James Citron is CEO and Co-Founder of Mogreet, the worldʼs first mobile video marketing platform. The digital entrepreneur has more than a decade of experience in the mobile industry with a proven track record for introducing successful, cutting-edge technology into the global marketplace. Follow him at @jamescitron.

Five years ago, a Canadian handset company stormed onto the scene with the hottest “must have” mobile device. The RIM BlackBerrywas around before the iPhone, when the Droid was still just science fiction.

Today, the seas have changed considerably. The mobile scene is now a two-horse race between Apple and Google. Where is RIM, the company that still commands so much of the smartphone market?

The days of the always-reliable BlackBerry may be numbered, save for a major re-focus of the company. BlackBerry will have to not only find its roots, but use them as a recipe to regain its thought leadership amongst mobile influencers and consumers. Here are four possible approaches.

1. Forget Apps – Leverage the New Mobile Web
2. Forget “Me Too” Innovation
3. Embrace and Market BBM
4. Open Mobile Marketing APIs

For marketers struggling to figure out which unique ad format to support or which mobile ad network to buy from, keep it simple: BlackBerry has 40% of the U.S. smartphone market and allows advertisers to use mobile web standards (not proprietary ad formats) to connect with your still affluent, hip audience. By embracing open standards, BlackBerry can win the love of advertisers who will create high-quality advertisements and not have to create one-off campaigns like the new iAds on Apple’s IOS4.

Good luck RIM. Despite what some say, you still can win the smartphone war — if you play it smart.

Source: http://mashable.com/2010/08/02/blackberry-stay-relevant/

Those estimates come from RescueTime, a firm specialising in time management software, which examined its users’ web habits on Friday and discovered that they spent an average of 36 extra seconds on Google as some were sucked into the classic arcade game.

While 36 seconds might not sound much, it adds up quickly when you consider that Google had 504m unique users during the day. RescueTime reckons there were an extra 4.82m hours spent on the page, above and beyond the usual 33.6m hours visitors spend on Google daily. If all those people had an average “cost” of $25 per hour, the tally comes out at $120,483,800.

Pac-Man was on Google’s homepage to mark the 30th anniversary of the game. The Silicon Valley internet search company reckons, somewhat dubiously, that Google has much in common with Pac-Man: “They’re both deceptively straightforward, carefully hiding their complexity under the hood. There’s a light-hearted, human touch to both of them.”

For anybody who got hopelessly hooked, Google has created a permanent Pac-Man page here.

However, since companies are constantly making organizational changes, their contact persons also change. Furthermore, there are many instances where businesses relocate or even shut down. As a result, not all businesses will be informed of the details of such changes, thus causing a breakdown in the communication chain, leading to information being lost or wasted.

Therefore, to eliminate the occurrence of such events and to speed up business efficiency, many have turned to using mailing lists – Business To Business Mailing Lists. They provide businesses with accurate and reliable details of relevant industry players, as they are being continuously updated. Companies providing such services constantly monitor and conduct research to ensure that information is of relevant use to their customers.

Ordinarily, Business to Business mailing lists contain contact information about individuals or companies which allow people or organizations to contact or send data to multiple recipients at any one time. B2B Mailing Lists contain information collected and complied from various places ranging from business annual reports to newspapers and the yellow pages. This mailing list enables businesses to choose relevant business contact details, information on sales volume and even SIC codes and descriptions about a company. The mailing list creates opportunities for businesses to conduct direct mail marketing, market analysis and promotion of the goods and services offered.

Business To Business Mailing Lists give businesses total control, whether or not a company wants to reach a big business, home business or a small business owner. It allows businesses to save time, without having to source for new contact information, and enables them to utilize a large database to reach thousands or even millions within one direct mail campaign. In addition, businesses have the ability to choose the best mailing list suitable for their product or service, making it an effective way for businesses to ensure that their targeted market is reached.

B2B Mailing Lists also cuts away middleman. It allows companies to get to their target groups directly, since they have the relevant contacts at hand. This further allows them to save time and money when they need to focus on other aspects of the business.

