- Nothing like a Monday doing a migration to an IBM foundations server #
Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-08-08
August 8th, 2010 at 2:33 am
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Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-08-01
August 1st, 2010 at 2:33 am
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- A couple of us from Eligeo will be helping #brownbaggingit at the #sunandsalsa festival tomorrow..early morning ahead #
- Camped out at my barricade to help vendors find their spot at the #sunandsalsa festival #
- http://tweetphoto.com/34856654 streets of Kensington being cleared for festival #yyc #
1st Annual Eligeo Ball Hockey Tournament
July 30th, 2010 at 6:51 pm
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|
An invitation from
Dexterity Consulting to join Eligeo & Scouts Canada – Chinook Council |
 Saturday August 28th, 2010, at the
1st Annual
Eligeo Ball Hockey Tournament Fundraiser supporting Scouts Canada
Proceeds from this exciting event go towards scholarships for children to attend summer camps and other Scouts programs. so ensure that you register early! Location
Date & Time
Saturday, August 28th, 2010
Registration begins at 8:30AM / Games start at 9AM Finals 3:30PM/ Awards 4PM
All players must be at least 18 years of age.
Food and Beverages There will be a BBQ on-site during the event including refreshments, food and desserts. (Please note that alcoholic beverages are strictly forbidden during the tournament.)
What To Bring Each Team Must Provide Their Own Equipment. It’s recommended that participants and fans bring foldable chairs for the event.
Fans are encouraged to paint faces, Jerseys Teams are encouraged to come prepared with their own set of jerseys or t-shirts. For many of our businesses participating in the tournament this will be a great opportunity to represent your company.
To Register with cheque: |
 |
|
If you can’t join us
but know someone who lives for ball hockey, feel free to forward this invitation to them. The more the merrier, and all for a great cause.
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Don’t want to play,
but still want to attend?
Volunteer Opportunities Available Team registration For more information about volunteering, please contact Meredith Petrie with Scouts Canada
at 403-283-4993 or email mpetrie@scouts.ca
|
The Scouts Canada – Chinook Council’s mission is to contribute to the education of young people, through a value system based on the Scout Promise and Law, to help build a better world where people are
self-fulfilled as individuals and play a constructive role in society.
If you’re unable to join us on August 28th
but would like to make a donation to the Scouts,
you can do so by clicking here
Spam Fighting in the Cloud
July 26th, 2010 at 5:10 pm
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At Eligeo IT we’ve recently built some really important relationships with a lot of key vendors including our most recent in that last few months with Panda Security. Panda has a really impressive spam protection solution that has tagged along with the likes of other Saas pioneers on the Internet. Their product is Panda Email Protection and it simply rocks.
For us system administrators out there it is nice to be able to install a remarkable spam solution and not have to purchase any hardware for it. You simply purchase your licenses from Panda and then your email is filtered through Panda’s servers and then re-directed to your mail server all clean. Pretty slick hey?
Postini, owned by Google, is another service that has been existence for some time and provides identical features. The nice thing with Panda’s offering is that they bundle it within a wide variety of anti-virus and end point solutions for our business customers.
With Panda you’re receiving:
- Spam protection through their servers
- End point / Firewall protection through the Cloud
- Anti-Virus / Malware protection managed through the Cloud
And it’s cheap! It won’t cost you an arm and a leg. The anti-virus solution starts at $26.75 per computer and then spam protection isn’t too much over and above that as well.
Panda certainly is onto something simply and easy to use.
How can you help your community?
July 25th, 2010 at 4:06 am
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I just finished tweeting for the first time in several weeks and it reminded me of a lot of things that we do at Eligeo. We just finished a successful seminar in conjunction with our partners at IBM last week and we had a bit on the “who’s who” of Eligeo and we talked a lot about our volunteering commitments. If you know me then you’ll know that I have a strong sense of loyalty to supporting those in my community and I’ve become very involved with a variety of groups in Calgary. One of them that I hold dearest is Brown Bagging for Calgary’s Kids who were the ones who really got us going on this path of philanthropy which has changed my view (and those that work for me) in a very positive way.
During our seminar I had presented our video from when we won the 2010 Leaders in Employee Volunteering Award with Volunteer Calgary. This was really special since it was the first time we won an award and it was for something that has changed our business but I’m hoping it has changed the way our partners, clients and competitors work in our community.
