RussellMasters

Recovering photo data from accidental fi

russellmasters — Fri, 21 May 2010 21:08:29 +0000

Recovering photo data from accidental file deletion in photo booth for mac http://ht.ly/1Omyn

russellmasters — Sat, 01 May 2010 21:17:17 +0000

Google Docs & Outlook 2007 = Harmony for Google Docs – As an avid user of both Google Docs from the Google Apps sui… http://ow.ly/17eLEM

Google Apps sync now supports syncing sh

russellmasters — Wed, 21 Apr 2010 19:30:50 +0000

Google Apps sync now supports syncing shared Google Apps Calendars & new Sync status window – Now you can share Outlook Calendars with teams

Gmail Calendar Invitations – Share your Free/Busy info

russellmasters — Sun, 18 Apr 2010 02:29:01 +0000

Google Apps mail and Gmail (Essentially the same thing) has a very cool new feature for inviting friends and clients to meetings and events.When you compose an email message, there’s now an “Insert: Invitation” link right under the subject line. Now what actually makes this very cool is that if the recipient has shared their calendar, either public or to you directly then you will be able to see their Free/Busy schedule from the popup Invitation box… Right from within your email.

The first thing the recipient needs to do is share their calendar with you or make their calendar public. As far as I can see making a calendar public (Free/Busy details only) has no negative impacts as it is not searchable by Google.

Referenced from: http://www.google.com/support/calendar/bin/answer.py?answer=139970

Now when you click “Insert Invitation”

A small window appears that displays your availability as well as that of the person or people you’re emailing. You can check both calendars and pick a time that would probably suit both of you. When you’ve decided on the most appropriate time and date for the event, click the “Insert Invitation” button and a preview of the invitation will appear in your email message:

When you send the email, the event gets added to your calendar as well as to your friends’ calendar, pretty much just a standard Outlook Meeting request.

Posted via web from russellmasters @TeamSpark

Spark Consulting – Hacking up Yellow Pages with Youtube Videos

russellmasters — Sat, 17 Apr 2010 11:03:49 +0000

As an idea designer for Spark Consulting I am often looking at ways to get way outside the box so when looking at our advertising on Yellow Pages New Zealand it was inevitable that I would be dissatisfied with a bunch of boring text to describe me. After all I am a Website Marketing specialist known for innovative ideas in promoting businesses…
So without boring you anymore about who I am and what I do (although the stage needed to be set for this stunt) let me get into the topic of this blog.

Looking at the little rectangle box I was presented with when editing my business listing in the Yellow Pages self service area I was a little disappointed that I could not “jazz it up” a little and then thought “what would happen if I threw some html tags in. You guessed it, “Jazzed it up a little”.

Obviously things progressed from there until I had a nicely formatted advert complete with images and links to my website. Satisfied with that it wasn’t until quite a few days later that I suddenly had a thought “What if I dropped the embed code from a YouTube video into that little rectangle box?”.

I did just that and voila, there in my business listing was a fully functional promotional video telling potential customers exactly what Spark Consulting did and how we could help them.

So now you’re wondering, maybe I could do that? well you can and it is simple. Watch the video on YouTube (Hacking up Yellow Pages) and find out just how easy it is.

If a picture is worth a thousand words imagine what a promotional video in your listing would do.

Spark Consulting – Hacking up Yellow Pages with Youtube Videos

Posted via web from russellmasters @TeamSpark

Spark Consulting – Hacking up Yellow Pages with Youtube Videos

russellmasters — Sat, 17 Apr 2010 10:28:23 +0000

The quick video on embedding a Youtube Video into your Yellow Pages listing…

So now you’re wondering, maybe I could do that? well you can and it is simple. " target="_blank">Watch the video on YouTube (Hacking up Yellow Pages) and find out just how easy it is.

If a picture is worth a thousand words imagine what a promotional video in your listing would do.

Spark Consulting getsCloud with Solve360 CRM

russellmasters — Thu, 08 Apr 2010 10:40:31 +0000

A large part of my working life revolves around my role as a Cloud Application Consultant helping people “getCloud” This is a 3 step process of Discovery, Adoption and Direction, but one area which I have not been able to find that “Good Fit” for the varying needs of so many of my clients is in the area of CRM.

