Here’s a great example.

I’m not an accountant. Managing my business accounting has been the only unsolved business problem that has plagued me for the past eight years. I’ve tried Quicken software four different times since the 1990s for our personal finances and fail every time: it’s too complicated to reconcile the bank statements with what’s in Quicken and the interface is clunky. Quicken Online worked better but $35 a month was too steep for me. I had looked at Mint and a few other services but, at the time, they didn’t have the feature set I need.

A few months ago, at a Refresh NYC meeting, we got talking about taxes and managing your books to make it easier to work with your accountant. Someone mentioned WorkingPoint. They used it to manage their fairly complex consulting business and a small retail business. Best of all: it costs $10 a month.

So I signed up for the free version first. One huge hurdle with these online bookkeeping services, and Quicken software on your computer, is that it takes time to put enough of your business in to really test the system. To see what makes sense and what does not work. It was fairly easy to input a couple invoices in WorkingPoint, then record payment. Adding client names and addresses proved equally easy and obvious. Then I added a few expenses. That worked well. My only real confusion had to do with the idea of accounts: I’m not an accountant and the lingo escapes me. The WorkingPoint help turns out to have a lot of plain English descriptions of the accounting process which helped me understand better.

WorkingPoint worked so well that I signed up for the $10 a month account and made the time on a weekend to add in my six months of invoices, expenses, and other data for this year. Besides being easy to use, I also created a second user account for my wife so she can stop asking me when different projects will pay off, what’s in the pipeline, and all the mundane data needed to mesh a business life with a personal life.

WorkingPoint turns out to have exactly the broad range of bookkeeping features I need to manage my businesses easily. For a great price. Some of what they offer:

• Record and categorize transactions, adjust/close activities
• Invoice customers and send by email or snail mail
• Manage business expenses
• Reporting for financials and taxes
• Manage customer contact information
• Manage cash and inventory
• Import and match transactions from your bank account

Their feature set appears to be driven mostly by their feedback forum where subscribers can vote for different features. They’ve recently added the ability to track recurring payments, for example, a fairly rare capability but important to track income for my online publishing service.

While the feature set is comprehensive for my needs, I’m most impressed by how they solve common problems people have when they do their bookkeeping. In the past month, for example, they added the ability to connect to your business bank accounts and then reconcile to your Working Point entries with your imported bank entries. I expected the clunky Quicken approach where you stare at a checkbook and try to figure out which items might be the same. Instead, Working Point surrounds each entry with a set of obvious links to import the data, never import, and ignore. Even better, if Working Point finds an entry for the same amount and around the same date, they add a message and link to let you quickly match the Working Point entry with your imported entry from your bank. It’s not always a match but it is far easier to import data.

Is WorkingPoint perfect? Not exactly. The Profit/Loss widget on the dashboard never seems to record money I take in until a month later, a problem that may be mine, something that is inscrutable to me. Which is no big deal because I use the other more robust reporting to see what invoices are outstanding, for example, or how much I’ve made the past month or quarter. People with a retail business might find WorkingPoint a work in progress with some features that need to be added. But WorkingPoint has a great customer support mechanism to handle ideas to improve their service. And they act on those ideas: that’s how they added the ability to import and reconcile their data with data from your bank.

Their Facebook fan page also turns out to have useful information for me as a small business owner. I click more on their stuff than I do other businesses. But the real benefit, aside from having the perfect cost and feature set for my needs, is that it is easier for me to keep my business organized. Once or twice a week I login to record expenses. And when checks come in, I login and record the income. When my wife asks me to update her on my cash flow, that’s easy, too: I tell her to login and find out.

Bottomline, if you’re like me and have struggled with how to manage your bookkeeping in a simple way, or you don’t like the solution you currently use, I highly recommend you look at WorkingPoint. It’s a great combination of features, and ecosystem to manage improvements, and a source of useful information about the whole problem of how to run a business and have a little fun. Not only have I solved a nagging problem. I actually make more money because doing the books is not longer painful. It’s easier to sit down and invoice. The reporting features also create a positive feedback loop to encourage me to make the most of the work I do.