Here is the video clip once again from this past April:
This was a very special night for us as it re-enforced what we’ve been doing and what we need to continue doing. We haven’t stopped since April as we’ve now done work for the South Calgary Colts Football Association and we’re also getting ready to host our first annual Ball Hockey tournament later in August. This will benefit our friends at Scouts Canada – Chinook Council who have a goal to reach by the end of August to help them raise enough money to help children go to camp where they never would have had the chance before.
I know it isn’t something that is done a lot when it comes to small business but I think that if people can look at our small business and see what we’ve done they can see it is possible. We do cash donations, but our main focus is helping our charities in ways that can help them get funding or just assistance. We’ve helped make lunches with Brown Bagging for Calgary’s Kids, we’ve worked with organizations to secure grants and we’ve put in time to help others in many other financial ways.
I still give him credit and anytime he asks me to do anything I always jump at the opportunity. A true leader in Calgary is Bob McInnis who’s really inspired me to do more in our community and he’s probably one of the kindest men I’ve ever met in my life. If you ever get an opportunity to have a word with Bob, you’ll walk away with a renewed view on life without a doubt.
Anyways, what spurred this posting was that I’ll be helping supporting Brown Bagging for Calgary’s Kids tomorrow (Sunday) at the Sun & Salsa festival as a Street Marshall. Proceeds of the event will be divided up between a couple of charities including BB4CK.
I’ve been a bit slow on the posting but believe me I have about 10 drafts sitting here but they are not complete. They are sure to come soon.
What is your database worth?
July 5th, 2010 at 10:13 pm
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Have you ever thought about the value of your database? I had a good discussion with one of our clients today about the value of their database and how much it is worth to them. He basically said that his business is nothing if he doesn’t have his database and it is the reason that they are jam packed this summer when typically their industry slows down in the summer months. So how do you calculate the value of your database?
So I went out to Google some information on database worth and came across this article by Sarah Michel. She’s answering the exact same question I’m posing and it is the value of your database. According to IBM and a report in they released they found that each contact in your business database is worth $948 every year. I’ll be honest, for a lot of us it all depends on the contact and it can go up or down depending on the value but if we used this figure for argument sake, let’s say the following scenario:
1. Business with 200,000 Contacts that are contacted once a year to promote services to (service oriented businesses such as cleaning, duct-cleaning, plumbing..etc)
- 200,000 Contacts
- Average value of $948 according to IBM
- Value of $189,600,000
OK…then again that calculation might not be so accurate after all! But I will use a simple formula that I pulled together on a whim here since I didn’t think that $948 really makes sense when trying to calculate a value for your contact database.
Let’s try a different scenario and calculation:
1. Business with 200,000 contacts but only 2,500 actual sales are made.
- 200,000 Database Contacts
- 2,500 Actual sales made
- 1,000,000 in revenue
There are two ways of looking at it:
Each database contact is worth $5 and the other way of looking at it is that your 2,500 customers who purchased are worth $400 each. But I would say that if it takes 200,000 contacts in your database to generate 2,500 sales then the actual value of your database is $5 for every contact in it. See where I am going? The theory is that the more contacts and touch points you make with your clientele can help you increase the value of your database. The flaw with my calculation unfortunately is that you could have 10 contacts in your database and have revenues of 1,000,000 therefore making each contact a value of $100,000!
Regardless I hope you’re seeing my point in the fact that your database is worth a lot and sometimes it is the greatest asset in your company. If you ever decide to sell your business you need to take into account this value. As my client told me today without their database, they’d have nothing.
Identifying your needs for a CRM prosuct
July 2nd, 2010 at 9:53 pm
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One of the questions that a lot of mine customers ask has to do with when is the right time to purchase a CRM product. I think that answer is simple in that you need one the day you open your business.
Maybe you don’t need to have a full fledged Salesforce.com but you definitely something to capture data on your customer base. Many retail clients end up purchasing a comprehensive POS system to help them manage their business which also includes a robust CRM app. Others, such as consultants, may start off using spreadsheets or their contact manager in their email program. Regardless of what you use it is important to get something to help you get the most of your data.
So to start off look at many of the freely available CRM’s to help get your business off the ground and going. There are many options so make sure that you do your due diligence to get things in order.
