We recently had the privilege of working with the fine folks at B Labs, an embedded software technology startup that aims to change how the embedded systems industry works. Have a look at what we did for them, and then read on for an interview with Bahadir Balban, their CEO.

Where did B Labs come from? What is your vision for the company?

We want to change the way mobile platforms are designed by making the virtualization layer as standard in all mobile devices. In servers, virtualization is well recognized, but in mobile devices, there is either an operating system, baremetal software, or real-time software. A hypervisor is a layer that brings all of them into one runtime.

In a competitive and yet highly technical field, how does B Labs differentiate itself from its competition?

There are several hypervisors out there for mobile platforms. All of them are focused on a proprietary niche. Today there is no wide acceptance of any solution. We want to use a strategy that starts small, but eventually influences the industry to adopt the technology.

What is the biggest hurdle facing the virtualization industry of today?

The biggest hurdle is that a hypervisor is seen as an additional layer among the aforementioned hardware and the OS, and current vendors could not make a sufficiently compelling value proposition to ignite the change.

What is the best part about working in the field?

Best part is that we might have a modest chance to make a change in a deep technology area that affects the mobile industry.

Why did you come to Vesess for your website revamp? What did you like about the experience, and what can we do better next time?

I think Vesess design talent is top notch. I believe with the budget we had you did the best, but if we had a greater budget, one step up would be also collecting information from us that would make our side less of a blocking factor in progress.

Hello CurdBeans, and welcome to another CurdBee Weekly. This week we meet the cool kids behind iRide Africa and then hit Twitter to find out what people are saying about your favourite web application. Finally, we touch a bit on Time and Expense Tracking and when you can expect those features (and how you can offer to help us test them in the limited, closed beta as well). We hope you enjoy the read!

An African Adventure with Daniel Dobinson

One of the best parts about developing a web application is that you get to both serve and meet people from all over the world. This week, we’re here to introduce you to a CurdBee user from the Southern Hemisphere. Daniel Dobinson runs iRide Africa a bike tour business from Cape Town, South Africa. Having previously worked with bike nuts we were on somewhat familiar ground, and had a great time talking to him. Here’s what he has to say about bicycles, business and billing!

Introduce iRideAfrica to us. Who are you guys and what do you do?

iRide Africa offer customised cycling holidays and day trips around the beautiful city of Cape Town. We cater primarily towards bicycle lovers who want a cycling holiday with delicious food, breathtaking views, skilled guides and most importantly inspiring rides.

Our market is mountain bikers in search of great singletrack and road cyclists that want sunny training rides through incredible scenery. iRide Africa is formed by a closely knit group of bike-loving friends, dedicated to providing a top-quality, easy-going, fun and safe holiday experience

Why South Africa for biking? What makes the destination special?

Cape Town needs no marketing – it is an incredible city and is Africa’s most popular tourist destination. It has also been recently voted as the 2nd best beach city in the world.

European professionals have been using South Africa as the perfect training ground for years. It’s ideal climate and vast untouched area make for a perfect cycling destination. South African cycling has undoubtedly been flourishing over the last two decades, producing such quality riders as Greg Minnaar (UCI World Cup Champion) and Robbie Hunter (Tour de France stage winner) and the team at iRide Africa want to showcase South Africa as the great riding destination it is.

Mountain bike specific singletrack trails are popping up every month. They offer a host of different riding experiences to those in the know. Of course Africa is also synonymous with wildlife and visitors here get to experience the huge open spaces and inspiring wildlife that exists here.

In a world that is increasingly hostile to cyclists, how do you stay positive and just keep doing what you do?

We feel that the world is actually coming around to cyclists more and more. As cities get more congested, people are seeing the sense in getting on bikes. Bicycles are still the most efficient means of transportation ever invented! The time saving, health benefits and eco-friendliness of cycling to work is becoming more apparent to non-cyclists all over the world.

The technology in bikes nowadays is also helping get people on bikes. Efficient full suspension bikes are making mountain biking way more accessible to beginners and we reckon electric bikes are going to be the next big thing with regards to commuting.

As for staying positive as James E. Starrs once said, “Melancholy is incompatible with bicycling.”

Your business is quite different from all the others we have featured in the CurdBee Weekly so far. Take us through an average workday at iRide Africa!

The average workday at iRide Africa normally starts off with an early morning ride around our beautiful city. These rides are where we often meet up and have our ‘staff meetings’. Once back in the office, emails are answered and bookings are made. Our hire bikes are serviced and sent out to clients and our guides meet up with guests and go riding again! The best of the Cape is shown off with pride and our lunches are always something special, made with love and care.

Sometimes our clients are super fit and want a second ride in the afternoon-of course we don’t mind at all.

How does technology help your business, and how do you use it to make your customers’ biking experience better?

We could not have started this company, or run it like we do, without the Internet and email. Our Internet page is the face of the company and our email policy is taken very seriously to ensure that we answer every single email within a day (not common in South Africa!).

Our expenditure on marketing is tiny- we prefer to use Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Vimeo to spread the news and experiences we have here. Photos and videos of places we ride help prospective clients with their decision to visit South Africa for their annual cycling holiday. Of course, there is still nothing better than word of mouth referrals!

How did you find CurdBee, and why did you choose it over other online invoicing services?

The designer who helped us with our logo was using it and said it was the bee’s knees (excuse the pun). I looked it up and it was easy to use, clean and had the same kind of feel we like to give out on our website i.e. friendly and informal. We were hooked from day one!

What other tools and software do you use on a daily basis?

We use a lot of GPS tracking systems to display the routes we ride, and of course we need maps so I use a lot of specialized cartography tools to get the results we want.

If there was one as yet unreleased CurdBee feature that would make your lives easier, what would it be?

