Remember the dot-com boom, when countless web workers were able to take a business plan written on a scrap of paper to potential investors and get funding? The investment community doesn’t play quite as fast and loose with business plans as it did back then, but if you have in mind an entrepeneurial effort on the web, there are some good resources to help you craft a persuasive business plan. In this post, I’ll cover three examples.

Mike McKeever’s $23.99 book How to Write a Business Plan has a thorough discussion of how to attract investors, how to properly describe a business, how to detail marketing plans, and more. It also comes with a CD-ROM that has forms and spreadsheets to help, including spreadsheets for forecasting cash flows, profit and loss, and more.

If you’re looking for more automation in creating a sophisticated business plan, there are some good software tools for doing so. Palo Alto Software’s Business Plan Pro 11.0 ($99.95) comes with more than 500 sample business plans, and walks you step-by-step through crafting a plan. If you want a lot of hand holding this is the way to go.

JIAN’s BizPlanBuilder,at $99.77, is another software-driven way to automate the construction of your documents. It’s especially good if you’re working within Microsoft’s productivity applications. It comes with Word templates, a PowerPoint template for pitching investors, and GAAP financial models built in Excel.

Do you know of good tools, books or online resources for building effective business plans?

Share/Send

When planning a vacation, it’s hard to find good information on the web.  UpTake, now out of private beta, tries to help with that process by assessing keywords and returning user comments from across the web to help you find great travel destinations based on your preferences.

UpTake aggregates information from Expedia, TripAdvisor, and Yahoo Travel.  The website crawls these sites (along with other travel niche sites) and returns user generated travel spot reviews for spots throughout the United States. UpTake provides information on hotels, restaurants, tourist attractions, and suggestions for things to do.

The site is very similar to TripAdvisor, TripHub, or Yapta. However UpTake provides more contextual returned results based on users’ queries.  Uptake strives to build intelligence into the search results by providing you with accommodations and options tailored to the type of trip it senses you’re using.  For example, if you enter “wi-fi fax hotel,” it will assume you’re a business traveler looking for hotels that will allow you to work from a business center inside the hotel.

As you can see form the screenshot, the results are returned in an organized and well-laid out manner.   A Google Map is provided to help those unfamiliar with a town’s geography find the attractions near their area of interest.

UpTake was formerly known as Kango and is headed by Yan Lee, the former GM of Yahoo Travel.

Share/Send

SMS text messages are the unsung heroes of messaging; this low-fi 140-character medium has for years kept us connected to each other and is fasting becoming one of the key enablers for ubiquitous computing and the personal infrastructure of the web worker.

kwiry is the latest service to extend its functionality into delivery by SMS, enabling users to turn text messages into useful personal reminders.

To set a reminder, users simple text 59479 (yes, that does spell out k-w-i-r-y on a keypad!) with a short note describing the reminder they’d like to set; for example, an article you want to share, bills that need paying, looking up movie showtimes and pretty much any activity that can be expressed with brevity.

Interestingly when a ‘kwiry’ is added to a user’s account, opening it back at the main web interfaces, also pre-programs a bunch of searches across common web services. For example, adding a note ‘to watch iron man this weekend‘ automatically adds search buttons for Ask, Google, Yelp, iTunes and others. Also, kwirys can be routed to a number of start pages and aggregators - including iGoogle, Pageflakes, Netvibes and Bloglines - as well as shared within a user’s social network.

The SMS texting capability seems to only be available to US users at this time, a web UI and other entry points are available to international users, though the company is seeking to add MMS capability too as a photographic aide-mémoire as well as mobile web interface and iPhone support.

The service appears to be covering similar ground to Stikkit, I Want Sandy, reQall and even TwitterFone. Though each of these services takes a slightly different approach, there’s a certain focus and clarity in the user experience, something which the admittdely feature-rich Kwiry is somewhat lacking. However, there’s a lot to play for in this field and ultimately the utility each provides to users is the real measure of success.

