Software Solutions For Plumbing Professionals

Electronic Service Control

Electronic Service Control (ESCO) is a software platform targeted towards making the lives of plumbing professionals run efficiently and smoothly. The plumbing industry is filled with copious amounts of overhead costs, client specifications, tech support, troubleshooting, and emergency calls at odd hours of the night. With these areas of interests as the focal point, ESCO created a software suite that caters to the plumbing expert that wants to do their job with the utmost ease and comfort.

One of the brilliant implementations that ESCO has provided their plumbing clients is the ability to communicate in the blink of an eye. The software package comes equipped with an inbox directly targeted towards making communications with your customers that much easier. If you're familiar with email, you will soon recognize how the ESCO customer relations system works with an inbox, address, location name, and notes pertaining to each customer. This will allow full integration of customer needs, certain things to watch for on the job site, pertinent details about the property, and everything in between. Combine this will the ability to track and organize your workers from a mobile platform and you've just found a software solution for you.

JobFLEX

JobFLEX, unlike other software solutions for plumbers on the market today, offers a free and no-obligation trial of their software in order to share and express the power that their software holds. The JobFLEX application allows better communication with your customers by creating a professional and technology based solution to their plumbing needs.

What's more, JobFLEX takes tracking costs, expenses and overhead expenditure to another level. Their framework allows plumbers to put down the pen and paper and switch to a digital medium in order to create precise and organized estimate proposals for their customers. Not only does this save time and effort, it also presents your business to the customer in the best light possible. Similarly, the system incorporates a materials list that can be updated and edited as your particular job progresses. This enables full communication with both your company and the client when the cost fluctuates as the job gets more complex.

Perhaps the most beneficial aspect of the JobFLEX software is that it aims to create an easier work life for the plumber in question. If you're tired of wasting time with expense sheets and reports, JobFLEX is your software solution.

How Technology is Changing Event Marketing

Technology has changed the way products and services are sold. This includes the management of events and their marketing to the public. The efficiency of gaining the attention necessary for a successful event depends more heavily today on technology. Event marketing companies like Aventus help clients reach the right audience through social media, streaming video and other technological means. Presenting more control in community access. In an era where consumers can almost dictate information what information is received, it is important to market through the newest, most relevant technology.

Any number of events may happen on the same day and marketers need to find ways to stand out from the crowd to be noticed and position themselves for audience access. Millions of people utilize electronic devices each day, from their iPhones, laptops and tablets to find information concerning public events, news and the newest music video. Finding a point of entry amidst the deluge of social media noise is difficult, but not impossible using savvy event marketing.

Mobile technology is changing event marketing by allowing notifications about any event at a glance. Tapping into advertising on social media leveraging things like sharable video and tying it into experiential marketing can allow you to take an event like a product launch and turn it into a legitimate viral phenomenon, where your target audience does the legwork of promotion for you. Whatever audience you're trying to hit, or whatever the event, everything from camping, hiking, home goods to products for your office, leveraging your audience's love of technology is a necessity and with the right gameplan it's relatively easy - as long as there is access to Wi-Fi.

The use of the company website is an excellent way to create a "hub" for promoting any event. You have full control of your own website and can tie all of your pre-event promotion through traditional media as well as digital back to trackable locations on your website. Here you can track sign ups for the event, interactions, comments, etc. This data is invaluable as you gauge the success of different promotions you do for each event. Did a boosted post on Facebook drive RSVPs? Did a radio spot fail to meet expectations? While the technologies can vary, it does make sense to have a center point for your pre-event promotions. During the event, you'll want to make live, sharable videos, social media content and any other items promoted with recognizable branded hashtags and link back to your company's properties (social media, website, etc.) to maximize the value of the promotional "buzz". Just make sure that you've got high quality content waiting for them on your social media and primary website when they get there.

How Commercial Printing Can Save You Money

Printing business cards, ads, posters, and mailers is part and parcel of operating a small business. In fact, around 85% of small- and medium-sized businesses with annual sales of not more than $3 million turn to small commercial printers for their printing needs. Commercial printing can not only be an expensive business cost, but it is also an essential part of product or service marketing. If one would look at the larger scheme of things, using the services of commercial printers can be budget-friendly in the long run.

Hitatchi Hard Drives

The Global Storage Technologies department of Hitachi (Hitachi GST) is pushing the limits with hard disk drive technology. Hitachi has developed a new technology that will allow the company to create 4-Terabyte drives that are expected to be put in production in 2014.