It would be an export to csv option that includes all the data that is captured in the invoicing system of Curdbee, particularly the payment history^#. This would help us out a lot with our books at the end of every month!

^#At the moment, all invoice details can be exported via CSV. While an account’s complete payment history cannot currently be exported via the app itself, our API does support this, so a coder with some free time can easily pick it up and hack this functionality into being! Any volunteers?

Hive Mind

Here’s what our tweeps have been saying about us recently.

@curdbee oh yes I know we get along great already thanks for powering the free invoices, I’m now pro!

@curdbee I would be in a beehive, creating an invoice of course.

(in response to this)

@curdbee Nice. I guess now I really should try it out. If you’re doing beta on time tracking I’d be happy to test.

Interested in beta testing our new Time and Expense Tracking features (see below!) as well? Tweet @curdbee and let us know.

Time (and Expense) Tracking to Come!

CurdBee Time Tracking in the wild.

If you’ve been dutifully following our twitter stream, you’d know by now that Time Tracking and Expense Tracking are coming soon as CurdBee Modules. What you don’t know however is that soon may be sooner than you think. We’re now just a matter of weeks away from release, and we’ll be kicking off our March release schedule by giving away some cool stuff. Stay tuned!

Carson Pierce runs Idea Market, a web design and development firm located in Alberta, Canada. Apart from being an exceedingly cool guy, he is also a CurdBee user (+100 coolness). This week, he talks about web design, social media and why he uses CurdBee for invoicing.

Hi Carson! Tell us about Idea Market.

Idea Market is a small web design & development shop located in Red Deer, Alberta, Canada. We specialize in municipal and tourism websites built on open source content management systems like Joomla and WordPress. Culturally we’re pretty relaxed, both internally (as a team) and externally (with our clients). I think it’s safe to say that we’re known for not taking ourselves too seriously and being willing to take the time to get to know people on a personal level.

What makes your approach to Web Design / Social Media / Content Development different?

I don’t think we do anything terribly different in terms of product or process than most places. Where we differ is in how we work with our
clients. We have kind of different selection criteria for example; if we don’t laugh together at least once in our initial meeting, it’s probably not going to work out. From there we have a very collaborate approach; we don’t work for our clients, we work with them. Our favourite clients are more than just clients, they’re also friends.

Social Media! Woo! In a field filled with a billion buzzwords and acronyms, how do you guys go about staying relevant and as you put it on your website, not be irritating?

That’s easy. We don’t worry about buzzwords or follower counts or anything else the “experts” promote. Much like with our clients, we focus on relationships on social media. And if that seems like a fluffy waste of time, we’ve had several cases where those relationships have led directly to paid work. As they say, people like to do business with people they “know, like and trust”. Social media can help with all three.

Speaking of irritating, what is the most annoying thing a client can do using social media? Basically, tell our audience How To Lose Followers and Alienate Potential Customers via Twitter.

Personally, negativity is a big pet peeve of mine, but I think the number one thing you can do to ruin Twitter for everyone is treat it like a broadcast media. I mean it sort of is, I suppose, but that just means that people can tune you out if they want. You need to engage; make it a conversation. If you’re just spewing out your weekly specials, I’m not going to follow you very long.

While we’re at it, let’s hear what you guys make of CurdBee’s social media approach. Should we be doing some things differently? In what areas can we improve?

Can I be honest? I’m not actually following you. Oops. After checking it out, though, it looks like you’re doing a really great job. I promise to start following you right now and will let you know if you irritate me.

Editor’s note: Thanks!

How did Idea Market find CurdBee and what has your experience with it been like? Any complaints?

We had been doing things manually before and it led to two things: me hating my life for one day a month and a fairly sizable accounts receivable list. So we did a pile of research into what invoicing options were out there. CurdBee had a really nice interface, non-ugly invoices and a good tracking/reminder system. We’ve only been using it a few months, but it’s been everything we hoped for. Without sounding too much like you paid me for this, I actually kind of look forward to invoicing now. And our accounts receivable are way down.

<fake commercial voice>It worked for me and it can work for you! Thank you, CurdBee! </fake commercial voice>

You’re very welcome, Idea Market. We totally dig your offices btw.

As a small business, what made you choose CurdBee over more traditional invoicing packages?

I didn’t really differentiate between traditional and new; we just needed something that worked. CurdBee is much simpler than what we used to use, meaning it now takes a fraction of the time to put together an invoice than before. It also tracks things like viewed and payment status better than our old way of doing it.

Why go for us instead of another quick and easy online invoicing service?

A deal breaker for several other services we looked at was the design of the invoices as our clients would see them. We’re a design company; ugly invoices aren’t an option. Curbee was one of the better solutions in that regard. Oh – and the price was right.

What’s at the top of your feature wishlist for CurdBee?

We’ve been pretty happy so far. Maybe the ability to batch some functions such as sending reminders (ie. a reminder to everyone who still owes, all at once). Or maybe some reporting functions like an aged accounts receivable list. If I think of anything else , I’ll bug you on Twitter.

After hiatus for the holidays, we’re back with the first CurdBee Weekly of the year, featuring CurdBee user, hacker and advocate, Anders Haig. He takes us through what he does for a living and then shows us just how cool hacking the CurdBee API can be. Enjoy!

Hi Anders, and welcome to the CurdBee Weekly. Tell us a little about yourself!
I’m a web developer and business owner based in Iowa City, IA. I get to work from home full time doing work I love so I couldn’t be happier. I run a number of small companies (a local entertainment directory, greeting card company and Facebook fan page management service) so I stay busy and need to keep organized. Prior to using Curdbee, invoicing and getting paid on time was a nightmare. Now, things are a lot easier to track and I get more time to do fun stuff rather than administration.