Share/Send

The fledgling Google Friend Connect service lost one of its major selling points today, when Facebook announced:

Just as we’ve been forced to do for other applications that redistribute data in a way users might not expect or understand, we’ve had to suspend Friend Connect’s access to Facebook user information until it comes into compliance.

You’ll still be able to use your Google, LinkedIn, Hi5, or Orkut identity to log into Friend Connect sites - but without Facebook users, the reach of those sites is considerably lessened. Although Facebook’s reasons are couched in terms of respecting user privacy, there are other agendas here - like desperately hanging on to eyeballs to sell. Until and unless we see the rise of truly vendor-neutral frameworks for storing and sharing identity information, this sort of squabbling is bound to continue.

Share/Send

Some days it seems like the economic news is uniformly dismal: foreclosures up, food prices up, unemployment up, mortage money vanishing, financial firms crashing and burning. While economists are still arguing about whether we’re in a recession in the US, everything from gas prices to homes sitting vacant because no one wants to buy them suggests that something bad is going on.

For many web workers, though, it’s still business as usual. In my own particular arena (software development), things are still humming along for myself and most of my peers. Anecdotally designers seem to be doing well too. But it’s hard to make sweeping statements about the whole “web work sector” because we’re so diverse.That’s where you come in. We’d like to conduct our own little confidences survey by asking whether - and how - you’re planning for an economic downturn. Are you saving more? Investing in broadening your skills? Spending more time on marketing yourself? Planning to move out of web work entirely? Or are you confident that your own work will remain in demand for the foreseeable future, and just ignoring all the scare stories?

Share/Send

del.icio.us recently made a small news flurry when they announced their Firefox extension had been upgraded for compatibility with Firefox 3. But now there’s even more news, this time for users of the dominant browser: del.icio.us is out with the first serious version of their extension for Internet Explorer.

The IE extension includes a del.icio.us sidebar and toolbar with bookmark synching and typedown search (very similar to what’s been offered in Firefox). It also has indicators to show you when you have new links, and speeds up searching your saved bookmarks. It works on IE6, 7, or 8 on either Windows XP or Windows Vista. If you’re interested, you can download it here, or visit a dedicated Yahoo! group for further discussion.

Share/Send

One of the challenges of a constantly changing technology landscape is that nearly everything one recommended to clients a few years ago is not always desirable today. A few years back I was asked to help companies build web sites. Today, people want blogs, Twitter accounts and Facebook pages.

One of the benefits of a constantly changing technology landscape is that as a consultant, I can continuously grow my diversified list of services that I offer to clients adding new and interesting tactics. In the last year, I’ve been exploring virtual worlds and lately it has really been paying off as I’ve taken on new Second Life marketing projects.

More recently, I’ve been exploring custom social networks for my own projects and for my clients. With moves by major Internet sites toward a more open, “social Web” including Google’s new FriendConnect service that is currently in beta, I think social networks and virtual worlds will become more and more relevant to how companies and organizations communicate their messages and do business online.

Private-label social network can offer the following:

1. Brand building environments. I remember the days when my clients wanted their own “online communities” attached to their web sites, forums where their customers and potential customers could interact with one another and with company representatives. Besides being fraught with maintenance and liability issues, they saw online communities as viable ways to get their brands in front of people on a recurring basis. For better or worse, social networks take message boards to an entirely new level of interactivity and engagement.

2. Community building tools. Online forums of the past allowed community members to post message, either in response to existing messages or starting message threads of their own. Custom social networks allow members to express themselves through multimedia features including blogs, blog comments, page comments, photo uploads, video uploads, even audio uploads. The community can create more content in more ways than ever, tipping the publishing power from strictly the company or organization hosting the community to the members themselves.

3. Viral features. In the “old days,” online forums relied mostly on word of mouth or happenstance to build their memberships. Today, social networks provide tools that let members spread the word about the networks through widgets, easily invite other members into the network, and even see what other members are doing through activity feeds so they can do it, too.

