As virtually anyone would agree, it’s fantastic when technology works when required. But if a new report published today is any indication, the matter of when things function properly is still something we’re forced to reckon with. Perhaps things could be better. Much better.

This is the 800 pound gorilla in the room, folks. No question about it.

It’s not necessarily downtime that’s the biggest concern, though that is in fact quite serious. Instead, it’s the customer service element which matters most, and if we take a look back on the last year or two, there’s still a way to go to reach resounding satisfaction.

Pay Attention, Executives! Get Yer Heads in the Game!

I think it’s safe to say we’ve all had encounters with corporate agents and representatives that have done little but waste time or produce no significant results for the better, whether they be from a cable company or ISP (those are frequently one and the same) or wireless carrier. The resolution process can be a painful one, to say the least.

Yes, there are improvements made. Companies like Comcast have found a relatively effective way to communicate with customers through Twitter, or through corporate blogs that address concerns with reasonable haste and without having to employ a massive army of phone call responders. But all too often these changes have been implemented after the proverbial profanity has hit the fan.

That isn’t to say companies should hire weathermen to preempt chaos on the customer end, but the sheer act of communicating through channels that the client would prefer their issues be addressed through could be a very valuable change for the better that too few businesses reach.

Take a look the latest tech troubleshooting figures from Pew Internet. There are two sets of data involved that are key:

How consumers seek/conduct tech support:

38% of users with failed technology contacted user support for help.

28% of technology users fixed the problem themselves.15% fixed the problem with help from friends or family.

15% of tech users were unable to fix their devices

2% found help online

Consumers’ attitudes about various forms of tech support:

72% felt confident that they were on the right track to solving the problem.

59% felt impatient to solve the problem because they had important uses for the broken technology.

48% felt discouraged with the amount of effort needed to fix the problem.

40% felt confused by the information that they were getting.

It should be said that these figures are establish on the premise that nearly half of technology in the hands of consumers doesn’t work properly at one point or another, either through user error or technical faults.

But look at the first segment. 28% of users fix problems themselves; 15% were unable to fix their devices; and 2% found help online.

Wounds That Needs Healing

In aggregate, that’s a pretty unfortunate reality. I imagine a good number of self-diagnoses and self-fixes are done because of disillusionment of traditional help channels. Still 15% of everyone involved with the survey were unable to get back to normal, and only 2% found help online. That last number needs massive improvement.

The second set of data is telling in that the issue of impatience came up in more than half of all instances when attitudes were questioned. And if you grab the four stats together in succession, the feelings were of confidence, impatience, discouragement, and confusion.

Not good. Not good at all.

Patients Outnumber Doctors

This tells me people aren’t getting the help they need. And that if they were given the appropriate resources and guidance by companies, the costumer service bogeyman would exist no longer. At least not to the extent that it exists today.

There are entities like Fixya that are clearly fighting the good fight in the FAQ/repair/troubleshooting world, and the website’s receipt of $6 million in funding earlier this year is definite indication of demand for such a forum. But more has to be done.

Heck, it’s 2008, and it can still require hours of time to accomplish things so menial as a billing problem or email access configuration. To quote a world-famous American politician: “We can do better … Yes, we can.”

Imagery provided by iStockPhoto/DNY59/Barisonal; TBO.com

—Related Articles at Mashable | All That’s New on the Web:Facebook App Developer: Good Customer Service Will Pay BigAmazon Video Reviews Now LiveGet Satisfaction Takes Twitter Brand Management to the Next LevelT-Mobile Blocking Twitter?Comcast Isn’t Net Neutral; Are They Liars, Too?Free Mobile Price Checks with FrucallAmazon Launches Product Wiki

Delicious remains the most recognisable name in social bookmarking, but does it serve niche markets as ably as specialized tools could? Boca Raton, Florida-based Dwellicious thinks not, and has created a “Delicious for real estate” that it hopes will entice home buyers and real estate agents alike.

Better Than Delicious?

