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 Most iPad people only have the grossly outdated iPad 1 :p This is my first real apple product (not including a non-touch iPod), and I’ve had to figure out how it works… I’m slowly falling in love with it.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).

I like to listen to music while I work… sometimes I get stuck on a song that I like to hear… here’s what I do so that I can hear the same song over and over.  Note that I normally hate repetition but I put one of these songs on while I work and it’s nice background noise… with no distractions, and no need to hit replay:

Step 1

Open a notepad file and save it as an html file.  In Notepad you’ll want this code:

Step 2

Now, go to Windows Explorer and double click on the file – it should open in your browser, with a YouTube video embedded.

When you click on play, it will play to the end, then loop again and keep looping all day long.

I have about 7 videos on that page so I can put on different songs when one gets to be too much.

Step 3

To add a new video, just copy and paste the code above (from <p> to </p>) and change what is in bold to be the video code from the YouTube page (in yellow below).

You are telling the chunk of code above which video to show.

That’s it… I’m guessing I’ll update this post as people tell me what’s wrong with it, but it should work.

Not ALL videos work like this… some have protections placed on the YouTube side, and you’ll get a message saying you can’t loop it or show it… but many songs will loop.  Just play around with it.

One of these days I want to figure out how to loop a playlist :p

A few weeks ago I gave a fun presentation on hardware and software (and other stuff) for a home office.  It was fun because the career coaches in the room were taking notes they could take back to their clients who were interested in starting a home-based business, OR settling in for a serious job search.

One of the things I recommend you get is a headset that plugs into the computer that becomes, essentially, your phone. I use Skype as my phone service but my headset allows me to have hands free discussions… this is critical so I can give webinars, take notes, etc.  Also, I spend a lot of time on the phone and I don’t want my arm or neck to get tired.

While I was gone I had some work done in my office and was ultimately out of my office for about a month (yes, it sucked).  While out, one of my kids found my headset and played with it (translation: broke it).

This isn’t the first headset that I’ve had broken.  The first one was a nice, light, comfortable headset that plugged into the PC – you know, in those little round holes made for the mic and speakers?

When I replaced it I got a USB headset that plugs into a USB port… I liked this because I have a USB port on the front of my PC and the audio jacks are on the back, so I get some extra cord length.

I went to buy a replacement headset and my ONLY criteria was USB.  I knew I’d find what I wanted for around $30… I got it at Target just in time to jump on a webinar, and learned there was another very critical thing I didn’t think about:

A MUTE BUTTON!

The headset I bought didn’t have a mute button… and that absolutely won’t work for what I do (lots of live webinars/teleseminars/radio interviews) and my environment (home office with lots of noise/activity).

So now my criteria for a headset includes:

1. Price – around $30,
2. USB – for more cord length,
3. mute button

I got all that and I’m good to go! Hopefully this one lasts longer than a year (not because of the device but because of all the ways I can accidentally crush it :p).

I need to update you on the video thing… last post I asked for some input on a video from my new video editor…and since then we have changed some stuff and started to put out new videos (which are now live, and in production).

You can see all of the videos we’ve put out for JibberJobber user tutorials here, on Vimeo.  They are hi-def, which means crazy big files, but Vimeo handles it well, and the user doesn’t see slow download time (afaik). Also, if they make the video bigger the quality is good.  Cool.

I’ve also been working on the first series that I’ll sell – because it is HD we can’t do downloads as it’s GBs of info – just barely enough to fit on one DVD.  More on that soon!

Thanks to everyone who gave input on the video post from last time

I need some input/feedback on some changes I’m doing with my JibberJobber user tutorial videos. I’ve embedded our test video below, but you can see the wider version here.  Notice that the visible quality is horrible – we’ve uploaded it on vimeo.com also, but it is still rendering apparently… so ignoring the visual (and my narration), I’m wondering about the editing and final product.

Here are my initial thoughts/questions (I hope this doesn’t influence your feedback):

• Is the intro music (just a few seconds) okay? I think it’s kind of cool but I wouldn’t have thought of it…
• I’m not sure about the music throughout the entire video… is it… good? Distracting?  Okay, or horrible?
• At the end the video editor put his voice in the conclusion – thoughts?  My initial thought is “don’t say www”… it is not necessary when typing it in.
• What else – what am i missing?

Again, realize the quality of what you see (not the audio) will look much, much better on vimeo.