4. Social glue. There is nothing more powerful online than the strength of social bonds. When people connect with people they know or through people they know, they are more likely to interact in and return to a community because they have a social investment in that community. By building social networks, companies and organizations use social bonding to keep people coming back for more.

Because I’m not a developer, I’ve been using Ning to build custom social networks. I like the elegance of their tools and design templates for the non-programmer and non-designer. I do find Ning is lacking in a few areas such as not offering collaborative tools for network members, not having a way to post articles or upload document files that can be shared, and lacking a calendar feature. But for the time being, they are a major player in the custom social network building space.

This week, a new service debuted in public beta mode - WackWall - looking to enter the same space as Ning. WackWall feels like a watered down version of Ning with fewer features and capabilities. For now, I’ll stick with the tool that works and keep an eye on what Google, Facebook, MySpace and others will be offering in the near future.

Are you getting into the business of building social networks? And if so, what tools are you using?

Share/Send

Like a lot of Web Workers, I am fairly dependent on the Google suite of applications, and with good reason. They are feature rich, they’re reliable, I can get to them from anywhere on just about any hardware, and they’re free.

That doesn’t mean that they are perfect though. Each application has it’s own quirks and improvement is always possible. Thankfully, if you’re a Firefox user you can tweak these and other applications to add some really great functionality using the Greasemonkey add-on. We’ve talked about the benefits of Greasemonkey in the past, and with an impressive library of scripts available it can be used to modify quite a few web applications, including those made by Google.

Here are some of the more useful scripts I have discovered in my travels that help my Google experience be even more productive:

iGoogle - The iGoogle home page is a great way to consolidate everything from all of my Google services into one place, calendaring, email, docs etc.. Add my Jott’s and my Toodledo tasks and I really do have a dashboard with just about everything I need.

Unfortunately Google uses an overly generous area at the top of the page for the logo and search box. Enter iGoogle Max, a script which adds a toggle menu item which collapses the header area and search box. With them out of the way when I don’t need them, I have much more room to dispaly my useful widgets.

Reader - I subscribe to a lot of RSS feeds in Google Reader and the handy Show Feed Favicons script replaces the generic feedicon with the favicon pulled from the site. It’s very useful for picking out your favorites when scanning your unread list.

If you are also a Twitter user, you may like the Share with Twitter script. This adds an option to your Reader that will automatically submit / send an item to your Twitter account. Built in options to shrink the URL and count words make it super handy.

Gmail - I consolidate all of my various email addresses into one Gmail account and take advantage of the ability to choose which one I am sending from. Gmail does offer the ability to add a signature but it doesn’t differentiate which account I am sending from making it a less than viable option for me.

The addition of Gmail HTML Signatures solves that problem. This is a very handy script that automatically inserts a customized signature based upon which account I am using to send the message from.

A lot of the best Gmail scripts have been assembled into the indispensable Better Gmail 2 add-on from the Lifehacker folks. Get a lot functionality all wrapped up into a nice self updating package.

I wonder why these features aren’t already available as they often seem so obvious and really are indispensable once you get used to them. It’s not unusual for user contributed functionality to make it into new releases, but in the interim this is a great way to customize your apps to work your way. And if a script doesn’t already exist, you can always create your own.

These are my favorites - which Google related scripts do you use that I missed?

Share/Send

This blog has covered alternative word processors before, and both writers and readers tend to agree that Google Docs and Zoho Writer are good choices. I have a few other alternative word processors that I favor, though. In this post, I’ll cover four that are worth looking into.

Adobe Buzzword is built on the Adobe Flash platform, and is a particularly good tool for collaborating with others on documents, because it lives inside your web browser. It’s free, it’s good about showing completely WYSIWYG versions of documents, and makes it easy for collaborators to be sure they’re using the same document versions. A version for the Adobe AIR platform is in development. For more on Buzzword, see Mike’s post.

