Posts Tagged ‘Email’

SmartPhones = Communication & Organization

Smartphones change how you do business.  Make them increase your bottom line – there are at least 4 major business functions that Smartphones can streamline.  Here are the first two!

Communication

  • Surprisingly enough, a Smartphone still drags along the 19th century capability of holding a conversation with someone else who is somewhere else.
  • Email is one of the heavy hitters on Smartphones, configuration is relatively pain-free.  Just ask a teenager.  Mostly I use this to respond to what is both Urgent AND Important, leave the rest for your regular computer.
  • Text and Chat enjoy a somewhat blurry co-existence but both allow discreet and immediate communication.
  • Many Smartphones come with the ability to translate voice into text so you needn’t have such nimble fingers.
  • Hey, the Internet is right there.  Research anything at the tip of a finger.  No need to pull out a bulky laptop.
  • Back to eMail for a sec.  We assume you have a “question” section on your website.  Potential customers assume there’s a person in your company just waiting to respond to a question.  Have those sent to your phone and you can present a much more “big company” image by answering quickly.

Organization

  • Your calendar is right there, and the Smartphone is reminding you of what’s next.
  • Your contacts are right there, email and phone.
  • Document managing apps let you take important spreadsheets, presentations and contracts, invoices and work orders “to go”.  And they can often be printed in the field or onsite.
  • You can even take signatures right on your phone.
  • Dictate notes to your Smartphone, record spontaneous totally awesome ideas so they don’t fade away as the next shiny object grabs your attention.

More to follow this week!

 

Spam Fighter – what works best? SpamFighter, of course!!

In previous weeks we recommended our favorite choice for antivirus/antimalware.  That was ESET’s NOD32, available at www.eset.com.

We’re going to step out once again here and recommend our favorite SPAM fighting software and that’s SpamFighter.  Available at www.spamfighter.com.

We’ve tested other software and have consistently found that SpamFighter does just what its name says it does.  It fights spam.  We have numerous users that receive hundreds of emails each day and they previously had to weed through all the junk to get to the actual important stuff.  SpamFighter has made their lives much easier.  Filtering out  400+ spams down to the 20 that were real emails.

They have a free version, which works quite well.  But we recommend the paid version (costs $29/year) because of the excellent value it provides.  If your time is more valuable than 8 cents per day, this is a no brainer.

If you’re on a business network with an email server, SpamFighter will also stop spam from reaching your mobile phone.

 

The cost of spam!

How much does spam cost?

Considering that 94% of all email sent is spam, it can cost quite a bit in lost productivity.  Estimates are about $25 billion per year and climbing.  At a minimum, people spend between 1-2 full work days each year cutting through spam.

• If it makes it to the inbox, you have to delete it.
• If it gets filtered but it wasn’t supposed to, you have to un-delete it.
• And after you’re done with all that, you have to remember what you were doing in the first place.

That doesn’t even count the viruses and malicious links that could be included.  Eeeeww, there are BUGS in my spam???

The best free spam filter we’ve found so far is SpamFighter, available at www.spamfighter.com.  They have a paid version also that costs as little as 6 cents a day.