• notebook paperBe optimistic: bring lots.


• a clipboard or other hard surface if you like to work on the bed instead of a desk like I do.


• different colored pensI found it useful to write all the changes I wasn't sure I wanted to make in a different color pen. That way, if I changed my mind, I could easily find those particular changes and remove them.


• Post-It notesGood to bookmark pages when you flip back and forth between sections.


• different colored highlightersI learned a terrific exercise by attending a conference by Darcy Pattison. You shrink your manuscript to a font small enough to fit your entire manuscript onto 32 pages (play with the margins and single space). You then use different colored highlighters to highlight whatever you want to examine for flow in your novel. You then lay out your novel on the floor and can see the entire thing in one look.


• laptop computer (Note: ask ahead of time whether the hotel AND YOUR SPECIFIC ROOM have wireless. My room must have been just on the cusp of wireless coverage. I got a good 30 min. of online time and that's it. (It ended up being a good thing, as I didn't have access to time-sucking Facebook).


• keyboard, mouse, etc.It was worth it to me to have a mouse instead of using the touchpad of the laptop. I was fine with the mini-keyboard of the laptop, but if you're not, keep that in mind. Nothing's worse than having time to type and being uncomfortable.


• printerYes, you heard me correctly. I purchased a small HP printer from Walmart for $35 (color and black ink included). It was SO WORTH having with me. Sometimes I redo a page so extensively, I need to edit it a couple of times. It was helpful to be able to print it and write on a clean copy.


• printer paper


• flash driveIf you don't bring a printer, you still may want to print. By bringing a flash drive, you can print in the hotel's business center (or, you can always email yourself your manuscript and open it that way).


• scissorsin case you want to cut your story apart to lay out


• stapler or hole punchI keep my novel in a binder. After I printed some new pages, I wished I was able to stick them in my binder.


• synopsisIf you change your novel, you may want to update this as well


• other drafts of the novelI know I ended up referring to old copies of my novel for parts I had deleted from the most current version.
  

Non-writing Related

• snacksLots. Now's not the time to worry about calories. Okay, I'm rationalizing the fact that I brought a jumbo bag of M & Ms, Red Vines, and Sun Chips, but let's just refer to these foods as fuel for creativity.


• meal-ish FoodsI regret that I didn't pack anything that could count as a meal. Because my hotel had a HUGE children's chess tournament going on, the parking lot was packed. In an effort to not lose my great parking space, I refused to leave the hotel. That meant I had to eat at the restaurants at the hotel. Saturday morning, I spent $4 on a cup of Dannon yogurt and a microscopic box of Cheerios. I should have brought a couple granola bars, an apple, a box of raisins, etc.


• coolerAgain, for bringing your own food. My room didn't have a refrigerator. If it had, I could have packed my own yogurt for under a dollar (can you tell I'm still bummed my yogurt cost $2.50?)


• water


• hand soapAm I the only one that can't stand how hotels still provide a bar soap instead of having a pump by the sink? I bring my own instead of using the slimy bar. A tip for any hotel stay.


• ipod and headphones, workout clothes, etc.It was nice to take a break on the treadmill for a bit to clear my head. It also helped to work off about 4 M & Ms.


• swimsuitA hotel with a pool was a must for me. I forced myself to make it to a certain page before I could take a swim break though.

Dallas Lawrence is Chair of the Social and Digital Media Practice at Levick Strategic Communications, the nation's top crisis communications firm. He blogs on emerging digital media trends and best practices for social media engagement on Bulletproof Blog. Connect with him on Twitter @dallaslawrence.

Social networks have truly come of age in the last year. No longer viewed as lonely outposts for youthful college slackers, the reach of these platforms has grown exponentially. Today, more than two-thirds of the world's Internet users visit the social networking sites that reel in billions of eyeballs every 24 hours.

Yet, despite the staggering growth of social networking, determining how to monetize social media platforms remains a tough code to crack for even the savviest of companies. As such, identifying new revenue models will be instrumental in kicking off the next cycle of the social networking phenomenon in 2010.

