This week we are building and launching a new product which we will donate 50% of the first year’s profits to charity. The product is called Spend Meter, and we’re live blogging progress at Operation Canine.

We’ve nominated ourselves for the Crunchies 2008! If you are feeling in a helpful mood, we’d love for you to help us out by nominating Tactile CRM in any, or all of the following categories:

• Best Bootstrapped Startup
• Best Enterprise
• Best International
• Best New Startup of 2008

We’ve recently been working on some exciting new features for Tactile CRM, which we doing final testing on and hope to release this month. Watch this space.

Whilst Team Tactile have been working on the underlying code, we’ve also been contemplating some interface changes. Now we don’t mess around with mockups in Photoshop, with some of the excellent plugins available for Firefox, including the Web Developer Tool Bar, Firebug, and Stylish, we can quickly and easily work on the interface and see how it actual works in the browser, so we can have some user testing thrown in for free.

One thing we’ve been thinking about is moving to a fixed width design. Mocking this up with the plugins in the browser took about half an hour and the result is below. This may never make it into production, but we’d love your feedback as to which you prefer.

As displays get bigger, presenting text in a fluid layout becomes more of a challenge as it has a tendency to spread out onto a single line. Working with a fixed width also gives us more potential when working on reporting/graphs.

The screenshot below is the current layout for comparision.

What are your thoughts, and which do you prefer?

First of all a big thanks to Stewart at Sun Startup Essentials for our stand at FOWA – it meant we increased our presence from myself, to a total of four of us each day. Not only that – we saw a significant increase in coverage of our Tactile CRM product online, via popular blogs such as Paul Carr, Iain Wallace, a decent amount of Twitter traffic, and a video interview by Dennis Howlett.

We met a lot of people interested in Tactile CRM, and the general consensus was that an API would be really useful; we caught up with the Soocial guys and would love to put something together with their product when we have our API in place, and many more.

As always Ben from Redcat Co was on-hand to take my blog photo for the day (see below)!

Highlights for me where Andy from Huddle, talking about life outside Silicon Valley, and Jason Calacanis with Tom Nixon talking about work/life balance.

Last week was spent preparing for, and going to FOWA to promote Tactile CRM. The weekend was therefore spent catching up on email, news, and life in general.

One thing that caught my eye (as I was reading my RSS feeds) was that a competitor has recently rolled out a long overdue feature in their ‘CRM’ product called deals. As a CRM veteran (I’ve been doing this for over 10 years), the concept of deals/opportunities is one of the key features to the CRM concept as it helps to manage and maintain your sales pipeline. Without this a CRM application is not so much a CRM solution, rather a complex address book.

Now the folks at 37 Signals have done a nice job in rolling out deals to their product – one thing they are often criticised about when talking with people is the lack of a roadmap (we have one at Tactile CRM) since people have been requesting this feature for a while.

However, on this occasion I feel they have missed two fundamental features. Firstly, their is no due date on the deal to help you build your pipeline, and secondly, there is no pipeline (graphs/reporting/etc). Without these features I feel they have missed the point. We’ve had these features since day one (see the screenshots below).

At Tactile CRM, we talk with our users, actively encourage them to leave comments and suggestions, and take on board what it is they want.

37 Signals know their market, and create some great applications for their customers, however at Tactile CRM we are after a difference market and hence why, although we like to keep our applications simple, we have a more featured product.

So to the 37 Signals team, congratulations on the new feature, and lets hope we can all help our customers get through the current economic mayhem with some apps to help them streamline their businesses.

I wrote a guest post on the Sun Startup Essentials Blog about the recent Digital Mission to New York that Tactile CRM took part in.