Front Office Box Users » Business Internet Tools

Voicemail Direct to My Dashboard

stevensreeves — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 20:01:49 +0000

Here’s an awesomely short video demonstrating how my voicemail automatically gets delivered to my Front Office Box Dashboard, where I plan whatever needs to be done about it.

Courtesy of Ribbit – this just blows me away. No bells or whistles – just plain sensible function which works and stays out of my way.

Turn Voicemail into Email

stevensreeves — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 19:48:55 +0000

: Image via CrunchBase

Every so often my inability to resist new web apps really pays dividends. Mostly I’ll have a quick play, promise to go back to it and then don’t. Funnily enough this helps me understand a lot about adoption for Front Office Box – new article coming soon.

But in this case I picked a real gem.

Thanks to those excellent guys at The Next Web I picked up an invitation to use Ribbit, a competitor for Skype currently in restricted role out.

The big deal about Ribbit is it replaces my voicemail, taking the message, transcribing it into text and then sending it to me via SMS and Email. And IT WORKS.

But there’s a lot more to Ribbit available with the web app – basically all the stuff you’d want Skype to do, but it doesn’t.

Something I’m going to try out is inter-working with Front Office Box. There’s already some integration with Salesforce and Oracle CRM On Demand and we can work it into Front Office Box now, with auto-forward.

I’ve yet to try it but know this will work. I’ll set a filter in Gmail to forward any message from Ribbit to my XXXXXXX@frontofficebox.com address.
That way my voicemail will get transcribed into text and sent to my Front Office Box, showing up in my Dashboard. Meantime I’ll get an SMS message to let me know it’s there.

Now that will be really coooool!

BTW, any FOB users wanting to try out Ribbit should let me know. I have a small number of invitations to use – first come, first served.

Google Wave – First Impressions

stevensreeves — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 18:39:04 +0000

: Image via Wikipedia

Last Friday we jumped in to set up our Google Wave account. Disappointed at having to wait so long – first invitations went out Sept 30th – we were anxious to start playing with this new toy. Is there a game changing business application in it? That’s what we wanted to find out.

Google links the Wave account to my Google Profile (not just me obviously). I guess that’s how my address is stevensreeves – not my choice but I’m quite happy with it.

Starting up there’s a wave with introduction stuff and another with an Invites panel and eight invites we can send to friends. That’s exactly the way they rolled out Gmail, a long time ago, so we’ll expect to get more as time goes on.

Diving in I checked out a couple of Public waves – there are thousands already – then started my own – “Is anybody from Scotland out there”. Within a couple of minutes a guy in Israel replied and we were joined a few minutes late by somebody in India.

Global – Social obviously works.

But there’s a lot either missing, or not working. Most disappointingly the drag and drop of files only works with Gears installed in the browser, or with Chrome – neither of which are supported on my Snow Leopard drive Macbook Pro. So that will have to wait.

Later in the day we used Wave in anger. I needed some help with installing new themes in our self hosted WordPress. An IM to Marc got him suggesting we try out Wave, and for the next 30 minutes we did, and it works.

Quite whether it’s better than IM for one to one conversations I’m not sure. But certainly it has huge potential for many to many conversations. And maybe even for replacing Email in lots of circumstances.

The invitations let me set up frontofficebox@googlewave.com so we now can officially we contacted there and will try to make sure we’re on-line most of the time.

Finally (for the moment) I’ve just discovered an extension which adds phone and video conferencing via Ribbit. That’s going to take some working out, but I bet it’ll be exciting – Goodbye Skype?

Please find us on Wave, and help us work out all the exciting stuff small business will be able to do with it.

Friendfeed to Twitter to LinkedIn

stevensreeves — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 17:26:28 +0000

: Image via CrunchBase

As usual Mashable keeps us up with the news, and especially when there’s an inside track. Those guys certainly have good sources and access to the thought leaders.

I got pretty excited about this. All sorts of people who would never think of Twitter or Facebook are joining LinkedIn. It seems to the the professionally acceptable side of social media. Increasingly Searching for somebody throws up their LinkedIn profile. Therefore it makes sense to use autopost services (e.g. Friendfeed) to publish our stuff on Twitter and have it automatically show up on our LinkedIn profile. Just like it does with Facebook.

The excitement palled a little soon after I set up the link. A typically self deprecating “more proof I’m a jerk” type post on Twitter got me a thinly veiled sales pitch, from some type of coach, of course.

The prevalence of blatant selling is LinkedIn’s main weakness, and why most don’t seriously engage with the networks. If posting my Twitter updates there is going to bring more unsolicited sales pitches to my inbox I won’t be doing it for long,

How about you?

Anyway this is what Mashable reported:

Twitter’s spree of partnerships isn’t stopping anytime soon. Late last month, Microsoft and Twitter struck a search deal to integrate Twitter within Bing. Mere hours later, Google struck back with its own search deal with Twitter.

Now there’s a new Twitter partnership launching tonight. This one is between Twitter and LinkedIn, the popular business social network. Starting tonight and tomorrow morning, users of both services can sync their status updates. Yes, you can tweet from Twitter and it will update your LinkedIn, and vice versa.

