The new package will be different from the current ones as it will feature FTTP service on demand, which means that BT will install Fibre connection direct to the premises of the subscribers. Currently, BT provides fibre connection till ‘cabinets’ while connection from cabinet to premise is based on regular copper line. BT has already conducted a trial in Cornwall and it is planning to carry out further trials this summer. The new program will be available for both business and home users.

BT is also planning to double its current broadband speed from up to 40 Mbps to up to 80 Mbps. BT’s competitor Virgin Media has also announced such plans. While Virgin Media has hiked up its prices, BT has not disclosed its plans. The company spokesperson said, “Some internet service providers may choose to pass on the charge whereas others might absorb it in return for a long-term contract. It may also be the case that local authorities wish to assist with installation costs if they deem FTTP to be a priority.”

BT Planning to Upgrade Broadband speed to 330 Mbps is a post from: UK Gadget and Tech News, Reviews and Shopping Site - Gaj-It.com

Though, the device is not meant for mobile internet connection, it main unique selling point is that it does not require fixed BT landline and hence you can take this device with you to any place. This is particularly useful for people with multiple addresses. It is also suitable for people who do not want to sign up for long term contracts.

Three will be carrying out trials in Glasgow, Leeds and Edinburgh. The service will be available in two tariff slots. Three is offering a one month rolling contract at £15 a month. This plan will let you use 10GB of data. You will be required to pay £59.99 for the Web Cube device. Alternatively, you can opt for 24 months contract, where 15GB of data per month will cost you £15.99.

Three Offers Wi-Fi Hotspot for Your Home with the ‘Web Cube’ is a post from: UK Gadget and Tech News, Reviews and Shopping Site - Gaj-It.com

The report has also slammed service providers for poor advertising ethics. The report, however, gave top accolades to BT Infinity and Virgin Media for providing actual speeds closest to their advertising speeds. Ofcom chief executive officer Ed Richards said, “We can look forward to further increases in UK broadband speeds over the next few years. Most households in the UK can now access superfast broadband services.”

Ofcom has stressed that ISPs need to ramp up their services, as most of the increase in broadband speed is due to subscribers opting for higher speed packages. Michael Phillips of Broadbandchoices.co.uk added, “A 22 per cent uplift in the average broadband speed for consumers sounds impressive but on closer inspection it is mainly due to consumers biting the bullet and upgrading their broadband service, not providers improving their existing service.”

Ofcom Claims Broadband Speed Up by 22 Percent in UK is a post from: UK Gadget and Tech News, Reviews and Shopping Site - Gaj-It.com

Web-based CRM Systems are becoming an essential feature of all business marketing plans as a way of keeping your myriads of client data up-to-date, and by keeping track of which marketing campaigns work well and which ones bomb.

While implementing a CRM is all well and good to discuss, getting into a meeting room with a CRM company, hearing their exciting pitch and fainting when they tell you the cost of personalising their software to your company is something most businesses, particularly small businesses, prefer to avoid.

An alternative to buying your own CRM System is to go to the cloud. Online CRMs work well for small businesses because they’re easy to implement, cost-effective and you don’t need your own massive servers to store all of your growing data- they keep it all for you via the inter-webs.

It will still take a bit of time to get all your data uploaded, but once that’s done you’re ready to send flyers to all your contacts over the age of 60, email all your contacts over the age of 25 and Facebook all of your contacts over the age of 9.

Payment-wise there are usually various amounts you can pay per month or per year, depending on how in-depth you’d like your cloud-based service.

Usually online CRM companies will charge you per user, so it’s important you initially figure out who in your team is likely to hang around for the next few years. If someone in your company who is a nominated subscriber does leave, it’s usually no drama to change over the name on your account, or simply pretend to be them Facebook-hack style.

So if you’re sold on a software as a service (SaaS) solution, what are the best online CRM companies out there?

5. WiredContact.co.uk

WiredContact is a UK-based hosted CRM company that prides itself on UK-based support whenever you need to get in touch with them.

Its service offers the usual CRM tools such as managing and reporting on leads, sales opportunities, the activities of all of your sales reps and reports on your won / lost / pending ratios.

A nice touch to WiredConnect’s service is that you can easily tailor your interface to suit your business. By providing standard HTML-based templates you can alter the look and feel of your platform and choose from a range of custom views to suit your eccentric tastes.

Unlike some other CRM providers, WiredConnect will let you use your own servers to host data if you prefer which is one way to keep your fees down.

