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Now there’s a coincidence for you, I just watched the (very good) movie “The Great Debaters” last night and today I come across this website. To all intents and purposes, it is a platform for debating with others online. You can post a question that you deem as interesting and then people will vote on it, but not in a positive or negative fashion. Read more Learn more about JustTellMeWhy.com in Dataopedia.com Find out how much JustTellMeWhy.com is worth with Stimator.com

Sugar CRM is launching a new user interface as part of Sugar 6. It comes with a focus on what is becoming a prerequisite: an emphasis on speed, search and deeper integration with third party applications and mobile devices. The speed issue is one that SaaS providers always seek to mitigate as they want the service to seem as responsive as if it were worked on the desktop. Sponsor To do this, Sugar CRM is providing a revamped set up that when completed is supposed to be optimized for speed and designed for the experience that comes with using a social network. It includes a new, global search, another effort to optimize the experience for the end user. Search is becoming increasingly critical as more data is available for integration with third party apps. Sugar CRM will strengthen its search with an open-source engine such as Lucene . SugarCRM is paying close attention to the user experience, knowing it is a key to acceptance among users of CRM environments. SugarCRM also includes native application support for the iPhone Android and the Blackberry. The company has also introduced a native app for the iPad. Application integration is the hallmark of the emerging social CRM application. SugarCRM fits with LinkedIn, Hoovers and Jigsaw through its Cloud Connectors service, which connects third-party data service. SugarCRM also works with Sugar Plug-Ins for Microsoft Outlook, Word and Excel. But can’t this all become a bit overwhelming? All this data flowing into one CRM environment means that the customer needs to think carefully how to organize, discover and share what comes into the network. That’s why it makes sense that a search and potentially analytics component will become standards for services like SugarCRM. It’s also why SugarCRM has a certain advantage. Open-source platforms will thrive in the data deluge to come. Third-party services become critical as components that make sense of internal and external information. It’s just a matter of how those applications are applied so customers can get relevant information that they need for the opportunity at hand. Discuss

Although the median age of CEOs is 54, one of the fasted growing demographics of entrepreneurs is young people. According to a survey by JA Worldwide almost three-quarters of high school students indicate an interest in becoming entrepreneurs. Although there are a few college programs dedicated to entrepreneurship, even with the preparation from a college degree program many young entrepreneurs can flounder . To help remedy this, Under30CEO.com has collected advice from its users and offers “Young Entrepreneur Advice: 100 Things You Must Know!” Sponsor Many of the tips echo the idea that it’s a cold, hard world out there, and that young entrepreneurs would do well to hire great people, to delegate administrative tasks to others, and to develop strong professional and personal networks, not just of potential customers but of others more established in their field. Some of the notable themes: Know Your Market : “I wish I’d know how much easier it is to build a business around an established market that’s already looking for a solution to its problems rather than trying to build the market around the business I wanted to start.” – John Crickett Money Matters : “Finding the right Accounting / Financial Manager right up front was our biggest learning and biggest mistake. Completely changed our financial performance and caused us to hit a wall we should have avoided.” – Mike Cleary Don’t Worry too Much about Education : “It is OK to trust your instincts – even when they are not necessarily backed up by years of finance/accounting or business school credentials” – Jenn Benz Learn to Manage People : “I wish I would have known that the hardest part of owning and operating my own business would NOT have been how to create revenue on a monthly basis. I wish I would have hired a full time IT guy and a shrink to manage with my sales force!” – Bradley W. Smith Have a Business Plan that Includes an Exit Strategy : “Have a serious exit strategy & plan prior to opening doors. As an entrepreneur I was ready and willing to take the plunge to open my own company, but didn’t realize I had to structure my company around the exit strategy (i.e. make it sellable and transferable, and self sustaining without my everyday presence).” – Christopher N. Okada Cultivate Strong Support Networks : “I wish that early on I had sought out more business leaders in my field. It wasn’t until I was a bit older that I realized the value of the knowledge to be learned from veteran industry players and how it could help me grow my business.” – Jim Janosik Take Care of Yourself : “You can’t put your life on hold while waiting for your venture to hit. I have tremendous regret around all of the family events, vacations, and time with friends that I missed because I was working on getting my film/company off the ground.” – Pamela Peacock You can read the full post here . What advice would you add to this list? Discuss

You think your smartphone is cool now? Wait till it gets RFID chips, then it’ll truly be ’smart.’ That’s the promise of two emerging RFID-based mobile technologies called NFC and DASH7. We’ve already looked at NFC (Near Field Communication), which holds great promise as an enabler of mobile payments. Today we look at DASH7 , a wireless sensor networking standard that complements NFC. Both NFC and DASH7 may soon be a part of the mobile phone that you carry around everywhere – they’ll enable mobile payments, building access, advanced location-based services, ticketing, and more. We spoke to Pat Burns, co-founder and president of the DASH7 Alliance , to find out what DASH7 can do. Sponsor DASH7 was originally created for military use – and it’s still being used for those purposes. In January 2009 the U.S. Department of Defense announced a $429 million contract for DASH7 devices, to four vendors: Savi Technology, SPEC, Northrop Grumman, and Unisys. Pat Burns works for one of those vendors, Savi Technology. He also writes the DASH7 blog , which is an excellent daily read. According to an upcoming report by the DASH7 Alliance, which ReadWriteWeb got an early peak at, DASH7 is typically used for applications requiring low power, “bursty” wireless communication. The report states that DASH7 is “ideal for large area sensor networking or supporting reliable communication with things on the move.” That means that DASH7 is going to be an integral part of the Internet of Things , as it can acquire sensor data and help run social networking applications that use sensor data. Both DASH7 and NFC are technologies that enable your phone to communicate with other devices. So for example, these technologies allow your phone to read a ’smart poster’ (a poster with a barcode or chip in it). The major difference between the two is that NFC is a short-range communications technology, with a range of about 10 centimeters. DASH7 however has a much longer range, of hundreds of meters. DASH7 is also a low power wireless technology, meaning batteries can last for many years. The main disadvantage of DASH7 is that it can’t handle high bandwidth data transfers. DASH7 competes directly with a wireless data protocol called ZigBee . However DASH7 and NFC complement each other, according to the upcoming DASH7 report. Both technologies can potentially be hosted on the same phone. The report states: “NFC is a short-range passive RFID technology whose “killer” application is the enormous-but-elusive mobile payments opportunity. in the future we will probably just ditch our credit cards and instead wave our smartphones next to a cash register or vending machine in order to complete a purchase. Enhancing NFC silicon to include DASH7 functionality will accelerate the adoption of NFC for non-payment applications and ultimately for NFC generally.” The reason why DASH7 is hitching its wagon to NFC is that NFC has received the most interest so far by mobile handset manufacturers. Nokia is an early adopter of NFC, while both Apple and Google are rumored to be close to adopting it in 2010. Pat Burns told ReadWriteWeb that DASH7 could play at the intersection of location-based services, Internet of Things, social networking, and other mobile services. Examples include enhanced location-based apps, building automation smart energy, tire pressure monitoring, and in-transit temperature monitoring of perishable goods. We will look into these and other DASH7 use cases in Part 2 of this post tomorrow. Discuss