business development ideas

SocialCalendar

People use SocialCalendar to get their social life together - birthdays, anniversaries, holidays, get-togethers, other social occasions and associated gift-giving.

SocialCalendar makes it easy to manage and remember important social occasions like birthdays, holidays, and other get-togethers through event reminders, and allows users to share these dates with friends and family. In association with Amazon, SocialCalendar also takes the guessing out of gift-giving, helping users give (and receive) the perfect gift for any occasion. Users can browse for millions of gift ideas and items can be one-click added to wish lists without ever leaving the SocialCalendar page. Friends and family who receive event reminders can select the gift they want to purchase directly from the included wish lists without having to navigate to a new site – or go to the mall.

Almost 3 million Facebook users have added the application, and tens of thousands more sign up every day.

SocialCalendar is a Facebook and Bebo application that pretty much does what you think: manages your social activities, birthdays, parties and appointments. However, there are some nice unexpected features that pop up. For example, the app doesn’t just list scheduled dates of events, but actually allows you and the other people involved to collaborate on the best time and date that works for everyone’s schedule. This reduces the need for excessive emails and phone calls back and forth, as well as the risk of miscommunication, ensuring higher attendance for the activity.

There’s also a wish list feature (from Amazon) that lets you know what presents others want, which helps a lot when it comes to gift giving ideas. This eliminates guessing games and reduces the odds of giving bad gifts. It helps your chances of getting what you want too. There’s an option that lets you see which gifts your friends and family will get for you, but you can turn it off if you like surprises.

SocialCalendar does a lot more than I expected from a social networking application. The only complaint I have is that in order to make full use of its services you have to connect to Facebook or Bebo. While that isn’t a big deal for most apps and games, that isn’t the case when it comes to time management tasks. In these hectic times with crazy schedules we need to be able to access this information anytime, anywhere.

Being tethered to any social networking site isn’t convenient. However, maybe that will change thanks to mobile devices such as the iPhone that allow us to access services we couldn’t access previously. Ultimately, I would have liked SocialCalendar much more if it were a full-blown service outside of any particular social network.

Editor’s Note: This post is part of an ongoing series at Mashable - The Startup Review, Sponsored by Sun Microsystems Startup Essentials. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here.

Sponsored by Sun Startup Essentials

As we watch the economy do what economies do - have growing pains and adjust to challenges - it becomes ever more apparent that doing things the old way just won’t work anymore. That is true of many of the old ways, especially when it comes to how companies advertise and grow their business.

It is my opinion that the return on investment (ROI) for traditional advertising will continue to shrink, even as companies using traditional advertising methods continue to throw money at ads in hopes that their company will survive these choppy financial seas. Instead of panicking and clinging to the deflating lifeboat of old ideas, now is the time to stand firm and innovate.

Evaluating the Situation

Before a company can find success in branding and marketing through non-traditional means like social media, companies and entrepreneurs need to reevaluate how they define ROI. Sure, there is always investment, but instead of thinking of this investment solely as monetary, also consider the investment you can make in time, staff, creativity, participation, and other less tangible resources. In this economy “investment” could be replaced by innovation, inspiration, involvement, or interaction for a different and fresh form of ROI.

Social media is often accused of taking a “touchy feely” approach to advertising, marketing and brand management. In a sense this is true. The ways of measuring ROI in a social media campaign are much more indirect than a cost based traditional model. In part this is because the cost of social media to grow your company is relatively low and consists mainly of intangible things like proper use of your time.

If the company is large enough, it may entail the cost of hiring someone to manage your social media efforts. If the company is a small to medium business or an entrepreneur or sole proprietor, most will find that after an initial training session with a good social media guide they can use existing staff to manage social media campaigns. This is a huge cost saver that can be carried over into a reduction in traditional advertising expenses as well.

Measuring ROI

One of the most tangible ways to measure ROI is site analytics. If you have a site that is starting a social media campaign, make sure to get a good analytics program installed, like Google Analytics. As you start each campaign, make sure to associate it with tags and key words you can track in your analytics program.

You can do the same for on-site CPM advertising, like the ever popular Google Adsense. By associating each ad block with key words and campaigns, it makes it easier to measure where the money and visitors are coming in from. Coupled with a great stats program like Mint or similar, there is no reason you can’t develop your own in-house ROI study as you embark on your first social media campaign.

Enhancing ROI

One of the many ways to enhance your ROI from social media campaigns is to consider transparency. Since it is very hard to hide behind an image these days (go ahead and Google your company name plus the word “sucks” or “stinks” or other negative connotations and see if anything comes back), the more transparent a company and its top level staff can be without giving away company secrets, the better.

A fantastic example of transparency helping a company’s numbers is that of BuzzAgent. They were so invested in the idea of changing how they approached their brand they did a 90 day experiment that showed measurable gains (and other interesting data) through openness and interaction.