Word processors today are so full of toolbars, icons, docks and other interface clutter that sometimes I like to work on a totally uncluttered document. Among applications that deliberately try to free you from all of the clutter, many are designed to keep you looking just at what you’re working on, minus interface distractions. There are several good word processors that reach for this goal, and my favorite one (for Windows) is DarkRoom.

DarkRoom is a port of the popular, similar word processor for the Mac called WriteRoom.  Both of these word processors present you with a stripped-down interface designed to keep you focused on the text you’re working on and little else. You can also see a lot of text on screen at one time. WriteRoom is good, but DarkRoom is free, and WriteRoom now costs $24.95.

From the open source world, AbiWord is available for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. It works smoothly with .DOC, .RTF, .TXT and HTML files, but what long-time users with experience in Microsoft Word (such as myself) appreciate is how faithful to Windows and Word conventions this word processor is. In the new version of AbiWord, there is even a new, experimental Ofice Open XML (OOXML) import filter.

Sure, GoogleDocs and Zoho Writer have their places in the world of alternative word processors, but give some of the above choices a try. Each has its own unique strong points.

Do you have a favorite alternative word processor?

Share/Send

We’ve mentioned the Tempo time-tracking application before. Although it’s only been a couple of months since we looked at their innovative timeslip-based recording, they haven’t been standing still. Their most recent release focuses on a pile of useful integrations:

• Export invoice data to Blinksale or Quickbooks
• Import projects from Basecamp
• Track time via Twitter

They’ve also added timer-based tracking to their timeslips focus. Signup for a single user remains free, with paid accounts starting at $5 per month.

Share/Send

We’ve written before about the importance of personal branding for the web worker. But there’s one piece of that brand that’s been growing in importance, yet is often ignored: your avatar.

In blog comments, on Twitter, on Facebook, on Skype, in instant messenger clients (the list goes on) the first impression that many people will get of your identity is through the tiny image that you choose for yourself. People who have already established their own logos and branding can just go with those; many others opt for the cell phone or MacBook photo. But there are plenty of other choices for getting a distinctive or customized avatar. Here’s a roundup of some of your options.MyPictr is an online photo editor. Upload your photo and it lets you crop, zoom, and then download the results. The nicest thing about this service is that it already has the dimensions for many popular sites built right in, so it helps you crop to an image that will display without distortion.

At the high end of the market, you can take a look at Iconize Me! This service, run by a few professional caricature artists, lets you send in a photo that they then redraw into a custom icon. You’ll pay $40-50 for this.

Yahoo! has their own avatar maker, designed for use with their IM service. Of course, you can always take a screenshot of your creation there and use it anywhere.

DoppelMe is a generalized online avatar builder. It walks you through a series of menus to pick clothing and accessories and hair and so on, and presents you with a picture built up from these parts. The results are more cartoony than realistic, and the service is free.

If you want to go the pop culture route, there are actually two different Simpsons avatar makers, the Mini-Mizer (which lets you create yourself as a Lego minifig), or the South Park avatar maker.

Have you put any effort into creating your own avatars? How did you go about it?

Share/Send

Where did the time go? If you ask yourself this question at the end of your workday and don’t know the answer, odds are you’ve wasted some time on unnecessary tasks.

As web workers, our unproductive time doesn’t go to water cooler gossip or hanging out at the employee lounge. Usually, we’ll lose hours each day on social networks, email, instant messaging, and random internet surfing. Of course, these are important aspects of our web working lives, but they often take more time than they should.

So how do we prevent from indulging ourselves in our favorite time-wasters?

Social networks. If you’re a web worker it’s highly likely that you have a social networking account. In fact, you might have more than one. The average person probably spends less than an hour on Facebook daily, while others are more extreme. If you’re more like the latter, then you need to trim down your social networking time.

