Tuesday, January 25, 2011

Guarding Your Company's online reputation

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Monday, January 24, 2011

personal finance

Eight resolutions for retirement savers in 2011 [MarketWatch] "Now that 2010 year-end statements are arriving in the mail it's time to get back on the grid — and to make sure you start 2011 on the right foot, especially with your retirement accounts."

Extra Income Online: 5 Websites That Can Seriously Pad Your Pockets [Wise Bread] "Instead of taking on a second, or in some cases, third job to elevate your earnings, consider making use of these websites that can take you from rags to debatable riches."

11 Tricks to Cutting Travel Costs in 2011 [NY Times] " Here are 11 strategies — and some useful Web sites — to help you save on travel this year."

30 Things Broke People Say (That Keep Them Broke) [Smart on Money] "Why save money? You can't take it with you when you die!"

Save Money on Gas, Food and Travel: 13 Smart Tricks [MoneyWatch] "Here are 13 ways to trim some of these everyday expenses."

— FREE MONEY FINANCE

O'Donnell, who set a state record by raising more than $7.3 million in a tea party-fueled campaign this year, has been dogged by questions about her personal and campaign finances.

At least two former campaign workers have alleged that she routinely used political contributions to pay personal expenses including her rent as she ran for the Senate. She has run three consecutive times, starting in 2006.

O'Donnell has acknowledged paying part of her rent with campaign money, arguing that her house doubled as a campaign headquarters.

On Thursday, she told NBC's "Today Show" that people making the spending allegations include a fired former staff member and a former volunteer, both of whom she described as disgruntled. She says many other workers who spent longer with her campaigns have defended her.

Her contention that the accusations were politically motivated echoed a written statement she released the day before, which singled out Biden.

"Given that the king of the Delaware political establishment just so happens to be the vice president of the most liberal presidential administration in U.S. history, it is no surprise that misuse and abuse of the FBI would not be off the table," she said.

The vice president's office declined to comment.

O'Donnell's campaign also has criticized the nonpartisan watchdog group, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, which filed a complaint about O'Donnell's campaign spending this fall and asked Delaware's federal prosecutor to investigate.

O'Donnell says the group is part of a liberal effort to kill her career, noting that the organization is run by Washington attorney Melanie Sloan, who worked under Biden as a lawyer for the Senate Judiciary Committee in the early 1990s.

Sloan dismissed the criticism Thursday, emphasizing that the allegations originated with conservatives who worked for O'Donnell.

"I don't see how anybody can say that those people are part of the liberal machine," Sloan said. "What CREW did was look at what they were saying and say, 'Wait a minute, that's against the law.'"

The U.S. Attorney's office in Delaware has confirmed it is reviewing CREW's complaint. But officials in the office and the FBI declined to say whether a criminal investigation was under way.

Federal law prohibits candidates from spending campaign money for personal benefit. FEC rules state that this prohibition applies to the use of campaign money for a candidate's mortgage or rent "even if part of the residence is being used by the campaign," although O'Donnell's campaign has maintained that it was told otherwise by someone at the agency.

O'Donnell drew national attention in September when she upset U.S. Rep. Mike Castle for the GOP Senate nomination. She was handily defeated in November by Democrat Chris Coons following a campaign that focused largely on past controversial statements, including that she'd "dabbled into witchcraft" when she was young.

One former O'Donnell staffer, Kristin Murray, recorded an automated phone call for the Delaware Republican Party just before the primary, accusing O'Donnell of "living on campaign donations – using them for rent and personal expenses, while leaving her workers unpaid and piling up thousands in debt."

O'Donnell told NBC that Murray was fired from her 2008 campaign after less than two weeks because of incompetence.

Another former aide, David Keegan, said he became concerned about O'Donnell's 2008 campaign finances as she fell behind on bills and had no apparent source of income besides political contributions. He submitted an affidavit to CREW alleging that she used campaign money to cover meals, gas, a bowling outing and rent.

In a message sent last week to AP, Keegan said he had not been questioned as part of a criminal investigation, and that he considers himself only a "catalyst" in a case in which several people must be questioned to scrutinize O'Donnell's accounting practices and alleged misuse of campaign funds.

O'Donnell has run through numerous treasurers over her three campaigns, many of whom left abruptly after brief stints. At one point O'Donnell was acting as her own treasurer, and her current treasurer is former campaign manager Matt Moran.