Additional Benefits

If you aren’t sold on the idea of fully embracing social advertising, consider the intangible benefits of a brand campaign as well, including how social media can save you money indirectly. By becoming more involved with your brand and embracing both the negative and the positive (realize you no longer control the conversation about your company) you can stop problems before they start.

By giving your customers access to you through social media and using it to channel everything from customer support to sales and hiring, you will find that you are gaining income and stopping some tradition areas of corporate monetary hemorrhaging. All without spending vast amounts of extra money on ads no one stops to watch, listen to or read anyway outside of Superbowl Sunday. I’d say that’s pretty good indirect ROI, wouldn’t you?

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In another move towards earning more revenue from its huge audience, YouTube has started streaming full-length TV shows that will include advertising. The content, which includes Star Trek, The Young & The Restless, and Beverley Hills 90210 comes through a deal with CBS. Advertising will include familiar formats like pre, mid, and post-roll.

For YouTube, the deal certainly marks further indication that the company is not having a great deal of success in monetizing the user-generated video that dominates the site. While the current lineup of content from CBS may not be especially impressive – no offense Y&R fans – it’s likely just the first of many deals that YouTube will make to bring more professionally produced content to its site that can be more easily monetized.

For CBS, the deal might be seen as yet another sign of a lack of confidence in Joost, the professional video content site where CBS is an investor. Meanwhile, CBS already offers full-length versions of many of its popular shows like CSI on its own website. Ultimately, it would look like YouTube is simply being viewed as another place to distribute content for the media company. CBS also recently did a deal with Slide to distribute video content through Facebook applications.

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Upcoming.org founder Andy Baio and Del.icio.us founder Joshua Schachter have released a project called Memeorandum Colors. It's an easy-to-install Greasemonkey plug-in that shows the political bias of past linking behavior on blogs aggregated by Memeorandum, the political sister-site of tech aggregator Techmeme.

In this heated election season, Memeorandum is a huge asset for following politics online, but it's hard for the casual observer to get the most out of the conversation by merely visiting the site. Memeorandum Colors adds a whole new layer of clarity and sophistication to the site by color-coding algorithmically categorized liberal and conservative blogs.

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Memeorandum, like Techmeme, tracks hot conversations in the blogosphere by seeing who is linking to whom. Every 5 minutes these sites check to see what the break out topics are and then organize them by link-hub and conversation links. See the screenshot I took a few minutes ago.

Memeorandum Colors takes the history of what 50,000 blogs indexed by Memeorandum have linked to and analyzes them for patterns. Schachter and Baio found that there were two clear groups of blogs that tended to link together. Presumably they looked at them and determined that one group was conservative and the other, liberal. Interestingly, the two ran the same algorithm on the blogs in Techmeme and found that the blogs there are split into two groups as well - business vs. technology.

The Greasemonkey script then color codes each blog in shades of red or blue, depending on how consistently they've linked with the conservative or liberal pack in the past. The end result is that when you load the Memeorandum site, you can see which kinds of blogs are clustering around a common node, which story nodes are of such general interest that they cross party lines and which brave conservative blogs step out of the norm and link to liberal sources and vice versa. This author was just complaining yesterday about how hard it is to find out what liberal blogs have to say about conservative conversations on Memeorandum without a lot of knowledge about who the leading blogs are in each camp. Problem solved!

This is an awesome example of the kinds of magic services that can be created by analyzing aggregate data around user generated content. We love this kind of stuff.

If you've never used Greasemonkey before, we assure you - it's much easier than it sounds! Just download the official Firefox plug-in and then click on any Greasemonkey script link to install it. Honestly, two or three mouse clicks and you're cooking with gas. If it helps you can watch our screencast How to Start Using Greasemonkey in Under 5 Minutes.

For an in depth technical discussion of how Memorandum Colors was created and to grab the Memeorandum Colors script, see Baio's fabulous blog Waxy.org. I'm off to see what moderate conservative blogs have to say about reports of extreme hostility at Republican political rallies!

In downturns there is a "flight to safety". Typically you would put Venture Capital (VC) at the risky end, with something like a Money Market Fund at the safe end. Well today even the safest stuff is looking scary, thanks to the games that the financial engineers have been playing. So maybe investing in a real business that disrupts the old order with a fundamentally new value proposition is actually the safest thing to do. That is "Real Venture Capital (RVC)". But RVC is very, very different from "Momentum Venture Capital" (MVC). MVC is under a significant threat.

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Real Venture Capital (RVC) is anything that takes a risk and works hard to create something fundamentally new. Many classic VC funds fall into this category. So do many angels. But I would also put entrepreneurs who bootstrap their ventures into this category. I would also even put Private Equity and Hedge Funds that do turnarounds and transformations.