The basics are unchanged: add a bookmarklet to your browser and click it when you see a real estate listing you like, anywhere on the web. Except that unlike generic bookmarking sites, Dwellicious is optimized to work with the following: Century21, Coldwellbanker, Frontdoor.com, Har.com, Homes.com, Realtor.com, Redfin, Remax, Rentals.com, Trulia, Yahoo Real Estate and Zillow. Unlike Delicious, Dwellicious knows where to grab the data from on these pages, and bookmarks all the relevant info with ease.

Here’s the smart bit: Dwellicious bookmarks are dynamic: updated whenever the price of a property changes, or new photos are added, or the property is taken off the market. Use cases might include sharing your favorite property picks with your spouse or real estate agent. And so yes, it’s “better than Delicious” within the real estate niche, but this benefit seems marginal.

Simple Business Model

Dwellicious is not only a simple idea, its planned business model takes little explanation either: the site plans to create Pro accounts for real estate agents, offering advanced tools to help their buyers.

Uncertain Future

It’s a simple, easily explained concept. And yet, the competitive advantage seems slim: unless you’re a real estate agent, generic social bookmarking may suffice…and if I did find a dream home at a bargain price, would I want to share that information or keep it to myself?

In truth, Dwellicious’ future likely lies with the real estate agents themselves: either as a tool to keep track of hundreds of properties at any moment, or as a service to their clients. Even so, the market gap here seems slim at best.

Dwellicious will launch on January 7th 2009 at the Inman Real Estate Connect Conference in New York City.

Further Resources

For more useful real estate tools on the web, see our following resource lists:

REAL ESTATE TOOLBOX: 65+ Real Estate Resources

20+ Tools to Survive the Real Estate Crisis

Source:Mashable!

The holiday season is fast approaching, and with it, hectic travels. This is the busiest time of the year when it comes to traveling, especially for families. Luckily, online and mobile tools help make the experience much more manageable.

From travel planning sites to navigation apps and services to help you keep track of your spending, here are over 20 resources to help you survive the holiday travel season.

Are you planning to travel? Which services have you found most helpful? Tell us more in the comments.

Planning Your Vacation

Disney - Has a useful site dedicated to families on the go. Believe it or not, they don’t just recommend that all families just go to Disneyland or Disney World! There are plenty of excellent suggestions for activities and sites to see.

Kaboose - Also provides a tremendous amount of ideas for family travel and vacationing. There’s a plethora of useful family friendly tips and suggestions such as the best family-friendly cars.

The Travel Channel - Has a special section just for family travel and vacations. There are many videos covering travel suggestions as well as message forums dedicated to families on the go.

Tripology - Like an online travel agent that works with the information you provide on the type of trip or vacation you want to take. They take the information and provide relevant suggestions for your upcoming journey.

TripoRama - A travel planning service specializing in group trips. Similar to other sites, this service can make suggestions and share useful information for any type of trip you want to experience with your loved ones.

For information on finding cheap flights, check out “30+ Tools for Finding Cheap Travel Accomodations.”

Navigating Your Way

Source:Mashable!

Like many entries in the world of SaaS, Bizroof, a company offering a steadily growing CRM package, practices the art of incremental improvement, a concept popularized by Google, et al., which takes a semi-experimentalist approach to product development.

This past July, for example, Bizroof had its official launch, and only a month later implemented support for Yahoo’s location-based service Fire Eagle. This week the company is introducing users to new cash-flow analysis and sales automation tools; a whopper of a bonus for managers seeking that all-in-one fantasy.

And users will be content to know that the money management options provided are similarly well-design as the previously standard set of software. Ease of use is the order of the day. If your cost analysis job isn’t so rigorous as to require some serious machinery, these extensions will likely suffice for the day-to-day.

Layout is straightforward and segmented into view options for reports new and old as well as edit fields for money brought in and money sent out. Really, if you have just a semblance of understanding about accounting, you’ll learn it in seconds; a few minutes at most. (Account owners can also change currency settings from US dollars to euros to  pounds to yen.)

For Bizroof to deploy these things to the company’s stated membership of 3,800, regardless of their use of free or paid accounts, is quite a treat, too. Just know that a Basic plan will limit you to 20 cash flow reports per month, whereas the $120/year Pro level will grant you access to 5,000.