O'Donnell, who announced just after Election Day that she had signed a book deal, hasn't held a full-time job in years and has struggled to explain how she makes a living.

___

Associated Press writers Matthew Barakat in McLean, Va., Ben Nuckols in Baltimore and Randall Chase in Dover, Del., contributed to this story.

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Aaron Sorkin's Cable News Network Project Awaits Greenlight At HBO ...

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Tuesday, January 18, 2011

Forum Making Money

Every startup needs to understand that the customer paradigm has dramatically shifted over the past two years with pervasive social networks and smartphones. The customer base is no longer a mass audience that can be driven by mass media, but a dynamic network of individual customers who interact with each other, and expect to interact with you as a business.

If your business doesn’t connect with your customers, individually and as a community, demanding customers will not only ignore you, but will actively keep other customers away. According to the 2009 Tribalization of Business Study by Deloitte Development, one third of all online communities now launched by businesses fail to engage even a hundred participants.

A new book by David L. Rogers, titled The Network is Your Customer, elaborates on this paradigm shift, and outlines the following five key strategies to thrive in this digital age, prioritized from the most basic to the most complex in value to the customer:

Access to your business from the relevant network of customers. Every organization today faces the expectations of an always-on world. To compete, startups must find ways to provide customers an easier, faster, more pervasive connection to digital networks, via mobile as well as the Internet.
Engage customers with relevant and valuable content. In an environment of media overload and rampant ad-skipping, startups that want to engage customer networks need to create content that customers actually want to consume. Funny videos and worthless give-aways won’t make your website go “viral” these days.
Customize your interactions to meet unique customer needs. You need to give customers the tools to customize products, services, and content to suit their needs and interests, to engage them more deeply, add value, and differentiate your offering from competitors.
Connect to the customer in your communication. Join in conversations with customers who are already shaping brand perception and sharing their ideas and opinions on the Web. Conversations may be on existing social media, or on your own brand forum established specifically for this purpose.
Collaborate with customers on shared goals. One of the most powerful ways to engage customer networks is to invite them to collaborate with your startup on shared goals and projects. This requires the right balance of motivators (love, glory, and money), and the right balance of bottoms-up versus top-down control.

Many businesses that seem to understand the new paradigm still fall for some common mistakes, like the following, that can blunt the effectiveness of their efforts:

Infatuation with technology. Founders too often see a list of the latest hot tools, and go after them, without first making the proper analysis and connect to relevant customers. The best tools, if not relevant or used incorrectly, can’t save you.
Lack of customer insight. Startups launch plans without taking the time to understand the networked behavior of their customers, or the drivers for that behavior.
Lack of clear objectives. Without a clear scope and vision, efforts become unfocused, lack impact, and are impossible to measure. Everyone on the team has to be involved and on board, or the efforts will be fragmented.

This book outlines a good process for planning and implementing a customer network strategy to match your customers, your business, and your objectives – whether you need to drive sales, reduce costs, gain customer insight, or build breakthrough products and services.

The bottom line is that today, whatever your goals and whatever your business, the network is your customer. Connect to it and win customers.

Marty Zwilling

Big Sis Has Our Back

Home - by Claudia - December 19, 2010 - 10:30 UTC - 21 Comments

From Planet Moron

Stop, Or I’ll Obtain Stakeholder Advice!

It can be difficult for those charged with keeping us safe to prioritize the threats that face us, what with North Korea threatening war, the ongoing border war with drug cartels to our south, and a threat level that can never seem to get below Elevated.

But Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano has a keen sense of what is important and so cleared her calendar to attend a forum yesterday that identified something our national security apparatus has been sorely lacking:

“Environmental Justice.”

What is environmental justice, you ask?

Environmental justice is like regular justice except that you’re already guilty.

The problem of environmental justice arises when people who earn more money are allowed to live in nicer places than people who earn less.

And it’s probably only going to get worse.

Some examples of our shortfalls in environmental justice include the fact that the air in major cities tends not to be as good as the air in the country. This is clearly unfair to the lower income people who live there, as they deserve all the benefits of living in the country, without having to actually make any of the sacrifices of moving there.

They will take checks, however.

Also, many poorer people hired as farm workers to pick fruit and vegetables are exposed to higher levels of pesticides than people who don’t pick fruit and vegetables for a living.

We are shocked to learn that different jobs entail different kinds of risks and demand that a stop be put to it. And that our taxes go up.

