Vesess

Twitter – our favourite little micro blogging tool has opened  pathway
to a new way of communication and it’s becoming a mainstream
information channel. For both CurdBee and Hotelotravel Twitter has
become a handy tool to get more in touch with users and we can’t help
but fall in love with this handy gadget. How ever as much as popular
and useful it has become, it too has faced woes of economic collapse to
top off the lack of a proper business model to keep it sustained.

This quote pretty much sums it.

The bad news: The startup makes zero dollars — still. In this
economy — VC
funding is drying up, maybe you’ve heard — that means Twitter
could shutter as suddenly as it appeared.

To know the full story yourself follow this  – Announcing The Create A Twitter Revenue Model Contest

But on the plus side of the story, some good ideas have come up and you can
give your feed back to choose the best one out of them and try to salvage this handy way of communication. 11 Business Plans For Twitter

We have integrated various payment methods for both Hotelotravel and CurdBee. But still the world of online paying is evolving and we have no option but to look for more alternative payment methods that could help the end user.

By 2012, it is estimated that online payments will gross US$355
billion in value with alternative payments holding a 30 percent market
share. By targeting unmet merchant and consumer needs, alternative
payments are seeing a growing market acceptance. With increased market
acceptance, alternative payments would no longer be ‘alternative’ but
could become mainstream consumer payment methods in the future.

Alternative Payments: More Ways to Close the Sale

Today, US beekeepers are faced with a great challenge with Colony Collapse Disorder, which causes huge losses due to millions bees being killed in the winter season. Extinction of bees would be a serious problem (not only we loose a brand identity, but our food too). Aaron E. Hirsh suggests to restore natural habitat and right geographic arrangement for wild-bees near the crops, as a solution to this. Interesting to see how world is moving towards permaculture.

Nice visualization of people editing Barack Obama’s wikipedia page from October 2005 to November 2008 (by Jamie Dubs).

Just sent this month’s CurdBee newsletter! Check it out here, if it still didn’t arrive at your inbox. We are collecting your suggestions before we launch the Pro version of CurdBee. So take a minute and participate in the survey.

Here we go with the first month of our monthly roll of responses to the questions, complaints, requests, and hacks the community has sent in. Read on and be intrigued.

Q. Will Curdbee stay free ?

Yes, CurdBee will remain free forever without any limitations (unlimited invoices, clients and items). Why? Because we believe free products are awesome. An upgrade to CurdBee PRO will be available for a nominal fee, but the free version you have enjoyed all along will always be free.

Q. How do I add a tax to my invoice?

This feature is a top priority and we will be adding it to the core (free) version very soon. We’re really sorry, but for the moment you’ll need to manually add taxes as line items.

Q. How can I export my invoices?

Sorry, but there’s no out of the box solution for this at the moment. Of course, Jon Stancato, a CurdBee user like yourself, found that you can copy and paste the invoice page directly into a spreadsheet and expect everything to end up in the correct cells, rows, and columns. Thanks Jon!

Q. Can you flesh out the Items page to make it more service-friendly in terms of hourly work?

We came up with a simple hack, for what you’d like to do – you could, for now, enter the number of hours into a ‘quantity’ field, since it accepts decimal numbers. Of course, this is not an elegant solution, and we are working on finding a way to do this in style.

Q. How can I close my account?

Don’t panic. Just send us an email to support [at] curdbee [dot] com. We will remove your account and all your data from CurdBee.

That’s all for this edition. Happy invoicing until we meet in the next month! If you get stuck, need help or want to suggest something, just send them over to us (via our [forum](http://forum.vesess.com) or mail it to support [at] curdbee [dot] com)

At CurdBee, and at of course at Vesess, we believe that Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) are the future of the web, and featuring them here is one of the most awesome things we do all month. Conducted as a supplement to our CurdBee newsletter, we hope you enjoy this interview as much as we did!

Adelle Charles is a Designer & Blogger, Principal, Creative Director of Fuel Brand Group, and runs Fuel Your Creativity. She is an obsessive email checker and highly addicted to Starbucks. Loves to add “fuel to the fire” any chance she gets. Her dogs Chino and Jameson jot down ideas for her while she’s at work. They are obviously the secret to her success.

What does a typical work day look like for you? Tell us a little bit about your workflow as well.

I stroll in between 9-9:30 (yes I’m late!) with my Starbucks in hand and usually have a couple of meetings to start with and I usually spend a couple of hours answering emails. Then I get down to business being the Art Director for a local news station here in Rochester, NY. After that I go home and work on a number of freelance projects as well as putting time into a company that I’m a partner in called Fuel Brand Group in addition to working on FreshID, another great company I’m involved with.

What tools, both online and offline, do you use on a regular basis? Where does Curdbee fit in to all of this?

I use Yammer, Skype, Tweetdeck, Things, NetNewswire, Dropbox, Textmate. I also use Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator as well. As for CMSes: WordPress. CurdBee is a great tool that I use to invoice all of my freelance clients.

What do you find most rewarding about design and interaction, especially on the web? Also, what do you find most frustrating about this sphere?

The web is a great way for designers all around the world to meet and exchange ideas and feedback. I find it frustrating because we’re such a close-knit community so ideas seem to overlap frequently.

As a designer and Internet entrepreneur, what are the challenges you see for yourself and the community as you step into 2009?

It is always a challenge to stay ahead of the curve and constantly reinvent yourself and your company so you can consistently produce products and services that customers want.

What advice do you have for newbie designers who are just starting out in the field? What tools, tricks and techniques can they use to stay competitive in the veritable jungle that is the web of today?

Frequently check out other designers’ work and leave comments to get your name out there. You will find that we’re a friendly bunch and will return the favor. Also, I recommend getting back to the basics and sketching everything. It will be a great brainstorming activity and you may be able to get future designs out of it.

Well, that’s it from Adelle! Thanks for reading, and see you next time.

If you want to spread the word about something in the virtual world, the
easiest way is to use social web. For projects like
Hotelotravel and
CurdBee we have used it excessively to
take the word to the people that are in need of such products.

However this is another aspect of social web that worth your two cents -
The unforseen consequences of social web.

> There are plenty of open source applications that can help you
tremendously as a web designer. Open source projects are great not only
because of their price tag (free), but also because of the passionate
community that typically forms around them. In these economic times,
it’s often a worthwhile endeavor to see places where you can conserve,
and open source alternatives are a good place to start looking.

In this article,
you’ll find 30 exceptionally handy open source applications for web
designers.

Tens of thousands of Africans – men, women and children fleeing their homeland – attempt to make the perilous trip from their home countries to Europe every year, seeking refuge, asylum and economic opportunity. Some travel thousands of miles overland, being handed from smuggler to smuggler, ending up at one of many ports in northern Africa, to be packed into makeshift boats and make treacherous sea crossings to European soil, to places like Spain’s Canary Islands and tiny Malta where they hope to either sneak in unnoticed, or, if intercepted, be allowed to stay. Many do not survive the journey.

Checkout the Photo Essay