If Anyone Can Do It, Facebook Can

---

Facebook, social networking's acknowledged leader, has surpassed every platform on the market today, corralling more than 350 million unique users globally. If any social network is poised to design a winning formula for successful revenue streams in 2010, it's Facebook. CEO Mark Zuckerberg has set an aggressive agenda for the company, publically stating that he expects social networks to become as essential as web browsers and operating systems, and he has set the lofty yet entirely realistic goal of 1 billion users worldwide.

In the less than five years since it expanded beyond scholastic audiences, Facebook has not only grabbed the lion's share of users, it has engaged them like no other platform on the Internet. The average Facebook user visits the site at least once a day and spends an astounding 55 minutes engaging friends and family - statistics that another Zucker (Jeff) would probably kill for over at NBC.

While translating such popularity into dollars and cents isn't easy - especially in an industry whose users have grown accustomed to getting something for nothing - Facebook could potentially provide a monetization template that would revolutionize social networking as we know it.

The Next Level of Advertising Revenue

---

Advertising has traditionally provided the simplest means of generating revenue. PricewaterhouseCoopers reported in October that Internet advertising revenues totaled $10.9 billion for the first half of 2009. It's been estimated that Facebook alone took in $435 million of that total. But for a site with nearly half a billion users, a quarter of which spend more time within the network than watching television, these numbers represent just the beginning potential.

First, Facebook needs to admit to itself that it is in the business of selling ads. By better managing its advertising network, intelligently expanding its marketing options, and developing workable social ads that leverage the branding power of friends and connections, Facebook can begin to capture its rightful share of online ad revenues. The final piece is to increase awareness and understanding of Facebook ads among corporate decision makers.

For example, every executive in America today understands the value of purchasing Google ads - and that didn't happen by accident. Google understood that what caused it to dominate online search wasn't going to ultimately position the company as a global corporate powerhouse valued at nearly $200 billion. Google's aggressive marketing, communications, and lobbying shops have worked to ensure every ad buyer, political campaign, marketing executive, and public relations flack knows the value of the service and has direct and easy access to account executives who explain the much worshiped ROI Google ads provide.

Today, Facebook stands on the precipice Google inhabited just before it became a top money-maker. By taking a page from the Google playbook, and aggressively marketing and explaining its power to influence buying decisions, Facebook ads could become as essential to 21st Century marketing as the yellow pages were in the 20th Century.

E-Commerce Stop Sending Customers Away

---

The launch of Facebook as a true e-commerce site holds immense potential as a business solution and could forever change the way we shop. Online purchases through the first three quarters of 2009 totaled $98.3 billion according to the Department of Commerce. For the majority of companies selling products online who are also engaged on Facebook, opening Facebook fully to direct e-commerce transactions will dramatically change how businesses advertise and how consumers buy goods online.

Consumers and companies would flock to a Facebook storefront for one simple reason: We do everything else there. Imagine an integrated, one-click solution whereby your friends see your recent purchases (because you were incentivized by the brand to share your information) in their feed and are able to simply point, click, and purchase the same item.

With a few adjustments, companies can make timely offers of birthday gifts for friends, travel arrangements for event items, or the latest music from favorite artists - and make the sale without forcing the user to leave Facebook or put in new login information.

Rather than driving their 350 million users away from the platform to close the deal with retailers and purchase the item on an external platform, Facebook could benefit financially by charging companies a percentage of sales, a fixed rate to have a storefront, or from increased advertising opportunities.

Premium Subscription Options

---

Finally, whether users like it or not, Facebook will do itself a long term disservice if it does not consider premium subscription options. Users (whether they are corporations or teenagers) are amenable to paying for even the simplest features and functionality, as evidenced by the success of Facebook gifts.

Nothing good in life is free. It's a stark, mature reality that Facebook (and its users) need to face in 2010. By leveraging economies of scale, Facebook can churn a sizable profit without alienating users. Would you pay one dollar a month to share higher-resolution photos or upload higher-quality or longer videos? Last month, 2.5 billion photos were uploaded to Facebook. Even if only a quarter of the site's active users opted for premium options, this one change would generate more than $1 billion in annual revenues.

