As 2009 begins we are entering a time of change. From the uncertainties of a recession and falling exchange rates to a new President in the White House it will, without doubt, be a tumultuous year.

For businesses, 2009 will be year that makes us. It is the wake up call we have needed after enjoying the times of plenty and a swift reminder that the ‘economy can go up, as well as down’ (speak with any financial adviser and these will be one of the first lines they speak when talking about investments). Our businesses are our investments, from the hard work our staff give on a daily basis to the technologies we work with, we need to keep an eye on them and nurture them – data, information and they way it is analysed is key to a successful investment.

Agile companies will be those that succeed – the ones that can shift their businesses rapidly to take account of changing circumstances, new developments and trends – but to make the decisions required to be flexible businesses need information. Acting on a hunch may work for loveable /rogue television detectives but in the World of business it’s worth backing up your hunch with a bit of real World information and analytics.

We live in a World where data is king - Google ‘index the World’, the big supermarkets send us customised magazines with content and offers specific to our buying habits, and we are entering an age where we have the World’s information in our pocket with devices such as Apple’s iPhone. These are changing our buying habits and forcing retailers to think differently, December saw the demise of several large chains that couldn’t adapt, but with all the information they had to hand should it have been so?

As agile businesses there is no need to let this happen – use the information to hand, collect more when/where possible and act before it is too late. Accounts and sales figures are information businesses are used to having, a list of customers and their contact details is a luxury for some. The costs are low to collect and analyse business data with today’s technology and an investment should be made in these tools. They will help businesses prosper and thrive. Now is not the time to scrimp and save on these invaluable tools.

Every business has a variety of data they can collect and analyse. This can help build the bank of information on hand to influence critical business decisions. The difficult part is working out which is useful and worth spending time on.

Big businesses collect huge amounts of data – used to influence their ordering (you should see more cold drinks on a hot day in supermarkets because they tie in their ordering with weather forecasts), or send you specific offers and deals. Smaller businesses can make similar gains with the host of tools already available and the information they can collect and make available. Don’t think that this doesn’t apply to your business/industry – you may already be making use of the information you have, but there is always more that can be collated and acted upon – those businesses that see this and take the opportunities will be the ones that emerge from 2009 bigger and better.

2009 will be the year where Darwin’s ’survival of the fittest’ will be played out in front of us.

I’m almost back home after a few days in Paris at Le Web. Many people have written about their experiences, my favourite is Paul Carr’s on the Guardian website. I don’t agree with all of it but I do have a few points of my own:

1. Day 2 was better than day 1, more tech content and interesting speakers
2. Lack of wi-fi was really irritating but it meant as a participant I had more reason to give speakers my full attention
3. What is with all the ‘fan boys’ saying don’t worry Loic, it was still a great conference.

That last point is my biggest bug-bear. I had a great time at Le Web, but because like all of these conferences I went to meet the people that are there, more than for the content. However, having paid for my ticket the conference itself was not great. I understand the issues and Loic is responding to them, however moving venues and all of the problems could have been tested before hand. If it was a problem with Swisscom they should get a refund and pass some of that saving onto people who paid for their tickets surely.

If Loic Lemeur took anything away from the conference it should be from his last interview with Gary Vaynerchuck, you customers are always right and put them first before everything else (or something similar).

I may make it to the next Le Web if it survives, but at the moment I won’t pay for a ticket and I’ll be there for the after conference events which is where the value normally lies for me.

I’m pleased to say the Spend Meter got built for Operation Canine and it looks like an awesome application (if I do say so myself!).

Full details are on the Spend Meter website, and there’s a screenshot below of what it looks like:

I’m on my way to London for a reception for Digital Mission companies and it’s turning into a mission.

First of all I tried to get the Oxford Espress and they don’t take cards - I can understand that, but not having a cash point at the park and ride bus station is stupid. So back into the car to drive to the train station in Oxford city centre. I already knew that I would have to pay for parking, but it’s not an obvious system if you haven’t used it before - which I hadn’t.

1. There are no obvious signs in the car park when you first arrive saying that you have to pay by phone. I knocked on the door of the hut and the guy in the hut told me I had to pay at the station.
2. So I arrive at the station and it is a voice activated system to pay for the ticket. Now I use the excellent SpinVox for my phone voicemail and it is an excellent system. However, not so the one used by RingGo to pay.