Hitachi drives utilize magnetism to read and write data to their drives. Their breakthrough technology for the new recording head is called “current perpendicular-to-the-plane giant magneto-resistive (CPP-GMR).” On Monday, this new technology was unveiled during the 8thPerpendicular Magnetic Recording Conferencewhile at the Tokyo International Forum in Japan.

Hitachi will accomplish this by reducing the recording head size of the hard drives. Some of you might not understand completely how this works: if you compare the size of a big Sharpie marker to a freshly sharpened pencil, you quickly realize that the marker will take up a much bigger area when compared to a pencil while writing. This would mean that the new pencil (recording head) has an ultra-fine tip, and this results in allowing the writing and reading of more data on the same surface area.

The risk for data failure is potentially higher than with drives available today. If any of you have had the painful experience of a HDD failure, then you would quickly realize why this could be a double-edged sword. The good coming from all this is that other companies like Western Digital and Seagate are likely to develop new technologies to rival that of Hitachi, and will drive prices down further in the future.

The bottom line: this is good for consumers in the future, and for driving down the prices of current hard drives.

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Miro

Miro, one of the best applications and multimedia players combined for downloading and managing online video, is being prepped for an official Miro 1.0 release. The Participatory Culture Foundation is also in the hunt for a good PR consultant; this is clearly to provide as much good exposure for their big release happening within the next few weeks.

Miro, which was formally called Democracy, has been going strong with over 200,000 downloads in the last month alone. The application could use some great PR as the non-profit company which supports it is in need of donations to keep the project maintained well.

Both new and returning users will hope to see many improvements and features to entice new users. My primary complaint is the fact that there is no way to throttle your download speed within the application. This ranks as a significant problem for me, and possibly for others who need to use their computer while Miro is working.  However, that does not take away from the greatness of this application.

That one issue aside, Miro is a wonderful project that everyone should try. No other project gives you the ability to find, download, and manage video content so easily. I wish great things for Miro and the Participatory Culture Foundation. For now, you can check out the 2nd public preview which is completely free and available for most operating systems today.

When I get my hands on the final release I will be sure to break down the new features, and possibly even give it a review.

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How Managed Telecom Services Can Save You Money

Telecom (Photo credit: yum9me)

When it comes to your business, it is very important to save money whenever possible. This money you can reinvest into the company in order to expand your operation and to help it grow. There are many different ways to go about decreasing your expenses and to save money, and one method is through managed telecom services. Telecommunications is probably an expensive service you need to provide for your clients, in order to answer necessary questions and respond to issues customers are having with services and products.

Chances are you just don't have the time to answer all of these questions and you probably want to give the questions your attrition, but with so many other services in the office you need to focus on you probably just don't have the time. Paying individuals to come in and answer phones all day is expensive, as then you have to give them a full time hourly, or even salary based wage, and this is going to prove expensive. Instead, you need to instead look to outsource this kind of service. Outsourcing allows you to service the customers all while saving a considerable amount of money.

When you outsource the services you do not need to pay the full price for workers, which you would normally pay inside the United States. This saving along is going to give you more money to reinvest back into the business. Depending on how large your company is the more money you are going to save. Having the same number of operators in a foreign country is considerably less expensive than what you'd pay in the states, so this is a no brainer solution and capable of saving you tens of thousands of dollars per year.

You don't have to worry about the quality of the services for these individuals who will be answering the phones for you. You are able to provide all the necessary information to the telecom service provider you are going to use, and this is the same information those who are answering the phones have access to. Plus, all of the individuals are fluent in English, so you don't have to worry about clients calling and having to speak with someone who barely speaks English. This ensures you have high quality standards and are able to save money.

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Firefox Extension: QuickProxy

This extension allows you to enable and disable the proxyserver settings quickly in Firefox.

This extension will be useful for those who either have a direct connection and need a proxy connection to access a private LAN....or people who use anonymous proxyservers.  ;-)

The great advantage with this extension is that it places an icon in the status bar which can be clicked to switch the proxy settings on and off. The settings are pretty much simple, "Manual", "Automatic" and "Auto-detect".

Related tools: Multiproxy.org

The manual setting allows you to set the proxy server in the options screen of Firefox and automatic uses the proxy server whose values are already entered.