Improving advertising, developing an e-commerce platform, and adding subscription services will not only generate the revenue necessary to make the transition from highly adopted to highly profitable, it will open revenue streams as Google did before for the next generation of digital developments.

More business resources from Mashable:

---

- Social Media Marketing: How Pepsi Got It Right
- 5 Ways Small Businesses Can Avoid Social Media Panic
- HOW TO: Take Advantage of Social Media in Your E-mail Marketing
- HOW TO: Implement a Social Media Business Strategy
- 18 Online Productivity Tools for Your Business

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, peterspiro

Tags: advertising, business, e-commerce, facebook, MARKETING, monetization, monetizing, money, social media, social networks

Yahoo's social bookmarking service Delicious launched a new home page this morning, combining recent tagging activity and cross-referenced links on Twitter to deliver what it calls the hottest news from around the web in real time. While the exact formula behind the front page remains unclear, its contents are clearly changing minute by minute.

It is something the site probably should have done a while ago and if done correctly could make other services, like Digg, look all the more behind the times. The move could also help Delicious survive the coming Yahoo Search purge at the hands of Bing.

Sponsor

The new front page is focused on political and tech news instead of the most popular topic on Delicious, web design. There also appears to be some smart filtering of the Twitter messages being counted, as the numbers are far lower than other services' counts and seem to exclude the spammy retweeting bots that pump up big news sources in other retweet counting services.

We've long believed that Delicious is one of the most under-appreciated social media services remaining from the early days of the social web. This new version could help win back some of the early love, but it does represent a radical shift away from the original vision most people have of the service as a tool for bookmarking things you want to return to later. The founder of Delicious, Joshua Schacter, said on Twitter last night "i hate the delicious twitter integration (sharing != saving) but i like the new search a great deal."

The pressure on Digg to find a way to speed up the pace with which it surfaces news on its front page has got to be growing. Note that Delicious hasn't decided to put its links inside a toolbar as Digg, StumbleUpon and many other services have. That's nice.

For a closer look at Delicious and the real-time web, see our recent posts Five Great Delicious Hacks, in Five Minutes, for Delicious's 5th Birthday and our Introduction to the Real-Time Web.

The last time I heard the term "thought leader", I thought, "There ought to be a little anniversary present to mark the three millionth time you hear a buzzword."

That may be my biggest complaint about buzzwords and jargon: not that they're often impenetrable to outsiders, and not that they often mask a lack of clarity on the speaker's part, but because they take perfectly good phrases - phrases with power, phrases with innovation and meaning - and suck the life out of them through overuse.

Sponsor

Got a social media buzzword or catch phrase you'd like to lay to rest... or maybe reclaim and restore to life? (Say, "social media", for instance?)

Happy Birthday!

By the way, this marks the first anniversary of Noise to Signal on Read Write Web. I've made a birthday cake but, uh, since you're not here, well, I'll just have to eat it myself. For the past year, I've been whipping up weekly cartoons, Richard has been gamely publishing them and you've been so kind as to read them.

Thanks for that. And thanks for every comment, Digg, tweet, stumble and Delicious-ifying. I hope that you'll keep reading them in the year to come... and that you'll enjoy them as much as I enjoy drawing them.

Ed: Thanks Rob, I've thoroughly enjoyed the weekly funnies! It's given RWW a sense of humor that sometimes we're accused of not having (being serious types) ;-) Here's to many more classic Rob Cottingham cartoons over the next year.

More Noise to Signal

On a good morning there's no alarm clock. I wake up with the sun and do my best to resist the instinctive urge to look at the computer or check email for at least an hour.

My vice of choice isn't coffee, but the Kindle. Its electronic shelves are filled mostly with the business books I read in order to grow up to be a real businessman (before someone figures out I'm not). At any point in time I have about 120 books downloaded. Interspersed between Drucker, Godin, and Buffett are classics like Seneca, which I wish I could read more often but only get to a few times a year.