—Related Articles at Mashable | All That’s New on the Web:Bizroof CRM Adds Fire Eagle SupportBizroof Joins a Saturated CRM MarketNew Google App Provides Free Ad ManagementLinkedIn Seeks Warrior to Fend off FacebookWhat is Web 2.0? Devil’s Dictionary Defines It!Revolution Money Raises $50 MillionRevolution Money to Launch Facebook Application?

You can always tell when the weekend is approaching. If it isn’t Twitter getting killed, it’s podcasting dying, death of blogs, slaughter of the record labels or one or more form of Heritage media.  It’s honestly quite difficult to top it every week. On the one hand, we bloviators have generally no compunctions re-using the same media type, but for it to really generate a respectable bitchmeme, you’ve got to really be creative.

Steve Rubel, well known for predicting economic doom and gloom due to over-investment in technology, this week predicts the death of all tangible media.

Steve says “by January 2014 I will wager that in the US almost all forms of tangible media will either be in sharp decline or completely extinct,” including (but not limited to) software, books, video games, newspapers, CDs, and DVDs.

Once again, Steve’s penchant for hyperbole gets him in trouble. Certainly, there will be a sharp decline in the usage of a lot of the media we still purchase to this day, and for a lot of the categories of physical media he alludes to, I expect them to disappear altogether a whole lot sooner. But all tangible media eliminated? That is something that won’t happen until we’ve as a race technologically transcended the need for human bodies.

Video Games

Steve cites systems like XBox live, and the advent of their online only markeplace for UGC content as evidence the death of video games in their physical format. The problem comes in when you consider the size of your typical video game can be between 4 gigabytes and 34 gigabytes. On your base level Internet connection, the download times start at six hours, and end at three days.  

Even if you have one of those brand spanking new Comcast or FiOS connections, you’re still looking at least a couple hours. None of that takes into account those cute bandwidth caps all the operators have decided were such good ideas recently.

Newspaper and Music

He doesn’t get much argument on this one from me.  Music, in physical form, is more or less dead. Physical record shops are a rarity, and the record labels continue to pursue self-destructive business models (suing your customers and their 12-year-old children is not a winning marketing move).

Similarly, newspapers around the world and across the country refuse to take drastic enough actions to adapt to life in the digital age. Those that understand that the future is online don’t do enough with organization to adapt to producing content for the web environment, and the rest of the industry is still in denial.

These are examples of industries that will not transition to digital media, but be replaced by a new guard that has the will and ambition to create viable solutions in this arena

Books

As dozens of Rubel’s commentors noted, there might be a transformation of the book business to a mostly online model, but it will never make the full transition. Books in many of their various forms and genres are considered collectible. Some commentors had other protests:

“I like having the artifacts of my reading around me to decorate the house. I’m in my 40s, though, so perhaps future generations will have no such nostalgia for tangible media artifacts.”

“I like being able to flip through an atlas and a few large picture books, something I can’t do on Kindle. These provide very different experiences than Google Maps and a Flickr photo album.”

I think that innovations in eBook technology will make the format so popular that this will be a moot point, but it’s almost impossible to put a date on when this will happen on a broad scale. There is so much that needs to be right about the device, from user experience on down to business model. Kindle is the closest we have at the moment, and I’m really excited about what’s promised by the PlasticLogic, but there’s no telling how the general public will receive it.

TV and Movies

We’re getting closer and closer to a world where physical media and even the traditional distribution methods are superflous, and no longer needed. The primary limitations in place that prevent a full on replacement of network TV, cable TV and the Hollywood studio and distribution system lay in monetization and, of course, bandwidth limitations.

It wouldn’t be fair to cite Blu-Ray statistics for a fair estimation of your average size, since many pundits think that Blue-Ray adoption rates indicate it won’t take hold as a standard before it become obsolete. If you take into account the standard size of a regular DVD movie, you’re still looking at average download times of five to seven hours for most broadband subscribers.

Timeshifting, media RSS, podcasting, and downsampling all can help to bridge this gap, but it will all be meaningless until someone is able to create some sort of set-top box for the living-room that people will actually want to use on a regular basis. This, in my opinion, won’t happen until the device makers in this space start to pay attention to the types of content out there and the ways that people like to consume their digital content.

