We recently won a place on the Digital Mission to New York so I’ll be at the Web 2.0 Expo from the 16-19th September if anybody is interested in catching up and finding out more about omelett.es, Tactile CRM, or Resolve RM.

I sign up to, trial and test a higher than usual number of products on the web. Most are easy signups and not too onerous.

We’ve taken this to heart with our Tactile CRM product. You can sign up for the product for free, no credit card details required, and it’s free for as long as you like.

Here are the details we ask for if you sign up for the free version of Tactile CRM:

OK, it’s not the shortest sign up, but we need all those details to set up a new account – it’s not us trying to do data capture. The main point is we don’t ask for your card details on the free trial. 

We want people to start using Tactile CRM, try the product and give us feedback.

As a start-up this feedback and exposure is just as important as the people that sign up for the paying plans. We really do want people to use the product and actively pursue feedback and suggestions we receive, so giving users an extra barrier to entry, such as entering credit card details is a no-no.

So sign up forms like the following from Apple’s Mobile Me is silly in my opinion:

I wanted to give the Mobile Me ‘Exchange for the rest of us’ feature a try with my email (I already have IMAP and wanted to see if it improved on it).

The old .mac service let you have a free trial without this step and I gave it a go. However, I can’t be bothered to complete the above form as I am likely to forget to cancel the trial if I don’t want to carry on.

I’m sure Apple aren’t worried about little old Jake not signing up, but for some of the smaller fish like ourselves we want as many people as we can get.

I have been keeping this under my belt for a week or so, but I was really pleased that Tactile CRM has been accepted onto the 2008 Digital Mission to New York. Full details are on the Chin Wag website, TechCrunch UK have done an initial post on it (they are one of the media partners), and the press release is here.

I’ve been trying to stalk follow people on Twitter that are going. So far I have found the following – companies & people with Twitter accounts first (those with two people have the person representing them on the digital mission first):

• B View
• Headshift – Christoph Schmaltz
• Huddle – Alistair Mitchell & Andy McLoughlin
• idiomag – Andrew Davies
• KMP – Bill Darling & Paul Fabretti
• Mippin – Scott Beaumont
• Quick TV – Nick Bell
• Smarkets – Jason Trost
• Sweemo
• Tactile CRM – Me (Jake Stride)
• Tempero – Dominic Sparkes (not sure this is the right Twitter account, could be this one [update: it's not!] too)
• Ugame - Sam Matthews
• UnLtdWorld – Albert Nardelli
• Veedow – Fabio De Bernardi
• World TV – Alx Klive
• Harvest Digital
• Head London
• Market Sentinel
• Littleloud
• Slicethepie

DM on Twitter or email me jake [at] tactilecrm dot com if I have missed you off.