Automattic, the holding company behind WordPress.com, finally got an office late last year at Pier 38, a beautiful open-floorplan space right on the Embarcadero. It's about a five-minute walk from my apartment, but my preference is to work from home. We're very much a virtual company where everyone primarily works from home (or their coffee shop of choice). The half dozen of us in the Bay Area will go in on Thursdays to have a little company, but six days out of the week the space is usually empty. But we throw some great parties there.

The team communicates mostly via P2, something a little like Twitter but password-protected, with real-time updates and threaded inline conversations. P2 is almost like a chat channel, but structured like a blog, and we've evolved to have almost a dozen across the 40 people at Automattic serving a variety of purposes. We fill any gaps in communication by IRC, Skype, and, in a pinch, email.

In my home office there are two 30-inch monitors a Mac and a PC. They share the same mouse and keyboard using Synergy so I can copy and paste between them. The Mac is mostly used for email and chat, while web stuff and coding happen on the PC. The keyboard is, of course, Dvorak, a more efficient keyboard layout that I switched to 10 years ago. I also have a Sony Z90 laptop with me all the time, whether I'm going overseas or just to the doctor's office. I'm pretty rough on laptops, sometimes going through two a year. At home I like to geek out with home servers and networking, and sometimes find myself doing IT support for family, friends, and colleagues.

One of my favorite programs that we didn't make is RescueTime. Hackers all know that you have to profile before you can optimize, and RescueTime runs in the trap of my computers and tracks how much time I spend on different things, sometimes with surprising results. My biggest time-suck is email, and to help out I wrote a WordPress plugin that filters people into folders based on their email address and priority settings which helps keep my inbox relatively clean. Tim Ferriss, author of The 4-Hour Work Week, advocates checking email only twice a week but that's too severe for me. I'm currently trying Leo Babauta's approach from The Power of Less, which suggests small steps like checking email five set times a day instead of constantly. It's like dieting: People who binge diet gain it all back. That happens to me with email.

Music is my muse and I listen to it all day. There's a lot of jazz Dexter Gordon and Sonny Rollins but I'm also a big fan of Jay-Z, Beyonc, and Method Man. I have an analog Shindo stereo that was hand built in Japan and the aural experience is mind-blowing. When you're coding you really have to be in the zone so I'll listen to a single song over and over on repeat, hundreds of times. It helps me focus. The other best way to focus is to turn off email and instant messenger. The moment that little toaster pops up and says you've got mail you're taken out of the flow. You're juggling variables and functions and layouts and the moment you look away it all falls to the ground it takes you 10 minutes getting it back in the air again.

A big part of my job is to manage the support, usability, and product development people who are scattered all over the globe, from Alabama to Ireland to Bulgaria. My management strategy is centered on hiring: find extremely self-motivated and curious people and then give them the autonomy to succeed. There's no manager looking over anybody's shoulder, so everyone needs to be self-directed. For every person we hire there are hundreds of applications. We always start people on a contract basis first; that way we mutually understand what it's like to work with each other. One of the most important things I look for in rsums is a history of contributing to Open Source projects, because I know these people will understand our ethos.

For four years I was the only developer on Akismet, our anti-spam service. It started because my mom had wanted to start a blog but I was scared she'd be bombarded by spam for Viagra and worse, think that's what I looked at all day. We finally added a second engineer to the project at the end of 2008, which was weird for me but was necessary for growth, especially as I'm pulled in more and more directions.

I go out for lunch whenever I can, which fits well with my preference for no meetings before 11 AM. There's something very personal about sharing food with someone; it's a deeper connection than shaking hands in a boardroom. Often when I'm in town I'll have lunch with Toni Schneider, my CEO. He and I get along super well which is one of the reasons I think the business has worked. He brings gravitas because he's a digital native but also has great startup experience including being the CEO of Oddpost, a webmail company Yahoo acquired in 2004. Sometimes we'll go to lunch at 12:30 and stay until 5.

