Is productivity contagious? by Kelly Forrister

Kelly Forrister made an interesting observation regarding productivity and a New England Journal of Medicine article. Here is Kelly's blog post...very stimulating thinking about personal productivity and organizational productivity. Both positive and negative. Is the productivity virus in your life or office constructive or destructive to others?

Jott.com rocks

For those of you out there that are friends with the GTD (Getting things done) management method, Jott.com may be your best friend. Now you can leave yourself a message on the Jott voicemail system for things you need to do. How it works: You call a number, tell Jott to whom you want to send the message, leave a message, they record the message in MP3 format, then transcribe the message, and then email to whom you want to send the message (I like to send myself the message as the voice-to-text transcriber is not 100% perfect...more like 98% accurate)

The Art of Demotivation: "Principles of Storytelling"

Truth or Fiction? Memories of a few executives I have known.

Mal Warwick answers your fundraising questions

http://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gifHave a question about charitable fundraising. Mal Warwick is attempts to answer your questions. Here he answers over 500 questions on fundraising from Direct Mail to online to anonymous recognition.

http://www.malwarwick.com/mals-corner/askmal/q-a.html

Non-profit 2.0 :: A reality

I have been thinking a lot about how to make the whole Web 2.0 (or is it 3.0 now) a reality for Non-profits (I call it non-profit 2.0). My technology recommendations for non profits with less than 20ish million in revenue is:

Google Apps for Non-profit enterprise email/contacts/calendars
NING for Social networking (with Joomia or Drupal CMS installed on their platform)
SalesForce CRM for a CRM (and has a very open platform for integrations. I think Kintera is a very close second if their connect platform rivals SalesForce.)

Now the question is how can we take donations online with this setup? Well, Salesforce has integrations with 3rd party (via AppExchange) credit card processors that can take money online. And, I also recommend that Google Checkout be used as a donation engine due to easy of integration and the low over head of processing/credit card fees (2%...and 0% until Jan 1, 2008).

So adding everything up, the total costs for small non profits is less than a few hundred a month. (For example,www.myafh.org is using this stack. As Athletes for Hope is using my recommended technology stack. I will report back on their success.)

Flash Video in High Def

Yesterday, Adobe announced that the new version of the flash plugin will support the H.264 video format with high-performance AAC audio (same as HD-DVD and Blue-ray disks). Here is a link to their press release. To use it, you will need to manually uninstall the current version of flash and install this version.

Here are a few examples:
http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplayer9/fullscreendemo/ (The official demo)
http://worldtv.com/labs/ (The video is produced by BBC)
http://www.dvlabs.com/ (I know it is an ad for VW...it still look great for Web based video)

p.s. Apologies the lack of postings. I have been heads down on building a social network for one of my clients. Checkout www.myafh.org