What’s Minim Group and what do you do there?
Minim Group is my freelance web development business. We offer quite a few different service but focus on small business and web application design & development with a pretty strong Facebook focus in addition. I’m all over the place with a few additional designers and developers as needed.

That’s a neat little status board app you’ve written using the CurdBee API. What made you do it?
Until a few weeks ago, I’d have 5-6 different tabs open at all times to keep track of what was going on with my work. I built the status board to aggregate all that data so now I’ve just got a single window to look at and get information at a glance. Using the Curdbee API, I was able to list the most recent invoices and their status so I can tell if someone has paid or what I’m still waiting on. In the future, I hope to add a simple interface to send invoices and quick reminders from my status board as well.

The simple status board Anders built to keep a track of his business activities.

How easy was it to use our API, and if you could give us one suggestion on improving it, what would it be?
I had a very easy time developing with it and as I created my status board in Sinatra, the available gem and examples were a huge help. As far as improving it, I’m afraid I’ve got nothing to offer you on that front right now. I just spent the last 10 minutes looking through the API documentation again and can’t find any additional features I’d request, nor have I had any trouble with the current features. In comparison with the Basecamp or Facebook APIs, I had a much easier time integrating it with my work (of course, everyone’s experience may differ).

What advice would you give a new developer who is just starting out with the CurdBee API?
I’d say just look at the documentation or examples in the Gem repository on Github. Everything you need is there. It’s got enough similarity to other APIs that it should feel very familiar to work with.

What are your favorite CurdBee features and which Modules do you use?
I currently use the Pro Edition, Estimates and Authorize.net modules. I added the Estimates module only recently and it’s made estimating new projects easier to track and more professional. In the past, I’d have to go back, search my email and find an old estimate once I started a project and now it’s easy to track in one place. Authorize.net has been great for me as well and I can’t recommend it enough. Other things that I use a lot include multiple contacts for clients, the custom domain URL and discounts and taxes.

What other software do you use on a daily basis?
I use Basecamp for project management, PulseApp to track cash flow, Github to manage project assets, Dropbox to back up my files and a whole other host of development software and custom web applications.

Anders' workspace: where the magic happens.

What is #1 on your CurdBee feature wish list for 2011?
While I don’t expect any advanced graphs or reports, it would be nice to be able to view a yearly or monthly total without just looking at the invoices and computing the amounts. With partial payments, some of the income falls into one tax period while the other portion falls into another tax period. It’s not extremely difficult to manage but requires me to open and look at each invoice history individually when working out income.

It’s always a pleasure to talk to our users, and we’re really glad that Anders took the time to have a chat with us. Stay tuned for more from your fellow CurdBeans in the weeks to come!

This week’s CurdBee Weekly features new CurdBee PRO user Elena of Findmyart. We also look at our newly launched data migration solution, CurdBee Bridge, and finally encourage you to answer the question of the hour which can be found at the bottom of this post.

User Spotlight – Elena C. Vieriu

An artist by birth and graphic designer by profession, Elena won her CurdBee PRO subscription in the recent AppStorm giveaway. Below, we talk to her about her work and how CurdBee helps make her life easier. Read on!

Hi Elena, and welcome to the CurdBee Weekly! You’re the first artist we’re featuring here, so why not tell our readers a little bit about how you got into professional graphic design?

Hello, I am a Romanian graphic designer currently living in Florida. I have been doing traditional art since a very young age but after graduating High-school and University both with a major in Decorative Arts/Textile Design I couldn’t quite cope with the “starving artist” concept. I was curious to know what I could do with my skills. I had traditional drawing and color theory knowledge but it didn’t seem to apply practically in the real world. Therefore I started looking around, trying to figure out what I could do to actually make a living. I found that I could still do the things I loved, based on my skills in graphic design.

Detail your work flow for us – where do your designs begin, and how do they make their way to becoming the finished pieces you have up in your portfolio?

For each design I try to know as much as possible about the project and what is expected from me. First I look for inspiration & images that relate to my subject and create a Mood Board. Depending on the type of project, there is usually some sketching involved. For logo design I tend to have a longer process since, to me, logo designs are by far the most complex projects. Once the sketches look promising, I import 2 or 3 of them in Illustrator and start the digital versions.

I also design book covers, a medium which I see as a very good way of combining art and design. I have a great passion for books, and I can see myself doing this for the rest of my life. I come from a family of intellectuals where art and reading were very important and greatly encouraged. Any type of book, digital or paper, needs a cover and it brings me lots of joy to design it.

You’re an artist who produces paintings that make their way into exhibitions, and also a designer who produces everything from logos to book jackets. How do you balance art as a passion and design as a business and has this tension in any way changed the way you look at both fields?

Art helped me succeed as a designer, as the same color and shape theory applies in the design field. The only difference is that we design for clients and not for ourselves. I paint and draw when I need to get away from everything but my time is invested a lot in my business and I’m constantly improving my skills. I’m currently trying to also learn web design. It’s a long journey but I find it exciting and it keeps me motivated. I would say that curiosity and the need to know got me where I am. We can never stop learning!

What is most challenging about being a freelance creative in today’s market?

It’s a tough market, but I believe there is room for each of us. The biggest challenge is trying to make people understand why design costs as much as it does and why we are not working for free. Many do not understand the time and effort that goes into each piece. I believe in helping charities but I do not support free work without reason.

More of Elena’s art can be found in her online portfolio.

Tell us a bit about your toolset, including both online and offline software that you use everyday.

I try not to use too many applications but the ones I rely on for keeping my business running are:

• CurdBee for invoicing, very easy to use and professional.
• For keeping track of expenses and earnings, I use Outright.
• For time tracking I use Paymo.
• Design software: Photoshop, Illustartor, InDesign
• Design tools: Wacom Intous 4, sketching pad, colored pencils, watercolor, etc.