The more licences your company buys, the lower the cost for each licence, so 1-4 licences will set you back around £278 per user, per year, but 10+ licences will cost a noticeably less £174 per user, per year.

4. Lunar CRM

Lunar CRM may not be the biggest online CRM name in the business, but it’s local based in Coventry rather than California, and it’s small enough to still provide quite a personalised service as opposed to bigger US online CRM providers like ZohoCRM (which on a side note, I’ve not included in this list due to its ridiculous extra storage costs)

While it’s small, Lunar CRM offers a product to rival the big boys with the ability to compare suppliers and their product performance, breakdown your relationship with different customers and see which staff are doing a cracking job at selling ice to the Eskimos.

If something off the shelf isn’t exactly what your business needs, Lunar CRM can also design and build a bespoke system to fit your difficult needs, and also offers technical support 24/7.

Because they’re so boutique, you will have to contact them directly for a quote but we hear they’re priced in a similar vein to Salesforce.

3. SugarCRM

SugarCRM is one of those Californian-based companies, but has a UK branch Sugar UK supporting its service across the Atlantic. Sugar UK has engineers based in picturesque Surrey so support time differences won’t be a problem.

If you’re looking at a bit of a combo package, SugarCRM is an online CRM system that can bundle a VoIP phone system to integrate your company’s communication with customers directly into SugarCRM.

This means you can access features including click-to-dial and recorded-call logging. It also saves you money on an expensive PBX with everything hosted and managed on the network.

There are three different editions you can subscribe to, starting with the “Community” plan which is at the very reasonable cost of free. You do get what you pay for though and for a CRM system comparable to others on the market, you will probably want the next cheapest “Professional” plan at £235 per user per month.

For the extra cash you will get features like manual Outlook integration, sales forecasting, market analysis and field-level security. If you pay around double that amount for the “Enterprise” plan, you get some cool Android, iPhone and Blackberry apps at your fingertips plus a few other nifty features.

2. Open CRM

Open CRM is another online system option for your business, and what makes this company interesting is that regardless of your subscription level, all customers have access to all of Open CRM’s available features.

There is no disabled functionality so you’re never compelled to upgrade your account, or change your business strategy to fit within a set of limiting features so often associated with a cheap-option plan.

What Open CRM has going for it is incredibly competitive pricing. Ten users each with 10GB data storage and a ridiculous 2TB file storage will set you back £125 per month or £1500 per annum. Compared to big guns Salesforce.com, 10 users with 1GB data storage and 6GB file storage starts at £450 a month or £5400 per year.

While that may seem like an unnecessary amount of storage, the guys over at Open CRM take the view that as a business your storage needs will only ever grow, so any additional storage costs should be considered from the start.

If you somehow find your terabytes a bit too limiting, you can increase your data storage allocation with an additional 500GB for £15 per month, or 1TB for £25.00 per month, or if you’ve got high-res videos of every single person in your database, an extra 1.5TB will set you back £32.00.

1. Salesforce.com

One company that has done a very good job getting itself known in the market is Salesforce. The fact that its targeted marketing works so well is indicative of how good their systems are.

Apart from its standard CRM offerings, Salesforce.com has a number of cloud apps and platforms to help businesses keep on top of the game when it comes to interacting with potential customers.

It provides a private social network for your business called “Chatter”, a means to monitor your social media engagement called “Radian6”, as well as the world’s first enterprise cloud database, creatively called “Database.com”.

Salesforce.com has a swag of impressive clients making use of its services including O2, Boots, Confused.com and even the Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead.

For an entry-level very basic system, you only need to fork out £10.20 per user, per month, but the £45 per user per month offers a wealth more of the standard CRM options your business will most likely benefit from.

Top Five Web-Based CRM Systems for UK Business is a post from: UK Gadget and Tech News, Reviews and Shopping Site - Gaj-It.com

Apart from Finland, Hong Kong and Australia also showed the similar downward trend. Australians sent 9 percent fewer messages this year, while Hong Kong reduced the number of texts exchanged by 14 percent. The Australian figures have been provided by Telstra and Australian Bureau of Statistics. US, though defying the trend, is also showing the signs of reduced growth rate for texts. These figures may become a cause of worry for already struggling telecom companies.

The major reason behind the fading popularity is the emergence of alternatives. Popular social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook are letting the users share their moments without using text messaging services. People are also favoring use of dedicated messengers such as iMessage and BlackBerry Messenger.