This is very different from Momentum Venture Capital (MVC). The old asset class categories make less sense in this context. You get all kinds of MVC that would traditionally be called VC, Angel, Entrepreneur, Private Equity or Hedge Fund. But they are fundamentally different from Real VC. MVC jump on trends and amplify them. If they are lucky and smart, they get out in time. They are the bubble inflators. Their core competency is timing trends. They ride momentum.

In a downturn such as this, MVC get crushed. MVC that timed it well and got to cash are sitting pretty, playing golf ready to jump in a gain when the cycle turns. But MVC left "holding the bag" at a time like this get crushed.

RVC is contrarian. They invest when most people are scared and sell when everybody is bullish. MVC is the opposite. Smart MVC invest when the trends are obvious and get out quick, the classic "flip artist". Dumb MVC invest when the trends are obvious and don't get out in time. But both smart and dumb MVC are primarily trend spotters.

Warren Buffet ignores Mr. Market and buys companies that generate lots of free cash flow. RVC build the kind of companies that Mr. Buffet would want to buy (which mean that anybody would want to buy and that you don't need to sell until the right buyer comes along).

No asset class looks safe now. Remember that the objective is some cash after inflation, and inflation has certainly reared its ugly head again. Here are some of the usual assets that people turn to in difficult times. (In brackets are the classic "Chicken Little" fear mongering questions that you hear today).

1. Cash (in what Bank? After Inflation? In what currency?)
2. Money Markets (frozen assets in panic, no inflation protection)
3. Muni Bonds (what did Schawzenegger say about California needing emergency funds?)
4. Property, "safe as houses, right?" ('nuff said).
5. Oil (will drop if global economy slows)

I could go on and on. The point is that when nothing is safe the risk/reward of investing in a new business that you really understand, with people you trust, suddenly looks less out there on the risk curve.

This is what we wrote about yesterday related to SaaS and traditional IT vendors.

That maybe part of a bigger historical shift of power from BigCo to SmallCo, reversing what happened in the last 50 years when the share of US GDP controlled by Fortune 500 went from 1/3 to 2/3. Coase's Law and the reduction in transaction friction created by the Internet are the theoretical underpinning of this shift.

This historic shift makes it safer to build disruptive innovation from scratch than defend an incumbent position. To put it more simply, today it is better to be a Barbarian than a Roman.

In short, it is time for Real VC to be bold. Some will be bold. Some won't. Enough will be bold for this to work out just fine.

Image credit: Thomas Hawk

With the stock market continuing to plunge, one thing remains constant: financial news sites like to tell part of the story with images of distressed Wall Street traders and executives that are experiencing some of the worst moments of their careers. While the news of the day is indeed troubling and makes us all nervous, the emotion captured in some of these images is better than that any story could tell. Here are 8 of the best pictures we’ve spotted on the homepages of various business news hubs during the current market meltdown:

from The Motley Fool

from TheStreet.com

from Reuters

from WSJ.com

from USA Today

from Fortune - the CEO of General Electric

from BusinessWeek - the CEO of General Motors

Feel free to post links to some of the best imagery you’ve seen from around the Web in the comments.

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Social networking platform Ning announced support for the OpenSocial standard today. Thanks to this, developers can now easily create applications for the Ning platform. At this time, Ning already features 30 applications that users can embed into their profile pages, including support for file sharing with Box.net and poll creation from Polldaddy. One of the highlights of Ning's implementation of OpenSocial is that the widgets automatically adapt themselves to the branding and design of the individual networks.

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Ning is a social networking platform that allows its users to create their own, custom social networks. Some of its high-profile customers include celebrities like 50 Cent and Ellen DeGeneres.

For now, users can only add OpenSocial applications to their profiles, but not to their networks. This will change, however, once future versions of OpenSocial are developed, as Caroline McCarthy reports.

By adding support for OpenSocial, Ning is joining a growing number of social networks that support this standard, including MySpace, hi5, Orkut, and Bebo. For developers, supporting OpenSocial makes good sense, as they can reach a far larger audience with an OpenSocial application than if they just programmed for a given network's own APIs. The only hold-out with regards to supporting OpenSocial is Facebook, though Facebook is also considering the option of opening up its development platform to other social networks in the future.

Ning itself is growing nicely and just celebrated the creation of its 500,000th network. By supporting OpenSocial, Ning now gains the ability to offer its customers an even larger array of options, though it would have been nice if Ning already supported OpenSocial apps on network pages and not just on profiles.

Federated Media’s third, semi-annual conference, the Conversational Marketing Summit, will be held October 15 and 16, 2008 in San Francisco, CA. This two-day event, hosted by John Battelle, will look at the rise and evolution of conversational media and marketing, with a special emphasis on the role of brands in online media. Speakers include senior executives from Twitter, ComScore, Google, Microsoft and more. Visit http://federatedmedia.net/events/cmsummit for more information on the program agenda and speaker line up. Also, Mashable readers can save 30% off the ticket price by registering with this link.

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Photobucket has announced some new features for their online photo sharing service including the ability to add themes to albums and better album management tools.

