I am now working with the team over at Adesso Systems and the product they are building Tubes (www.tubesnow.com). Check it out some time as a great way to share information and resources with your friends. Lots of people are really liking it. Over the next few weeks I will be posting more about what we are doing and how it can help people.

When it comes to sharing ideas and information with others, one thing that should be very critical to all of us is the security of the information in our computers, and security of information over the network. It is my understanding that Windows Vista is going to be doing more to help keep information on your computer secure from unauthorized users. But it bears some serious watching.

Also, reading this article Secret Doors, Microsoft says not, China says maybe can lead one to be very concerned about PCs made in China including chips designed by the Chinese government. The important thing is that the Chinese are not even tell the manufacturers what all those chips do.

Building and growing a relationship with your customers

Email is now working as an excellent tool to build and grow relationships with customers and clients. Recently Ellen Byron of the Wall Street Journal (Nov. 23, 2005 Page B1) wrote an informative article showing how effective emails have become as a business tool for a number of retail companies. Here are some interesting facts I found helpful from the article.

Retailers are getting more effective in using email by creating messages that offer compelling and interesting information along with promotional offers. They are able to create an execute targeted campaigns that drive results. For example the article talked about how J. Crew's was able to directly boost the sales online of winter coats last year when winter struck a large part of the country and J. Crew sent out email messages highlighting their coats online. They saw sales jump up directly that day.

The article also said that the Gap is cutting back on celebrity filled TV ads. They have shifted the money to online promotions and magazines. The Gap had been spending some $26 million on ads in November and December and when they tested the effectiveness, there was not a significant increase in store traffic. Instead the Gap is moving to email because the cost is so low and there is direct tracking of use and effectiveness.

The costs of email campaigns are reported to be averaging about 2 cents per message, once you have a database and a tracking service.

Some average numbers reported indicate that the email messages work. On average consumers open 33% of the messages. They ask to unsubscribe at an annual rate of 9%, and the readers click through to your web site about 11% of the time. This information is from Forester Research and their interviews with 137 online retailers. So using the average numbers, with an email campaign the cost of getting visitor to the web site is 18 cents (Cost for 1000 messages is $20.00 and that would drive 110 visits or 18 cents per visit).

One key issue is that your messages need to have interesting and meaningful content if you are looking to grow your customer relationship. If the messages you are sending out do not have any value for customers, that is going to negatively impact your unsubscribe rate and the rate at which people just ignore your messages.

Few retailers see emails replacing catalogs. Rather they are being used to supplement the catalog and motivate quick action.

One key step is to segment your mailing database into key customer groups that have similar needs and interests so your email messages are targeted and meaningful for that segment. Also, very helpful for a number of merchants is to keep track of past purchases and use that to help refine and focus your database segmentation.

With email marketing, you have a great way to drive focused and immediate buying actions from your customers, if you know their interests and are able to deliver them relevant and interesting messages.

Ray Ozzie has added a blog entry for some work they are doing and sharing on extending RSS to enable sharing and syncing of information. I think a number of you may see that this is a updated extension of the work done to implement Groove and Lotus Notes, but done in a simple way that applications can use it the same way they use RSS. One important change here , is that since everything in RSS-SSE is done in XML it will make it the interchange of information between applications much easier than way Groove and Lotus Notes locked you into one way to do things.

Many interesting ideas there to consider for future applications. Let me know what you think.

Also here is an article in eWeek discussing the ideas here.

(Not sure how MS will make any business off this, but it looks like a reasonable way to go.)

One of the challenges for users of applications and creators of applications is how to charge and pay for the applications. CNET has an interesting article pointing out that businesses are less and less willing to pay upfront large fees to buy and deploy applications.

(CNET article Here)

The author has a number of examples of companies concerned about large up front fees, and instead going to use software on a pay as you go basis, with ASP applications like SalesForce.com as an example. That is one approach. I think a more valuable long term approach is for companies to pay for applications on a per user basis and not have only a small charge per server. All these enterprise applications going for large upfront fees are not giving companies the flexibility they need. For example the Dicodemy GForce application has a straight per user fee, and their is no server or enterprise charges involved. The reason some people like the ASP model for applications is that they only pay per user. However, with the ASP model you are giving control of your critical company data to an outside organization. A better solution is to allow you to run the application and services inside your organization, but only pay per user.

One of the people who contributes a broad range of ideas for software enabling people to work together is Ray Ozzie, who is now over at Microsoft working for Bill Gates as a CTO. Ray has started a new blog here (http://spaces.msn.com/members/rayozzie/PersonalSpace.aspx) to share some of his current ideas on software directions at Microsoft. It is a spot I will be watching to see what is new and coming down pipe for improving the future of great software applications.

One of the area that is of interest to a number of teams is how to effectively share contact information among the team members. This is also particularly a challenge for small or medium sized organizations that are working in distributed environments. One way to do that is Groove, (now part of Microsoft). However, Groove by itself does not do enough in this area.

I have been working with the team at Dicodemy (www.dicodemy.net) where there is now a solid application for sharing contact information, company profiles, tracking sales opportunities, having a team calendar and sharing follow up action items. The team has built a windows application that integrates with Groove using Groove Web Services (GWS) to enable you to easily share securely information among the team members.

With the application GForce.CRM and Groove every team member has local access to all the key information on their PC, and at the same time it is being kept in sync with all the other team members. This makes it very easy for me to work when and where I need with my key information always available to me, while keeping the rest of the team up to date on what is going on.