In general, I'm pretty darn disorganized, late as often as not, and really bad at keeping a schedule. My PA is now focusing on office and event tasks so I'm in the market for someone new. Last year I was on the road 212 days and clocked 175,000 miles, which is seven times around the globe (according to Dopplr, a great travel journal I use). The bulk of my travel is to WordCamps, which are educational and networking events that celebrate blogging. Automattic held our first annual WordCamp in San Francisco in 2006, thrown together just a few weeks before the event happened. Now they've exploded all over the world and I've been to over 30 community-organized events from South Africa to the Philippines. I say they're a great bargain: a full day of quality speakers, BBQ lunch, a cool t-shirt, and a party for $25. We just wrapped the largest WordCamp ever here in San Francisco with over 700 people. Though I'd love to, if I went to every WordCamp I wouldn't have any time to actually build WordPress, so I'm cutting back and trying to go to every other one. They are great fun, though; it's a chance to be a rockstar for a day. In the Philippines after the conference was done I stayed almost two hours afterward taking pictures and autographing badges and laptops. I've even been asked to sign body parts. Really.

To document my experiences when I travel I use my Nikon D3 camera. My photos are autobiographical my memory is so bad (and the travel pretty grueling) that I'll forget everything about a trip, and the photos help trigger my memories. On the plane ride home I'll process and edit the photos as a narrative of each day, a visual diary. On my trip to Vietnam last February I took 2-3 thousand photos. I've heard that the difference between an amateur photographer and a pro is that the amateur shows you everything they shoot. I'm somewhere in between I'll post maybe a quarter of what I take.

I used to think constantly about building an audience for my blog but now my attitude is that if I'm not blogging for myself it's not worth it. I don't force myself to post once a day, I just do it when it feels natural. Sometimes people complain Write more about WordPress; we don't want to see photos of kids in Vietnam but I don't really care. For my 25th birthday in January I published a list of 2009 goals on my blog. It included learning Spanish, learning how to cook, and posting 10,000 photos. Cooking has been a total fail so far; I go out for every meal. If you open my refrigerator you'll find Girl Scout cookies and barbecue sauce. Photos are blazing along, half-way through the year and I've taken 20,000 photos and posted about 4,000 of them.

My blog is fortunate enough to get lot of comments and I read and manually approve each one. I think the broken windows theory a broken window or graffiti in a neighborhood begets more of the same applies online. I'll happily approve a comment from someone who completely disagrees with everything I believe in, but if I get a positive comment with a curse word in it I'll edit it out. My blog is like my living room: If someone was acting out in my house, I'd ask that person to leave.
I look at our numbers every day, usually after 5 PM PST when GMT goes into a new day. We have an internal dashboard where we track 500 to 600 statistics about everything from how often people are logging in to WordPress.com to how many words they're pressing per day. Almost all of the numbers are real-time.

I do my best work mid-morning and super late at night, from one to five in the morning. Some people don't need sleep, but I actually need a ton. I just sleep all the time, catching naps in the afternoon or a 20-minute snooze in the office. Our business is 24 hours folks in Australia start their day around 4 PM my time and our guys and girls in Europe get going around midnight. Sometimes I'll go out at night, come home from the bar at 2 or 3 AM, and then go back to work.

For WordPress we're trying to set up a community that will be around 10 to 30 years from now, one that's independent from the whims of the market. My role is somewhat like Linus for Linux or Shuttleworth for Ubuntu, affectionately referred to as BDFL, and it's my responsibility to meet as many users as possible and direct the software in a way that reflects their interest. Last year I probably met 5,000 or 6,000 WordPress users, about half of them who make their living from it. We want to be like Google, eBay, Amazon they all enable other people to make far more money than the company captures. That's ultimately what we're trying to do, we're trying to create a movement.

My Mom started a blog a couple of months ago. Six years into this, and we finally made it easy enough for my Mom to use. (She hates it when I say that.)

If you ask questions in the comments, I'll do my best to answer them.