You can now select themes from a large library of selections in categories like Sports, Nature, Holidays, and more. If you can’t find a theme that you like or just want a unique one, you can create your own customized theme. Just select an existing one and make it your own. The themes can be applied to your photo or video collections.

Photobucket has also improved photo album management with new tools. For example, you can organize your photos and videos with a drag and drop feature, and add titles, descriptions and tags to any item in bulk, which will save a great deal of time. You can also now sort the order of media in albums any way you want, and the search feature has been improved, allowing you to search albums based on title, descriptions and tag content.

These new features allow Photobucket users to express themselves in a more visual way. Being able to add customizable themes to albums and the enhanced album management features raise the game for the service. While these aren’t groundbreaking additions, they do improve the online experience and provide more fun for users.

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The voting period for the BOSS Mashable Challenge ends Sunday, October 12th at 11:59 pm PT. So far, we have received over 2,500 votes. On Tuesday, October 14th, Mashable and Yahoo will verify the voting data and confirm the winners. The Grand Prize winner will receive $2,000 and an exclusive article on Mashable about their mashup. The runner up will receive $1,000 and Yahoo! and Mashable’s Kudos. The top 10 include: PlayerSearch, Tall Street, Surf Canyon, iMusicMash, CopyrightSpot, Socialmention, TuneChimp, PopGist, and Kallout. You can read the full descriptions at the submissions showcase page or read the brief descriptions below. Good luck!

Voting Round for The BOSS Mashable Challenge
( polls)

Voting is also secured by PollDaddy’s IP & Cookie security in a strong effort to thwart any attempts at spamming the system. Duck Duck Go has been removed due to an obvious attempt at gaming the system.

Player Search
Brief description from developer: “Player Search is a vertical search engine for sports that searches local and national news, video, photos, stats and more for content targeted to individual athletes.”

Tall Street
Brief description from developer: “Tall Street is a new search engine concept where you get to rank the results”

Surf Canyon
Brief description from developer: “Using BOSS, Surf Canyon accelerates the search experience on Yahoo!, enabling you to find relevant information buried in the results.”

iMusicMash
Brief description from developer: “iMusicMash is an iPhone social web application, which brings life to your music experience.”

CopyrightSpot
Brief description from developer: “CopyrightSpot allows you to discover all the spots where your licensed and unlicensed original content lives on the web.”

Socialmention
Brief description from developer: “Social Mention allows you to track conversations about you, your company, a new product, or any topic across the web’s social media landscape.”

TuneChimp
Brief description from developer: “TuneChimp is the easiest way to discover the best music from any artist!”

PopGist
Brief description from developer: “PopGist develops the novel search ranking algorithm based on auto discovered and topic focused expert pages, and the innovative result presentation interface with discussion threads”

Kallout
Brief description from developer: “Search is trapped inside the browser. KallOut sets it free. Get results in context over any website or Microsoft Office.”

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Two weeks ago, we held a ticket giveaway to the Time Warner Summit: Politics 2008 conference. Time Warner Summit: Politics 2008 is a conference that brings attendees face to face with thought leaders in media, politics, technology, finance, entertainment, and advertising.

We asked our readers what sessions they would attend if they got a free ticket to the entire event. All of our entrants had some great answers, but in the end, two winners rose above the pack. Congratulations to Christina Anastos and James Borow! Their entries are below:

Christina said:

I’m most interested in the “American Brand” and “The Candidate in the Media” sessions, though several of them get the political animal in me intrigued. The word “American” used to set the standard to aspire to rather than an insult. When (/if) we recover from the financial crisis, the quagmire in Iraq or any other of our problems, a large part of our success is going to rely on how willing other states are to work across borders. While the substance and stability of a country matters primarily, how we are perceived is a close second. Just as an example in Israel they had a “Who wants to be an Ambassador,” tv show where the winner traveled to countries not particularly friendly to them to disseminate rumors and other issues about the state; and, more famously the Beijing Olympics was in effect China’s debutante ball.

I’d like to see how self-aware about this issue the media representatives are, and see how integral they consider repairing our image, and not just our economy, is .

And James? He took another approach:

I am most interested in attending “The Influencers: The Editorial, OpEd Pages, TV Analysts - Establishing and Defining the National Conversation. As an internet entrepreneur I am fascinated by “our” collective ability to shape the overall narrative. The reason being is that politics is inherently divisive. Race, religion and class have separated us in the past and exacerbated our differences. The power of the web is the ability to bring different parties to the same table in an organized and coherent manner. Most intriguing is the web’s effect on Generation Y (full disclosure: I fall within this demo). The current political landscape is clearly broken and has diverged from the traditional platforms that once existed and this new generation of native internet users will define the future policies and parties. Presently, we operate in an ecosystem where “small government” Republicans drive massive deficits and interfere with personal liberties (see Terry Schiavo) while the “liberal” Democrats fervently back fiscal policies shaped by so-called “elitists” (Hank Paulson) and “neo-cons” George Bush. The net result is a confused electorate (how cant they be - try explaining to someone that Bush, Obama, Reid, Pelosi, Paulson, McCain and Frank all supported a $700 billion cash infusion that is highly representative of socialism - its incredibly difficult). The point being is that this country is in need of a new narrative and a new conversation. This is not something that may occur, instead it must and the most logical platform for it to take place on is the internet. Hence, why understanding those who will lead this transition, “the influencers”, is personally the session that I am most intrigued by and interested in attending.