If personal or business networking is valuable to you, then make time for it. Schedule it like you would an important work task. A maximum of 30 minutes each workday should suffice, unless you use social networks as your main communication tool for most of your contacts.

Random net surfing. There’s nothing inherently wrong with mindlessly surfing the net, however, it becomes a big distraction if you do it alongside your work tasks. It’s much harder to get your work done if you’re constantly clicking that Stumble button or jumping from one Wikipedia entry to another.

To trim your surfing hours, you need to know exactly how much time is spent on it, as well as the sites you visit. That’s where automatic time tracking apps come in. You might be surprised at the results. The first time I used one, I was surprised to find that although my main activity was work related, it only beat my random web surfing by 5%.

The best thing to do to limit random surfing is to find your peak working hours and do nothing but your work (and deserved breaks) during this time. You can also minimize visual distractions by hiding the Windows taskbar or by working in fullscreen mode. Doing this makes it harder to access random websites.

Email. Email is efficient, since you can send it whenever you’re free and your recipient can read it at their convenience. However, I’m guessing that the average web worker receives roughly a hundred emails a day, including subscriptions and spam. To mentally filter, read, and reply to those messages can take hours - which are better spent working or resting.

To lessen excessive email time, find a system that works for you. Personally, I’ve used Inbox Zero with great success, while other people made progress with fancier email styles. There’s also the newly coined Inbox Infinity. Pre-existing email productivity systems might not work for you perfectly, but they’re a great starting point if you want to change your habits and make email time more productive.

Like my advice on social network usage, it also helps to schedule email. You can check and respond to your email twice a day, which should be enough for web workers who have at most 5 regular clients at any given time. If you can, remove any audio or visual cues that let you know as soon as new email arrives. This includes the Gmail icon in the Google Toolbar, the sound that MS Outlook plays for new incoming mail, and other similar notifications. By removing these cues, you won’t be a slave to your incoming mail.

Instant messaging. It’s always a surprise to me how many people (web worker or not) are constantly messaging me during office hours, often for mere idle chitchat. Being constantly available via IM proved to be such a distraction, so I took some steps to change my IM habits. This included taking advantage of stealth or invisible modes, and being selective about who can see me online.

If you’re an IM power user, it’s best to use an all-in-one application, rather than opening Google Talk, Yahoo Messenger, and AIM all at the same time. This reduces the visual clutter on your desktop. Examples of such applications are Pidgin and Miranda.

Which of these activities waste your time the most? What have you done to lessen your wasted time?

Share/Send

Sometimes it’s the little things that count. If you’ve been holding off trying Zoho applications (now up to 9 productivity apps and 8 business apps) because you didn’t want to manage yet another account, they’ve got two new options for you: you can sign in with your Google or Yahoo! ID. Given the reach of those two services, this opens up Zoho to just about anyone who is seriously on the web, and of course makes it easier than ever to try out Zoho services.

With the Google and Yahoo authentication APIs available, and the penetration of those services, it leads me to wonder, though: is OpenID on the way to simply being irrelevant? It’s easy to point out benefits to owning your own identity and having it portable, but I suspect if Google and Yahoo signins spread, the vast majority of surfers just won’t care.

Share/Send

One of the main reasons I became a web worker was so that I could be around when my son got home from school. But I can’t imagine what it would have been like to work from home when he was in preschool. Peanut butter, meet keyboard.

Mike Gunderloy just did a post in which he suggested working at a stand-up desk might be a reasonable way to keep your work out of the reach of children. He also did a great post last year, discussing how to manage having kids at home.

We all agree that, as web workers, we’re incredibly fortunate to be able to participate in the discovery years. But you also have to admit that sometimes it’s impossible to work with a toddler or preschooler around.

If you have children, they probably have a lot to do with your lifestyle choice, so I imagine you don’t want to send your tiny tot off to daycare every day. But to get serious work done, you sometimes need a few hours to a few days a week without kid distractions.

