We are proud to announce that our CRM platform is integrated with Yahoo’s Fire Eagle, and we believe the marriage of the contact management and geo-location will extend users’ benifits.

Enjoy!

If you enter a phone number (marked as Skype), and you’ve installed skype on your computer, you can click the skype user name to call.

Additionally, if you are using Skype Firefox Extention, all the phone numbers will be highlighted, and you can click the numbers to make phone calls via Skype.

Enjoy!

We just upgraded the bizroof blog to wordpress 2.6 with the K2 theme 1.0-RC7.

And here is a list of wordpress plugins we are currently using:

1. AddThis Social Bookmarking Widget (Reason: promote blog)
2. Akismet (Reason: stop spams)
3. FeedBurner FeedSmith (Reason: redirect blog feeds to our FeedBurner)
4. Google XML Sitemaps (Reason: inform search engines whenever blog updated)
5. K2 Disable Widgets (Reason: integrate the K2 theme)
6. WP Google Analytics (Reason: track bog statistics)

Give us a shout if you think we missed any great plugins.

Matt

I’m excited to announce that Bizroof CRM, our brand new web application is live!

We are proud of the contact management system we’ve built, which gives small and medium sized companies a simple and powerful way to store, organize and share the useful information collected from interactions with customer.

I would like to express my thanks to the Bizroof Crew and all of you who constantly support us!

We see our business from customer’s perspective and build easy-to-use web based applications for you!

Jason

The new calendar is in iCal format which is a standard for calendar data exchange with apps like google calendar, yahoo calendar, MS outlook, MAC iCal and lot more. We use AJAX wherever possible for this design, and keep improving on the usability.

The Current features include:

1. Customize “first day of week” (i.e. week start on Monday, Saturday and Sunday)
2. Support multi calendars (coloured labels) for each user
3. Drag and drop events to make changes
4. Quick add events (just one click)
5. Translate human language to computer readable language. i.e. “Lunch with Jason 3pm tomorrow”
6. Auto detect “Time Zone” and “Daylight saving time” on the user’s computer
7. Support multi languages
8. AJAX auto-completer to add guests to events
9. Feed for events
10. Export in iCal and MS Word formats
11. Filter events by tags

Don’t hesitate to contact me if you have any suggestions.

Bizroof platform is a Couldn’t-be-easier and the worlds most innovative customer relationship management (CRM) and events scheduling system that lets you mix business with pleasure. We’re focused on discovering new ways of organizing your address book and events.

Finished Modules:

• People are contacts in your address book. Make it easy to have an intimate knowledge of your customers’ needs, wants, and buying patterns.
• Organizations are companies, associations, groups and other social arrangements. Everyone from an organization are in one place and providing the best picture of their collective goals.
• Events are meetings, tasks, projects and other social activities. Almost certainly the best event tracking and event chain monitoring system. Simply and functional.
• Users have usernames and passwords so they can log in. Share your address book, events and all other business activities with your colleagues and friends.
• Tags connects people, organizations and events. It is flexible and easy to keep related stuff together.
• Add-ons extend Bizroof, letting you personalize your business management experience.

Events, from the software perspective, are business activities associated with the contacts in your network. It ranges widely from lunch meetings with your clients to your coleauges’ birthday parties. However, the nature of events is simple as they always consist of a summary (What), time and duration (When), location (Where), and a guest list (Who). This simplicity just forms the basis of the event management solutions, such as Google Calendar, Highrise and Bizroof.

But, simplicity is not enough in this modern world. We need it to be functional as well. If you grab a cell phone and click through its menu, you most likely to see features like digital camara, alarm, web browser etc. Some people blame the manufactures putting too much functions they never use onto a simply phone. In fact, I am one of them. But, when they pop into a shop to buy a new phone, they always ask questions the quality of its digital camara… Ridiculous? Nope, that is just a common sense of the value of money. If we buy somthing, we try to get as many as they can, and we tell ourselves that we may need them
in the future.

Both simple and functional are equally important. Therefore, the information flow within the application need to be well designed with an objective to provide best user experience. As known to all application developers, AJAX can not only help to simulate desktop-like look-n-feel but reduce the page loading time dramatically by refreshing only updated sections as well. It is a perfect solution for filerting events options, inline editing events and live search. The paragraph below descripbs a simple test and results of AJAX.

Both my coleauge and I are given a same list of tasks (e.g. create new contacts, add new events etc) to do on bizroof. My browser has javascript disabled (i.e. AJAX disabled) while his not. He finished all the tasks in 14 mins while spent 6 mins extra.

Take data sharing into consideration, softwares should be able to talk to each other, not necessarily need to synchronize. We use RSS, RTF, microformats (vcard, hcalendar, etc) to allow data easily shared with MS Outlook, google calendar, iCalendar, Address Book etc.

Our team started developing bizroof platform 20 days ago, and currently working on the dashboard and address book modules. The dashboard is a place where you can see what is happening in your business and what’s your colleagues working on. Also – we provide the RSS feed facility, which allow you to easily keep up with the latest activities. The address book module is MAC address book style and compatible with all major contact management softwares, including MS outlook, Gmail contacts and more. With this module, you can create notes and related events (tasks, meetings, projects, etc) on a per contact basis and linked the contacts either by company names or tags.

We aim to deliver a simply and functional web-based business management tool which helps you to build your customer-centric and cost-effective business strategy.

I will keep updating our development news. (The estimated beta launch date is 31st July 2008)

Screenshots available at http://www.flickr.com/photos/bizroof/

With BizRoof Calendar Lite, you can see all top business stories in real-time and share yours with the world! Wouldn’t it be great to be able to keep track of all the events in the financial world and let your decision of investment safer, quicker and more accurate!

Click Here to see it live!