New Ways to Sell?

Lately, I’ve been looking for a customer relationship management (CRM) for the company that I work for and I’ve noticed some techniques that companies use to sell their products. Since there are many CRMs out there, one of my first steps would be to compare CRMs to see which ones are better. While I was trying to compare Salesforce and SugarCRM, I saw this site: http://www.worketc.com/compare

WORKetc is another company that sells their own CRM and noticed how in that table, they were the only CRM to have ‘perfect’ in every categories. Thinking back, isn’t SalesForce and SugarCRM the one and two most popular CRM right now? How can they be so poorly rated and be so popular at the same time? Oh. The comparisons were made by the company, WORKetc that gave themselves perfect and they are using this comparison as their selling point.

While searching for different CRMs, I found it quite difficult to get a more fair and useful comparisons. The example I showed above shows bias but other comparisons often do not show the pros/cons towards the features that I require. On top of all the difficulties I have in choosing, because I entered some of my data to watch a demo on Salesforce.com, I have had their sales people calling and emailing me daily to get my attention. While I appreciate the fact that Salesforce is serious about their customers, I find it annoying by being bugged repeatedly. Also, I find Salesforce’s website hard to understand. It took me a very long time to figure out how their products integrate (say Sales Cloud and Force.com). Force.com’s development page was just as difficult which would make development even harder when it’s so hard to find what you’re looking for. Perhaps of their difficult website, this is why Salesforce’s sales are calling repeatedly telling that I need their guidance.

HTML5!

Since people at work are consistently talking about HTML5, I was pretty curious and I spent some time looking into the stuff. I have to say, I was VERY impressed. I was looking at this site:

http://www.htmlfivewow.com/slide1

There’s a lot of very amazing features and all the API is already available. If you go on to slide 19 of that link above, there is a drag and drop where you can upload and download files. It seems like most of the stuff is done through JavaScript. I am definitely going to try to do something in the near future on HTML5. I really want to test out all those amazing features myself. I think I am concern about is that depending on which browser the user is using, the HTML5 feature may not be supported. In the mean time, seems like Chrome has the upper hand on these features but I may be bias. I really hope that this is something to be changed in the future!

Other sites that I saw:

http://diveintohtml5.org/ – Good read if you haven’t read about HTML5 before

http://html5-demos.appspot.com/static/html5-whats-new/template/index.html#1 – Some cool features. Note that the slides sliding template is from this: http://code.google.com/p/html5slides/

http://www.html5rocks.com/en/ -

Finally got Google+!

Yay, I finally got Google+. When I first signed in, it was asking me to give up my permissions to my photos? I didn’t read it fully but isn’t this the same reason why Facebook is consistently being criticized? Anyways, since there are not that many users on Google+ right now, I don’t find it very useful right now. Perhaps in the next bit, we will see more users coming from Facebook to Google+ or using both. One thing I really like about Facebook is that almost all of the users use their real name instead of a random username. This makes it so much easier connect with my friends. If Google+ does become the new social media site for the future, I cannot imagine how much we’re going to rely on Google in the future. Right now, it’s being used heavily for web searching, email, youtube etc… This goes back to my previous post, what happens if you lose your Google account? How would that affect you? I still haven’t had a good chance to figure out how to use all of Google+ features yet so I’ll update on my thoughts about it later.

Oh, one thing I do realize that Google+ is better than Facebook is G-Chat. I don’t know what’s going on with FB chat but it doesn’t work half the time.

PS. Does someone need an invite? Message me!

Awesome long weekend!

Not going to discuss about tech stuff this time but it’s always great to update this blog about myself! This past weekend, I took advantage of the long weekend (Happy 144th birthday, Canada) to head down to the US to watch Potlatch (Ultimate tourney) in Redmond, WA. It was nice to be in Redmond again and I really enjoyed the Cheesecake Factory in Bellevue. The best part of the weekend was definitely to enjoy the beautiful sunshine and watch UBC compete at the Big Muckamuck tournament that also happened at Potlatch. For those that are out of the loop, the Big Muckamuck is a tournament that consists of college teams represented by their alumni. I still have at least 2 years of school left so I did not play for UBC this weekend. It was definitely nice to see alumni from the last decade or so play for the team!

I also went to see the Boeing Tour at Everett and I have to say I was a little disappointed. For the steep price of $20, I was expecting a little more. I am pretty interested in aviation but just telling us facts about the 777, 787 etc… aren’t enough. I wish they covered more about previous airplanes and how they got to where they are today. Also, my tour had a lot of people where I found it difficult to find a spot to see the airplanes at times and hearing what the tour guide was saying. Maybe I’m not really that interested in just Boeing airplanes but more interested in the history of airplanes and more in depth information on what makes airplane fly in the sky so smoothly. An interesting fact was that Boeing does not deliver airplanes, companies have to send their own pilots to pick up the new airplanes!

Lastly, anyone got an extra Google+ invite to spare? I would love to check out what it’s really about! Is this going to be the new Facebook that some people are saying or a very optimistic opinion?