, and its timing almost certainly assures — short of atomic blast, alien invasion or Mayan end-of-the-world predictions come true — that Windows 8 will release to manufacturing by end of summer and launch in time for holiday PC sales.
Microsoft has greatly improved the look, feel and functionality of Windows 8 since releasing the Developer Preview in September…

Keeping motivation high in a start-up is important everyday, but it’s especially crucial during crunch-time. Here’s how to keep people going when the going gets tough.Every start-up comes to a point where things aren’t going so well. The equipment needed didn’t arrive, the product development schedule is late, or the marketing campaign launched…and the phone didn’t immediately start ringing off the hook. Or perhaps things are going so well that the team is exhausted, working lots of ramen-noodle-and-Redbull-fueled nights for little pay…

Dan decided to buy a SquareTrade warranty for his iPhone because, unlike AppleCare, SquareTrade also covers damage to the phone at a good price. This warranty turned out to be a wise investment, since he dropped the phone and cracked the screen. When the replacement phone stopped working, he called them up for another replacement before noticing that the glass was cracked. No more free replacement. How sad.

I chose to warranty my iPhone 4 through SquareTrade, rather than Applecare, because SquareTrade provided breakage insurance at a competitive price…

When it comes to murmurs of Best Buy doing anything that could benefit its customers, we keep our skeptical hats firmly on until they actually prove they’re not totally terrible. In this case, there have been rumblings that they’ll extend their return policy to 30 days, from 14.

TUAW.com (via MacRumor) says they’ve heard from a Best Buy insider, who says not only will the return policy be extended starting March 4, but the store will also match prices for 30 days as well.

All products would be included in the new rule, including iPhones, iPads and other Apple products…

Z picked up and moved to a new city for work, and rented a room in a three-bedroom house with an out-of-town landlord. He found the rental on Craigslist. Not his dream home, but not so bad either. Until he came home from a conference and found that the landlord came to visit, and stayed in the house. With all three bedrooms rented out, where did she crash? Z’s room, of course, which she also rummaged through and rearranged the furniture.

So I move to a new area because of my job and start looking for housing…

With Facebook Timeline‘s takeover of personal profiles complete, the social networking giant is unleashing its latest greatest invention upon brand Pages, too.
Facebook announced on Wednesday morning that Timeline is now live for the first time for some organizations that use Pages. Mashable got the lowdown on what brands can expect in a briefing at the company’s Menlo Park headquarters earlier this week.
Much like with profiles, the new platform has the potential for real design beauty, but with the added bonus of multiple publicly-known storylines and angles to draw from…

Multimedia specialist MAGIX has released Photo Manager MX Deluxe, the latest edition of its photo workflow package, extending the program’s already ridiculously lengthy feature list with some worthwhile new additions.
If you’re looking to create a panorama, for instance, the new montage tool will automatically combine, position and crossfade up to eight individual images, variously correcting for lens distortions, perspective and other issues to produce the best possible panorama. That’s the idea, anyway; our initial tests weren’t always successful, but did show the tool is capable of some impressive results…

I’m writing this article on a Windows 8 tablet. Thankfully, I’ve got a wireless keyboard and mouse as well as a dock to help the Samsung developer tablet act more like a regular PC. Microsoft made the Windows 8 Consumer Preview available this morning to everyone who wants to check it out. It was also kind enough to give Mashable a sneak peek.
What exactly is a consumer preview? I can tell you this: It definitely means it’s not ready for general release. It’s been a challenge trying to separate issues that are due to the inherent bugginess of a pre-release, changes that I’m just not used to, and things that are real problems…

If you’ve got a door that sticks when you try to close it, there are better ways to deal with it than slamming it in anger or cursing at it when it refuses to close all the way. You could go the textbook route and remove the door, sand it and remount it, or you could just try a simple trick that could save you all that work.

An old Yahoo Voices post recommends loosening the top screw of the top hinge a quarter turn. By giving the door a little extra wiggle room, it just might shut normally without protest…

The details of this year’s Software Satisfaction Awards have been announced, and we’ve just entered.
We won the Award for Best Small Business CRM System in 2008 and 2010, with second places in 2009 and 2011. On that basis, we’re due to win it again in 2012!
The competition kicks off on 1st May with the final winners announced on 18th October.