The new feature, which will roll out overnight, allows you to cross-post to both networks. From the LinkedIn side, there is a Twitter Settings panel that allows you to link your accounts and choose whether your Twitter account appears on your profile. There is also now a special box that you can check to tell LinkedIn whether you want to tweet out specific status updates:

The integration on the Twitter side is even more interesting. In your settings, you can link your LinkedIn account to your Twitter and then choose whether you want to share all of your tweets on LinkedIn OR just specific ones by using one of two hashtags: #li or #in.

This is exactly like the Selective Twitter Status Facebook app, which updates your Facebook with the #fb hashtag. The difference this time is that Twitter officially supports the #li and #in hashtags for auto-updating LinkedIn:

The Future of the Twitter and LinkedIn Partnership

I spoke with LinkedIn co-founder Allen blue about the new partnership and its implications. He told me that the first serious talks between Twitter and LinkedIn occurred 3 to 4 months ago. Part of the reason that this partnership occurred is because Twitter co-founder Biz Stone and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman share a close relationship.

Work With Us On Google Wave

stevensreeves — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 17:13:26 +0000

We finally got our Wave invitation and have spent a few minutes fooling around with it today, meeting and chatting with guys in Israel and India – kinda like a three way real time Twitter.

Lucky people already using Wave can find us at stevensreeves@googlewave.com – please connect.

For us Mac people there are some things which just don’t work (apparently they need Google Gears or Chrome, neither of which are available on my configuration. There are also some things that haven’t been implemented yet.

But Wave does seem an interesting technology, even engaging users in real time error reporting and feedback – in waves of course.

Anyway we now have wave and a small number of invitations to use. Geeky Front Office Box users who would like to work with us to pilot ways of using the tool to build better businesses are asked to let us know, leave a comment or email us.

It seems Google is queuing invitations so when we submit our contacts it might still take several days before they receive the Google credentials.

For the moment we want to restrict this to serious technology explorers. We’ll be sending invitations to normal people once we have more available and have figured out some interesting applications.

Protecting My Intellectual Property

stevensreeves — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 17:59:20 +0000

Can I steal your ideas, or can you steal mine? While you wouldn’t do that, I know, there are people around who would. How can we protect our work?

Some weeks ago I got wound up when Zemanta offered me a link which sounded familiar. In fact it wasn’t like something I’d written it WAS a headline I’d written. This did not please me.

I headed straight over to the site and, happily, found somebody had reposted one my articles, but with full accreditation. This is a compliment I’m happy to accept. End of panic and everything went back to being right in the world.

Then the thought came over me. If it had been a rip-off what could I have done? Not very much was my guess.

That’s why the recent release of the Copyright Proof plugin for WordPress blogs – from Digiprove – got my attention.

Installing the plugin and opening an account with Digiprove does a couple of things which enable me to protect my copyright.

The nice label at the bottom of the post should be enough to put off all but the most crooked of copiers. Where it doesn’t I have a record in the Digiprove database confirming the work is mine and when it was created.

That means I can be a little less paranoid from now on.

Can You.

BTW I have no relationship, of any kind, with Digiprove other than I’m using the plugin and service for all our blogs from now on.

FOB Small Business Network

stevensreeves — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 16:20:51 +0000

Owner/managers are busy people, far too busy to spend time sifting through social networks to sort the real business guys from the spammers and scammers.

But there are real benefits to connecting with like minded entrepreneurs to swap stories, get help or find partners. – Providing a network to help them do that is central to our ambitions for Front Office Box. That’s our goal.

It looks as if Google is going to offer a stream of enabling technologies to help us do that. It’s our job to figure out how to use it to everybody’s advantage. We’ll have Wave up and running as soon as possible, but will start with Google Friend Connect.

We’d love you to join in and help us define how the network should work – see the Connect With Us panel in the sidebar.

Here’s a short video from Google explaining some of the capabilities of Friend Connect.

Google Friend Connect Becomes More Like a Social Network (mashable.com)

Google Wave Coming to Front Office Box Soon

stevensreeves — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 18:02:52 +0000

Google Wave was featured by the BBC recently. Here’s a video of the article.

If you don’t spend your entire life watching what’s happening on the Internet you probably won’t be aware of the excitement generated by the release of Google Wave.

Reports from those who got the earliest invitations to use it are a bit mixed. Probably the technology is a bit undercooked as yet and this a pure technology play. – Google wants other businesses to build applications based on the platform. – So the lack of obvious ways to use it will will confuse some.

BUT the implications for B2B collaboration, especially between smaller businesses working together to deliver projects are quite mind blowing.

As soon as we can we’ll be offering a pilot platform to Front Office Box users so together we can define the business applications it’s missing right now.

If you’d like to help us do that leave a comment. We’ll get right back to you.

via news.bbc.co.uk

Posted via web from Front Office Box

The Future According to Paypal

stevensreeves — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 16:33:53 +0000

Mashable interviews Scott Thompson – President at Paypal

PayPal opens up API (telegraph.co.uk)

Making ToDo Lists Make Sense

stevensreeves — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 15:32:12 +0000

Here’s a short video demonstrating how we have built Front Office Box to make ToDo lists make sense, especially in the context of how small businesses need to organize their schedules and action items.

Check out the ways we organize actions and associated notes, correspondence and documents.