You recently won a CurdBee PRO subscription in the AppStorm giveaway. Which of the new features at your disposal are you enjoying the most right now?

Thank you for the CurdBee pro subscription! I love the way it looks, with no branding and the fact that I can accept payment methods other than Paylpal. The biggest asset to me is that CurdBee is easy to use – no fuss, no trying to figure out anything, it’s straight forward. The estimates feature is pretty valuable too.

If you could change one thing about CurdBee, what would it be?

A feature for creating design proposals would be something I would use for sure.

What is your professional analysis of CurdBee’s visual presence? What areas do you think we can improve in?

I think it’s fun, I loved that from the very beginning. I loved the bee character and the playfulness of it, I wouldn’t change a thing.

Thank you for having me!

Bee Supported – Using CurdBee Bridge to Import Data from Freshbooks and Blinksale

Yesterday, we launched CurdBee Bridge, a tool that makes data migration from Freshbooks and Blinksale super easy. While you can head over to CurdBee Bridge and get started right away, this neat little support article will help a lot if you get stuck along the way.

Buzz Back

We’re back again this week with the same question as before –

We got some replies last week, but if you haven’t had your say yet, we definitely want to hear your opinion as well! All our users are important to us, so if you want to get in touch and tell us what you think, please leave a comment below or tweet and mail us.

The Weekly took a break last week because we were busy with the Partial Payments Update, but we’re back with some cool stuff for you to read. In this issue, Caribbean photographer and CurdBee user Gladstone Taylor says hello and then we jump right into what people think about our newest update. Finally we wrap it up with an open question to our users. Go on then, jump right in!

User Spotlight – Gladstone Taylor

One of the joys of running a service for freelancers and small businesses is meeting cool new people all the time. While in our two previous weekly interviews we spoke to a designer and a marketeer, this time we’re going to meet someone a little different. A photographer who specialises in weddings, events and people, Gladstone Taylor hails from sunny Jamaica and among other things also uses CurdBee. Below, we get to know him and ask him why he chose to join the hive.

Introduce yourself to our readers. Who is Gladstone Taylor? What makes him tick?
I’m a 24 year old creative that recently moved from a technical field of web application programming, my previous occupation of four years. I’ve been practising photography on an amatuer level for as long as I can remember and got really serious about it within the last 3 years. Currently I freelance for a local newspaper company in Jamaica as well as provide photography services for my own client base.

How did you hear about CurdBee, and as a photographer, why did you choose it over the other invoicing options available to you?
I heard about Curdbee from another creative and friend Monique Powell, the brain behind Roaming Donkey. I was at the time using Blinksale and testing Freshbooks. On introduction to CurdBee, I switched instantly because of the simplicity of the interface and just how intuitive it was. Freshbooks was overkill for my needs and Blinksale just didn’t hit the spot like CurdBee did for me.

Why do you use CurdBee Standard Edition instead of PRO? Are there no advanced features you’d find useful, or are you just waiting for the right time to upgrade?
I use Curdbee standard because paypal isn’t a payment option when you choose to upgrade. However I have tried the pro edition and did love it. I enjoyed the ability to create estimates the most instead of actually making an invoice and then the client decides to cancel or shop around.

What other desktop and web applications do you use on a regular basis?
Web apps: the Google docs suite

Desktop applications: Photoshop, Lightroom, Google Chrome and Seesmic for twitter

Bee Supported

Our latest update brings in the option to let clients pay up in instalments, and here’s how you can take advantage of the feature.

1. Create a new invoice. If you’re new to CurdBee, you may want to check out this guide on creating and sending your first invoice.
2. As usual, fill the relevant fields you would require when creating an invoice and scroll down to Payment Options where you may need to check the check box next to Allow partial payments to allow this option for the out going invoice.

[Read Article]

Hive Mind

In Hive Mind this week we’re going to boast a little about our release early, release often philosophy and the positive user feedback it often generates. Here’s what people had to say about our recent Partial Payments Update.

@curdbee Thank you for listening to your users and CONSISTENTLY making your products better and simpler. You continue to impress!

Quick props to another favorite web app: @curdbee – nice work guys.

Whoo Hoo ! Estimates and partial payments with www.curdbee.com @curdbee online invoicing…

@curdbee I love you!

That’s not all, though – our giveaway on AppStorm got some people excited as well. Congratulations to Melissa, Elena and Jackstin on winning a $150 CurdBee bundle featuring a year’s subscription of PRO and the Authorize.net and Estimates Modules.

Melissa: A free Pro Curdbee account would be fantastic!

I’ve been eyeing it for a bit, I love the features at such a low cost. The domain support is fantastic, and I just love the overall feel of Curdbee.

I’m starting up a small web hosting company and would need all the help I could get as a two-team start up. I think having a Pro Curdbee account tied to my domain would be very professional, and it would keep down a bit of the start up cost. A little goes a long way!

Nothing else puts a smile on our face like seeing a new startup take on the world, and we’re glad that CurdBee will be helping yet another SME get off the ground. Good luck, Host My Heart. Hope you guys have a cracker first month!

Finally, user Wes is hungry for stats and wants to know if we’ll introduce a feature that allows him to “see what items are past due (red flags), how much is past due, and filter income by month, quarter, and year.”

We’re stoked to say that yes, this feature is currently in development, and when released will most probably be available to all users. In typical CurdBee style though, we’ll also release a Module which offers more advanced features, including cool stuff like graphs. Excited about the Statistics Module? Let us know and keep reading the weekly for more updates on it.

Buzz Back

We debut our community feedback feature this week by asking a very important question –

So, why are we asking? We’re putting together something sweet for Thanksgiving, and we want to make sure that we give as many of you as possible exactly what you want. To that end, also please feel free to leave your thoughts below or tweet and mail us.

