I had a chance to talk to the creator and VP of Marketing for MyStrategicPlan, Erica Olsen, and this is what she had to say:

Why did you start MyStrategicPlan?

MyStrategicPlan helps everyone run a better business. By the time someone is finished setting up their plan, they’ve learned the equivalent of a mini-MBA. The company started with the idea of giving even small businesses the chance to have a “Virtual VP of Strategy” who keeps things on track. We’re not just running a website, our plan is to start a strategy revolution.

What is MSP’s Business Model?

We use an annual per-user licensing model. Similar to many web applications, we offer a free trial after which billing begins.

How do you differ from your competitors?

Our industry contains either limited desktop strategic planning software that’s little more than an excel spreadsheet, or massive enterprise level strategic planning solutions that are far too expensive for medium or small businesses. We are the only affordable solution, and we provide so much more than just a platform to build a plan. Our software improves each month, and learning resources are added constantly- we do this because we truly want to start that strategy revolution.

Anything else you would like to share about your tool?

Tasks in MyStrategicPlan cascade from wide-reaching organizational objectives down to individual action plans, once the plan is done, MSP acts as a Performance Management System as well. We have been in business for 3 years, but are definitely still a startup- each day presents its own challenges for a young web application carving out a place in its industry!

MyStrategicPlan offers its services at a reasonable price point as indicated on their website. Navigating through the web pages, I found the features useful to new entrepreneurs as well as those who have an established web presence. It is surprising how the market has not capitalized on strategic planning tools, which essentially is the backbone of any business. If you have ever asked yourself three questions, “where is my organization now?”, “Where do I want to take it?” and “How will I get there?” then this tool will definitely prove to be a viable solution to your queries.

Click here to visit their blog and here for the homepage

For those still weary of such a brand, take note that the brand has even gained popularity among notable enterprises: Boeing, SCE, NASA, U.S. Navy, U.S. Coast Guard, U.S. Geological Survey, Mississippi University, Rutgers University, J.L. French, Rocky Flat, Stealth Engineering, GEO Systems U.K., RACAL Defense Electronics, Lynch and Sons, Herzog Electric, U.S.R.D., and Kansas Department of Health & Environment.

In addition, research composed by the International Data Corporation (IDC) reported that among the most common causes for notebook damage are drops at 64%, followed by spills at 38% and the component most cited for damage is the HDD and LCD display. The brands focus on durability brings to mind Volvo’s focus on safety. Anyhow, a unique approach to building portable PCs or any product for that matter is the right way to go especially considering the economic costs associated with poorly crafted computers. Surprising, however, is the fact that it took so long for someone to change focus from the conventional perception that the next slim laptop is all that matters to actual quality workmanship, safety and durability.

Click here for reasons to go ruff with portable computers and here for a listing of their product line, and here for features that set ruff apart from the conventional brands.

For those interested in spreading the wedding buzz; SharedWeddings.com helps connect friends and family. The site is quite interactive and the features as mentioned is often on the top of the list of brides and grooms. Also, the fact that family and friends can take part in the buzz long before the days leading to the wedding is priceless. In addition, the site has a Wedding Budget Planner. With this tool, you can categorize all of your wedding planning spending, record deposits paid, assign a due date, and make notes about each individual item. Furthermore, new templates are being planned and added to the lot of templates available. Overall, its a welcome addition to have this site as a form of relief aid for those planning their weddings, which can often be exhiliarating and at the same time be quite exhausting.

Click here to view a actual wedding website, and here for the feature list, and here for a list of sample templates

I had a chance to talk to the creator of the site, Joel Macfarlane, and this is what he had to say:

Why did we build such a thing? What could be the business model?

Until nine months ago I owned a successful software company providing Project and Portfolio Management software to large companies like Tecos. We made a pretty good living selling software locally and charging big money to install and maintain it. It was never a particularly easy business living from one big sale to the next. Meanwhile we observed the industry trend of moving away from large expensive applications to smaller cheaper SAS product. Watching other companies like BaseCamp and FogBugz sell millions of copies online for a small per month cost just make sense. I exited the company and spent the next nine months creating TeamEffect from scratch with the goal of being in the same market as these projects but with something completely visual and super easy to use.

We finished this month and have gone into Beta with the goal of giving the software away till it’s perfect. Check out the project video on our web site for a quick demonstration.

Why is your site different than your competitors?

The currently market leaders are very clunky as the web has not traditionally leant itself to good client side interactivity. Typically these apps give you text boxes and calendar pickers rather than a good old fashion start to end bars. I used to draw staff schedules up against projects on a white board where I could draw lines and rub things out with a finger rather than stumble my way through these lists. TeamEffect gives you the same features and more but presents them on a visual calendar with all of the interface smarts we all expect from Web 2.0 applications.

How are you planning to market it?

With experience selling this sort of software in person we are going to apply the same sales techniques online. We will be running a social forum based campaign over the next month to gather a few eyeballs. Then when we can hone our message and drive our conversion rates up we will start a formal branding PR campaign on some of the large Project Management sites.
 
Project Managers and Team Managers are busy people and generally hate scheduling and forecasting software since it adds workload, the campaign we have planned plays on this.

Any other information that you believe is relevant to your startup?