Many companies provide such mailing list services, offering mailing lists as well as knowledge on how one can go about choosing a suitable target audience or mailing list for a marketing campaign. They evaluate the success of each campaign, and provide advice to clients with which they are working with. Essentially, it enables them to increase their business network and grow their customer base. This will often result in the achievement of substantial growth rates.

Businesses simply have to contact a company that deals with mailing lists and they will be on their way to reaching thousands or millions of other businesses! It would definitely be difficult to deny the usefulness of such effective and efficient source of information.

Want to run a successful online business but not sure which internet business tools are the best to use? Discover the same resources that I and many successful online entrepreneurs use to run their businesses. And the best part is, most of them are absolutely free!

1. Email

The best free email service is Gmail by Google. You can set up a free account quickly and easily and even forward emails from your Gmail account to another email account.

Because of the amount of spam email that plagues the internet, it is best to offer a Gmail email account when you subscribe to a service. That way you won’t clog up the email space provided by your internet service provider.

2. Social Networking Sites

There are 2 main social sites that I use to network and communicate with people:

Facebook

Twitter

Both these sites are hot. Set up a free account right now and start inviting your friends, colleagues, etc to join you. You can end up developing networks of thousands of people and keep them up to date with the click of a button. Best of all, its free.

3. Roboform

This handy little password tool saves you heaps of time. There is a free version (holds up to about 10 passwords) and a paid version (unlimited passwords). It installs on your PC and creates a new toolbar on your web browser.

Whenever you go to a site that you need to enter a username and password, Roboform will automatically enter the details for you with the click of a button! I couldn’t imagine life without it.

4. Domain Name Registration

I use Network Solutions to register my domain names. They have an easy-to-use domain management interface.

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5. Web Hosting

While Network Solutions does offer web hosting services, instead I use FatCow.com.

The main reason I use FatCow is their understanding of internet marketing businesses. If I was to have a few complaints about spam, etc, FatCow won’t shut down my domain and seize possession of it – as other hosting companies have done and will do.

Another reason I choose Fatcow is their excellent support services.

Also, they have a generous referral compensation program which you can use to your benefit as you recommend them to your friends and associates.

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6. FTP Software

Once you have your own domain and a hosting account set up, you will need FTP software to easily upload/download content for your website.

I use Filezilla, a free open source solution that is the most widely-used FTP software available today.

Note: Make sure you download the “client” version.

7. Content Management System (CMS)

WordPress is the best (and it’s totally free) content management system for your website. WordPress is easy to install and is very user-friendly.

WordPress makes it easy for you to write and maintain content for your website. Also, it is extremely search engine friendly which means that you’ll have greater presence in Google and Yahoo! and, therefore, more free visitors to your site!

You can install WordPress from within Cpanel (in your web hosting account) under the “Fantastico Deluxe” section; this is the easiest way to install WordPress, or you can download it directly from WordPress.org and follow their setup instructions.

8. Webpage Design (HTML Editor)

Because I own Microsoft Office I use FrontPage for my basic webpage designs, such as landing pages. There is a free, widely-used alternative called Nvu. Nvu allows you to create and edit your own web pages.

You don’t need any programming skills so don’t be concerned if you’re totally new to this.

9. Autoresponder

If you want to build a subscriber list for a newsletter or otherwise, I highly recommend AWeber.

AWeber is easy to use, highly customizable, and has a high delivery rate. It is considered the industry standard and is used by most of the biggest players in internet marketing.

Tech support is superb. My requests have always been responded to within 24 hours and they even have a live support chat feature.

10. Keyword Tools

Keyword research is so important to building an online business. There are 3 main keyword tools that I use:

i) Google Keywords Tool

This is an awesome, free tool provided by those who know keywords best; Google. With this tool you can find out how many people are searching a particular keyword and how competitive a keyword is with advertisers. The Google Keyword Tool is the best keyword tool.

ii) Keyword Elite

Great tool if you want to easily generate keywords lists of hundreds or thousands of keywords (the Google Keyword Tool will only give you back a maximum of 150 results per search).

With one click of a button, Keyword Elite will search Google, Yahoo, Ask, FreeKeywords, Meta Tags, misspelled words, Wordtracker and Keyword Discovery.