Well, here’s another weekly! We must say, we’re having a lot of fun putting these together. One could even call it the highlight of our week here at CurdBee headquarters. Connecting with our users and thinking of stories to tell is a welcome break from the day to day tasks we carry out, and each of these issues only reminds us that we’re at the center of a really cool community. Thanks for reading, CurdBeans. We hope you enjoy the ride.

User Spotlight – John Rockefeller

Marketer, SME and FOSS enthusiast, CEO – John Rockefeller is many things. soma, the company he heads, is similar – it dabbles in everything from photography to Internet marketing. Read on to find out more about this unique outfit, get to know the man behind it, and find out how and why they use CurdBee as their invoicing solution.

How did you find CurdBee, and why did you decide on it as your
online invoicing platform?
We chose CurdBee because it had the things we were looking for to help us simplify and automate our billing. We wanted SaaS (which enables us with access to our invoices and estimates anywhere we are in the world as long as we have an Internet connection), a friendly team behind the software, and software features that would grow with us via modules.

Why did you upgrade to PRO?
There were a number of features in the PRO version that we needed. It was an easy sell since it’s so cheap. $5 per month. The features we were looking for were the ability to add taxes to our invoices, PDF invoices, SSL, and unbranded invoices.

Do you use any modules? If so, which ones, and why?
We use a ton of modules. Paypal is my favourite. Also, recurring billing. Recurring billing makes it simple to let your business run itself. You just set up how often to bill, the amount, and relax. soma also makes use of Estimates. It’s really really handy to be able to switch an Estimate to an invoice when you make a sale.

You tweet often about Free and Open Source Software and GNU/Linux. How do you think ‘Freemium’ SaaS products like CurdBee fit into the FOSS ecosystem?
soma offers a SaaS product built on a lot of open source technologies so there’s a lot of similarities between CurdBee and us. We use php, mysql, Linux, apache… We couldn’t do what we do without the power of Open Source software. But integrating this into the world of SaaS is a slippery slope. My personal feelings are that forcing service providers to open their source code because they use Open Source software to power their service (a la GPLv3) is not the right way to make the greatest change. Instead we should be focusing on pushing changes back to the library trunks as we make modifications to that service. Consider how Facebook, Apple, Google, and even Microsoft have offered FOSS patches for the FOSS projects that they use.

Very few firms these days do everything from website development to event planning to videography and social media marketing consultancy. How and why does Soma offer such a massive array of services?
soma is able to offer such a wide array of services because we’ve spent a considerable amount of time breaking each of those services into their core elements and seeing where each matches up. For website development, we use somaICE, which is our built-from-scratch web platform designed to enable our social media and marketing management/consultancy. We can easily create a newsletter for our client, send it, see the response, connect to people on Twitter, and convert. Each service helps the next.

As a marketing firm, how would you rate CurdBee’s marketing efforts so far? Is there anything in particular you would change about how we approach product promotion?
A Blackberry app would be awesome.Other than that? Keep up the great work. You guys have a very active Twitter account, I can easily find all sorts of great reviews via a Google search, and your website is easy to navigate and convincing. How about a Facebook page?

As long as we’re getting free consultancy from you guys (thanks!), what advice would you give a small business who is trying to market their product in today’s competitive online environment?

We always stress to our small business clients how much more they could be doing easily by integrating their customers directly in their decisions by way of Twitter and Facebook. You hear right from your customers, all the time. The customer is such a large part of any business and yet it is routinely left out of decisions at the shops they buy from. You can tweet from your phone while you’re waiting for coffee or you can ask everyone what they wish was on sale. It’s just incredible access to your customers. And it makes all the difference these days.

Bee Supported – Custom Email Notifications

At CurdBee, we’re always looking for new ways to get out of the way and let you do your think. The ability to customize email notifications was added with just that in mind. Haven’t used this feature yet? Here’s how.

1. Click the Settings link at the top right hand corner of your CurdBee account page. You will be redirected to a page titled Settings › Company Profile. Look at the right sidebar, and you will see a heading called Customize and under it, a link titled Emails & Notifications. Click it.

[Read Article]

Hive Mind

As usual, our Twitter notification box just keeps blinking as you guys tweet us your comments, complaints and suggestions. Here are a couple from this week.

@curdbee hey curdbee, nice app: reckon you’ll have an iPhone app out any time soon though?

We reckon we will, Ian. We’re currently in the process of putting together a solution not just for iOS users, but for mobile and smart phone users across many devices and operating systems.

Recently discovered CurdBee.com for invoicing, pretty good

We’d have to agree! Thanks a lot for trying Curdbee, and we hope you’ll continue to use it. Do tweet @curdbee if there is anything we can do for you.

Beekepers

Support. Whether you’re multi-national or a SME, this is often the most important area of your business. At CurdBee, we always tell ourselves that we shouldn’t be doing what we do if we don’t have the time / can’t be bothered / don’t have the ability to respond to our users individually. As a service aimed at freelancers and small businesses, people are at the core of our business model, and maintaining good relationships is a very central focus for us.

At CurdBee, our support page is designed to get you in and out as fast as possible. We don’t ask you if you’d like to fill out surveys or rate our service – we know that you’ll tell us exactly what you think by email or twitter. Instead, we let you jump right into the content, whether that means reading official how to articles or posts made by other users. Inter-user interaction is something we value highly, and it’s always nice to see people helping out their fellow CurdBeans with quick fixes for common problems.

Of course, we also let you ask questions. In fact, looking at what you guys have to say and seeing how we can serve you better is one of the best parts of the job!