Some things are just fine if you leave them unattended for less than a minute. Like, an apple, or a cat, or even a hammer. But a metal detector at an airport security checkpoint? Nope, you shouldn’t leave that alone when people are walking through it. Tell that to the TSA agents at the Sacramento International Airport.

The Transportation Security Administration had to shut down a terminal at the airport over the weekend, citing a security breach, says KCRA News. Flights were grounded for an hour, because four ticketed passengers and one airport employee waltzed through the abandoned metal detector…

If you’re waiting for home prices to start going up before you sell your house, feel free to keep waiting. As of December, house prices were still slipping, reaching their lowest levels in five years according to one index.

According to the L.A. Times, the Standard & Poor’s/Case-Shiller index — which tracks home prices in large American cities — found that prices in December slipped 1.1 percent from November and four percent from the previous year. Of the 20 cities included in the index, only two reported price upticks…

Avaya Communications Outsourcing Solutions provides multivendor, custom-managed services for large businesses.

Refinancing at today’s microscopic rates can build you a cash-flow cushion that could save your bacon one day. What are you waiting for?Interest rates are at lows you may never see again in your lifetime. Make no mistake: This is a gift. It’s a once-in-a-generation opportunity to improve your cash flow by, among other things, refinancing your mortgage. I’m encouraging my clients to grab this chance whenever it makes sense for them.As a business owner, however, you know full well that your business finances and personal finances are tied together…

Twenty years ago, if you were dissatisfied with a company’s product or business practices, you’d probably stop buying from them. You might write an angry letter. You might even tell your friends and family (a whopping 25 people, at best) not to patronize that business.
But the game has changed with social media. While one angry tweet may not make much impact, the web allows customers to find and connect with like-minded parties. Critical mass has never been more within consumers’ reach…

“Our records indicate that you have elected not to receive the AT&T directory currently being delivered,” said the tag left on Chris’s doorknob. This is correct. He has requested to not receive any phone books whatsoever, from any phone company, for the last three years. AT&T doesn’t believe him, though, so they left him some phone books just in case.

Chris writes:

I have visited http://www.yellowpagesoptout.com/ on a yearly basis for the last 3 years and yet I continue to get yellow pages…

Are you being asked to prove the value of social media for your business?Do you struggle to accurately measure the return on investment (ROI) of your social media marketing?You’re not alone. Several new research studies reveal that marketing managers are under increased pressure to show measurable results from their social media efforts.But these same managers indicate that measuring the returns is one of their top two challenges for 2012.See how your experience compares to others in the industry…

If you’re having a house built, you’re in for a heck of a lot more charges than your down payment, closing costs and mortgage payments. To shape your new home into something livable, you’ll need to go out and buy things that you might normally take for granted.

Moolanomy identifies some hidden expenses in new houses:

* Landscaping. Unless you’re going for the dirt chic look, you’ll need to spruce up your yard with an assortment of structures and vegetation that make it hospitable to visitors…

BARCELONA — Microsoft Windows Phone has, by some estimates, just 2% of the smartphone market. However, Microsoft execs talking to Mashable at Mobile World Congress were smiling and partying and said that they’re exactly where they need to be. Perhaps that’s because they know better than anyone else just how far Windows Phone has already come.
Market recognition and prominence is a tough mountain to climb for any company, but imagine if, before you started your ascent, you had to dig a hole almost as deep as the mountain is high, and then start your climb…

Apple swiftly popped the ever-expanding bubble of Apple iPad 3 speculation with a single email invitation. Next week, the Cupertino company will unveil what most people believe is the iPad 3. It is, quite honestly, a relief. No more guessing games or wild ideas—OK, maybe a week more of wild ideas—but the end is in sight. For Apple though, this is the official beginning of a new era and, as I see it, the 36-year-old company’s biggest test ever.
The story of Apple has been, for all intents and purposes, the story of Steve Jobs…

In Apple‘s third major privacy flaw revelation this month, app developers have told The New York Times that they can easily access private photos on your iPhone, iPad or iPod touch.
App developers told the publication that after you download an app, it can easily copy your entire photo library without telling you. Apple doesn’t block app developers from copying photos, but the company screens all the apps that appear in its App Store. Apple reps could not be reached for comment on the report…

Hello All, I’m trying to do a research on Monthly Traffic Reports, the various metrics the report should hold. What are the metrics which the report users are