I’ve been imagining this moment is just around the corner for at least the last five years.  At this point, I’m starting to give up hope they’ll ever understand.

Given these factors, we won’t see the elimination of the physical media for movies for quite a while (with the outside chance that some device maker could have an epiphany tomorrow).

So, Could It Happen? Could It Happen by 2012?

Yeah, maybe.  Maybe if …

eBook manufacturers absolutely nail the perfect combination of form, function and business model.  Oh, and Oprah has to keep plugging it on a regular basis…

… the recording industry continues down it’s self-destructive business model…

… the New York Times goes out of business …

… device manufacturers finally read one of my articles about “the veg-factor” …

… and the cable and telco companies decide to lift bandwidth caps and finish building out a real broadband network for America.

Quite honestly, I’d love to believe that all this could happen in the next two years or so. I just don’t see it happening, though.

—Related Articles at Mashable | All That’s New on the Web:The End of the Music Industry in 2008RIAA’s Sacrificial Lamb Appeals Damning Court RulingHow Big Media Can Beat P2P and Make a Killing in the RecessionDon’t Send Bac’n: Use TwitterSearchThe RIAA Will Die in 2008The Case of Facebook v SlickCashIs Social Advertising a Safe Haven for Marketing Budgets?

There are only a few places around the world where the vice of art of consumerism is having a good day. Suffice it to say that the holiday season will be celebrated; it just won’t be full of so much…stuff. And maybe a bit less happiness to show for it, too.

So Scrooge wins this time around. But here’s a glimmer of hope to nibble on. In the media world, in an industry dominated by the RIAA and the MPAA, diminished sales matched with increased P2P “naughtiness” may tip the scales in favor of the change that people have long been hoping for in the land of “fair use” and fair pricing.

It’s Worth a Shot

Of course, the cards remain stacked against what everyone fond of music and movies familiar with copyright law and media titans’ business practices believe in. You can teach an old dog new tricks, but it sure as heck ain’t easy, as the last few years of relative chaos has made clear. It’s hardly guaranteed that we’ll see greener pastures anytime soon.

But, and this is a pretty big but, there’s a possibility that what goes on on the Web between the present day and whenever the moment is that this global “economic downturn” goes in the direction most of us wish to go will cause the Sonys and Universals and Warners and EMIs of the world to shift course. In three ways, this means:

Taking DRM entirely out of the picture, which continues to be an annoyingly persistent reality, despite its philosophical and practical absurdity for associated software and hardware markets (i.e., iPod/iTunes vs. Zune vs Sandisk, et al.);

Allowing for streaming services like Last.fm and MySpace Music to actually host on-demand playback options for full tracks from full albums and EPs with no limits;

And attaching costs to purchased copies of singles, albums, and movies that more accurately reflect production and modern distribution costs. Simply put, having to pay upwards of $10 for a 10- to 12-track album or $12-15 for a film that involves little or no petroleum in the effort to get it from the seller to the listener is ridiculous and dishonest.

All About Bang for Buck

Let’s face it, the path for a continued physical presence in consumers’ lives is a finite one. CDs and DVDs sell, but that won’t forever be the case. And in light of that expectation, the media industry would be off to quite an improved position in these murky times if it 1) enticed consumers with a largely irresistible cost structure for retail downloads, and 2) made it easier for consumers to actually play their preordained part.

It’s pretty logical, I think. If you as a producer would like people to consume more of your content, make your content available in ways and at prices that don’t scream “here’s the premium to pay to watch this on your television set or hear that on your portable player this very minute if you prefer not to gas it over to Wal-Mart or wait for super-slow Super-Saver shipping by Amazon for the tangible thing.”

Yes, the convenience of near-instant gratification is a definite plus. But with infrastructural savings on the part of producers and distributors should come a substantial financial benefit for the consumer as well.

