TorrentFly - new Bittorrent meta search engine with fake filter

TorrentFly is a new Bittorrent meta search engine, which crawls 13 BT sites to gather up its results. We only mention it in passing ‘cause it comes with a filter for torrents that are ‘slow, fake or corrupt’. And we like the logo.

“What Is TorrentFly? - TorrentFly is a bit-torrent search engine that gets its results in real-time from various large and respected bit-torrent hosts. This website does not actually host any torrent files; it only links to websites where you can find them. Currently TorrentFly crawls 13 of these websites and filters out torrents that are slow, fake or corrupt.”

Assault Cube - free open source first person shooter game

Assault Cube is a free Creative Commons licensed first person shooter game. It’s multi-platform (Mac, Linux and Windoze), very small and can be played multi-player over a 56k dial-up modem. You can even run it on an ancient Pentium 3 machine. Nice to see someone thinking of the cave-dwellers amongst us, eh?

AssaultCube, formerly ActionCube, is a free first-person-shooter based on the game Cube. Set in a realistic looking environment, as far as that´s possible with this engine, while gameplay stays fast and arcade. This game is all about team oriented multiplayer fun.

Tip of My Tongue - find that elusive word, pronto

Tip of My Tongue is a small web application which helps you identify those elusive words that are on the…. It’s clearly a work in progress, but is potentially a very useful idea which could supplement your traditional thesaurus nicely.

Regarding the dictionary: I need a better one. Even the word ‘pizza’ is not in this list! I have looked at WordNet and the problem is that it doesn’t include all words. So I have to compile my own dictionary from WordNet + Wiktionary + GCIDE etc. And all of these have databases in their own format so parsing them to get a good [word -> meaning] list is not trivial. Anyone know a good simple online/free dictionary with straight-forward [word|meaning] mapping that I can legally use here?

Predict Premature Birth Detection with New Software

In some amazing news from the land down under, software is reportedly being developed by Australian engineers at the University of Melbourne to better identify women at risk of giving birth prematurely. And here's the crazy part: It's essentially the same technology used to assess the risk of cyclones and nuclear accidents. Now, a software trial is being launched in the city of Newcastle to gauge its success.

The program identifies blood hormone level patterns, which can indicate that a pregnancy is going awry. "The mechanisms that regulate the onset of human labor are still unknown, which makes it difficult to predict the event," said Roger Smith, professor at the University of Newcastle.

If it's successful, the three-year trial is hoped to produce a computer model that can be used by doctors to detect warning signs of premature birth risk. "If you can collect data then you can begin to plot the course of the pregnancy," said Smith.

In Australia, premature births account for 70-percent of newborn fatalities, and 50-percent of cerebral palsy cases. Science FTW. [From: The Age]

iPod touch 2.1 firmware update now available

Stoked about all those new features you heard about during today's Stevenote? Dying to get your paws on the improved battery life, smoother UI, and other bug-destroying goodies? Well if you're a current touch owner, you can download the update right now (for a tidy $9.95, of course). Just follow the read link's "buy now" button to iTunes, and keep a credit card handy.

Update: If you already have firmware 2.0, this upgrade is free.
Upgrade to ipod 2.1 firmware here

Best Web-based CRM Software Applications Comparison

Customer relationship management software is important for businesses that are both small and large. Freelancers and small businesses need such a system as much as large businesses and enterprises do. Well, maybe you need it a bit more if you have millions of customers, but that said: managing your customer relationships is not only tricky and often complicated, it’s essential to running a successful business. Software makes such a complicated and time-consuming aspect of your business easier to handle and more efficient. There are many web-based CRM applications available, so let’s take a look at a few of the options available to you.

Highrise

Highrise is the popular CRM from 37signals, developers of many other popular productivity web apps. There’s no free option, and the prices are a bit marked up - you’re probably paying for the storage space more than anything. Perhaps they’re only targeting enterprise users, but for my uses I’d only want to plonk down for a plan if it had more power than the cheapest option while costing less than the $50/month option.
Highrise’s main features are a shared company address book, built-in task management, contact histories and cases, which allows you to keep case notes on a contact, along with other files.

PipelineDeals

PipelineDeals delivers a sigh of relief with a monthly cost of $15 per user, and unlimited data storage is included in that price. PipelineDeals is very sales-oriented, as the name implies, focusing on tracking your sales, keeping a sales calendar, tracking your leads and organizing sales documents, so if you’re in a sales environment this may be one for you to look at. They talk about your sales pipeline a lot too. Who would’ve guessed?

Salesforce

Salesforce is perhaps the most popular CRM in the field, and prices start at $9 a month and go up higher than you can count. There’s also a pretty restricted free account called Personal Edition, which infers that it’s useless for anything business-related. Salesforce tries to integrate the process of managing customer relations with the process of funneling new leads into the system, using Google AdWords integration.
While it’s popular and quite powerful (and the fact you can manage AdWords campaigns from the app is enticing), it’s another CRM that is highly focused on making sales and not so much on customer relations management.

Oracle CRM On Demand

Oracle’s CRM On Demand starts at $70 a month per user. What you get for that $70 is not incredibly clear, with a convoluted website design that makes finding decent information difficult, and copy that’s just badly written. Oracle has some built-in analytics tools and call center integration features that will make it more useful to quite large businesses.
I couldn’t find any sign of whether data storage was limited or unlimited, and the website claims that the app requires “Microsoft Windows compatibility.” What kind of a hosted CRM requires you to be on Windows?
Unfortunately, when a web application’s sales pages are poorly designed, it’s a good indicator that the web app itself is just as bad.

SugarCRM

SugarCRM has an on-premise product, but we’re looking at hosted CRMs, so I’m going to look solely at their hosted option, Sugar On-Demand. The cheapest option is $40 a month and will allow you 300 users, though it requires an annual commitment. It also demands that you have five users or more, which is a fairly odd and restrictive move (as if the requirement for an annual commitment was not enough).
That said, SugarCRM seems to have a better balance between sales and marketing than some of the other options that focused far too much on one or the other to be an effective CRM. Furthermore, part of customer relationship management is good customer support, and SugarCRM is one of the few hosted options that offers decent customer support features.

Zoho CRM

From a perspective of price, Zoho CRM offers one of the best deals. The first three users are free, and after that, the prices are $12 and $25 per user per month for the Professional and Enterprise Editions respectively. The free edition isn’t lacking all that much from the paid versions; it doesn’t let you send email marketing material and there’s no SSL. There are a few other disabled features, but aside from that it’s fairly intact.
Zoho does a good job of balancing the marketing, sales and support triad, and includes an inventory management system that integrates with the sales process — this obviously prevents any embarassing sales of a product that is out of stock.