Email newsletters have been separate marketing channels from Facebook, Twitter, and other social media. This week, MailChimp has taken a great stride forward by adding Facebook Like buttons and other integration of social media into email campaigns. For example, you can use their Facebook application to integrate email signups with your Facebook fan page.

Their new Social Pro plugin syncs your email list with the Facebook social graph. It shows what social networks subscribers are on, who’s following you on twitter, rank subscribers by influence, and more. These additions help marketers understand their audiences better so they can refine their offers and drive conversions and sales.

Integration of email newsletters, which still yields significant customer actions relative to other forms of marketing, with social media, which yields significant details about the demographics and preferences of customers, is a huge win for marketers. However, the audience is limited to people who feel comfortable enough with Facebook privacy controls to expose their personal data. MailChimp goes as far as you can go to connect the email marketing and social media marketing channels.

The MailChimp blog has the details. They also have a guide to their social media capabilities. And it’s all done with the usual MailChimp tongue in cheek style (although hopefully their monkey has not been fired: they’ve moved more towards a 1950s design aesthetic and away from cute mouthy spokesmonkeys).

URLs

a href=”http://www.mailchimp.com/blog/mailchimp-v5-2-is-coming/” target=”_blank”>http://www.mailchimp.com/blog/mailchimp-v5-2-is-coming/
http://downloads.mailchimp.com/guides/MailChimp_LetsGetSocialGuide.pdf

“Harrison Tang cares about his privacy and takes elaborate steps to protect it. Your privacy is another matter.

Tang, 27, is co-founder of a “people search” website called Spokeo, which serves up extraordinarily detailed profiles of pretty much everyone — including you — gleaned from online directories, databases and social networks.

Don’t take my word for it. Do a search for your name at Spokeo’s website (www.spokeo.com).”

From the LA Times. You can remove your listing from their service by using the Spokeo Privacy page. What is most disturbing is that they charge money to aggregate data about individuals. It’s one thing to have to search to find information about people. It’s another to pull that data into one place then charge money. But it’s also not unexpected when, in the US, at least, there are few rules about online privacy when it comes to businesses harvesting personal data.

URLs

http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fiw-lazarus-20100608,0,7917251,full.column
http://www.spokeo.com
http://www.spokeo.com/privacy

CMO.com a few months ago, published a chart that describes the social media channels most used by businesses. According to research CMO.com and BazaarVoice did recently, CMOs Plan for Higher Social Media Measurability in 2010, 81% of Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) plan to link their revenues to their social media efforts. Tracking ROI, whether dollars earned or simply business impact, is a big step forward for business use of social media.

While the CMO.com chart is interesting, and a good high level introduction, it’s missing Four Square, Yelp, and other location based social media that retailers can use to great effect. Retailers and local businesses have long found it difficult to get noticed and recommended online by their customers. LinkedIn works great for some businesses, and individuals, but not so well for your local flower shop. Four Square and similar services are perfect for the millions of these small local businesses.

If you’re interested in charts about social media, what social media is and how it operates, HubSpot has a great post, 22 Educational Social Media Diagrams. For example, the first chart groups social media outlets by type of activity, commenting versus creating content versus joining, a point of view that had not occurred to me. Plus at the bottom of their post is a link to PowerPoint and PDF versions of 50 more charts. Perfect for presentations to sell in social media projects.

URLs

http://www.cmo.com/social-media/cmos-guide-social-media-landscape
http://www.bazaarvoice.com/blog/2009/12/17/cmos-plan-for-higher-social-media-measurability-in-2010/
http://www.foursquare.com
http://www.yelp.com
http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/6005/22-Educational-Social-Media-Diagrams.aspx

“Google Grants is a unique in-kind donation program awarding free AdWords advertising to select charitable organizations. We support organizations sharing our philosophy of community service to help the world in areas such as science and technology, education, global public health, the environment, youth advocacy, and the arts.”