Imagery provided by iStockPhoto/DNY59; HappyBirthdayBilly

—Related Articles at Mashable | All That’s New on the Web:If It’s On The Internet, It Must Be TrueGot $80,000? You Can Buy SimpleWeatherDesperate Brokers are the New LolcatsWill Aggregation Ever Go Mainstream?Australian Ad It Last Comes To AmericaYahoo: Microsoft’s Bid Undervalues The CompanyLiveblog: Is Broadcast Media Co-opting Citizen-Powered Media?

A concept in video advertising has been bubbling up amongst the professionals I’ve been listening to over the last six months, one that makes a lot of sense and is already in use by several successful podcasters, but one that is rarely described explicitly and definitely lacks a cute buzzword-y name, at least as far as I’ve seen.

Most advertising in video and audio media is treated separately from any other content, text or otherwise. Most blogs and news organizations that regularly (or irregularly) produce and feature video and audio content don’t monetize it at all. Those that do monetize it either rely on remnant advertising methods or sell by CPM, and are often discouraged when production costs outpace the sales returns for the content being created.

I’ve spoken here before many times about the value of sponsorship models for all forms of online content, and their inherent superiority over metrics-based advertising for publishers. The topic has come up a few times when we’ve discussed different ways to monetize Twitter, particularly in the context of making money from a personal brand, rather than trying to look at the content as monetizable inventory:

Folks like Louis Gray and Robert Scoble have been able to launch entire Web 2.0 niches just by describing a problem, and then subsequently promoting a company or set of developers that work to solve those issues. Those are just two names I’m intimately familiar with within the hundreds of Twitter users that have several thousand or more subscribers. Twitter should be striking deals with these users and splitting the cash with them.

And I spoke even more recently about the idea of sponsorship in the context of online video when I explored some of the hidden reasons behind Revision3’s recent cuts:

For a real world example, why is it, do you think, that Cisco signed on to sponsor the Mashable Conversations video podcast (one with zero subscribers at the time when they signed the deal) before we’d ever put out an episode?  Why do you think Seagate continues to sponsor Robert Scoble’s endeavors, despite the fact that he doesn’t have the distribution of larger blogs like us?  The answer is the same in both cases - those advertisers want to have their name associated with the brands they’re buying into. 

When you compare the budgets spent on brand sponsorship to metrics based ads on the very same show, the value to the publisher is clear - sponsorship is the way to go, as it can swing the money dial upwards easily by between a factor of 10 and 100.

With a Difference Like That, Doesn’t Advertiser Value Suffer?

Advertiser value, in theory, should go up. The reality of sponsorship situations is that they’re chosen much more carefully, and with much more manual interference. A company simply isn’t going to drop what can easily be a six figure sum on a well known publisher’s brand without some human interaction taking place. Conversely, buys that take place on remnant video inventory or CPC text and image inventory can easily exceed that value, and most of the time it’s handled primarily by automated systems.

Perhaps in a coming age, these sponsorship transactions will also take place by sophisticated automated means (and when that day comes, a lot of folks in the sales and marketing business will be fearful of their jobs), but I rather doubt it.

These types of sponsorships are generally made because careful consideration has been made by both the savvy publisher and the savvy marketer to identify where the audience for the product or service and the content being monetized coincide closely.

For a real example of what I’m talking about, simply look no further than our daily sponsored feature at Mashable, the Sun Startup Review. The content and the sponsorship is strictly textual in nature, but the concept here is the same. Sun decided that a key target for their future business lay in the startup sector, and Mashable’s brand is inextricably tied to the startup business, so thus a sponsor-publisher relationship made sense.

Sun could have simply bid on a text ad on the side bar, or even purchased one of the more expensive graphic ads we sell, but they were looking to shape their image to our audience beyond what may or may not be glimpsed when a reader scrolls through our pages looking for content. 

In terms of online video, these concepts are no different, it’s just that the added value of the sponsorship becomes much more stark and visible.

New Media Beats Heritage Media Moguls at Their Own Game

Although I’ve vocally disagreed with Brightcove’s media distribution strategies from time to time, their Vice President Adam Berrey very succinctly made this point about publishers with respect to how they work to monetize their video efforts at a recent roundtable discussion hosted by Beet.TV.