The main problems I had was that you have to stand by a stand on the platform next to the tannoy. Trying to speak your registration number, brand of car and colour whilst an announcement is being made doesn’t work. If you shout ‘piece of crap system’ at it, it puts you straight through to an operator. This wasn’t much better as he couldn’t hear me and got my details wrong the first time.

If you’re in a hurry trying to get all of this done before you get onto the train would be a nightmare. I had 5 minutes to spare and still only just did it before the train arrived. As there is a person manning the carpark, why can’t I pay him instead?

This week we are building and launching a new product which we will donate 50% of the first year’s profits to charity. The product is called Spend Meter, and we’re live blogging progress at Operation Canine.

I’ve been setting up a couple of new blogs this last week, and the most time consuming part of it is adding the plugins I use. The most useful ones are:

• FeedBurner FeedSmith - used to integrate the RSS feeds with Feedburner.
• SEO Title Tag - an easy way to tweak the page titles to help with search engine optimisation.
• Spam Karma 2 - this plugin helps cut down on comment spam and has been open sourced under the GPL license.
• Trackback Validator - helps cut down on track back spam.
• wp-cache - a caching module to help speed things up/reduce load on the servers.

I love the Wordpress platform, the only major issue we have with it is the file uploads on our load balanced servers (we deliberately don’t have a shared file system), i.e. they don’t work!

As part of today’s new release of our award winning simple CRM for small businesses - Tactile CRM, we made one major change that should make our lives a lot easier, and keep things easy to use for people using Tactile CRM.

We’ve merged the ‘Clients’ and ‘Leads’ tabs to become ‘Organisations’.

Previously Tactile CRM had the concept of clients and leads. When we built the system we made a concious decision to seperate out clients (companies/organisations you actually work with/sell to) and leads (companies/organisations you are talking with, but don’t yet work with, or would like to work with).

This decision was based upon our work at Senokian with companies building bespoke web software systems to enable their CRM systems. Traditionally the work was with larger corporates and this distinction was needed to help keep their systems neat and tidy. We thought this would be a great concept to bring to Tactile CRM, however we were wrong.

Analysing the database and our user stats we can now see that most people don’t use the ‘Leads’ functionality, and with the addition of the new tag features, it isn’t really needed. We also tended to get a reasonable number of support requests asking what the difference between Clients and Leads, or Leads and Opportunities were.

Tactile CRM version 2 now has the ‘Organisations’ tab which has all the ‘Clients’ and ‘Leads’ together - for users that did use the Leads tab, we have automatically tagged all the ‘Leads’ with the tag ‘Lead’. If you don’t want this tag, you can use the new tag features to easily remove it.

We hope that you find this new feature useful, and would love to hear any comments or feedback that you may have.

Today is a big day for Tactile CRM, our small business contact and sales management system - we have just released Version 2.

After listening to our users feedback we have implemented a lot of new features around Tags. The new features are available via the ‘Tags’ tab and allow you to easily view all items with a specific tag (see the screenshot below) as well as being able to rename/merge tags, delete a tag, delete all items with a specific tag (if you are an admin), and search across all items (organisations, people, opportunities, and activities) with a specific tag as well as being able to drill down on specific tag combinations:

We’ve also added a new tag cloud so that you can easily see the most popular tags and drill down on them - a bigger text-size means the tag is used on more items (organisations/people/opportunities/activities).

We hope that you find this new feature useful, and would love to hear any comments or feedback that you may have.

The team behind Tactile CRM - the easy to use contact and sales management system for small businesses, are pleased to announce version 2 of our award winning CRM software.

We’ve spent a while tinkering under the hood and adding some great new features that our users have requested, and we hope you’ll agree it’s been worth the wait. There are some big changes and updates this time - so, a drum roll please for our new version:

• We’ve merged ‘Clients’ and ‘Leads’ to give ‘Organisations’
• Added new Tag options
• Added a new tag cloud to easily find everything you have tagged in Tactile CRM and to give a more powerful search
• Added the ability to rename, merge and delete tags
• Added the ability to delete everything with a certain tag
• Updated the quick search to show ‘Recently Viewed’ items at the top
• Increased the number of opportunities on the ‘Micro’ and ‘SME’ plans, and the number of contacts on the ‘Micro’ plan too
• Hidden disabled users from the list of users you can assign items to
• Added the ability to delete configurable data

We’ve nominated ourselves for the Crunchies 2008! If you are feeling in a helpful mood, we’d love for you to help us out by nominating Tactile CRM in any, or all of the following categories:

• Best Bootstrapped Startup
• Best Enterprise
• Best International
• Best New Startup of 2008