There are a whole bunch of online CRM applications and I believe I have tried a greater majority over the last 12 months. In all fairness the majority of them are fantastic, feature rich applications and a lot of them I just couldn’t quite put my finger on why they just didn’t fit my business. I have quite a few clients who have happily adopted SalesForce CRM or smaller products like Tactile, Highrise, Pipeline Deals as a good fit to their business with no second thoughts but have not been able to comfortably recommend a suitable app for a good many clients due to the lack of Application Agility.

It wasn’t until several weeks ago when I had the good fortune to stumble upon Solve360 from http://norada.com that I realised just what it was that held me back from committing to any of the previously tested CRM applications. I couldn’t fit my idea of how I want to work into the structured environment and it didn’t have a functional workspace environment to live in.

Solve360 imho defines cloud app agility in a user defined application, “plain english” you make Solve360 fit your workflow and sales process, you bend it twist it and shape to your will and then sit back and watch it do tricks. Then, if you are lucky enough to get some deeper insights into the customisation, usage of API and little tricks there is one big “Aha” moment.

One of the most critical areas often overlooked in the adoption of any data based application is the failure to simulate how it looks, feels and operates after months of data input. Does it still look clean and user friendly as it did when it was void of data? Is the data retrieval process work as well when there are hundreds of entries vs just a few dozen and does it scale as you grow?

So here’s a 60 second “Lets put it through its paces”

Setup was easy (pretty much no setup required for basic operation), linked contacts from my Google Apps account, search is good, filters are powerful, the customised fields I created are useable as filters. i.e Search for all contacts not viewed in the last 30 days who haven’t got any open projects and fit the custom tag of “New Clients”

All next actions, and calendar items are available in my Google calendar, what about my iPhone? I had to choose between native retrieval using the iPhone calendar or through Google calendar (I chose native as its faster than Googles sluggish calendar subscription retrieval

Project Blogs, now heres an area that got cluttered and messy quickly, even with the ability to drag and reorder. But hang on, you can add section header to any part of the blog and group a bunch of activites into a tidy collpased area. i.e Finish a months worth of tasks, add a section header called April, collapse it and carry on. 3 months of data or 3 years of data, it remains as clean as it did in the beginning.

Solve360 blends the concepts of CRM and Project Blogs into a private, versatile hub where sales, support, operations and clients team up and stay coordinated. Securely publish individual Project Blogs to anyone with an email address so they can stay up-to-date and collaborate with your team on specific projects.Prices start at $24USD p/mth which I think that for the well rounded and mature look and feel of this application it is excellently priced.

Support has been outstanding with an active forum and responsive email replies to questions that I couldn’t find an answer for. Documentation is a bit sparse but to be honest I think that it would be hard to document something whose structure is essentially defined by the person driving it.

Interested in finding out more about how Solve360 can help your business?
Call Russell on 07 9811 037 or contact us through the contact page.

Posted via web from russellmasters @TeamSpark

Download & share your free meeting planner – another free idea design from spark consulting

russellmasters — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 03:31:57 +0000

I am sure there is not one of us that needs preaching about the necessity of planning. Its not that we always do it, but we generally seem to know it should be done.

Well there is one area I am almost zealous about planning and that is prior to meetings as it not only means that I don’t forget stuff but it also gives me the ability to better control a meetings progress and to be able to gauge how a meeting is progressing towards its objectives and when to wrap it up. Often its that last one that people just don’t know how to do, have you been in a meeting that just doesn’t end… and just keeps going… then when you think its finished… and so on.

If you are going to host a meeting then spending 10minutes beforehand planning it and detailing it will make such a difference, no longer will you be boring your client to death because you are flying by the seat of your pants, nor will you look like an idiot if you forget something crucial to the meeting.

This meeting planner is what I use in every meeting with Spark Consulting and is inspired by Ambrose Blowfield at the The Marketing Company. I created my own version which is broken down into 5 areas. It may not be prefect for you because I designed it for me, then again it may just work. Either way if you don’t use a meeting planner then you should seriously consider it, even try it out a couple of times you might be surprised at just how well it works.

The parts of my Meeting Planner

Details Details Details, have you ever got to a meeting and the client is late but you don’t have his or her phone number? Additionally and right off the bat you need to have a clear objective about what you want to achieve from your meeting.

It’s all about the Preparation. How many times have you seen someone in a meeting forget something crucial like their promotional gear or a report they were pulled an all nighter to write.

