This is a new site my company recently launched. It’s meant to connect technology buyers with technology vendors. Technology vendors can post their product demos, webinars, brochures, and more for free. Check it out.
Filed under: Business Service, Business Software, Web Collaboration, Website Marketing | No Comments »
This is an incredible company. We just bought a couple of dedicated servers from these guys and they are in my opinion Top(#1) in the hosting industry. Our sales rep was incredibly knowledgeable and their offering is just incredible. We’ll be posting our dedicated server hosting evaluation soon. I mean Phobulous will be doing it.
Filed under: Dedicated Hosting | No Comments »
We are looking for an online payroll service and found the following:
I am sure there are more out there but we are just looking for a quick solution for our own payroll. Most of these providers are in the same price range offering similiar services for automatic deducation calculation for taxes and other payroll administrative features.
Filed under: Online Payroll Service | 1 Comment »
You can get your own incoming fax line at www.k7.net. We have tried the service and seems to work pretty well. We are not using it for our business but wanted to just posted it here in case someone is interested in this. You cannot fax out with this service but you can receive faxes and either have the fax email to you or you can download it from their website.
Filed under: Online Fax Service | No Comments »
I think lending tree has a great model/tagline, “When Banks Compete, You Win.” As a small business owner, myself and our partners spend a lot of time searching for better ways of doing things. This often translates into identifying companies/solutions that we need for our business. But the current process sucks, we have to first figure out our needs and search on Google for solutions/vendors that can solve our problems. But the issue is we have to sift through so much information to ultimately get to the companies that can help us. Why isn’t there a way for companies to compete for my business. Why can’t I post some where and list out my problems/requirements and have the companies that can best serve me contact me. That would save us a ton of time and money. I probably need to build something if no one else does it.
Filed under: Random Rants | 3 Comments »
I am notoriously unorganized and some have hinted that I might have ADD. I just find it tough to keep organized given my mind very rarely rests and I have a ton of stuff on my plate and constantly is being pulled in different directions. I had thought about ways to better organize myself and others around me (hmm… it might be the other way around where people are trying to get me more organized). Anyways, I’ve tried to use apps like Basecamp from 37 Signals, Outlook’s task management features, and Zoho Projects (We are big fans of the Zoho guys). While some of these system work fairly well, I still think it’s a pain to input stuff into the system because I have to alt-tab into that browser window and then input my tasks.
I currently use Google Desktop and using the sidebar feature I can see at all times my Todo list within Google Desktop. I have a 2nd monitor and my todo list is always visible. I think in order to manage todo list management work well, the solution has to have a desktop component where it’s always in front of you. I don’t have time to do this right now but I would totally build a todo list manager that has a desktop component and with visibility/edit capability for the people that I work with.
We might just have to build this if no one comes out with it.
Filed under: Todo List / Project Management | No Comments »
We need to serve up advertising banners across our network of websites. We want to only offer our direct customers access to our ad inventory so we need a system that allow us to easily serve up banner/text ads. We ran across Ad Server Solutions. We are fairly new at serving up ads so wanted a solution we can quickly deploy and obviously grow with. We are going to test this solution out while we find other alternative solutions.
Here are some details about Ad Server Solutions:
The cost is very inexpensive. You can buy it for $299 if you like to install and run it yourself. For our company, we try to operate our business with a no-software (well, obviously not 100% possible) principle so we would opt for the hosted service with is $30 a month for serving up 500k impressions, $50 for 1 Million impressions, $113 for 3 million impressions, and price obviously goes up as you serve up more impressions.
Like everything else on the site, we will use this and test this out and report back.
Filed under: Ad Serving / Management | 1 Comment »
I just wanted to post the pricing info to compare the 2 email marketing vendors.
Here is the IntelliContact Pricing info from their website:
| Plan | Contacts | Monthly | Annual |
|---|---|---|---|
| Clever | 500 | $9.95 | $107.46 |
| Sharp | 1,000 | $14.00 | $151.20 |
| Intelligent | 2,500 | $29.00 | $313.20 |
| Smart | 5,000 | $47.00 | $507.60 |
| Wise | 10,000 | $74.00 | $799.20 |
| Bright | 15,000 | $109.00 | $1,177.20 |
| Brilliant | 25,000 | $149.00 | $1,609.20 |
| Master | 35,000 | $219.00 | $2,365.20 |
| Advanced | 50,000 | $299.00 | $3,229.20 |
| Expert | 75,000 | $439.00 | $4,741.20 |
| Genius | 100,000 | $579.00 | $6,253.20 |
Here is the Constant Contact Pricing info from their website:
 Contacts - Monthly Cost
50 - Free
500 - $15
2,500 - $30
5,000 - $50
10,000 - $75
25,000 - $150
25,000+ - not published
If I strictly just look at it from a pricing standpoint, Constant Contact is much cheaper since you can send unlimited number of emails while IntelliContact will allow you to send up to 6 times your subscriber limit. We are looking at a solution to support about 10,000 names.
Constant Contact vs IntelliContact
                       $75 vs $74
We are only expected to send out our newsletter four times a month but the 6 times your subscriber limit from IntelliContact is a bit annoying. We’ll have to find out from Intellicontact on what the cost is to go above 6 times. If anyone else out there knows of other solutions we should at, please provide us with your recommendations.
Filed under: Email Marketing | 2 Comments »
We are currently testing out ConstantContact right now. One of my customers uses them as well so they actually come highly recommended. They have a free version for those that want to play with it. What we care the most about is the usability of the system and also from a pricing standpoint is it going to break bank as the number of subscribers grow.
 I am not an email marketing expert but the UI was simple enough where I could start adding contacts and creating a sign-up form pretty quickly . One thing that I don’t like about it is that I cannot seem to create a 1 step newsletter sign up process. For some reason Constant Contact forces this 2 step process where someone has to enter his/her email first and then pick a newsletter that they would like to subscribe to and there is no option to change this into 1 step process. We will be testing out IntelliContact next and we’ll report back what we find. We have shortlisted about 5 vendors that offer trials and hopefully we’ll decide on a vendor by end of next week.
Filed under: Email Marketing | No Comments »
We have been using the standard 3-way calling feature on our VOIP phone and have finally decided that we need to use a real service. When I did a search for phone conferencing service I found a overwhelming number of vendors. We tried Freeconferencall.com but we didnt’ like the fact when you dial it the automated voice says it’s free conferencing. We ended up using trueconferencing.com which gave us $30 worth of credit for us to try it out. It seems to work ok so we’ll see if we stick with this service. The service is 4 1/2 cents per minute per participant. There seems to be a ton of reseller of phone conferencing services. We just might do a more thorough review of these vendors to see if we can find the best deal for this stuff.
Filed under: Phone Conferencing Service | 1 Comment »