The point that he’s driving at there is that it’s the audience you’re selling, and not the content. This is true for any media organization, and it’s an important distinction for those who are trying to sell any New Media inventory to learn and learn well.

Put another way, New Media publishers hold in their grasp the holy grail that moguls of the olden days spent millions, if not billions, to acquire - the ability to sell against multiple media types. Congress won’t ever pass legislation to break up a media monopoly by an online website in an effort to prevent them from utilizing video, audio, images and text on their website. On the other hand, congressional hearings are routinely held whenever mergers and acquisitions take place that consolidate too much media in the hands of too few publishers.

Just In Case You Need a Refresher on the Value of Video

Case study after case study shows how video and audio are more valuable than simple text content. The old standby study I like to cite was published two years ago by Ken Rutkowski, and it documented the simply amazing response rates to online video advertisements.

It found that of those that watched a video advertisement online, 45% had some sort of measurable response from the ad, and 31% followed through on the advertisement enough to go to the company website. Of those that watched the advertisement, 16% ended up making a purchase, and separate 13% either signed up for a free trial or ordered a subscription.

Plainly, if under half watch the advertisement, and then 45% of those folks respond, you’ve got around a 25% viewer to response ratio, a not insignificant number. Likewise, of all the folks that will view a video, 12.9% will end up buying the product, requesting a free trial, or ordering a subscription.

At this point, evangelism for online video response rates is almost preaching to the choir, no matter who it is you’re talking to. The reasons behind it, particularly for the web savvy, are almost common sense.  

A video advertisement defeats most common forms of web ad-blindness. 

Standard video and audio CPM base rates for even remnant ads are far higher than that of text.

Video and audio are more memorable and often easier venues for conveying complex ideas, and thus …

… better at creating a lasting impression of advertiser brands, offers, products and services.

The formulas for CPMs and CPCs are great starting points, but shouldn’t be set in stone. When a publisher is looking to solidify the sponsorship relationship, they should treat all inventory (be it audio, video or text) as ala carte.  The key is, for both advertisers and those who sell ads, to wrap your head around the concept of what a video or audio ad is worth, what your brand and audience is worth, and how to convey that to those who want to partner with you to reach your audience.

—Related Articles at Mashable | All That’s New on the Web:Google Testing AdSense for VideosThe CommunityNext::Monetize Event is Coming Up!Broadband Enterprises Partners with ScanScout for Video Overlay AdsNew Media Expo 2008 Conference Ticket GiveawayLiveRail is a Video Ad Distribution NetworkFor Your Imagination Gets Another $1M for Internet Video ProductionYouTube IPO?

Wizzard Media announced this Monday their third-quarter results, which continued along their impressive track record of sustained growth for this year. Wizzard, the publicly traded podcast network, is still not in the black but continues to bring in more revenue than most other networks could dream of doing.

The year to date reported revenues that exceeded last year’s by 29% at $4.6 million as of September 30th. The Q3 revenues alone sat at $1.5 million, only a 4% increase year over year, yet still impressive in what has been a generally unimpressive quarter so far for the general economy.

Growth is slowing slightly at Wizzard, but they continue to close the gap towards profitability, and it’s on track to at least match last year’s performance in terms of revenue.

As reports of the economic slow down finally hitting the online advertising sector have surfaced, it’s a good thing that Wizzard has appeared to have significantly cut their costs, with their net losses having outpaced revenue and dropped by 89% since last year.

Enough With the Numbers. What Does it Mean?

As I said last week when Revision3 announced their performance last week, 2009 will show us which business model is superior in terms of online multimedia content providers.

The two companies represent two competing forms of content monetization for today’s podcast only content. Revision3, like other niche outfits such as FunnyOrDie, is primarily a creative force, putting the bulk of their resources into show development, on-air talent and production value. Wizzard represents the other side of the industry, like YouTube and others, who act primarily as a hosting outfit and put their resources into developing unique and innovative ways to monetize the content created by those who aren’t directly employed by the company.