Also, you can easily filter keywords based on positive or negative keywords.

iii) Keyword Spy

Keyword Spy is a weapon that I’ve only recently discovered and added to my arsenal. With Keyword Spy you can search any website or affiliate offer and find out exactly who is promoting it and what the keywords are they are bidding on. Very powerful tool.

11. Payment Processors

Clickbank makes payment processing easy if you have a digital product you want to sell.

Clickbank take care of everything; they handle credit card payments and also refunds. Also, they handle affiliate commissions.

To set up a merchant account with Clickbank, sign up as a vendor.

PayPal is a great free alternative for payment processing.

12. Office Software

For my word processing, spreadsheets and databases I use Microsoft Office mainly but there are a couple of free solutions that are just as good:

i) Open Office

ii) Google Docs

Open Office works just like Microsoft Office and is even compatible with it. You can exchange and modify documents with other Microsoft Office users.

Google Docs is awesome. You can use an online word processor, spreadsheet and calendar just like you would use Microsoft Office. The one major advantage with Google Docs is that you can access the program and all your documents from anywhere in the world as long as you have an internet connection. Also, you can assign anyone permissions to view and/or modify one, any or all of your documents!

13. PDF Creator

If you create reports, such as this one, you will need to have a PDF printer to convert your word documents to PDFs. There is a free one that I use called PDF995.

There are a few free PDF converters out there but I like PDF995 because you can download free add-ons that allow you to create customized hyperlinks within your PDF document.

14. Paint Program

Editing images can be a big part of creating an online presence. An excellent free image editing program is called Paint.NET.

15. Screen Capture

Capturing screenshots is a great resource, especially when you are preparing a how-to guide. ScreenHunter is a free program that is easy to install and use.

16. Video Creation

Creating videos is a must these days. We all know how to create videos with our video cameras but creating screen recording videos is extremely useful.

The most widely-used screen recording video software is Camtasia Studio. It is not cheap but it is a great product. I have a copy and used it to create a video ecourse and other projects.

There is a free alternative but I haven’t used it myself so I can’t comment from personal experience. It is called CamStudio and it comes highly recommended by those that do use it.

Creating screen recordings is a great way to teach others how to do something. You can then use that knowledge to drive traffic to your site by posting your videos online. Which brings us to the next resource I use…

17. Video Hosting

The most popular video hosting service on the net today is YouTube. YouTube membership is free and it also costs you nothing to upload as many videos as you want. The only limitation is that the video length can be no more than 10 minutes (unless you are willing to pay for a different plan).

YouTube is a great source of free traffic. Videos are so popular and they will only continue to attract more and more visitors in the years to come.

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To be successful in your home based business is predictable if only you can get yourself organized. I have been through the road and I know what I am talking about.

My early days in the home based business climate were muddled with a lot of unorganized schedule and work environment which saw my productivity falling short of my investment. Luckily, I got a lift away from this after attending a seminar on small business organization, planning and management for effective productivity. Since then, the tip I learned and practiced has practically increased my personal and business productivity.

There never seems to be enough hours in the day to complete all our tasks. Tight workspaces, untidy environment, unplanned schedules and other cluttered environment affect us deeply both mentally and physically than we may realize. When we are surrounded by these monstrous disorders, we feel drained, stressed out, confused, exhausted and overwhelmed. You should also note that little details knitted together make up your work and as such lack of organization makes you forget some of these little details. Neglecting this for a long time definitely leads to a fall in productivity.

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The purpose of getting yourself organized is for you to increase your return on the mental, emotional, physical and spiritual capital that you have invested in your home business. For every minute that you spend organizing yourself and planning out your goals saves you ten to twenty minutes in advance for the execution of your work.

Here are five tips to help you achieve good organization.