But it’s not just that some places aren’t as good as others or that life involves an infinite series of tradeoffs that are the problems. As Napolitano (who we should probably remind you is in charge of our nation’s security) points out economic justice demands that we address global warming as well:

“Changes in climate really translate into huge environmental changes that have impacts on communities and also on national security, because they raise not only the issues of making sure that we are taking into account and caring for the most at-risk populations, but that we are also looking at and planning for the potentiality of mass migrations, demographic changes, patterns, concentrations of economic assets, population growth in different areas, deteriorating infrastructure. All of this gets knit together under this umbrella of climate change and environmental adaptation.”

We don’t know about you, but we’ll sleep better at night knowing that the Secretary of Homeland Security is all over the potentiality of concentrations of assets. (Although it’s not entirely clear if anyone has told her where all the economic assets are currently concentrated, because we’d be really interested in seeing her plan for fixing to that.)

Read the rest here.

Obama sure knows how to pick ‘em.

Source:http://removeripoffreports.net/

Iranian men to be stoned to death over gay sex - Pink News

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Modernizr News

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Friday, January 14, 2011

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The main areas of law which are still eligible for public funding are Criminal, the Tenant part of Landlord & Tenant and Family/Matrimonial. Some criminal matters may be means tested and may require a contribution towards the legal advice costs but legal aid is available for most people facing criminal prosecution.

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The situation with Aid for family/matrimonial matters is somewhat different and the rules are beyond the scope of this article. Broadly speaking if a litigant is on benefits then they won't have to make a contribution toward their legal costs and it will all be funded by Legal Aid. If they are not on benefits and earning a wage they may have to make a contribution towards the cost of their legal work. It happens that very few people who are not on benefits fall in to the category where all their costs would be publicly funded.

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Thursday, January 13, 2011

Affiliate Making Money

10 Exciting European Startups from 2010

Europe’s had a bumper year for interesting startup ideas. The Next Web’s Hermione Way and I put our heads together to come up with this list of ten small tech companies from across the continent that have excited us in 2010.

Brainient

London-based Brainient makes it easy to add interactive elements to existing web video. A ‘Magic Script’ lets publishers add a few lines of code into a website’s Body HTML, enabling pre-roll ads, overlays or any other type of Brainient layers on any embedded video in the page.

The company launched its developer tools at The Next Web Conference in April this year and announced the first of a fresh wave of commercial partnerships, allowing video site SeeSaw to transplant Hulu’s “Choose your own ads” format to the UK for the first time.

Tastebuds

If music be the food of love, the Tastebuds is on to a good thing. This Last.fm-powered dating site that we profiled earlier this year matches you with others who share your taste in music.

It’s a simple idea that the site carries off incredibly well and as a niche dating idea we love it. Music taste can often say a lot about a person’s outlook on life and if nothing else, it’s an excellent conversation starter. The service may be a little too reliant on Last.fm from a business point of view, but as a concept it’s beautifully realised.

Skimlinks

Affiliate links are a major revenue stream for some online publishers. Taking all the effort out of this type of marketing, Skimlinks gets rid of the long URLs that often put users off clicking links. The fact that the publisher is getting a cut from sales of the product they’re linking to is completely invisible, as a Skimlinks URL looks just like a normal non-affiliate link.

It’s a model that has won Skimlinks major worldwide publishing clients. This year the London-based startup launched Skimkit, a product that makes it easy for writers to add affiliate links to their articles, even suggesting items that might be suitable to link to.

Shutl

As satisfying as it is to conveniently order shopping online from home, the wait to get it delivered can sometimes make a trip to a bricks-and-mortar store seem like a better option. Shutl aims to improve on next-day delivery by offering products to your door as soon as 90 minutes after you place your order.

The service works by aggregating capacity across local courier companies into a single web-service that retailers can use to speed up deliveries. A GPS tracking facility in partnership with Bing Maps allows shoppers to track their deliveries in real-time via the Shutl website. The UK startup is currently trialling its service with certain Argos stores in the London area.

Paper.li

It was hard to ignore Swiss startup Paper.li this year. The “Twitter newspaper” startup saw rapid viral growth thanks to the automated tweets it sent out each time a user’s daily newspaper was published.

This annoyed some Twitter users, who found their reply stream filled with announcements that they featured in their followers’ Paper.li publications each day. Still, the service is still growing at a reported 1000 papers per day, with plans to expand beyond Twitter and Facebook and offer users the chance to make money from their newspapers in 2011.

