What happened today is about 1 chance in 84 Billion.  Here is what happened.

I was using the URL shortening service http:\\tr.im.  This service takes a long URL and shortens it into something manageable.  The utility of the service is that you get a short URL which can be used on venues such as Twitter, where every character counts.

In fact, I was going to tweet about a new product, Contact Capture for the iPhone.  The latest iPhone is the 3GS.   I typed in the long URL, as shown in the picture below.

Next, I pressed the [TR.IM] button and got the following:

If you haven’t picked it up, the iPhone is the 3Gs, the trimmed URL is “x3Gs”

Now for the fuzzy (very fuzzy math)

There are approximately 96 usable ASCII characters.  ASCII is the characters on your keyboard plus a few more  (A-Z, a-z and 0-9, etc) .  There are about 96 usable ones that the TR.IM service can use.

With 4 unique characters in the URL, that means there are 96 * 96 * 96 *96 combinations or 84,934,656 combinations.

This itself is interesting, but the fact that the URL was for an iPhone 3Gs we have to look at this question:  Of all trimmed URL’s, what percentage are for iPhone related content?  I am going to be  conservative and sale 1 in 1000.

So 84 million multiplied by 1000 is one in 84 billion.

The bottom line is that this was a coincidence, it made me smile and I thought I would share it.

Here are the links I made today:

Contact Capture for the iPhone:  http://tr.im/x3Gs

Contact Capture for the Blackberry:  http://tr.im/x3Fu

If the Blackberry link included something like a Blackberry model number, I would be heading out to buy a lottery ticket…no such luck.

This all made me think about Malcolm Gladwell’s new book Outliers.  One of the concepts I gathered was, basically, when opportunity knocks, you need to take advantage of it.  Sometimes an opportunity is one in 84 billion.

Tag Cloud

I’ve had some recent fun with Tag Clouds.  These are the sections of blogs that show the most frequently used words in blog postings; the most used words are shown in larger text, less frequent in smaller text.

Tag clouds are great summary tools.  In my next presentation at the Specialized Information Publishers Conference in DC,  I am presenting on The 7 laws of Internet List Generation.  I thought it would be fun to start the talk with the first slide that shows a Tag Cloud of the most frequently used words in the PowerPoint presentation.

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For about two years now, I’ve been getting calls to act as a consultant for several of my clients.  Normally, this is not my role.  My role at Broadlook, historically, has been envisioning the business logic behind a technology solution, building the product, and then evangelizing the hell out of it.

Sales and recruiting teams, in 22 countries, are power users of Broadlook software solutions.  They are thinking of new ways to leverage technology that I dreamed up…in ways I never dreamed of.  Cool. They are creating their own internal Broadlook corporate training classes, building corporate wiki’s and flying Broadlook Black Belt trainers on-site for advanced training classes.  Very cool.

Here is what bugs me:  They are not talking!   Many clients see the Broadlook tools as a confidential trade secret and an integral component of their business process.  So they won’t talk about what they are doing. Not cool at all.

Here is what happened recently: Read the rest of this entry »

“Data normalization” is a phrase that leaves a blank stare on most peoples faces.  Here is a secret:  it is really simple.

Here is the inside scoop:  Technology people have a secret club, complete with handshake and everything.  It’s a club that we don’t want outsiders in.  So we create these long phrases that make peoples eyes glass over.  Why?  Because if everyone understood what we do, then we wouldn’t make the big bucks.   Being a recovering technologist, I’m on a continually journey to lose my geek speak. So get ready, here is the skinny on Data Normalization Read the rest of this entry »

Most CRM implementations fail.  This is a fact.  Look it up.

In my years in the industry, I’ve worked with many vendors on the consulting side to help reduce the possibility of CRM failure.  While there is a whole host of reason that failure occurs, I have a very unique perspective into one of those reasons.  The Nature of Contact Information.

The nature of contact information is fairly finite (i.e. Company, URL, Name, Title, Email, Phone, Social Network membership, etc). In addition, the concept of contact information is a simple one to grasp. It is so simple, in fact, that if often gets overlooked.

One of the most important concepts in business is “be brilliant at the basics”. If you are brilliant at your basics many more complex processes will fall naturally into place. So how are you treating contact information?

The miss-handling of contact information can lead to dire consequences across your company.

Take the following work flow as an example:
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