Childcare Options

You could get creative with nanny sharing. if you have schedule flexibility, you could start or join a childcare co-op in your area, or find other at-home parents and do some informal kid sharing.

A few co-working centers that offer on-site childcare have come and gone (TwoRooms in NY, Gate 3 Work Club in Emeryville, CA). Neil Goldberg of WorkClub, which ran Gate 3, says there is lots of action in the co-working arena, and that the topic of childcare always comes up. He pointed out that liability is a major factor when it comes to adding a kid space.

Now there’s a new co-working center called CubesAndCrayons, which Imran Ali discussed just the other day. This one might just survive, due to its location in Silicon Valley. As Imran pointed out, It’s a fully equipped work center that offers professional childcare for kids from three months to five years old. It has all the amenities you’d expect and one I didn’t: a workout room. Nothing like a few minutes on a treadmill to clear your head.

The Bigger Picture: Get Organized

What we really need is a village. We need to be able to coordinate with each other through a site where we could group ourselves and network according to our very specific needs and interests.

CafeMom, the most popular social network for women, has 500 groups for work-at-home moms. I browsed through some of them, but their emphasis seems to be on finding ways to work at home, rather than coordinating or dealing with childcare or other challenges faced by web-working families.

I also went to LinkedIn to see if anyone had created a group for web workers. I looked under “Professional Groups” and “Networking Groups” and didn’t find one. Lots of you belong to LinkedIn, I’m sure. Anyone feel like creating a web worker group there?

Or someone could launch a social network for the web-worker niche. They’re saying that small is the new big; people are starting to gravitate towards social networks that are built around particular interests. It’s relatively easy to do and there are many options available, one of which Mike Gunderloy reviewed not long ago. Someone named Larry started one at Ning, but he’s the only member so far…

There are more of us web workers out there every day. If we were organized, we might even be able to do important things like influence government policy to improve our lot. Right now we’re all like Whos on Horton’s dust speck. We are here!

ed: If you’re interested in any of these ideas, say so in the comments. We’ll see what we can do to make it happen.

Share/Send

Lately I’ve been sprucing up my collection of software applications, and spending time with some good online tutorials on my favorites. Many of these tutorials are free, and in this post, I’ll round up several that I’ve found worth paying attention to.

Are you a Photoshop user? Good-Tutorials has a great collection of tutorials on effects, filters and more. They’re all free, and easy to follow.

Also on the graphics front, Good-Tutorials has a useful collection of Adobe Illustrator tutorials. You can learn how to do convincing wood and metal effects, and more. If you happen to reach for the open source application GIMP when it comes to graphics, check the tutorials at HowToGimp.

If you dabble in Linux at all, there are a couple of sites on the web with outstanding tutorials specific to almost every Linux distribution, from Ubuntu to Fedora. HowtoForge is a good place to start. Look down the left rail of the site for the many topics covered. Also check out Unix-Tutorials.com.

Recently the OpenOffice suite of productivity applications was upgraded to a new beta version. As I’ve been trying it out, I’ve also been spending time at LearnOpenOffice.org, which offers free HTML- and Flash-based tutorials.

My very favorite site of all for free tutorials remains W3Schools. You can become proficient in almost any kind of web development at this site, tuning up your HTML, CSS and JavaScript skills, among other topics offered. Give this one a try.

Do you have any favorite sites for application tutorials?

Share/Send

If you must travel for business, it’s nice to know what it costs (and your accountant will be asking you what you spent at the end of the year). This is where new service FuelFrog comes in: keep it posted on the amount of gas you put in your car, the mileage, and the price, and it will calculate and graph your mileage and spending trends over time.

Of course, anyone can do this with a notebook and a spreadsheet at home; the math is trivial. What makes FuelFrog actually useful is the fact that it has Twitter integration. So rather than keep track of written notes or gas receipts, just pull out your mobile phone and send over a tweet whenever you gas up the vehicle. Then visit the web site at your leisure to see how you’re doing.

Share/Send