Never underestimate the power of first-mover advantage, especially when being one of the first movers gets you bought by Google. Back in August, 1999, Pyra Labs launched Blogger. LiveJournal had launched six months before and Open Diary in October of the previous year. But it was Pyra Labs which was acquired by Google in February, 2003, and the rest was history. Now, nearly ten years later, Blogger is still the dominant hosted blogging platform. In May, 52 million individual people from the U.S. visited a Blogger blog, almost twice as many as the 28 million who visited a blog hosted by Wordpress.com (comScore). Six Apart properties, including Typepad.com, attracted 14 million.

Millions of bloggers still use Blogger because it is easy. However, Wordpress.com is making steady gains and growing its aggregate audience in the U.S. at more than twice the annual rate of Blogger (40 percent versus 14 percent). These numbers don't count all the blogs that host Wordpress on their own servers, such as Techcrunch.

The vast majority of Blogger traffic comes from outside the United States, where its annual growth rate is 38 percent compared to Wordpress.com's 59 percent. On a worldwide basis, Blogger blogs have a readership of 267 million people a month, compared to 143 million a month for Wordpress (comScore, April, 2008). The biggest countries are, in order:

1. U.S.
2. Brazil
3. Turkey
4. Spain
5. Canada
6. U.K.

From a business standpoint, Blogger is good for Google because it creates millions of sites which can show AdSesne ads. It creates more inventory for Google. Only recently has Google bothered to start showing ads to the users of Blogger itself every time they publish a post.

Can Blogger keep its lead indefinitely, or will Wordpress eventually catch up? Or will something else entirely overtake both of them?

Today, two of the people behind the original Blogger, Evan Williams and Biz Stone, have another little service that is capturing people's attention. It is called Twitter, you may have heard about it. In May, Twitter.com had 17.6 million unique U.S. visitors to its Website alone, making it bigger already than Six Apart.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

So far, I have found the following

[visit site to read more]

Related posts:

1. Proporta Turns 12, but You Save 15
2. American Airlines Turns On the WiFi Access
3. Get Ready for Loot Ninja's Loot-a-Palooza!

A lady in NY followed the same procedure and ordered a birthday cake over email but here's what they delivered on her birthday - a cake with some HTML icing.

It turned out that she used Microsoft Outlook to send her email but Wegman's email system failed to recognize the proprietary HTML tags of Outlook and hence this goof-up.

This is best explained by an employee of Wegman - "we just cut and paste from the email to the program we use for printing the edible images, we are usually in such a hurry that we really don't have time to check. and if we do the customers yell at us for bothering them."

Also see: Cake Design for Geeks

How Microsoft Outlook Ruined Her Birthday Cake ? - Digital Inspiration

Indeed, there are two parts to any discussion about Kindle (1) the device and how it works (2) how Amazon will use it and it's Digital Text Platform to create a micro-payment economy for authors.

For now, I want to introduce a few aspects of the device, starting from taking out of the box.

The strangest, most unsettling thing from the un-boxing? Amazon included a coupon for a free McDonalds chicken biscuit in the box. Amazon, please don't cheapen the experience for future Kindle buyers.

One of the awesome aspects of getting started is that the Kindle already knows who you are. Since you purchase it from Amazon.com, it arrives connected to your Amazon account and immediately connects to (Sprint's EVDO) cell-phone network called Whispernet, which quickly delivers books to the Kindle after purchase. This connection is free - paid-for by Amazon.

I don't think people understand that this cell phone connection means the Kindle is a 100% stand alone device - no computer needed. I dread connecting new devices to computers and it's so delightfully lightweight to skip that whole process and use a device that connects to a cell phone network instead.

I'm not a huge fan of the physical design, though after using it regularly, I have become very comfortable with how it fits into the hand. I love reading before bed and always hated having to hold a book open. The Kindle makes reading easy.

Speaking of reading - people often wonder why they would use a Kindle when the same info (newspapers, blogs, etc.) is available on the Web. It's true - but for me, I want to get away from the computer and computer screen to read. The Kindle's screen is "e-Ink" and appears like a printed page, in tones of gray. It's not lit like a computer screen - it's easy on the eyes and looks better in light. This also helps the battery last a very long time.