So, who is on our support team? Our developers, of course. When you send a support request to CurdBee, your message doesn’t get picked up in an outsourced support center. It doesn’t get read and answered by a robot (or intern). No, at CurdBee, it is usually a dev, often the same dev who is working on the feature in question, who will get back to you. Some may call this uneconomical. We call it realistic. Our devs are more than programmers. They are experience creators, and we want them to be held accountable for the features they develop.

Does this mean that developers have to spend some of their time answer support requests? Yes, it does. In the long run though, it means that some things get fixed almost instantly and that the minor changes you guys request are seen to in a timely manner.

We’re always trying to make our product do more and we’ve found that some of the best ideas we’ve got over the past few years have been from you, our users. If you’re ever using CurdBee and think to yourself hey, this would be cool – just fire up your mail or twitter client and say hi. We may have a fix for you, we may not, but rest assured that we’ll always say hi back!

Hello, and welcome to another weekly. This issue is packed full of user generated goodness. From an interview with designer Grace Smith to an awesome review of CurdBee by Iszuddin Ismail, the focus this week is on the people that make this community tick. Coupled with the usual content from Beekeepers and Hivemind, we hope this weekly will be a fun and informative read. Enjoy!

User Spotlight – Grace Smith

Owner of a design studio called Postscript5, and editor of The Freelance Feed, Grace Smith is a designer out of Northern Ireland. Apart from being a strong supporter of freelancers and SMEs, she has also been a vocal proponent of CurdBee, and is featured here as our CurdBean of the week!

Below, we talk to Grace about design, invoicing, and why she uses the Bee.

We know you get asked to do this a lot in interviews, but could you go through your daily toolset for us as well? I’m sure there are many CurdBeans who’d be interested to see how their favourite app fits into a designer’s average day.

My daily toolset is as follows:

Chrome – Web Browser
Google Apps – Email/Docs/Calendar
Adobe Photoshop/Illustrator – Design
Coda – Code Editor
MAMP – Local Development & Testing
TaskPaper – Organiser
Transmit/Filezilla – FTP
Onotate – Project Feedback
QuoteRobot – Proposals

I have Curdbee set up as a desktop app in my Dock using Fluid. This means I have quick access to my account whenever I need it.

Why did you choose to go for CurdBee PRO, what Modules have you added, and why?

Although the free edition is excellent, Curdbee PRO offered several features which I felt were essential for my invoicing requirements including; unbranded invoices and emails, a custom domain, PDF support, overdue reminders, thank you emails and SSL encryption.

I particularly like having a custom domain to forward clients to, it adds to the feeling of professionalism I value so highly in my studio.

I like the Estimate Module as it’s so easy to convert to an invoice when required, and the option of allowing the client to download the estimate as a PDF is an added bonus.

You loved our recent User Interface changes! Would you mind telling us why you’re a fan?

One new feature I love is the ability for my clientsto now accept estimates with just one click. It saves both of us time!

I also particularly like the new smart suggestions for clients and items when creating a new invoice.

You’ve mentioned before that you switched to CurdBee from Freshbooks. What prompted this move, and what can we do to make sure you stay with us in the long run?

While I think Freshbooks is a fantastic service, I wanted to cut down costs and use a simpler, more efficient platform that meant I spent less time invoicing and more time working. I found Curdbee last year and haven’t looked back. It doesn’t have thousands of unnecessary features, it’s not bloated down with options, it’s intuitive and elegant and exactly what I require.

The Curdbee team continue to refine and improve the user experience and interface which is great, as you know these are people who care about their product. Along with the great support, I can’t see myself going anywhere else, anytime soon.

If you could change one thing about the CB experience, what would it be?

I’m not sure there is anything I would change at present, though there are features I would love to see introduced. For instance; automated late payment reminders which can be set to your specified no. of days and client reports which show their payment history including late payments, how they pay, average amount per invoice etc.

Bee Supported – Localizing Statements

Catering to as many people as possible has always been a major focus for us here at CurdBee, and our Invoices and Estimates localization article is there to help anyone from anywhere customize the app to suit their specific needs. To get started,

1. On your CurdBee account, click on “Settings” from the top navigation.
2. Then click on “Localization” from the right side bar.
3. You will see the following screen where you will be presented with the available templates for localization.

[Go to Article]

Hive Mind

This week, we were pretty stoked to have a fellow South East Asian write about us! Iszuddin Ismail (@iszuddin) very kindly recommended us to @hostmyheart, a user on the lookout for an online invoicing app. He also linked us to a lengthy review of CurdBee he wrote a while back.

“Then I found CurdBee. CurdBee does not do that (have client/invoice limitations on its free account) to you. Of course there are ways that CurdBee limit its software and try to get you to upgrade. But they do it in a much nicer way. CurdBee does not “force” you to upgrade. CurdBee proves it with its superior software features.

Thanks, Iszuddin! It’s always nice to see users happy with our free service. As web app connoisseurs ourselves, we understand the frustrations of artificial limitations and do our best to make sure that CurdBee Standard always remains functional and useful, and above all, allows your business to grow. Speaking of business, good luck with Upload N Sell and Mini Site Gallery. We’ll be watching both closely to see what you’re up to.

Beekeepers

Last week, we debuted Beekepers, a column in which we talk about what it’s like being on the CurdBee team. In fact, in our maiden issue we told you about our average release day. Today, we’re going to expand on that and tell you what it’s like being in GMT +0530, and why that makes releases a little bit easier for us.

Being on Sri Lanka Time means that we usually get to work when most of America and Europe is still asleep. It’s morning for us though, and between 10am and 2pm local time, as we migrate the new code and restart whatever needs to be restarted, the majority of our user base is in bed, out on the town or raiding with their WoW guild. That helps.