We are inviting 100 people to sign up this month for free to start our advisory community. We need all the feedback and help we can get to make this software really stand out. So get on board and give us a hand.

It’s a pleasant surprise that TeamEffect.com is offering these services for free until the site is perfected - a great approach to building loyalty and user acceptance. The site, built using a fair bit of client side code and ofcourse, Ajax technology for user interaction, can be said to be usabilitiy and technology driven. Overall, it is great to see a real world tool to aid management in planning the initial and subsequent stages of the project development process. 

Click here to visit TeamEffect.com and check out the demo videos.

This release includes the API infrastructure, the FQL parser, the FBML parser, and FBJS, as well as implementations of many common methods and tags. We’ve included samples and some dummy data to help you get started fast.

Facebook Open Platform also has extensibility points built in so you can add your own functionality, such as your own FBML tags, API methods, etc.

This certainly is a response to OpenSocial, as Facebook continue their catch up with other social networks such as MySpace, which is considered the largest social network.

The goal of this release is to help you as developers better understand Facebook Platform as a whole and more easily build applications, whether it’s by running your own test servers, building tools, or optimizing your applications on this technology. We’ve built in extensibility points, so you can add functionality to Facebook Open Platform like your own tags and API methods. We’re also hoping you use Facebook Open Platform in ways we’ve never thought of – just as you showed off your creativity with Facebook Platform, we hope this lets you be creative with the foundation of the platform itself.

It is licenced under CPAL. The FBML parcer is licensed under MPL.

Certainly more details will be released in the next few days.

This will leave door open to many new startup facebook applications.

I had a chance to talk to the creator of Guitarati Sonal Pandey, who also brings to the table her software industry background, this is what she had to say:

Why is your site different than your competitors?

Guitarati provides an offbeat, intuitive way of music discovery based on music-color co-relation. Amidst a world of music discovery dominated by tag clouds, 1-10 rating systems and so forth, we wanted something that enabled users to easily find music that others had ‘felt’ the same about. In this way, we work orthogonally to the heavy number crunching music discovery algorithms and other social music discovery methods out there.
 
What is your business plan or model?

Users can listen to full length tracks for a cent, and these cents get deducted from the download price when they download the song. Or they can listen to free, high quality samples. Guitarati provides multiple means of revenue for bands and labels, as they get paid for song downloads as well as streaming. Bands and labels decide the price of their music and retain 75% of the earnings. We earn money through a cut of the music streaming and download sales.
 
Why did you start this website?

We want to create products and services that are fun, unconventional, perhaps even bizarre. Music discovery is one such step. On a serious note, we think that the future of massive data classification could be more intuition based. Of course, we don’t mean intuition in a woo-woo new-agey scaring-people-off way, but in a way that lets people follow their instincts. People use their instincts so often, may be more than we realize, that making a choice of music based purely on what color they feel attracted to at any given time is not so far-fetched after all.
 
Music color relation has been studied for ages and explored by the likes of Newton and Plato. Research and experience show that music and emotions are tightly coupled. The thought of color based music discovery occurred to us one day and then we started reading up on the this intriguing topic. And so we began working on the website 6 months ago.
 
How are you planning to market it?

We believe that simple, quirky means attract people’s attention better than somber campaigns costing thousands of dollars. We are using the power of social media and since our target visitors frequent social websites, we are benefitting from this approach. Other than this, we are regularly being written about in blogs.
 
   
Any other information that you believe is relevant to your startup?

We utilized the private beta period to invite bands and record labels to upload their music while we parallelly tested and finished our back-end systems. The website is now open to everyone who has an interest in music or color or both. Responses from website users have been ranging from ‘love it’ to ‘I don’t get it’ and everything in between. But the bottom-line of all feedback has been curiosity. That we think is a good start.
 
Certainly Guitarati is an innovative and interesting approach to music that will definitely build hype among music enthusiasts and surfers alike. In this day and age, building sites that cater to a different perspective on a known concept or perhaps an entirely different concept is a promising approach. Also, having a sense of creativity and a honest desire to present ideas and concepts in a different light are really praiseworthy. In that regard, I have much anticipation for Guitarati and the curiousity it creates.

Jey

What does this mean for you?

Well if you are operating a social network site, users can now run Facebook’s applications on your platform. This is a great news for the creative minds. A year ago Facebook launched their platform where it allowed users to create their own applications to run on their platform, which allowed other users to use many applications to interact with other users.

This is probably a response, a strategy to fight back to the “Open Social”, a Open Source Social Networking platform which is backed by Google, Yahoo and MySpace.

Facebook has issued the following statement:

“We’re working on an open-source initiative that is meant to help application developers better understand Facebook Platform and more easily build applications, whether it’s by running their own test servers, building tools, or optimizing their applications. As Facebook Platform continues to mature, open-sourcing the infrastructure behind it is a natural step so developers can build richer social applications and share what they’ve learned with the ecosystem. Additional details will be released soon.”

Stay tuned folks, lot more details to come in this fight to hold the ground in social networking.

This really means, the face of social networks will soon be changing to even a more comprehensive, more effective tools that will be available for the people who will continue to use it everyday. This really is good for the end-user.

Click here for the Globe and Mail article.