Text Messages Losing Their Charm? is a post from: UK Gadget and Tech News, Reviews and Shopping Site - Gaj-It.com

According to the rumors, Mozilla was also courting Microsoft and Yahoo for such deal. However, Yahoo backed out and Mozilla renewed its ties with Google.  Mozilla recently announced that it derived 84 percent of its annual revenue in 2010 from its Google deal. Firefox commands 25 percent market share in global browser market.

Firefox is currently fighting a losing battle as its market share is constantly depleting. So, it is surprising that Google chose to not only renew the deal, but also agreed to pay higher fee. It looks like that Google’s main motive was thwart Microsoft’s plan to get its search engine Bing as the default choice on Firefox.

Google holds about 65 percent market share in search engine market and the distant runners up are Microsoft’s Bing and Yahoo, both of whom command 15 percent share each.

Google Signs $300 Million Deal with Mozilla is a post from: UK Gadget and Tech News, Reviews and Shopping Site - Gaj-It.com

The company said that the step has been taken to ensure that all the IE users are using the latest and safest version of the browser. According to Ryan Gavin, senior director of Internet Explorer with Microsoft, “90 percent of infections that were attributable to a security vendor had a patch out for more than a year.”

The new service will debut in January for IE users in Brazil and Australia. However, for this service, you’ll need to turn your automatic updating feature on. The service will then be launched in a staggered manner internationally.

Microsoft has also offered opt-out service, in case you want to have complete control over your browser. This facility is especially useful for corporate clients, where such automatic updating may lead to disruption of corporate network. The blog states: “One of the things we’re committed to as we move to auto updates is striking the right balance for consumers and enterprises – getting consumers the most up-to-date version of their browser while allowing enterprises to update their browsers on their schedule.”

The move is likely to help Microsoft in transitioning its users to the latest version of the browser. According to a recent report a large number of users are still using IE versions as old as IE6, which is particularly unstable version – much hated by web developers and users alike.

Microsoft to Update Internet Explorer Automatically is a post from: UK Gadget and Tech News, Reviews and Shopping Site - Gaj-It.com

Google Chrome currently commands e5.7 percent of the market share, about double of the share it had a year ago. However, Microsoft Internet Explorer faced decline in its market share. The browser currently has 40.6 percent market share whereas its market share, a year ago, stood at 48.2 percent.

Firefox also showed decline in its market share. The browser which is popular mainly in Europe, is now down to 25.2 percent of market share. A year back, it commanded 1.2 percent market share. The distant fourth position is occupied by Apple’s Safari browser, with 5.9 percent market share. Opera captured the fifth spot with 1.8 percent of the market pie.

StatCounter made these findings on the basis of data collected from more than 15 billion page views per month. The firm used more than   million websites for this purpose.

Google Chrome Overtakes Firefox for the First Time: IE Retains Top Spot is a post from: UK Gadget and Tech News, Reviews and Shopping Site - Gaj-It.com

Currently, PCs are the most popular method for conducting video calls, but in the future, smartphones and tablets are expected to become equally important medium. The main hindrance in the path of video calling’s popularity is the sketchy internet connectivity. Video calling on smartphones suffer due to poor quality of 3G services. However, the situation is likely to get better with the introduction of 4G or LTE connectivity.

Skype is currently the leading service provider on all the platforms such as PCs, smartphones and TVs. The report says, “The entry of players with significant market presence has been critical in pushing mass adoption in mobile video calling. Currently, the living room market is still quite small; however, In-Stat expects to see significant developments in this market in the coming years.” Video calling is also expected to become more popular with integration of calling with various social networking sites such as Facebook.

Video Calling Gains Traction: Faster Internet Speed Helps is a post from: UK Gadget and Tech News, Reviews and Shopping Site - Gaj-It.com

Sky Broadband has made over 1 billion pounds of investments for upgrading its infrastructure. The investments also funded its program to provide the country’s first 100Gbps internet plan.  The speed would let 4.6 million subscribers enjoy HD streaming.

However, the company is not quite hot about expanding its reach to hitherto unconnected areas. The company said that such endeavors are generally very expensive and do not provide good return.  These programs also face hurdles in connectivity. Trevor Legg said, “There’s roughly a 0.6 second latency which is a big issue and would make gaming impossible. I don’t think it’s mass market for us. We’d more use more radio spectrum to get to rural areas if more spectrum becomes available.”

AS for the proposed Cloud Wi Fi scheme, it is not quite clear whether the offer would be extended to all the customers. Though, it is highly likely that this would be the case.

Sky Broadband to Offer Cloud Wi-Fi Service to Subscribers is a post from: UK Gadget and Tech News, Reviews and Shopping Site - Gaj-It.com