I have no idea how it works, but I'm fascinated by the glittery-gold cursor thing that allows you to make selections.

The "Next Page" and "Previous Page" buttons are huge and I often hit them accidentally. I find it hard to believe that the design team actually thought this was the optimal size. But, I'm used to it now and it does make paging very easy. There is no scrolling on the Kindle - only paging.

When it's in Sleep mode, it displays random illustrations of famous authors and tips.

Buying books, periodicals, newspaper susbscriptions, etc. from the Kindle Store (accessible from the device and Amazon.com) is as easy as you would expect from Amazon. We've been giving Amazon digital money for years, so it's a no-brainer to do it from the Kindle - especially when books are delivered in seconds instead of days. I've found the selection of books sufficient and growing.

Overall I'm a big fan of the Kindle. It has some design issues, but I truly believe that it has a very bright future. People are quick to criticize it sight-unseen, but once you sit down with it, buy a book and understand how easy, lighweight and fun it is, you'll want one. I believe it is the future of reading.

But like I said, the device is only one part of the equation. What excites me most, and is least publicized, is Amazon's Digital Text Platform. More on that soon.

More Info:

Kindle: Amazon's New Wireless Reading Device

(now $359 - recently reduced)

Jeff Bezos on Charlie Rose

Walt Mossberg's Kindle Review

Good Experience: Customer Experience Review - Amazon Kindle

Gizmodo Kindle Review

The site is in the final week of private beta. To register, you still need an invitation code. The company asked me not to publish it, but it's OK if I distribute by request via email. Send a note to info@netbanker with "SmartyPig" in the subject line. Or simply wait until after this weekend when the site goes into public beta.

How it works:

1. Users create savings accounts at the site. Deposits are held at West Bank, a Des Moines, IA- based financial institution with $1.3 billion in assets. Funding is through ACH (electronic) transfers from outside bank accounts. SmartyPig currently pays a high, 4.3% APY on deposits.

2. After the account is established, users are encouraged to create savings goals funded through automatic monthly ACH transfers until the goal is met.

3. Now here is where SmartyPig diverges from a typical bank account. The savings goals can be made public or kept private. Public goals can be funded in part, or entirely, by outside contributors. Think of grandma and grandpa contributing birthday money to help junior buy a new bike. Contributions are funded through credit card charges with a maximum charge of $500 and a per transaction processing fee of $4.95. To make sure grandma's $50 doesn't go to a Mario game, the money cannot be withdrawn until the savings goal is met (or canceled by the primary account holder).

4. After goals have been met, the user can elect to take the funds out in the form of a MasterCard debit card or a gift card from a retail partner such as Amazon.com. Participating retailers add a up to 5% bonus to the savings goal so that $1000 saved for the plasma TV is worth $1,050 if redeemed via Amazon gift card. That's a great added incentive to use the service.

Gift Cards
SmartyPig also sells gift cards that can be redeemed towards new or existing savings goals. These cards, issued in denominations of $25 to $500, are meant to be given as gifts or employee incentives. They cannot be redeemed outside the SmartyPig system. Physical card are produced and delivered for a processing fee of $4.95 plus delivery fees of $5.95 or more. Or consumers can deliver a virtual card through email to eliminate the delivery charge (but the $4.95 processing fee remains the same).

Summary of Fees

• Public contributions: $4.95 flat processing fee for each contribution made by an outside contributor. Contributions can be from $25 to $500 and are funded via credit card.
• Gift cards: Gift cards incur a $4.95 processing fee and an optional $5.95 shipping fee. The shipping fee can be avoided if a virtual gift card is chosen which is fulfilled via email.

Analysis
Although, not everyone is going to want to go through the extra steps to save this way, we are impressed with SmartyPig and are awarding it our first OBR Best of the Web award for 2008 (see note 1). We like how it's part gift registry, part savings account, and potentially a big help in getting users in the habit of saving for larger goals. The look-and-feel is very Web 2.0 and should resonate with teens and twenty-somethings.