Congratulations to both of you and enjoy the show! For those of you who still want to sign up, it’s still not too late to register!

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A startup, by (loose) definition, is a young company heading into uncharted territory. And, by that very definition, it needs funds to operate; these usually come in the form of investments from venture capital companies or angel investors willing to accept significantly higher risk for their investments, which occasionally yields higher rewards.

As you can all see by looking at the headlines of finance sites and stock market charts, the definition of “risk” has changed significantly.

Web startups, which comprise a great portion of what we cover here at Mashable, won’t go far without venture capital. Unfortunately, there has been quite a boom lately when it comes to Web startups, so the usual definition of startup has widened; sometimes, a team of one or two with a good idea and a proof of concept is now considered a startup, and expects - at the very least - money to rent an office, buy servers, hire secretaries, marketing people, finance people, more developers. Business plans, something no sound company ever wants to be without, are often loosely defined, and depend on a lot of factors which may or may not go as planned.

Unfortunately, it’s time to go back to the old drawing board for many. I can’t tell anyone how to run their business. But a company that makes no money, in a time of financial turmoil and crisis, is not a business. Therefore, one or three guys with a good idea and a proof of concept should not assume they’re running a business just yet, because a) they might not ever get funds for it and b) even if they do, they might burn through the cash very fast and never get a second chance.

You’ve got a great idea for a Web product or a service? Fantastic. It’s a project. By all means, develop it, work on it, find other talented people that are willing to work on it and if you can afford them, hire some. With time, your project might start earning money and your small team will start feeling too small for it. Wait some more. Maybe you’ll get offers and be very sure that it’ll keep earning more and more money and on the other hand your small team will really become overwhelmed.

Then it’s time to start a business.

Do it too soon, and you might find yourself in an empty office with bills to pay, no cash and a bunch of angry emails from employees to answer. Am I overly pessimistic? Maybe. You go check out that Dow Jones chart and be an optimist, I won’t.

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Admit it. You don't always read the EULAs when you install software on your computer. You just click "I Agree." The same goes for the web. Most of us don't read the privacy policies that accompany our favorite web sites and services (myself included, apparently). But our failure to do so has some researchers suggesting that it's time the Federal Government got involved. According to these researchers, today's privacy policies are long and hard to read. Instead, they think it may be time for the FTC to step in and read the privacy policies for us.

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A new report by Carnegie Mellon University, authored by Aleecia McDonald and Lorrie Faith Cranor, states that online privacy policies take an average of 10 minutes to read. If every U.S. web user read the privacy policy at every site they went to, the time spent reading privacy policies would total 44.3 billion hours per year. Their recommendation? Regulation. They concluded that regulation might be necessary to "provide basic privacy protections."

Of course, you can imagine a lot of companies are not happy over this proposal, specifically those that take advantage of long privacy policies which they know no one reads. Online advertisers are the worst for abusing the average user's ignorance over how the internet works. They deploy behavioral targeting platforms that track users and their behavior across the net. Instructions for opting out of these programs may be found in the privacy policies, but few people take the time to read them and discover how to do so.

Cranor, who's also a member of the EFF, thinks that people shouldn't have to read these extensive privacy policies in order to protect themselves - the FTC should get involved and regulate if companies aren't willing to improve the readability of these online documents.

If a privacy policy is long, does that mean it fails? We've seen the privacy policies now sent in the mail to us from our credit card companies. They aren't the most readable documents either, but they're legal.

Privacy policies today only seem to be there for the hyper-aware online citizen for whom privacy is a major concern. The rest of us just hear about the breaches of trust when one of those folks takes the time to read the long and boring legalize and then warns the rest of us of their findings.

The problem with privacy policies isn't just their length, though. Alissa Cooper, chief computer scientist at the Center for Democracy & Technology, argues that "It's not only that they're long, but they're also complicated. They're not really written for your average Internet user to understand them."

The average internet user? You mean those people who access the internet for twice a day for a total of 20 hours per month? The ones that spend less than one minute per page? Something tells us they're not going to read privacy policies no matter how clear and easy-to-understand they become.

Image Credits: Computer Eye, Mikey G. Ottowa; Cameras, Urbankudos

On Wednesday I was asked to give a keynote at the Portuguese Annual Advertising Conference. Their theme this year was Consumer Engagement.