From Google Grants. The value of their grant varies and depends on how the non-profit uses their grant. Google says it is about $300/month. But the goal is to allow non-profits to use AdWords to get donations, volunteers, and other good things.

If you’re a non-profit that qualifies and is accepted, or you have a non-profit who meets their criteria, this could be an excellent program. There is no end date to the grant as long as the non-profit actively keeps up their AdWords account.

“No single visual element has more effect on a viewer than color. Color gets attention, sets a mood, sends a message. But what colors are the right ones? The key is that color is relational. Colors don’t exist in a vacuum but are always seen with other colors. Because of this, you can design a color-coordinated document based on the colors in any element on the page. Here’s how.”

From Before & After magazine. It’s part of their process to collect email addresses so you have to provide an email address to get the document. However, I find their monthly how-to emails often interesting, not pushy.

This article shows a series of basic steps you can follow to take a photograph and extract many different possible color palettes. Picking colors can be hard, especially for business people on a budget. Even with a budget, it helps to know the color picking process if you manage or hire designers. In this case, their article shows how to use colors in one element of a document, a photograph, to then extract palettes from a color wheel. It’s a very good primer on that process.

UPDATE: This document on how to pick colors that work together also works great with an online color wheel to pick analogs, tetrads, and so on. Color Scheme Designer, for example, lets you define an RGB color value (to the lower right of the circle on the left side of their page) and then all its different color relations. Color Scheme Designer also lets you see how your color choices look to color-impaired people. You still have to pick your colors and ensure they work together in a palette, but an online color wheel can make the process faster and easier.

“We’re living in a social media world, and, like it or not, our avatar is often the first impression others get about us as we interact virtually on social networks, blogs, microblogs and other online communities. Our avatars are a representation of our brands — our personal brand or our company’s or organization’s brand. But how many of us are thinking strategically about our avatars?”

From Salon. If you have not figured it out already, the avatar, the small thumbnail sized picture you use on Facebook and LinkedIn, among other places, can say alot about you. This blog post describes six different issues to consider as you pick and change avatars.

“Frustrated by a slow and antiquated computer system, the city of Los Angeles is weighing a plan to replace its e-mail and records retention software with a service provided by Google, a move that could allow the Internet giant to retain sensitive records transmitted by the police and other municipal agencies.

If approved by the City Council, responsibility for protecting the internal data and public records would be shifted from the city to Google, according to a report submitted this week to a council committee that will weigh the proposed $7.25-million contract.”

From the LA Times. A few years ago, there were stories about countries like Brazil promoting open source as an alternative to Microsoft Windows and Office. Now it’s cities talking about using Google’s network and software to replace antiquated software, in this case, GroupWise email. And companies like Motorola and Genentech apparently find Google secure enough to use for their businesses.

In case you’re somewhere on the planet without the internet, today is the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission that landed men on the moon on July 20, 1969. NASA has a commemorative site with lots of news, pictures, and interactive features.

Most striking, to me, in our age, is that Neil Armstrong, the man who actually stepped on the moon first, has deliberately avoided the public limelight. He doesn’t appear in People magazine every few years by choice. He’s never on TV. Instead, he’s lived out the life he wanted in Ohio. That’s truly odd, and wonderful, in an age that worships and promotes celebrity.

In 1969, personal technology meant a TV, radio, and telephone. Technology like Apollo 11, and mainframe computers, were too expensive and too complex to be run by anyone other than governments and well-funded corporations. Today, of course, personal technology includes updated versions of TV, radio, and phone but it also includes a host of internet-related services that most people take for granted. Especially if you have a phone with internet connectivity and a web browser.

While no government has matched what happened 40 years ago today, you could say that instead we created technology that helps billions of individuals. And much of that achievement has been based on the Apollo and other space and science missions. And much of that achievement has been from individuals from many countries who took government created technology, specifically the internet, to create technologies such as Google, eBay, Flickr, Facebook, Twitter, open source, and all the rest. We have had the technology revolution promised by Apollo. However, it has happened on earth, not space. And it’s been created and used by millions of people, not carefully selected astronauts.

