One of my favorite techie colleagues is Camille Carboneau Roberts, who specializes in in resumes (and especially federal resumes).  Camille always has great insight into techno-geek stuff.  She wrote in about her favorite screen sharing software/systems, and gave me permission to repost here.

I’ve been using GoToMeeting, GoToPC, and GoToWebinar since they first came out. I’d have to say for at least 12-13 years. So long ago, that the price I pay per year is not even half of what they charge now because I set it up to renew annually. I do get my money’s worth because I use it for training-software, social media, and on occasion 1:1 with clients on their projects.

However, now, I use join.me for the quick individual sessions. Clients don’t  always want to download the software even though it only takes about 2 minutes and join.me is just really simple to use. I also use it to “remote” in and do computer/file/software fixes.

There are hundreds of others that work well including:

WebEx.com

Glance.net

Skype

TeamViewer.com

Mikogo.com

Freescreensharing.com

CrossLoop.com

and a small drum roll:  Google+

There has been Remote Assistance built into the last few versions of Windows, but not a lot of people know about it… and it is a bit buggy if you aren’t tech savvy.

If you are looking for simple, you can’t beat join.me.

Thanks for the list Camille!

We have format issues with our stuff – usually audio and video.

I asked a friend from my neighborhood what he uses to convert video and he said to use Convert Files. I’m guessing we’ll be using this a lot, between our Lumix camera and the Olympus voice recorder.

Cleo Parker shot me a note about After the Deadline… looks like an awesome tool for writing better.  You can use it for free, and if you have a web service you can incorporate it there, for free.  I think we’ll need to add this into JibberJobber

Here’s what Cleo wrote:

While I was writing the summary, I used a cool tool I learned about in my local  WordPress Meetup, After the Deadline.  You may be familiar with it as it’s a grammar checker plugin available for WordPress and I see you’ve got a WP blog. But outside of a blog, you can use their online demo to check grammar and spelling in anything you cut and paste into the space.   It’s called After the Deadline, great resource for anyone who wants their writing to look as good as possible. http://www.afterthedeadline.com/

Thanks for the tip, Cleo!

I’m toying around with changing some visual elements of one web page (not a website), and I found some AMAZING tools:

Color Scheme Designer: This helps you see what colors go good with one another… very cool tool.

Flaming Text – Free Logo Designs: Put in the word, change some settings, and it gives you text with different visual characteristics.  Super cool.

Choosing Color Combinations: blog post that is excellent, from Veerle’s blog.

Here’s a new thing I’ve seen in spam recently:

1. This is the first email I’ve noticed where they CUSTOMIZE the dormant account holder. Normally it is a deceased general or president or something like that, and I’ll get millions of dollars.  This time, though, it’s a supposed relative!  I’m guessing this is just enough to get the unsuspecting to start the scam process

2. and 3. Why is someone from an “international bank” using a Yahoo account?  It doesn’t match up… red flag.

There are a few other red flags in this email – but I hate listing them all for fear the spammers will only use them to make their messages better.

Today I was in a mastermind meeting for a few hours and set up my work station… didn’t even think twice about it until my colleague (Mitch Seehusen), from across the table, started cracking up and said he had to take a picture… of this:

iPad 2, a very expensive mousepad!

I realize this has a hint of sacrelige… but it was the only option I had :p

I’m sitting on my couch plucking away on a Microsoft 6000 keyboard I just got in the mail, writing this on my iPad 2.

I feel like I’m such a techie, although in reality I’m usually quite behind on new technology.

But this is pretty cool, I’m really enjoying it. 80% of the coolness of having an iPad 2 is that, well, I have one! Most iPad people only have the grossly outdated iPad 1 :p This is my first real apple product (not including a non-touch iPod), and I’ve had to figure out how it works… I’m slowly falling in love with it.

Here are some things I love about my iPad 2:

1. It is fast to turn on and turn off! I LOVE this for when I’m on the plane… as soon as we hit 10,000 feet I pop it out and turn it on and I’m ready to go. No watiting to load up.

