This is my short story of how this came about. May there be interesting tidbits for others facing comparable problems.

It all started off with CabChap developing faster than anticipated. telfish being an B2B business, didn’t generate many leads, we were able to handle them with the standard Mac address book.
CabChap on the other hand, is pure B2C play. And as leads, partner requests, customers, bugs and that stuff started rolling in, I needed a more capable solution.

Everybody knows 37signals and salesforce, so these were the obvious places to start. I tried Highrise first, being an avid user of Ruby on Rails I deemed it fair for them to get the first shot. But I somehow didn’t get the hang of it, found it was lacking to much in terms of integration with my contact and mail database.

On to salesforce: Everybody knows them, seemed to me, it’s the gold standard of CRM on the web. Wrong! It feels reasonable fast, but it looks, feels and IS way over-engineered. It probably has all the (little) features I wanted but 1.) at a price in terms of money, and 2.) in terms of a steep learning curve.

Features I required:

• Integration with my contact database on MobileMe (or Google for that matter) – I am a heavy iPhone user
• iPhone app or at least iPhone-enabled access
• Integration with my mails (MobileMe or Google as well – I ended up switching contacts and mail to Google because they are interfaced the most to other solutions)
• Have the ability to put notes and tags to contacts easily
• Be affordable
• ‘Handle Projects’ is an optional plus that Solve360 delivers, it wasn’t on my list at first

After 37signals and salesforce I turned to small solutions for SMBs like BatchBook and TactileCRM. I like them way more, but they both felt clunky to use, like Web 1.0 – plenty of page reloads and SLOOOOW, at least from Europe. Maybe that is different from the US/CA. Actually I preferred BatchBook over TactileCRM, the latter producing a few significant display-problems in my beloved Safari browser.

On to a short stint with Gist. Gist.com is something like a external information aggregator for your address book, feeds, blogs and Gmail. It pulls together all this information and helps you stay informed about what is going on with you important accounts. It bills itself ’social CRM’ but its less CRM and more social. I am still playing with it, but more to find out if I may have other uses for it. Check it out, it’s worth a trial.

So, a few days and a few address book rebuilds later, I found a hint on the CRM solution Solve360 from Norada. At first its an awkward mixture of CRM and project management. But the UI looked so good and it felt like it was engineered with passion (something I am very susceptible to as an avid Apple user). So after a few hours of importing my stuff and reading through the CRM forums I almost felt relieve, this could be it – at least for me.

So next morning I took the plunge and started to migrate all my stuff to Solve. Then I couldn’t help it, I had to push my luck. I activated two very cool beta features that Solve is about to deliver: Google Contact Synchronization and Google Mail Integration. This sounds to good to be true, none out there, delivers a tight live integration of the most important poor-man’s tools. But as I said, I hit a few problems here. At first the sync wouldn’t work, this was resolved within hours by helpful Norada support staff.
But once the integration worked I got all my contacts (1000+) into Solve and this was not what I wanted. But again, very helpful staff sorted out (my) mess in a few hours and I am good to go again. What really shocked me was, how understanding and empathetic support was (thanks Mike!). Live email integration worked somehow nicely, but then again I have a complicated setup with different SMTP-servers for the different projects, and compared to the fantastic Gmail Client it has to lack big time. Remember, these both promising features are beta, so things will improve further and I will probably try them again one day.

So, my setup looks like this now: I keep my contacts in Mac and iPhone address book, my emails in Apple mail and Gmail and all neatly synced with Google Sync. This works like a charm, is fast as hell and push-y (and free, but thats not so important for me). I keep Solve separated, but mails for my projects are automatically forwarded to Solve via Gmail filters to my Solve360 dropbox. Sending mail is triggered via the Solve web app and then automatically sent to the dropbox as well (via bcc). Looks and works good so far.

If you have any questions or tips, don’t hesitate to leave me a note below.

Bonus tip: Back up your contacts in different formats (VCard and CSV preferred). You’ll need these files for import into your chosen system anyway – and I messed up my contacts db in the process a few times.

http://mirrors.kernel.org/moblin/releases/2.0/images/

I’ll try it in a minute, download is halfway through. Cheers!

Update 2009-09-16 – T-Mobile just declared: Screw yourself! Owners of a 1st gen. Complete tariff will never be able to get tethering to work on their iPhones.

Update 2009-09-01 – T-Mobile just declared that if you own an 1st gen. iPhone Complete Tariff they offer tethering for free. Later tariff-holders have to pony up the cash. Sorry, gents, I’m good to go! (http://bit.ly/2mVis)

#freetethering would be it. I don’t know how long I’m already dealing with crappy USB-UMTS sticks, Dual-SIMs etc. I was hoping for free tethering on the iPhone to put an end to all that!. But now, one carrier after the other, starts either postponing it or charging extra for data traffic that I already pay for!

I don’t suggest we get extra traffic, just the allowance that is already included with my plan. I guess that the providers just granted these Gigabytes of traffic per month because they thought it looks nice and nobody will be able to use  it – so what – you were wrong, get over it.

E.g. T-Mobile had an especially funny idea: You are / have been entitled to use a second SIM (in a UMTS modem for example) on your data allowance, for free! I don’t see the difference between a Multi-SIM and tethering; maybe it’s just that tethering is not enough a hassle….

What about setting up a #freetethering day at/via Twitter, where all iPhone users interested in getting what they pay for start using their iPhone like mad (I guess downloading videos over the youtube app is the best way!?)? The idea is to motivate the providers to rethink their pricing-strategy and come up with something more customer oriented… (aka free)

Get in touch on Twitter @tomschlenkhoff or via comments here, I’ll start clogging the tubes on monday, every monday until they rethink their position!

But following a long discussion here, it seems to me that frameworks like phonegap do have a problem – Apple does not permit apps built with those into the app store. At least a huge majority of recently built apps didn’t make it into the store.

So I decided to pursue anothe route, at least for the IPhone (phonegap covers even Android and Blackberry).

Getting help from here it was easy and straight forward to build a native app, that exposes location information to my web app. Check it out, if you are focused on the iPhone and latitude&longitude this may be the way to go.

• sudo bash
• cd “/Library/Application Support/VMware Fusion/isoimages”
• mkdir original
• mv darwin.iso tools-key.pub *.sig original
• sed “s/ServerVersion.plist/SystemVersion.plist/g” < original/darwin.iso > darwin.iso
• openssl genrsa -out tools-priv.pem 2048
• openssl rsa -in tools-priv.pem -pubout -out tools-key.pub 
• openssl dgst -sha1 -sign tools-priv.pem < darwin.iso > darwin.iso.sig
• for A in *.iso ; do openssl dgst -sha1 -sign tools-priv.pem < $A > $A.sig ; done
• exit

This basically fixes a bug in Fusion that disables running Leopard Client by changing the required signatures of the ISOs. How nice. I stumbled across this great piece of information here: http://blog.rectalogic.com/2008/08/virtualizing-mac-os-x-leopard-client.html