Nuji

When we covered Nuji‘s launch earlier this month, we described it as “Instagram meets Instapaper” for shopping. This social network sees you sharing things you like, be they items in shops or objects you spot online, as a way of demonstrating your taste. A mobile app lets you scan barcodes while you’re out shopping, making adding items to your profile easy.

As it builds a network of tastemakers, Nuji plans to monetize by offering relevant shopping deals to users based on their interests.

Flattr

This Swedish startup from Pirate Bay founder Peter Sunde offers publishers an “online tipjar” that can easily monetize any Web page.

After adding money to their Flattr account, users click the ‘Flattr’ button on pages that they like around the Web. At the end of the month, the money in their account is divvied up to the publishers of the content the user ‘Flattr-ed’. Thus far the service’s most high profile signup has been Wikileaks, which added the button to its Afghanistan war logs page as a way of accepting donations. The service remains one of the few income sources that hasn’t been closed off to the controversial whistleblowing website in recent weeks.

Moshi Monsters

Moshi Monsters from London’s Mind Candy became an online phenomenon for children this year. Youngsters can adopt a pet monster, and solve puzzles to earn virtual currency that can be spent on items to help kit out their monsters’ world with food, furniture treats and the like.

The virtual world has seen real-world spinoffs galore. A deal with Penguin Books was followed by toys, mobile apps and video games in what is set to be a highly profitable year.

Stupeflix

France’s Stupeflix offers a browser-based online video suite and this year launched a service to automate the creation of videos, for example, in the online retail sector where a video of a pair of trainers created from a bunch of photos might be more appealing to potential customers than static photos.

Stupeflix also offers an API to automate the processing and generation of video content for third parties.

Screach

Screach aims to make all sorts of screens interactive by way of a mobile app and a highly customisable development platform. TV shows could use it to allow real-time interaction from viewers, bars could use it to run quiz events with instant on-phone rewards for winners and it’s already being used to enhance a museum exhibit in the UK.

At present there’s little to try out Screach’s mobile app on, but that should change next year when the UK start-up is set to announce commercial partnerships.

Every day, more and more people go online to find a way to make money. Here are some ways you can exploit the power of the Internet.

Sign in with eBay – Despite the downturn in the economy, people are always very nice to the U.S. dollar on eBay. All you need do is to set up an account with them and with PayPal and both are free. Once you have done this take some time to gather all the things you already have, and no longer want or need, and begin to list them on eBay. Be sure to take good pictures and descriptions of your articles are great. Thereby significantly increasing your sales.

Learn Affiliate Marketing – Affiliate marketing is big and growing fast now. If you do not know anything about this strange way to make money, takes time to learn all this. Affiliate marketing is basically when a person is committed to promoting company products and / or services. For each sale generated from that person to receive the commission. There are many people making full time income and just affiliate marketing. Sounds crazy right? Well, actually there are millions of people around the world who earn their living in earnest with the powerful method of affiliate marketing. Could be one of them?

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Monday, January 10, 2011

Ways of Making Money

Ok Go Explains There Are Lots Of Ways To Make Money If You Can Get Fans

from the everything's-possible dept

Over the last few years, we've covered many of the moves by the band Ok Go -- to build up a fanbase often with the help of amazingly viral videos, ditch their major record label (EMI), and explore new business model opportunities. In the last few days, two different members of Ok Go explained a bit more of the band's thinking in two separate places, and both are worth reading. First up, we have Tim Nordwind, who did an interview with Hypebot, where he explained the band's general view on file sharing:

Obviously we'd love for anyone who has our music to buy a copy. But again, we're realistic enough to know that most music can be found online for free. And trying to block people's access to it isn't good for bands or music. If music is going to be free, then musicians will simply have to find alternative methods to make a living in the music business. People are spending money on music, but it's on the technology to play it. They spend hundreds of dollars on Ipods, but then fill it with 80 gigs of free music. That's ok, but it's just a different world now, and bands must learn to adjust.

Elsewhere in the interview, he talks about the importance of making fans happy and how the band realizes that there are lots of different ways to make money, rather than just selling music directly:

Our videos have opened up many more opportunities for us to make the things we want to make, and to chase our best and wildest ideas. Yes, we need to figure out how to make a living in a world where people don't buy music anymore. But really, we've been doing that for the last ten years. Things like licensing, touring, merch, and also now making videos through corporate sponsorship have all allowed us to keep the lights on and continue making music.