I had great fun, and met some great people. And so thank you for everyone that came along and thank you to Manuela from APAN for inviting me.

This posting has really nothing to do with our main themes of Communities Dominate. But as Alan is as close as it is possible to being a Finn, I'm sure he joins me in feeling the pride that all Finns feel this day, as our previous President, Martti Ahtisaari, has just been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Please allow me a few words on this.

The Nobel Peace Prize is one of the most prestigious and perhaps, one of the most noble of prizes that society can award any of its members. The past winners reflect truly some of the greatness in recent mankind, both in personal character - consider Mother Teresa, or Desmund Tutu or Lech Walesa or Dr Martin Luther King Jr or the Dalai Lama - as well as heroic works towards achieving peace in what has often seemed unending conflict, such as Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin in starting the peace process between long-warring Egypt and Israel; or Henry Kissinger and Le Duc Tho (who refused the award) for bringing the Vietnam war to an end; or Nelson Mandela and Willem de KIerk with South Africa; or John Hume and David Trimble with Northern Ireland.

There have been some who have won the Nobel Peace prize for achievemens of considerable humanitarian needs, where the Nobel Peace prize has seemed the most fair way to acknowledge exceptional contributions to mankind, while necessarily not actually "achieving peace" in any given conflict at that time, such as Al Gore for his work with the environment. And sometimes the Award has been given for organizations working to peaceful goals, such as Amnesty Interational or the UN peacekeeping forces etc. And there have been years when the Award has not been handed out at all.

While many of the winners have actually achieved a peaceful resolution in a given conflict, the winners in most cases were the political leaders on both sides of that conflict (such as Vietnam, South Africa, Israel-Egypt and Northern Ireland). These are worthy recepients, but there is rarely also an even more altruistic role and contribution to peace. That is the achievement of a peace envoy to a long-running military conflict, where the peace envoy comes from the outside. Not as a political ruler from either side.

That is what Martti Ahtisaari has done all throughout his long career in international diplomacy. Recalling that our country of Finland is in Northern Europe, bordering Russia, Sweden and Norway (and the Baltic Sea), ours is a peaceful country and has not had conflict on our borders since the second world war. Finnish troops serve on United Nations peace missions all over the globe, my cousin Jukka Lundgren served with the UN troops in Lebanon for example. We - like our Scandinavian cousins in Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Iceland - have been promoting peace quite actively all over the world.

But nobody from Finland has been anywhere near as dynamic as a peace activist, as Martti Ahtisaari. He has been personally delivering peace in Africa, in Namibia. In Asia, with the long running civil war between the Aceh and the government of Indonesia. And he's done it in Europe bringing peace to Kosovo.

Here is a man who already had been the President of Finland, who as President brought Finland into the European Union. He had his place secured in our history books and he could have retired to write memoirs and attend some conferences etc. But rather than that, Martti Ahtisaari set on a personal crusade to help bring peace all around the world. The United Nations considered him one of their best - if not "the" best peace negotiator sending him to the toughest trouble-spots.

If there ever was a stereotype of what was the ultimate "peace hero" for winning the Nobel Peace Prize, that could be imagined at the birth of the prize, Martti Ahtisaari embodies that persona. A true hero of peace. And a remarkably successful one at that as well.

Congratulations Martti Ahtisaari. All of Finland celebrates your leadership and example. Thank you.

It’s tough being a competitor to Gmail. Google has been the first major company to offer virtually unlimited storage for e-mails, and the simplicity of the service, solid spam filtering and good integration with other Google services has made Gmail a favorite for many.

Zoho Mail has been in private beta stage so far and thus it is definitely not as widespread as Gmail, but it has always been a worthy competitor. It’s a slick, feature-rich client that tries to marry Gmail’s simplicity with the overall look and feel of a full featured desktop email client, such as Outlook. Today, they’ve reached an important milestone - Zoho Mail is coming out of private beta, and it has some new features to show off.

First, through Google Gears, Zoho Mail now supports offline mode. To access, it, you must have Google Gears installed in either IE or Firefox, and click on the “Setup Offline” link on the top. Zoho Mail will recognize your connection status and switch between online and offline mode seamlessly. It may not be a killer feature, but it’s useful, and the fact that Gmail has been dabbling with it for quite a while but the official offline mode is still not out there is in Zoho’s favor.

Another important feature is mobile support - oops, did I say mobile? I meant iPhone, since Zoho Mail currently only works with Apple’s phone, and support for other devices is “in the works.” Just login to zoho.com from your iPhone and you’ll find the mobile version of Zoho Mail right there.

These two features, along with some others, for example support for Gmail-style labels as well as Outlook-style folders, and integrated chat, make Zoho Mail an interesting competitor in the Web mail field and a great addition to the already very solid Zoho Office suite.

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GMail on Your Desktop Yet?