All that said, as a web designer and coder, chained to computers all day and tormented at times by lousy Microsoft web browsers, my dream job is to herd goats in some mountain village somewhere that has no internet, no phone, no TV, no radio. You have to read books and talk to people to keep amused. You have to be outdoors hiking, swimming, or sitting around and watching the day pass. I would like universal health care, of course, and a professional government. My daughter tells me Norway might be just the ticket.

As a web designer and coder, I collect tons of emails and attachments from clients that have to be carefully tracked and easily found. And many projects have three, four, or more people attached. Often I have to dig out their contact information to make calls.

Awhile back, I found Xobni, a software tool with an odd name that should be in every version of any email software. Now they have a Plus version, for $29.95, that solves the major issue I had with the software. Both the free and paid versions are a huge value if you collect a lot of email for projects.

Xobni works as a plugin to Outlook. When you set up, it can take a few hours for the software to index thousands of emails. But that is a small price to pay for the features. Once indexed, Xobni sits on the right side of Outlook or it appears when you call it. Typing in part or all of a name or search term in Xobni calls up all your emails from that person or emails that contain that term. You also get the contact information from your address book. And attachments. And email threads, the chains of email by email subject line, nested and sorted by date. The ability to dig out ancient and obscure emails in seconds floored me the first time I used it.

Xobni also is useful in going back to tell your clients the exact email, by date and subject line, that had the information you sent them months ago. You know the phone call: the client calls up and says, “Did you ever do this?” Lawyers and anyone who needs backup often months later will find Xobni extremely easy and helpful.

While I religiously create project and client folders in Outlook and sort email every day, Xobni makes it possible to avoid that chore. Indeed, Xobni really is a totally different way to look at your email and work with it. Which is the reason every email client should have a current email view and the Xobni view.

The only issue I’ve found happens after I archive my emails, when my Outlook file goes over 2GB which happens every year. Happily, Xobni keeps a copy of the text of emails, and contact information, but not the attachments. Often that’s all I need.

Their new Plus version, however, includes the ability to search across multiple Outlook files. So I can have old archived emails as easily found as the ones in my current email file. The Free version still is limited to one Outlook file which may be fine for most people because it keeps the actual email text of archived emails (assuming you run Xobni before you archive your emails, of course).

Bottomline, Xobni is well worth a try if you have to manage large amounts of email. And even if you don’t the ability to quickly find any email based on author or content is amazing and valuable. The free version has a lot of capability. The Plus version, at $29.95, is a huge value even if you only use it to search across your archived email files with their attachments. It’s a small price to pay to support useful innovative software.

“Many of us in this room have had our lives transformed by technology. Some of us have grown up with tech while others have embraced it as adults. Many of us have become enamored with tech and its transformative potential. And because of this, many of us have become technology advocates. We’ve worked our way into different institutions, preaching about new opportunities introduced because of the internet. Furthermore, many in this room have been active in transforming politics through technology. We’ve leveraged technology for fundraising and getting out the vote. We could go on and on about political events that have been shaped by technology, from the Obama Campaign to the post-election Iranian protests.

All of this is brilliant and powerful, exciting and motivating. But I’m also worried. I’m worried about the rhetoric we use when we talk about technology. Given what we’ve experienced and what we witness today, we tend to believe that these technologies are the great equalizers, that they can help ANYONE participate, that the technologies in and of themselves can revitalize democracy. In other words, we tend to believe in a certain utopian myth of the internet as the savior. What if this weren’t true?”

From “The Not-So-Hidden Politics of Class Online”, a presentation by danah boyd. Found through a NYTimes.com Blogwise item, Does Social Networking Breed Social Division?.

Both the presentation and the NYTimes.com post are important to read. However, the research points up something that should be rather obvious: people associate online with the same people they associate with offline. The class divisions in any society will be carried into the online world. Technology is neutral. If social equality is the goal, and I would sign up for that goal, perhaps technology needs to expand to make connections online that might be impossible in the real world.