Next Steps – Who’s going to do what and by when? Don’t leave this to chance, decide it at the meeting, write it down so that those who are responsible see you writing it down. They suddenly become more accountable & yes I do it with clients and things I want them to do, then I email them with the meeting summary including the next steps that are required of them.

We all have an agenda. If you are going to have any hope of controlling the meeting then you must have an agenda. Be specific with what you are going to cover in the meeting.

Take Notes; but more importantly do something with them after the meeting.

Download now or preview on posterous

Meeting Planner-another idea design.pdf (280 KB)

The Pipe – Fast Sales Pipeline Cloud App – First Screenshots released today

russellmasters — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 04:12:01 +0000

Over the last 6 months we have been developing The Pipe a super fast Sales Pipeline Cloud App to fill a gap in our business. Our problem was we had CRM but never got the full reporting benefits from it because we more often than not didn’t spend the time to continually feed data into it. Why… well to be honest most of us already had that data somewhere, on an iPhone, in a task manager etc… and quite frankly laborious data entry kills me.
I wanted to have an application where I could simply put in “Who, Where, What, When, How Much, and What Stage” thats it. The Pipe is that solution, we simply enter who, where, what, when, how much, the sales stage and thats it. Now every day we can see where we are, how we’ve done, how we are sitting in respect to financial targets and even use it as an overview of what projects are in-house at the moment and where can we top up.

This is our first in-house production version and there are a few things left to do before making this available to the public. We will be looking for beta testers so give me a holler if you’re interested to russell@teamspark.co.nz.

See and download the full gallery on posterous

Posted via email from russellmasters @TeamSpark

Getting things Done: Contexts for WebWorkers

russellmasters — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 09:15:49 +0000

I use task lists every day, in fact lists are my glue but when you sit in front of a computer with a list of stuff to do each day that continually gets added to it is so easy to not be as efficient in processing that list as we would like to be. We all have, or at least a lot of us have, our own methods on how to deal with it from simple avoidance to elaborate strategies.

I use a Getting things Done philosophy primarily because it helps me keep my email inbox under control, email comes in and I either respond, delete or schedule it to do later. Either way it gets the email out of the inbox on each session, that’s right I said each email session. Unlike many I refuse to leave my email open buzzing away all day, opting instead to check it four times a day. I set aside about 15 minutes to simply process the inbox and then close it and move on to the next context based workflow.

Contexts are one of the core principles of the GTD philosophy and is unshakably also the foundation of how we generally do stuff on a day to day basis whether we know it or not. Simply put contexts are the areas where we can undertake a specific task set aside by ourselves for later action. For example phone calls would be best done in a group when sitting in the office in front of a phone with 1/2 an hour of uninterrupted time available or we would get batteries for the remote when we are out at the shops running Errands.

Traditionally contexts used to be based around very tangible phone, office, home and errand concepts but for many of us that holds very little relevance to how we spend larger percentages of our working life online where things are broken down into micro areas which need differentiating. Contexts for those who spend a lot of time working in an online world take on a whole new meaning, after all the context Computer is just way to broad for today’s tasks, it would be like having an Awake context 5 years ago.

With the majority of my work being done in the cloud (Cloud Computing – using applications online through a web browser) the contexts I use are simply the name of the cloud app being used to complete the tasks at hand. After all they are essentially a virtual area in which I spend a period of time each day. I use contexts like Zendesk (Handling customer tasks), Xero (Accounting) Email, InThePipe (Sales forecasting), Blogging, Google Docs (Word & Spreadsheets) and Social (listening, searching and monitoring).

These have become my standard contexts in my task list so when I have tasks around invoicing or writing quotes it goes under the Xero context and likewise if I have potential leads to mange that goes under the context InThePipe. I also have some more traditional ones as well including Phone, Review and Later (a special context for stuff that can be done in the future and is not time important).

Whether you subscribe to a GTD work method or some other way of getting through your day with a sense of accomplishment chunking tasks into a context based workflow can help increase your efficiency and even give you back some time. I know it does with me every day.

5 tips that have helped me work efficiently in an online world

Break down your online tasks into areas or applications on the computer that you frequently use to achieve results.
Set up a calendar which chunks out time each day for working in those contexts.
Get rid of computer based distractions, otherwise known as reminders and notifcations.
Take micro breaks at the end of each set of tasks within a context.
Arrange your day when you are doing the most productive stuff when are at your best.

Posted via email from russellmasters @TeamSpark