myYearbook’s Chatter Driving 1 Million Updates A Day, 1 Billion Page Views A Month

This is quite an accomplishment!  Coming soon are the iPhone and Android apps.

Balsamiq Mockups Home | Balsamiq

Great software to get wireframes together quickly.  Easily replaces or augments paper prototyping with a large library of common controls and objects.

This is a fantastic read on the transformation happening in the print world.  A great view on how the iPad will give context and meaning to content, and improve the consumption of information; a game changer.

“Put very simply, Formless Content is is unaware of the container. Definite Content embraces the container as a canvas. Formless content is usually only text. Definite content usually has some visual elements along with text. (via Books in the Age of the iPad)”

Why You Can’t Work at Work from Jason Friend, the co-founder of 37signals.

This really hits home as a challenge for today’s corporate environment.  The good news is that we have tools and people to overcome it, and the smarter we work, the better the output.

Controlling distractions is paramount for individuals, managers, and for success across the enterprise.

Loic Le Meur Blog: The Corporate Social Networking Manifesto

Salient points from Loic and just as relevant for your personal business and brand.  Scale it to what you can afford.

Cool Infographics - My Digital Life 2.0: A Consumer Gadget Map

A great example how consumer products are penetrating our lives, and will become assumptions for digital natives.  As a Product Manager, mapping your product strategy to the consumer requires a deep level of understanding, beautifully visualized by Randy in this infographic.

I made a simple, similar diagram for my digital life to help visualize my strategy for my home network and devices.

Defining the interface from which we manage all of our media is one of the greatest UX challenges facing designers today.  The Boxee beta is a great example of understanding the user’s goals, and making a complex task relatively painless.

I think there are still major challenges ahead for the media centers, but Plex, Boxee, and Hulu have a good handle on it, and are innovating.

Social CRM is coming

If web 2.0 has taught us anything, it’s that the web is the place for social networking.  But until there is one place that personal and business information can co-exist safely, it’s hard to keep track of everything that is happening out there on the web.  Social CRM is starting to gain momentum.

Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and others are vying for your data, aka, your biography, friends, and status updates. But there is also a wealth of information in your day-to-day interaction spent in E-Mail, CRM, and on your smartphone.

Enter Gist.com.  A tool that is attempting to consolidate the various sources of information on the people & companies that are important to you.  It’s in beta stage, but the concept is compelling.

Gist will analyze your Facebook, Salesforce.com, LinkedIn, and Outlook data and more, to give you insight into your contacts.  The interface needs to mature, but with so many data sources, it’ll take some time before the dashboard is as simple to navigate as iTunes is for your media collection.

Until then, I’ll keep an eye on Gist.com.  This could be an especially important tool for the sales, researcher, human resources, marketing, or others looking for a consolidated view of a person or organization.

More at Brent’s Social CRM blog.

My public Gist profile, which has good privacy controls.

I’m excited to see the upcoming outcome of Intuit’s acquisition of Mint.com.  Mint is one of the best personal finance tools available on the web, and has a great iPhone app.

• Wesabe.com is also a good personal budgeting contender
• Let’s not forget about Cake Financial for research and brokerage insight
• I’ve yet to make a personal loan Prosper.com, but it looks like personal lending has made great progress
• I support Kiva: micro-loans for developing nations - philanthropy 2.0

What tools are you using to keep track of your personal finances? What blogs are giving you the best information for investment and financial management advice?

Thanks Bonnie!

bonniejarvie:

CNBC Original, Maria Bartiromo takes viewers Inside The Mind of Google for a rare look at the world’s most powerful technology company and its crown jewel, the Google Internet search engine. This is the fascinating story of how two grad students, in barely a decade, took a one-time research project and turned it into a global technology powerhouse…changing the way we interact with information, the Internet, and each other. See how Google came to dominate the search industry and turn it into a profit machine… and see where it’s taking its next step… and how the company plans to address arguably the biggest controversy in today’s digital age: privacy.