We are surrounded by information and data
June 29th, 2010 at 6:58 pm
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I remember back in University when we had to describe the difference between information and data. For most people they probably can’t define it but if you were doing anything with statistics or any computer science related field you will have surely come across this.
For those that don’t know what it means here is my definition: Data is the actual raw data that we receive and utilize to produce information that is more relevant to us such as graphs, charts and summarized information.
We are absolutely surrounded by raw data in today’s world. Just think about it for a second and take a look at the computer you are using at this very moment. There are logs being recorded as you read this blog post just in case something crashes and you’re friendly local I.T. guy needs to fix and diagnose the computer. There is tons of information on our computers, iPhone’s, BlackBerry’s and just about every other device out there to help us track what’s going on with our systems and how we use them.
Actually, it’s kind of scary when you think about it. You’re every move and every window you open is being tracked. Over a decade ago we were just starting to take a hold of all of the computer systems that we have around us and now every person you see walking by you likely has a cell phone or mobile device that is collecting data. Conspiracy believers will tell you that the Government is watching you through a combination of GPS and Cell phone towers. Others will tell you that you better watch what you type over text message because it simply could read by someone who picked up their friends cell phone before they got the message.
My point is that we are flooded with data. The trick is taking all of this data that is relevant to your business and using it in a meaningful manner. I’m not saying for malicious intent, and if it is for malicious intent you should probably go to jail, but if it is with the approval and acceptance of your customers then take advantage of this.
Whether it is Twitter, Facebook, customers walking into your store, how many times the phone rings or whatever it could be, this is all very important information that you should utilize for your business.
I’ve talked about KPI’s before and yes some of this data can be used to create your Key Performance Indicators while some of it may just be to help improve a subset of your business. A great CRM package can likely pull in a lot of the data that is out there and make sense of it.
If budget is an issue and you’re trying to find a quick way to interpret information then almost everybody with Microsoft Office likely has MS Access. This is a pretty powerful tool if you’re looking to organize data and produce quick reports on it.
Don’t let data go to waste. Turn it into valuable information so that you can apply your business into a whole new setting. Most customers will gladly provide details about their business to you as long as their is a benefit to them. One of the best things is asking your customer “When is your birthday so that we can send you a card”.
Find what works for you and I guarantee you will see your referral business shoot up or you might just find yourselves targeting a whole new segment of customers since you found out through your data that the customers you are acquiring are really nothing like the ones you “thought” you were going after.
Salesforce VS Microsoft – The Patent Battles
June 28th, 2010 at 2:50 pm
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I’ve been a bit quiet the last couple of days after a nice trip down to Fort Langley, BC for a short camping trip and family reunion. Back on the horse now!
I woke up this morning to see on my Google Alerts to see that Salesforce is going after Microsoft. I am going to come out and say it – I love the patent battles. I think a lot of these patent battles are silly but many are warranted. I still think about the “one click” patent that Amazon secured some years ago. These are the hindrance patents that I think stop business from evolving properly.
If you follow Research in Motion you’ll see that they are at the forefront of many patent fights related to wireless technology. Jim Balsillie often refers to how busy the U.S. Patent Office is and it is why so many “broad” type patents make it through because they are so overwhelmed.
Anyways, back to SF and MS. This is actually a countersuit to Microsoft’s suit alleging that Salesforce had infringed upon 9 different patents related to a variety of things including Windows Server, .NET and other technologies. Salesforce is now fighting back saying that MS has infringed on 5 of their own patents through the same products.
Now, I wouldn’t want to be in a battle with Microsoft regarding patents. It seems they go for the throat when it comes to other busineses and while Salesforce isn’t a small player it is quite small in comparison to Microsoft. The longer Microsoft drags out these cases the more it hurts a lot of these players who are trying to protect themselves.
On the flip side. You have to protect your rights and if you’ve acquired a patent for your invention then I absolutely agree to fight for it. And I’m no lawyer but I know this stuff can get messy and while most patent cases are settled financially I just don’t think Microsoft is out looking for money.
Anyways, that’s my 2 cents. I hope everyone has a great start to the week.
Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-06-27
June 27th, 2010 at 2:33 am
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- Those brazilians can sure move that ball #
- Some really exciting projects coming along. It's a really cool feeling to help businesses take advantage of new technology #
- Well so much for the. iOS 4 upgrade, I don't notice too much but I guess I just need to wIt for new apps #
- It always amazes me at how insanely busy tim hostile is #