There are a few rough edges that need better explanation and/or minor redesign. For instance, there is no way to simply add funds to a savings account without first setting up an automatic funding plan. But the site isn't even officially launched yet, so these issues should be ironed out during the beta period.

The processing fee of $4.95 per transaction is a bit on the high side. One could argue that it's worth price of a triple mocha for the convenience and benefits of the savings account. But for smaller deposits of $50 to $100, it's a pretty high percentage of the overall deposit.

It would be nice if the company could lower the fee, perhaps by creating an ACH funding option. Another way to reduce costs is to lower the 4.3% APR. I'm not sure the savers attracted to this account really need that high of a rate. A lower interest rate combined with lower fees might make the service more palatable overall.

The company may have to tweak its business model going forward. But the real lesson here is that savings accounts can be made stickier with automation and incentives. Leave it to the Iowans to show us the way (note 3).

Screenshots

1. The main account screen: I set up a savings account for my son. Then set a savings goal of $300 for a new bike. SmartyPig requires that the savings goal be funded in equal monthly withdrawals from the linked checking. It would be helpful if you could opt out of the automated savings plan so that the savings goal could be funded manually.

2. Public goals: If you opted to make your savings goal public, anyone can find it by searching via email address under the "Friends' Goals" tab on the top (you can see this one by searching for jim@netbanker.com).

Users can publicize their goals with a widget (see inset, and link at bottom of screen above) or by sending email to friends.

After making a contribution, the following screen is displayed.

Note:

1. Online Banking Report (OBR) Best of the Web awards are given for products that "raise the bar" in online financial services, usually for pioneering a new feature. Recent winners are covered here. Five awards were been handed out in 2007: two for Wesabe, and one each for Jwaala, Buxfer and Obopay. In the past 10 years, 67 companies have won the award.

2. Full disclosure: I was born and raised in Iowa and my brother lives within a few miles of the SmartyPig world headquarters.

One of my friends, who shall remain nameless, got me this Apple Security patch for my birthday. This is an official (though old, since Apple doesn't use that logo anymore) patch, my friends. Can you say collectors' item? I thought you could!

I am thinking about getting someone to sew it onto my laptop bag because I'm a geek like that.

Thanks, mystery gift giver!

Hong and Young started the site just because they thought it would be funny. They got the idea while drinking and talking about a girl they knew. And they just sold it for a reported $20 million to a fairly mysterious Canadian operation called Avid Life Media, which has a home page that goes nowhere.

I've known James for a number of years. I'd be hard-pressed to say that he works hard -- a fact that Hong would celebrate, not dispute. He mostly invests his money or time in projects out of some sort of bizarre personal need or because he wants to back a friend. A year or so ago, he showed me a project called SaveMyAss.com -- a Web site that automatically sends a wife or girlfriend flowers on pre-determined dates, such as a birthday or Valentine's Day. (Guys, you might want to check out the site considering it's now Feb. 12.)

On another occasion, James put money into his friend Dave Samuel's new company set up to sell electronic toilets.

Looking forward to seeing what James and Jim do with their HotOrNot money.

I just realized that I am jobless today! (Yesterday was my last day at PodTech, tomorrow is my first day at my new job, I'll have a post at midnight Pacific Time tonight about that).

Speaking of PodTech, Rocky and me kicked butt right until the end. We have a ton of videos going up on ScobleShow this week (my last video, which includes a really fun interview with my first girlfriend runs on Friday).

The first of the Retrevo Gangs, which features Fred Davis, one of the founders of Wired Magazine, among other things, are now up too. Fred's one of my favorite people in the world has such a great outlook on life and always inspires me.

Speaking of inspiring me. Yesterday was my son Patrick's 14th birthday. Damn, I can't believe he's almost in high school. Two more years and he'll be driving. Help us all! We'll do some Qik videos from MacWorld today together and tonight we'll be on Apple Universe Live together.

I love jobless days hanging with my favorite Apple fan (that'd be Patrick).

See ya later.

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