Separately, last Friday, Damian Kulash wrote a nice writeup in the Wall Street Journal all about how bands can, should and will make money going forward. In many ways the piece reminds me a bit of my future of music business models post from earlier this year -- and Kulash even uses many of the same examples in his article (Corey Smith, Amanda Palmer, Josh Freese, etc.). It's a really worthwhile read as well. He starts by pointing out that for a little over half a century, the record labels had the world convinced that the "music" industry really was just the "recorded music" industry:

For a decade, analysts have been hyperventilating about the demise of the music industry. But music isn't going away. We're just moving out of the brief period--a flash in history's pan--when an artist could expect to make a living selling records alone. Music is as old as humanity itself, and just as difficult to define. It's an ephemeral, temporal and subjective experience.

For several decades, though, from about World War II until sometime in the last 10 years, the recording industry managed to successfully and profitably pin it down to a stable, if circular, definition: Music was recordings of music. Records not only made it possible for musicians to connect with listeners anywhere, at any time, but offered a discrete package for commoditization. It was the perfect bottling of lightning: A powerful experience could be packaged in plastic and then bought and sold like any other commercial product.

But, he notes, that time is now gone, thanks in large part to the internet. But that doesn't mean the music business is in trouble. Just the business of selling recorded music. But there's lots of things musicians can sell. He highlights Corey Smith and Smith's ability to make millions by giving away his music for free, and then touring. But he also points out that touring isn't for everyone. He covers how corporate licensing has become a bigger and bigger opportunity for bands that are getting popular. While he doesn't highlight the specific economics of it, what he's really talking about is that if your band is big, you can sell your fan's attention -- which is something Ok Go has done successfully by getting corporate sponsorship of their videos. As he notes, the sponsors provide more money than the record labels with many fewer strings:

These days, money coming from a record label often comes with more embedded creative restrictions than the marketing dollars of other industries. A record label typically measures success in number of records sold. Outside sponsors, by contrast, tend to take a broader view of success. The measuring stick could be mentions in the press, traffic to a website, email addresses collected or views of online videos. Artists have meaningful, direct, and emotional access to our fans, and at a time when capturing the public's attention is increasingly difficult for the army of competing marketers, that access is a big asset.

...

Now when we need funding for a large project, we look for a sponsor. A couple weeks ago, my band held an eight-mile musical street parade through Los Angeles, courtesy of Range Rover. They brought no cars, signage or branding; they just asked that we credit them in the documentation of it. A few weeks earlier, we released a music video made in partnership with Samsung, and in February, one was underwritten by State Farm.

We had complete creative control in the productions. At the end of each clip we thanked the company involved, and genuinely, because we truly are thankful. We got the money we needed to make what we want, our fans enjoyed our videos for free, and our corporate Medicis got what their marketing departments were after: millions of eyes and goodwill from our fans. While most bands struggle to wrestle modest video budgets from labels that see videos as loss leaders, ours wind up making us a profit.

Of course, that only works if you have a big enough fanbase, but that doesn't mean there aren't things that less well known bands can use to make money as well. He talks about an up-and-coming band in LA that doesn't even have a manager that was able make money:

The unsigned and unmanaged Los Angeles band Killola toured last summer and offered deluxe USB packages that included full albums, live recordings and access to two future private online concerts for $40 per piece. Killola grossed $18,000 and wound up in the black for their tour. Mr. Donnelly says, "I can't imagine they'll be ordering their yacht anytime soon, but traditionally bands at that point in their careers aren't even breaking even on tour."

The point, Kulash, notes, is that there's a lot of things a band can sell, focusing on "selling themselves." And, the thing he doesn't mention is that, when you're focusing on selling the overall experience that is "you" as a musician or a band, it's something that can't be freely copied. People can copy the music all they want, but they can't copy you. "You" are a scarce good that can't be "pirated." That's exactly what more and more musicians are figuring out these days, and it's helping to make many more artists profitable. And, no, it doesn't mean that any artist can make money. But it certainly looks like any artist that understands this can do a hell of a lot better than they would have otherwise, if they just relied on the old way of making money in the music business.

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What made this project so successful? After all, there are other iPod Nano projects. And it's a wristwatch, which even with the addition of a Nano, might not be the coolest or most necessary of accessories.