These items also point up the flip side of some technology policies, for example, Facebook’s invitation only model. Building a service on invitation naturally reinforces the carryover of our offline social networks online. But it also makes it difficult to break out and identify and connect with people who share our interests but would not connect with offline. Facebook groups help break the walled garden dynamic. But you have to find a group, join, and then participate actively to make friends outside your real world friends.

Perhaps humans also should create technology that passively suggests connections based upon participation (e.g. key words in posts, group affiliations) and level of activity (e.g. suggesting only people who are active online). People could choose to not connect. But they also could choose to connect with confidence there was sufficient basis for connection based on interests.

What disturbed me were the disparaging comments about people who use the other service, in this case, MySpace, made by the teenagers boyd interviewed. While it is human to engage in us versus them thinking, teachers and parents should work to balance that way of thinking with the equally real notion that we live in a big world with lots of people who are very different from us, that we are indeed equal at the human level, that we should be open to others even if they are not like us or even disagree with what we think and do.

“Bonnie Smalley has Internet bragging rights: She has been blocked by Twitter for hand-typing too many tweets in an hour. They thought she was a computer program made to spew spam.

Ms. Smalley, it turns out, is a 100 percent human customer service representative for Comcast. She is one of 10 representatives who reach out to customers through social networks, rather than waiting for them to find Comcast’s support site.”

From the New York Times.

This is a fun and simple overview about how you might manage your online social networks. For me, the more interesting bit is the links to sites that help you create avatars, for example, Be Funky. Many of these effects you can get in Photoshop. I also liked the mention of the Firefox plugin, LeechBlock, that lets you ban specific sites (oh, you know, YouTube or Facebook or ___) during certain hours of the day so you can get work done.

“How do you find a new search engine if all you know is Google? Typing “search engine” into the usual box might lead you to Microsoft’s newly launched Bing, the combined search at Dogpile, or the former king of search, Altavista.

But for those willing to dig around, searching for search engines can reveal a treasure trove: The net is rich with specialized search services, all trying to find a way to get their slice of the billions of dollars Google makes every year answering queries.

For this article, we surveyed some 50 specialty search services and picked out our favorites. What follows is not a systematic ranking or review, but a general guide to a very vibrant world that few have bothered to explore in depth.”

From Wired. There are a number of great engines to check out based on this article. Collecta looks useful for companies who want to find out what is said about them online while ParkingSpots can help you find a parking spot.

This article highlights the search trend away from generic search to topic specific search and action specific search. My guess is that some of these new search engines will be bought up by the bigger players like Google.

“Even though the legal profession depends heavily on writing, legal typography is often poor. Some blame lies with the strict typographic constraints that control certain legal documents (e.g. court rules regarding the format of pleadings).But the rest of the blame lies with lawyers. To be fair, I assume this is for lack of information, not lack of will. This website tries to fill that void. There are numerous guides on typography for generalists available but none specifically aimed at lawyers. So as one of the few typographers-turned-attorneys in America (yes, there are others) I figure that if I don’t do it, nobody will.”

From Typography for Lawyers. Found through The (Non)Billable Hour. This is a truly excellent introduction to typography geared towards all lay people. While it is hard to explain typography with words, showing people two examples of fonts that say the same thing, as this site does, explains it all to the average person.

My only quibble is that the layout is too wide even for 1024×768 screens. And you need to click into the site to get to the content, starting with the About page. However, that’s exactly the way legal documents usually work so it is no wonder.

We humans prefer to be addressed in our right ear and are more likely to perform a task when we receive the request in our right ear rather than our left. In a series of three studies, looking at ear preference in communication between humans, Dr. Luca Tommasi and Daniele Marzoli from the University “Gabriele d’Annunzio” in Chieti, Italy, show that a natural side bias, depending on hemispheric asymmetry in the brain, manifests itself in everyday human behavior.

From Need Something? Talk To My Right Ear in Science Daily. Found through HiveLogic.

Best part is that the tests were done in a noisy nightclub asking people for cigarettes. Probably the worst place to have a conversation. This research suggests that when you pitch your clients, you should always directly face their right ear.