Rather than roll out new versions when everyone is at work frantically refreshing their CurdBee accounts to see if that elusive client finally paid, we get to push new features to much a smaller userbase, which means less stress on our servers, and by extension, less stress on us. By the time you guys are up and hitting your laptop power buttons in that half-conscious state of mind between your first tweet of the day and your first cup of coffee, the new release been up for a few hours and we’ve ironed out most release crinkles already. At CurdBee, we’re forever thankful that the earth is round.

Firstly, Happy New Year from everyone here at Vesess! 2009 was a tough one for small businesses, but we got through it with your help, and are raring to go in 2010. To start the year off with a bang we’ve got an interview with someone who really knows his SMEs.

John Joyce is the one man band that runs The Small BizNest, an outfit that specialises in developing marketing plans for small businesses. When John came to us to have his company’s web presence developed, we had no idea what kind of experience we were in for.

As we put together the The Small BizNest site, we slowly realised that we were working with one of the best marketers in the field. Today, we hope to share that experience with you via an interview we recently conducted with him.

On your website, you say that The Small BizNest develops ‘online marketing eco-systems’. That’s an interesting concept – could you tell us what it means?

The days of outbound marketing are over and, for any business to attract new customers, they must embrace the concept of inbound marketing. Many people mistakenly believe that simply building a website will instantly attract new customers or that just signing up for a Twitter account will generate new business. The truth of the matter is that you have to establish your messaging and then build an entire ecosystem (website, blogging, SEO/SEM, social media, networking, list building, etc.) that will consistently deliver your message to the largest number of “qualified” prospective customers.

You’ve worked with some of the biggest companies in the business. What made you choose SMEs as your field of choice?

After a long career working with large corporations, l decided it was time for a change. I was fortunate enough to join GotVMail (now Grasshopper) when they were a small company (less than ten employees) and that experience sparked my passion for empowering small businesses.

How is marketing for SMEs different from marketing for bigger companies?

In most cases, the SME doesn’t have the financial or human capital to effectively and consistently market their business. SMEs need to be educated on low cost, no cost marketing solutions as well as solutions that are as automated as possible so they can focus on their core business.

What do you like most about the work you do? If there is one thing you could change about how the game is played, what would it be?

The most rewarding aspect of the work I do is being able to quickly see results and share in the success of my clients. The greatest challenge is the speed at which technology like search engine algorithms change. Your goals don’t change but your strategy and tactics are always a moving target.

There are tons of publicity firms out there. Why should SMEs come to you?

Marketing, advertising and publicity are all beginning to merge. They are all components of an online marketing ecosystem. I don’t just offer hype or buzz – I build a strategic vision that encompasses all aspects of attracting new customers and building brand equity.

‘Internet marketing’ is a term that’s bandied about a lot these days. What similarities and differences does it share with traditional marketing, and how does The Small BizNest take these into account when creating strategies?

I equate traditional marketing with outbound marketing and, although there are outbound components of internet marketing such as email, it’s no longer an effective strategy. The days of blasting your message to the disinterested masses are behind us and businesses now need to engage in ‘inbound marketing’. We develop strategies that help clients identify (1) who their target customers are, (2) what their needs are and (3) where they can be engaged. The resulting tactics can be a mixture of inbound/outbound and online/offline components but inbound online efforts currently offer the best ROI.

Which Internet technologies have affected online marketing the most, and why?

Search engines, most importantly Google, have really leveled the playing field. More than 80% of consumers use a search engine to research a product or service they are planning to purchase. SMEs are able to create a comprehensive business profile on all of these search engines for free.

I also think SaaS, cloud computing and open source paved the way for the huge number of powerful yet affordable solutions available to SMEs today.

As someone who has a passion for SMEs, what are your resources of choice for keeping up with the latest developments in the sphere? What should new SME owners be reading these days?

Books:

• The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don’t Work and What to Do About It – Michael E. Gerber
• Inbound Marketing: Get Found Using Google, Social Media, and Blogs (The New Rules of Social Media) – Brian Halligan, Dharmesh Shah
• Crush It!: Why NOW Is the Time to Cash In on Your Passion – Gary Vaynerchuk
• Trust Agents: Using the Web to Build Influence, Improve Reputation, and Earn Trust – Chris Brogan, Julien Smith
• Web Analytics: An Hour A Day – Avinash Kaushik

Online Reading:

• Guy Kawasaki
• Chris Brogan
• Smallbiztrends
• Duct Tape Marketing
• Gary Vaynerchuk
• Tim Berry
• Seth Godin
• Bizsugar

On a related note, what has changed the most about the SME game in this post-Internet era? What are some of the new challenges a new SME
has to face today?

• The barriers to entry (for starting an online business) are extremely low so there’s a greater likelihood that there will be a steady stream of new competitors.
• There is an extremely steep learning curve when it comes to online marketing due to the complexity of the solutions and the speed at which they change.
• Although there are many free marketing products/services available to SMEs, many of them require a serious time commitment to make sure there is plenty of care and feeding while you grow your ecosystem.

Social media is a relatively new concept, especially to firms outside North America and Europe. What advice do you have on getting the most out of it, especially for firms that are just entering the fray?

At the risk of being self-promoting, the best way to impact your business using social media is to hire someone with social media expertise. Learning the right way to implement and manage these solutions as a part of your overall marketing strategy will save your business a great deal of time and money in the long run.

No, we’re not patting our own backs. We’re just bringing you an interview with the people behind A Good Company, a SME that is doing it right. Read on to see what what Caroline and Micah have to say about design, clients, and their plan to take over the world.

Micah and Caroline, thanks for joining us today. For starters, could you tell us a little bit about A Good Company, and how it came to be?

Caroline: We both went to Otis College of Art and Design, a small design school in Los Angeles. We decided to work on our senior thesis project together, it was us and another designer, our pal Nicole. The 3 of us worked together and had a hell of a time creating www.thegoodsideof.us, where people can share stories of their good deeds.