Innovative Web Office startup Zoho has beaten Google to the punch again, announcing offline support for the newly public Zoho Mail tonight. Ironically Zoho is using Google Gears to enable offline functionality in Zoho Mail - see the video below by the Google Developer team. Zoho also beat Google to offline support in online word processing, again using Gears, by launching that functionality in November 2007. Google followed up with offline support for Google Docs at the end of March 2008.

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We wrote in July about speculation that Google will start rolling out offline support for both Gmail and Google Calendar through Google Gears within the next six weeks. Didn't happen.

However Yahoo Mail did come up with offline functionality in July - it gave offline access to all free and paid Yahoo Mail users through the Yahoo Zimbra Desktop. Earlier this week Yahoo announced further Zimbra integration, this time with its Calendar app.

So Google is well and truly behind the times with offline support for web mail. However the Google white coats are having a fine old time tinkering with mail stuff in their labs - tonight Google Labs announced Advanced IMAP Controls, which lets you "fine-tune your Gmail IMAP experience."

To be fair, Google probably isn't worried about Zoho coming out with offline functionality in its mail product before Gmail has. For one thing Google is so big it can afford to wait until it's good and ready, despite Gmail fans yearning for offline support! But also Google probably sees Zoho less as a competitor at this point (even though Zoho does compete directly against Google Apps) and more as an evangelist for its technology - such as Google Gears.

To access mail offline in Zoho Mail, you'll need Google Gears installed on your browser - at this point IE and Firefox are supported. Chrome and Safari support is coming. According to Zoho's blog, you can also download images and attachments in offline mode. Another cool feature is that Zoho Mail automatically detects your connectivity and switches to online/offline modes.

Here is the video, also available on Google Code blog:

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I recently outlined why I'm sick of the 'ROI in web 2.0' discussion. To be specific, the debate as to whether there is one at all.

In that post, I gave examples of how naysayers reacted to social media tools in the past - and how they were left in the dust of those who experimented with these web 2.0 tools. So, where do these naysayers come from? Why is there a resistance to web 2.0? In this post I'll explain how to sell social media to those people and/or your boss!

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This is a guest post by DJ Francis, founder and author of OnlineMarketerBlog.com

Your Responsibility

Seth Godin says it's not because your boss is stupid. It's not that your boss is ignorant of Facebook, but that they know the 30-second spot. Seth says that the best way of changing the world is to open the close-minded and you do that by presenting more data in a palatable way. It's your job to teach your boss about web 2.0 tools.

Here are some suggestions for ways other companies have used social media tools. Consider how these could apply to your business. Be creative and don't think about what you could do - think about what your customers want. Then determine which social media tools can help you deliver what they want.

Ways To Sell Social Media Tools To Your Boss

1. Keeping Up With The Joneses

Your boss doesn't want to get left behind and it's getting more likely that s/he's seen some of this fancy social media stuff at work. Dr. Nora Ganim Barnes and Eric Mattson report that familiarity with and usage of social media within the business world (the Inc. 500 in this particular study) has nearly doubled in the past 12 months.

This means that your boss is likely primed for a conversation about using social media in your business. You just need to fit a web 2.0 tactics to your current business objectives. Your boss might just be looking for someone to lead the charge.

Barnes and Mattson report that "When queried on the importance of social media, 26% of the respondents [Inc. 500 members] in 2007 felt social media is 'very important' to their business and marketing strategy. That figure rose to 44% in approximately one year."

2. Listening (Customer/Market Research)

Social media offers infinite market research, branding, and listening opportunities. I dare you to search for "[Your brand] sucks" and see what you find. Listening - a simple yet often over-looked aspect of human life - may be the Web 2.0 killer app and smart companies are catching on.

TNS/Cymfony found that "Revolutionaries" - companies that focused on listening rather than selling - "have a more sophisticated approach to creating strong relationships with consumers and as a result are gaining a competitive edge," said Chief Strategy and Marketing Officer Jim Nail. (Bill Green at MakeTheLogoBigger concurs that social media leads to listening that eventually leads to monetization.)

When I heard AOL had bought Bebo earlier this year I cringed just thinking about the energetic startup in the clutches of a Web 1.0 holdover. From The Economist: "The non sequitur is to assume that the new service will be a revenue-generating business in its own right." But the service could be amazingly valuable if marketers used it as a listening mechanism.

3. Responding

Social media gives marketers the chance to give quick feedback and break down unnecessary walls. Businesses are using Twitter to personalize a brand (@Zappos), quickly solve customer's problems (@ComcastCares), and create more immersive interactive media experiences (@_S_A_R_A_H_ from the Sci Fi Channel's Eureka).

And these comprise only one social media tool. Response ideas are endless considering the vast array of tools at your disposal.

And speaking of response, the best way to get that is...