1. Before you start your work each day, spend between 10 – 20 minutes of your time organizing your work space. Keep the places tidy; put every thing from papers to books in their proper filing position. The purpose for this is to enable a neat and harmonious working environment.
2. Use a notebook and planner as a tool to organize your work schedule, plans, and productive thoughts and mark out your progress. The notebook or planner serves as a place to organize your ideas and tasks so they are not running out of control through your mind while you’re trying to be productive. It should divided into sections to contain a calendar , where you designate one page for each day’s activities. Write down appointments, work assignments, errands, and anything that needs to be done that day. Also have sections for ideas, future projects, goals and anything else that fits your business and family.
3. Take the time to positively think and dream. Give yourself at least 30 minutes to one hour daily for these activities for such moments bring out some of our best Ideas. Make it up a little earlier in the morning or late at night alone. Keep your notebook or organizer closer to enable record your ideas because good ideas seems to be volatile. Breathe deeply, empty your mind and enjoy the quiet moment of thoughts.
4. Beautify your work place with motivational writings, quotes, pictures and even a jar of beautiful flowers for your desk. Placed these in a position to glimpse once in a while during your working hours.
5. Always prepare for the unexpected. Sometimes surprises springs up while getting yourself organized, therefore putting you on a part to changing your plans. I such an unexpected situation, do not panic, accept it and do your best. Whatever it may be, look at it carefully for it comes with an opportunity that will give you a break. Take an advantage of such situation, think critically about it and reorganized yourself.

Finally, what I will have you note here is that just like chaos and clutter are habits, so are tidiness and organization. Changing your unorganized habits to that of an organized person will see your productivity soar very high.

Is your profit and loss report increasingly in the red? Many small to medium business owners and managers are watching the same sinking trend as they struggle to prop up business profitability. Here’s a powerful way approach to that problem that can revolutionize how you build your business.

Identify Key Factors: The first step in getting control of plummeting profits is identifying each key area of your business and recognizing how it affects profits. Many owners of small to medium businesses haven’t fully grasped the impact key business processes such as shipping and product pricing have on the bottom line.

This isn’t so hard to understand when you consider that the average small business owner wears multiple hats throughout the day. It’s hard to focus on a more profitable shipping method when you’re putting out fires in production and marketing.

Finding a good business planning tool is the first step in identifying what’s shrinking your profit margin. Easily understood online business tools are coming of age as small business owners race to maintain profitability. Find a business analysis tool that’s customizable for your situation and start feeding it information about how your business runs.

Analyze The Results: Once you’ve created an online snapshot of your business operation, it’s time for some analysis. Which business processes have shown a sharp increase in expenses, without adding income to your bottom line? Which departments are profit-neutral but play a key support role for other profit centers?

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Here’s an example of how a business owner might analyze her key business factors: A mailing services firm finds her pricing is no longer competitive, but that they still lead the local market in delivery time. The loss of business to the competition has the owner wondering if employee layoffs are inevitable in order to bid more competitively.

With the help of an online business analysis tool, she documents a steady creep upward in packaging expense over the past two years. She also sees that the cost of fuel, vehicle maintenance and uniforms are primary factors in the firm’s declining profitability.

Make Decisions Based on Reality: With these trends well documented, this business owner can begin to make decisions about her business. Rather than immediately reducing her workforce, she uses her business productivity improvement system to project the impact of making changes in these areas.

Could she, for example, realize savings in uniform, fuel or vehicle maintenance expense by securing bids from other vendors? Is the increase in packaging expense really driven by the paper manufacturing market, or are other suppliers offering better pricing?

With those savings in hand, she can determine how much decreasing the rates she’s charging will impact her bottom line. The key is deciding which modification in the way she does business will improve business profit most significantly.

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The need for this deliberate review and reflection about business profitability might seem obvious to some, but many small to medium business owners find it difficult to stay on top of every aspect of their operations. That’s the beauty of employing an intuitive business profit increase system to analyze key business factors.

Doing so removes the guesswork and saves you, as a business owner, time better spent developing new products and marketing them. That, after all, is the way your business will remain competitive in today’s challenging marketplace.

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Here are the five powerful ways for a business to improve productivity Items listed first are of the most importance.

1) Stress Management

Stress management is listed first because without it other ways of increasing productivity are either less effective or impossible to implement. For this reason there have been a lot of programs aimed at reducing stress in business. Unfortunately most of these programs have not been effective, and do not have any research backing them. We where only able to find one program with research showing effective reductions in organizational stress. The Transcendental Meditation Program (TM) usually recommended as a relaxation technique to high blood pressure patients, proved to be effective at reducing organizational stress, during a study in a high security government agency.