We both work really well together and during school we constantly talked about starting a company someday, we both have similar ideas of what kind of a company we wanted to create. We even came up with the name A Good Company, during our senior year in college. We thought it’d be funny and also true. Obviously we both care deeply about good design, but what we also want from our company is a business that can be good, and help other business be good. We like the idea that being good is financially sustainable.

So after we graduated college, we decided that we’d like to keep working together. And since at the time I didn’t have a full time job, and Micah was looking for a good reason to go back to sunny CA, we thought that maybe now is the best time to start a business together.

How does A Good Company operate? Do you guys have offices, or do you just work from home? How do you guys divide the work flow between yourselves?

Caroline: We both work from home. And since right now we’re working from opposite sides of the country, we mostly work together through IM. As for our workflow I’m not quite sure, there’s really no rigid rules about it, it’s more like, we each do what we know we can do best at that specific time.

Micah: We’ve worked together really closely for… almost two years, even if it wasn’t always for A Good Company. That thesis project, and school projects, had us working really close, and we got a pretty clear idea of each other’s strengths and weaknesses. I’ve been doing a lot of client-talking lately, or programming, while Caroline spearheads a lot of the design and concepting. A lot of times we trade off more menial business work with design work, so one of us is organizing files or setting up tools and the other is gettin’ stuff done. And then we trade chores.

What changes, if any, have you had to make as a result of the prevailing economic downturn, and what advice would you give other small businesses trying to stay competitive in this financial climate?

Caroline: To be honest, I dont think we have made changes at all. At least personally I dont think a bad economy is a reason for us to hold back or anything like that. We’re both generally are pretty good about keeping in budget, for our personal finances. As for the company, since our business doesn’t require us to put a huge amount of monetary investment to it, I don’t think financially the economy has affected us in a big way.

I’m not sure if I’m qualified to give business advice to anyone, but one thing that we are trying to do with our company is to … well not to lose hope. People have said to us, in this economy you want to be careful, you need to hang on to every client you’ve got, just be thankful you have clients at all. Well, I dont think the bad economy is a good reason for us as a company to lower our standards. We still believe that working with good clients whom we respect and trust, doing work that is good, intelligent, and fun, is still what we’re strive for. So i guess if I have to give an advice to people about dealing with the economy downturn: don’t compromise, on anything, we might be in a hopeless situation but we’re not hopeless.

Micah: I don’t really believe in recessions. I don’t really believe in germs, either, but the thing is, we don’t really spend much money. And I’m constantly advocating us making products, so we can be more self-sufficient. My long term goal is to make our client work optional.

Deploying a service as a small business is often a nerve-wracking task. How has A Good Portfolio fared, and what have you learnt from working on it?

Caroline: Well even though we put this project on hold for sometime now, personally for me what I really learned from it is how to be more flexible. Micah has this mentality of “an idea is a dime a dozen”. I, on the other hand get attached to ideas. I’ve always thought this was a good idea and when we had to put it on hold, I was very resistant at first. but we did have a good reason to do it. We realized that this product is not the kind of product we wanted it to be. We were searching for a product that could give us a passive income, something we don’t have to manage. After doing some research, we realize that our target audience, being students, we probably won’t make much money from it. So we put it on hold, because we couldn’t afford to spend so much time working on something that woulnt earn us money.

The reason we revived the project is because Micah has this new take on working on this product. Before, we were gonna have all these fancy features, which we both admit would be really cool to have (templates, customizable fonts, color pickers, etc). The problem was, it’ll take a long time for us to figure out how to build all those fancy things (considering that neither of us are actual programmers, I have 0 programming knowledge and Micah is a hack, though, for a hack, Micah is a genius, if I do say so myself). So what we’ve decided to do this time around is to keep it as simple as possible. We want to build only the things that we absolutely need to launch. Once we have something that’s working then we can add other cool stuff to it, but we don’t want to focus so much on the nice-to-have features right from the get go. First we focus on the essential, and once we have that, we can expand as needed.

Micah: Not that we invented that idea, or anything, but we’re both kind of perfectionists deep down, and I’ve been working hard to change my mindset about that. We were concerned at first that it wouldn’t make us any money, but realized that if we didn’t spend too much time on it at first, it’s not much of a loss. So we picked it up again, made it real quick, and we’re testing it out. But I agree with Caroline, I think it’s taught us to get over ourselves and roll with the punches a bit.

On your website, you mention that you have “big plans” for the future. Mind elaborating? Where would you like to see A Good Company go in the next few years?

Caroline: hmm our big plans… well our long term business goal is to take over the world. But I guess we need to start with small steps.

In the next few years, I’d like for A Good Company to start working with good clients, in every sense of the word. I don’t care about size, they don’t need to be famous or popular. Here’s my idea of a good client, someone who treats us like we’re a partner, like we’re real people, working together with them to help them achieve their goals, be it creating a identity for their company or coming up with a product idea that’ll help them grow their business. A good client would also have the same ideas about business as we do, which means that they want to make their business profitable by using technology, design, science, inventions, and ideas to make a positive changes in the world, big or small. If we can start having more clients like that in the next few years, then I think we’d have no problem meeting our business objective in the long run.

Micah: Yeah, honestly, I share Caroline’s thoughts on clients, but I want it to be a choice – I don’t want to worry about income or making sure we have paying clients. I want us to pick projects we want to work on, based on how much we can do to help the world somehow. Inventions, events, who knows what. A Good Company is gonna be a model for how companies and people can help each other out and make the world a better place, that’s our goal.

A Good Company, of course, like any good company, uses CurdBee to power their invoicing. Here is a screenshot of their Bee deployment at work.