Neither model is particularly cheap, or clearly superior on the face of it, but running a network isn’t a sprint, it’s a marathon. The aggregation route has the potential to be the superior distance runner, since they’re in the business of developing and utilizing monetization technology for massive amounts of content, which after a point will go down in costs. Meanwhile, independent creative networks will continue to have significant production overhead, since on-air talent, when it’s successful, can only go up in cost.

Logic would then dictate that since content must continue to be created, yet won’t be most efficiently monetized by strictly in-house teams and technology, that the only way creative networks can succeed in the long term would be by either folding into or partnering with larger aggregation networks.

I think that as 2009 rolls in, we’ll see some of this start to happen with the recognizable names in this space. We’re starting to see some of this with the larger heritage studios and labels biting the bullet and partnering with YouTube. This trend will continue and possibly accelerate due to larger economic motivations.

—Related Articles at Mashable | All That’s New on the Web:Wizzard Media Joins the NavyWizzard Launches Branded Podcast PlayerWizzard Media Publicly Traded on AMEXWizzard Releases Video Using Adobe Media PlayerWizzard Media Joins Forces with TubeMogulWizzard Sees First Quarter Revenue Grow 130%Podcast: A Conversation with Wizzard’s Rob Walch

Anand Iyer with Microsoft Startup Zone provided a video demo and details about the Microsoft BizSpark program. Microsoft describes the program as, "BizSpark is an innovative new program that unites Startups with entrepreneurial and technology resources in a global community with a common goal of supporting and accelerating the success of a new generation of high-potential Startups."

Check out reviews on Geekzone, The Register, Ostatic and Sitepoint.

CN Sponsor: CloudContacts - make your business cards work for you!
Other CenterNetworks Coverage: iminlikewithyou, FriendFeed, Web Jobs

An iPhone application called FrontPocket, built by Jacksonville, Florida-based design firm Updatable, launched today. It behaves as a mobile extension to 37signals’ Backpack service, a business organization and data sharing utility.

As any 37signals fan might intuit, a development of this type must be one thing above all: simple and straightforward. The better to conform to the less-is-more ethos maintained by the team behind Backpack and its siblingware. I think it’s safe to say FrontPocket can feel right at home with family.

A closer look at design

The design is almost entirely plain. Only the basic template of features evident in many other iPhone applications are there. Nothing more. As for color, I would say there’s only a half-rainbow thing happening, whereas on the desktop things are a little more festive. We all know how festive data management can be, eh?

Reasonable limitations

Looks aren’t very important here, however. It’s all about information access and seamless management between desktop and mobile environs, which FrontPocket handles fairly aptly. Of course, you can only do so much with the release. You can’t post files, for instance. (You’re using an iPhone, after all.) Lists, pages, calendars, and journal entries are the extent of what the application is capable of building, maneuvering or adding to or subtracting from. But that’s pretty much all you could sensibly ask of the app for the time being, right?

Whether you’re signed up for a payment plan with the browser-based service or maintain a free account, FrontPocket does its thing. Mostly. It is by no means a replacement, functionally speaking, or an equal to its inspiration. And there’s this thing about access you’ll need to be aware of, which is that you’ll have to fork over cash to 37signals each month - $7 or more - to make use of the calendaring service. Yet that is true whether you’re iPhone-enabled or not, so it’s hard to feel disappointment about such a restriction on FrontPocket’s part.

Is it worth it?

So, is it worthwhile? I think yes. There’s enough to get out of the application’s connection to the full-fledged “home service” to make it handy in many circumstances. If you happen to encounter any technical issues with the initial release (an issue was discovered for 1.0, which was pretty hastily corrected in 1.0.1, and the developers expect to issue version 1.1 two weeks hence), any rough patches will presumably be smoothed out in short order.

Quite frankly, if you’re an ardent fan of Backpack, and simply wish you could have some variation of it to keep with you at all times, this application will make your day. I’m 99.9% sure of it.

—Related Articles at Mashable | All That’s New on the Web:Writeboard vs Writely37Signals Releases Backpack Update37signals Backpack Organizer Now Offers Options for Groups37 Signals Launching Newsroom: Wordpress Prologue Competitor?How To Run a Web 2.0 Company: Less is MoreWeb 2.0 Mashup Matrix!IMified - Control Apps via IM