Many businesses use the Transcendental Meditation technique to reduce stress and increase productivity. They all seemed very happy with the results and recommended TM as one of the best ways to increase productivity, reduce sick leave, and improve critical thinking.

2.) Kaizen

Kaizen is a Japanese term that literally translates into meaning “good change”. In the business world Kaizen is part of something called LEAN, or LEAN thinking, through which companies eliminate waste and improve productivity. Within LEAN, Kaizen refers to a process of continuous improvement, whereby a company regularly self analyzes their own processes and improves upon them.

Kaizen and other LEAN methodologies have been some of the most successful programs for increasing productivity, and have been adopted by many of the largest most successful companies, including Toyota, Intel, and Boeing. Kaizen is lot limited to use in large companies, it works just as well for small and/or start up companies.

If your interested in implementing Kaizen in your business consider reading “Lean Thinking” by Womack and Jones this book describes how LEAN is broadly applied in manufacturing around the world. Also consider reading “Value Stream Management for the Lean Office” this book is a step by step manual for implementing Lean more or less anywhere.

3.) Steven Covey’s Time Management Matrix

Steven Covey is the author of the best selling book “7 Habits of Highly Effective People”. In his book he mentions a time management solution that is both simple but extremely effective. Covey recommends using a time management matrix with four quadrants. His system suggests that you organize all of your daily tasks into one of four groups, as follows:

group a) Important tasks that require urgent attention

group b) Important tasks that are NOT urgent

group c) Non important tasks, that require immediate attention

group d) Non important tasks that do not require immediate attention

Groups (a) and (b) are represented in the top to quadrants, and this is where you should have your attention. Obviously if something is important and urgent(group a) you should take care of it, other wise you should be focusing on other important tasks (group b), and avoiding distractions(group c), or trivial tasks(group d).

4.) Meaningful Deadlines, and/or Time Quotas

Deadlines and time quotas can be a very good way to make sure your not spending to much time on any given task but they have to be used correctly. How to use Meaningful Deadlines and Time Quotas:

a) Don’t think of deadlines as a way of pressurizing yourself or your co-workers into “working harder”. Setting a false deadline simply to add pressure will create distrust amongst your employees and eventually lead to lower overall productivity. If you set false deadlines for yourself, then you will be just wasting your own time and the result will be even less overall productivity.

b) You need to discover what the real deadlines are for your business. And then, make sure you understand the underlying business needs that require these tasks to be completed in a given time frame.

c) Make sure you communicate the reason for a deadline to whomever is performing the task, this will make it clear that you are not just trying to pressurize them. Your communication should differentiate between deadlines that are time related, and those that are more cost related, this is important because often rushing to perform a task quickly can cause a business more money.

d) Everybody in your organization should understand the economics of your business, and should take responsibility for making the business profitable. For example, in a business that makes pizzas, it might be that you have allocated $0.45 worth of time for preparing the crust. That $0.45 then translates into 3 minutes of time. If your workers understand that time limitation then they won’t spend 10 minutes getting the crust on a pizza “just right”.

e) It’s OK to shorten deadlines a little to create a safety buffer. For example saying the project has to be done tomorrow when you have one more day. This can be necessary on important deadlines and is different to setting a false deadline that are not tied to any real business requirements.

5) Task management with the 20,000 dollar idea.

The twenty thousand dollar idea was first introduced to Charles Schwab (a manager at a steel plant) by a new management consultant named Ivy Lee. Lee said that he could help Schwab find better ways to do the things that were necessary to make the company a success. Schwab challenged Lee saying “Show me how to do the things we ought to be doing, and we’ll pay you whatever you want.” Lee said that he could do that in 20 minutes. He even offered to let Schwab use the system and then pay Lee whatever the steel company executive thought it was worth, if anything. Schwab was impressed with Lee’s confidence and told him to proceed. Lee handed Schwab a piece of paper and said, “Write down the things you have to do tomorrow.” Schwab did this. “Now number these items in order of importance,” Lee continued. Schwab did that. Then Lee gave Schwab his instructions. “First thing tomorrow morning, start working on #1 and stay with it until it is completed. Next take #2, and don’t go any further until that is completed. Then proceed to #3, and so on. If you can’t complete everything on the schedule, don’t worry; at least you will have taken care of the most important things before getting distracted by the items of lesser consequence.”