2. It is small, small, small! Normally I like big, big big! but on a plane (I guess I spend a lot of time on a plane!) I find it more comfortable to collect my thoughts (work on a book, etc.) than using a keyboard… where my wrists and elbows are bent at unnatural angles.

3. It definitely has a “cool” factor that I’m not used to. Everyone wants to ooh and aah over it…

4. I love my first exposure to Apple design. I find some stuff to be non-intuitive, but once I figure it out it’s easy to navigate and use. Sometime’s it’s just hard to figure out :p I’ve already given a few design ideas to my JibberJobber dev team based on the interface I’m experiencing on the iPad.

There’s more I like, but I’ll stop here.

I don’t see this replacing my laptop (for on the road) and my PC, because they have different purposes, but it is really cool technology for someone who group up before cell phones, GPS and the rest of the amazing technology we have today.

I hope I can find some older iPads at discounted prices for my family… it’s pretty amazing!

Many of you know JibberJobber is a relationship management tool, designed off of traditional CRM, but stripped down to focus on RELATIONSHIPS instead of sales processes and jargon.

In the last almost-5-years I haven’t seen much news on the CRM front as far as aquisitions or anything.  Salesforce is the 8 billion pound guerrilla in the space, but I continue to hear they are way to complex and way too expensive (I’m sure they have their sweet spot in big companies, doing huge, huge deals).

Today I just read about two deals, though, which are pretty exciting.

The first is for GIST. I was actually on the phone with a GIST person a few months ago… I had tried to get in touch with them through their Contact Us methods but none of that worked. The phone call was okay.  The announcement of their acquisition by RIM (the company that puts out the Blackberry device) just came out yesterday.  No disclosure of how much the acquisition was for but according to TechCrunch they have taken in over $10M of funding… it’s said investors want a 10x return, which means they would have had to sold for $100M, but I’m guessing this deal was between $30M – $60M.  I have NOTHING to base that on, just a guess  No news on TechCrunch on this yet

The second is for Bantam, acquired by Constant Contact for $15M in cash. This is on TechCrunch here.  This is very interesting to me because it is a low purchase point, imo (even though, if they really did raise less than 2M, investors got about a 10x return (less what other owners got)), and because it was by Constant Contact.  My thoughts about CC doing this?  IT IS ABOUT TIME!  CRM is a great add-on for them.  iContact should follow suit and acquire their own CRM package, because this is so, so, so critical to their clientele.

As for me, I’m still plugging along, doing cool stuff with my CRM

Here’s another scam… these will never, ever end, and they will always be slightly different.  They are getting smarter… here’s a my post called Scary Spam where I break down the components of a scam email.

This one looks good enough at first:

But, if you mouse over the link you’ll see, at the bottom left of the browser, that it doesn’t go to a google page at all… it goes to this page where they’ll probably try and get your credit card info:

What I do, when I get this, is not just delete it, but I report it for spam, or in a worse case like this, for phishing (this is a gmail option)… I hope that by doing this I (a) decrease the amount of this crap in my own inbox and (b) somehow penalize the email sending the crap.

Please be careful on what you click on!  First mouse over it and look at the URL… that’s the first thing to check out!

This is really clever, very scary… I think the spammers will have a good success rate with people clicking on this:

here are the things to watch for:

1. I don’t know the “from” person, and “local schools” doesn’t make sense to me (but it might to a lot of students :s)
2. I went to laca.org and it wasn’t a real website… didn’t go anywhere.
3. online.com?  Too generic…
4. subject line has a period
5. I don’t have a mailbox with 23GB.  I Don’t have an account with them.
6. NEVER, EVER “click here” to validate a mailbox… or anything that you haven’t specifically requested.
7. Other poor grammar towards the end of the email

When you mouse over the “click here” link you see it will go to this URL:

A few red flags here, also:

1. the URL doesn’t match the sender (laca.org)…
2. the subdomain starts with scripts. … NOT GOOD.
3. 4goodhosting.com?  Seriously?
4. form1.html?  Very novice.

This has yellow and red flags all over it – but they’ve done a very good job. PLEASE don’t click on anything that looks like this.  Simply delete it (or, if you are on Gmail, report phishing, or report as spam).