4. Talking To Actual Customers

Some bosses - maybe yours - are so removed from their customers that they get a kick out of hearing from them. After all, if you spent 20 years getting your customer feedback from memos, you can imagine how disconcerting but exciting it would be to hear from, you know, a real human.

I recommend starting with positive feedback. Grab a sampling of social media feedback from your customers (just Google your company name or check Yelp.com, if nothing else). MarketingVox reports that reviews are usually positive - 87% of them, in fact. Print out a few and put them in front of your boss. Seeing glowing customer feedback will only get your boss more interested in hearing from customers.

In the up-coming book Secrets of Social Media Marketing, author Paul Gillan describes it this way: "Once they start taking direct feedback from customers, they tend to get addicted. Direct customer relations is like a drug."

5. Set The Boss' Sights Long-Term

When discussions of ROI come up, a time frame almost always comes up. "What will we get in the next quarter for this investment of time or resources?" "I want monthly reports on this expenditure."

This discussion is worthwhile and statistics should be kept to track progress. However, you will have more success in social media if you set your boss' expectations to cover a longer period of time. Engagement is a long-term project.

Valeria claims that engagement and impact on retention can take two years to measure. That's not to say you won't see results before then. Lewis Green talks over at MarketingProfs about the ROI his company received from their blog. But manage your boss' expectations and keep them looking at the long-term goal.

BL Ochman put it succinctly in this interview:

"You need to have realistic expectations, and know that conversational marketing produces results over time. It is not a quick fix or a magic bullet. Instead, social media must be integrated into the overall marketing plan for the long haul. And over time, you can build traffic, sales and your customer/donor base with these new tools."

So What?

In most instances, when marketers talk about measurement or ROI of social media, they are trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. You can't apply a Web 1.0 gestalt in a world where the audience cannot only respond, but can also generate more content than any single company.

Instead of measuring how well we are pushing our message onto potential customers, we should instead gauge our success on the number of conversations listened to, problems resolved, and useful suggestions received from the community of customers we already have.

Your challenge is bringing your boss around to this worldview. And it is a worldview, not just some notion. It changes the way you interact with the world, so it's no small task. Likewise, it's a big job, so you'd better get cracking right now.

Social Media Linked To Trust

Don't forget that the reason to sell social media to your boss is so that you can begin to build a cache of trust with your customers. In truth, that trust is the real return on investment. The more they trust you, the more they will buy from you and respect your opinions.

Ian Schafer, CEO of Deep Focus, said in AdWeek that "The other risk is that in the zeal to track, marketers and agencies will lose sight of the need to trust that getting closer to customers is a worthy goal in and of itself."

Marketers seem obsessed with assigning value to interactions on social media sites. But real success comes when you value the interaction itself.

Have you sold your boss on social media tools already? How did you accomplish that? Please leave suggestions in the comments section below. And if you haven't already, subscribe, where I regularly blog on these topics.

DJ Francis is the founder and author of OnlineMarketerBlog.com - a business blog at the intersection of marketing, copywriting, and social media.

OpenID adoption has been lopsided. Getting sites to offer OpenIDs has been relatively popular. Google, Yahoo!, MySpace, and countless others provide OpenID addresses for their users. Even AOL users have an OpenID. Far less popular? Allowing users to access their accounts on those services with an OpenID.

But JanRain is hoping to change that with the release of RPX, a new subscription-based service that simplifies implementing OpenID. RPX promises to result in more OpenID login opportunities on the Web - and a revenue stream for JanRain.

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JanRain has been involved in OpenID development since 2005. During that time, it has received a wealth feedback on OpenID implementations.

Earlier this year, that feedback motivated JanRain to simplify the usability of OpenID logins for users. Now, they're turning that same "ease of use" attention to the sites that want to implement OpenID. The result of that effort? RPX, which provides plug-and-play OpenID logins for any site, delivered via a software as a service (SaaS) model.

"We've heard loud and clear that companies want to simplify the registration and sign-in process," said Tore Steen, VP of Business Development at JanRain. "They definitely see the value of accepting OpenIDs, but there hasn't been a clear path for adopting OpenID and other open authentication standards. With RPX, JanRain is providing that path with a simple SaaS implementation."

According to JanRain, RPX makes accepting OpenID logins (and OAuth requests) as simple as subscribing and making a few code changes:

For JanRain's customers, RPX carries the benefits of lowering implementation and maintenance costs. Companies gain access to the technology they want while the onus of staying up-to-date on the latest code changes and dealing with other maintenance issues resides with JanRain.

For JanRain, however, the product solves a completely different issue: producing revenue. Offering OpenID services as SaaS, JanRain gains the ability to charge customers a subscription fee based on the number of OpenID logins in play. If the service takes off, so could JanRain.

To date, lack of use cases and general confusion about OpenID implementation techniques have been effective deterrents to more widespread OpenID adoption. It will be interesting to see if the introduction of JanRain's solution - combining ease-of-use with a subscription model that companies understand - breaks that logjam.