Lee said that if Schwab completed every item on the list before the day was done, he should make a new list and start on that; or, if any items were left at the end of the day, they could be considered for the next day’s list. “The secret,” Lee continued, “is to do this daily, evaluate the relative importance of the things you have to get done, establish your priorities, record your plan of action, and stick to it. Test it for as long as you like and then send me a check for whatever you think it is worth.”

In a few weeks, Charles Schwab sent Ivy Lee a check for $25,000. This was big money in the 1930s! Schwab reportedly told his associates that this was the single most valuable idea he had ever received.

As a group, search engines appear to be in the process of losing bragging rights in Australia. Social networking sites and forums (also taken as a group) topped search engines in terms of market share over Christmas and are poised to assume the lead on a permanent basis.

Hitwise’s Alan Long wrote this morning, “The chart below confirms that during the week of Christmas . . . the Social Networking and Forum industry category overtook Search Engines share of visits for the very first time. While this looked like a short term lead, we are now seeing continued growth of Social Networking and Forums to now sit just 0.4% share behind Search Engines in week ending 16 January 2010.”

That’s an impressive fact, especially if you consider how far social networks have come in the last six months.

The one potential problem with the Hitwise analysis is that YouTube has been classified as a social network. Marshall Kirkpatrick observed that the site also functions as a search engine, and so social networks and forums may not deserve to have it (and its impressive numbers) on their side.

Still, it’s obvious that social networks are becoming more and more popular however the numbers are spliced.

We knew it was coming. It was only a matter of when. Back in November, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone told a crowd at a conference in Malaysia that the current suggested users list would be going away, and that it would be replaced by something “more programmatically chosen, something that actually delivers more relevant suggestions.” Twitter has now announced the reality of that new kind of suggested users list.

Originally the suggested users list was meant as a way to help new users, and it still is. The problem was that the list was static for everyone, and not all tastes are the same. Now the lists will be more tailored to users’ specific preferences.

“Two of the biggest challenges for new users have been finding accounts to follow that appeal to their interests, and finding their friends and colleagues who tweet,” says Josh Elman of Twitter’s product team. “Over time, we’ve learned that by making suggestions of who to follow, we can help users get going more easily on Twitter. In our new design, we’re taking some steps to continue to improve this process.”

“We’ve created a number of algorithms to identify users across a variety of clusters who tweet actively and are engaged with their audiences,” explains Elman. “These new algorithms help us group these active users into lists of users by interests. Rather than suggesting a random set of 20 users for a new user to follow, now we let users browse into the areas they are interested in and choose who they want to follow from these lists.”

Twitter says its lists will be refreshed frequently as the algorithm identifies new users who should be suggested. Others found to be less engaging may be removed. Twitter offers its own staff-picked list, and a special staff picks for Haiti list as well.

In a pamphlet handed out at the show, ASUS says it believes that the future of information technology will be rooted strongly in mobility and the cloud lies at the heart. “But granting access to vast amounts of data wherever you happen to be runs the risk of information overload, which is why ASUS is working on devices that deliver just the information you need, when you need it,” it says. That’s where Wavface comes in. On display were three designs: the Waveface Casa, the Waveface Light, and the Waveface Ultra.

The Waveface Casa is intended for home use. It’s basically a big widescreen TV, but it acts as both an entertainment center and an Internet portal. “Unlike current big-screen TVs, the Casa isn’t designed to dominate a room and much of the screen is hidden behind a flexible cover when it’s not in use, leaving just small exposed areas that show useful information.”

It’s really the kind of thing that has to be seen (see video) to appreciate. That is the case with the other designs as well.

The Waveface light is like a notebook, but it’s flexible, and the keyboard keys actually come out of the screen. The Ultra is a flexible smartphone that you can wear on your wrist and operate by simply moving your hand while you wear it. Again, just watch the video.

Unfortunately, these are only proof of concept designs, which means that you won’t be able to just go out and buy one of these products, but the technology behind them shows you some potential coolness that we may be seeing from actual products down the road.