Bryce Roberts, the Managing Director of O'Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, points to some reasons he's identified that contributed to the success of the Lunatik/TikTok fundraising endeavor. These lessons that can be seen in other successful Kickstarter projects (such as Diaspora), but they're also applicable in many ways to more "traditional" funding efforts.

Tell a personal story

The Lunatik/TikTok "pitch" wasn't a bulleted list of qualifications or clients. Rather, the members of the team "told personal stories that created a connection to the project that had nothing to do with their professional pedigree." While this sort of storytelling doesn't boost their professional credentials, Roberts argues, it does give the entrepreneurs a certain personal authority and helps to connect them to funders and potential funders in a different way.

Roberts argues that the best fundraising pitches always emphasize this personal aspect. "It's a given," he writes, "that if I chose to invest in you I believe I can make money, but there are the intangibles around personality, perspectives, and life experiences that will make a potential funder more likely to want to believe you."

Tell the product's story

If you watch the TikTok video (below), you'll see the product is featured throughout. This demonstrates what the product can do - and that it can do what the startup promises. The video also demonstrates the larger potential of the product. These might be "small, nice little features" that some investors would dismiss. But with the crowdfunding model, the right storytelling around this seems crucial. "The difference between a nano strapped to a wristband and a premium quality, highly designed, customizable piece of wearable technology is simply a matter of how you tell the story."

But even when you aren't using a site like Kickstarter to raise money, it's crucial that your product be front-and-center in your presentations.

Give rewards and issue progress reports

Investors, by definition, invest in order to make a financial return. Nonetheless, argues Roberts, you should offer more than simply the promise of "making money." These sorts of non-financial rewards can be personal and personalized. By design, Kickstarter tells its users, "the best way to inspire support is to offer people great rewards. Everyone loves limited editions, one-of-a-kinds, and fun experiences (parties, screenings, balloon rides!). Spend some time brainstorming your rewards and people will respond. No one needs another coffee mug."

And as your project and your company are constantly evolving, it's good to keep investors and potential investors up-to-date on your progress. In the case of TikTok, the creators even filmed themselves in China when they traveled to the factory where the watch kits were being made. But the same could be said for all funding relationships; keep your investors apprised of "how you're making progress and how your story is continuing to unfold in a big and important way."

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Friday, January 7, 2011

manage personal finances

We are mere days away from 2011, and still happily ensconced in the holiday madness of 2010. This jolly season, which usually kicks off at Halloween, is a fast-moving fog of candy, cookies, cards and frenzy at the malls. It is also hopefully full of joy, laughter and quality time with family.

After the season’s last hurrah on New Year’s, what emerges is a renewed sense of spirit for the coming year –- and sometimes a desire to undo everything that has just been done. This is precisely why most people hit the ground running on January 1 with a resolve to lose weight, get in shape, walk the dog more, and so on.

The following roundup contains apps that can serve as trusty sidekicks to help you keep those resolutions you swear you’ll actually follow through on this year. In addition to personal health, other common resolutions include managing finances more efficiently, quitting smoking, finding a better job and finding love. There are obviously many more apps out there for each category, but I’ve hand-picked twelve to help you get 2011 off to a good start. Happy New Year!

Losing Weight/>

Lose It!/>

Lose It is a great, easy-to-use app that provides users with features for managing and tracking their weight loss and fitness goals. With an extensive database of foods and nutritional information available, you can simply scroll through the options and log what you have consumed for the day to get a total calorie count. The app also tracks calories burned through fitness and shows where you’ve gone over or under your caloric requirements for weight loss each day.

Cost: FREE

Go Meals/>

A dieter’s dilemma: You’re eating out at a restaurant and have no idea what the best choices are that are still suitable for your dieting needs. Go Meals is a helpful app for those moments when you’re out at P.F. Chang’s and want to know if the Mongolian Beef is less caloric than the Orange Peel Beef (it’s not). This app also includes thousands of listings for grocery store foods and provides full nutritional information for foods you eat on a daily basis. When an item has been chosen, you can save them to “Today’s Plate” and keep a log of your caloric, fat and protein intake. A very handy tool.

Cost: FREE

Getting in Shape/>

Fitness Free/>

This is a great free app that provides photographs and detailed steps for each of its more than 320 exercises. Essentially every major muscle group is reflected and you can use this app to get good ideas for triceps, quads or any other body part that you want to improve. There is also a section offering a small selection of pre-bundled, three-day workouts, or you can select exercises of your choosing and create your own customized workout.

Cost: FREE

iPersonalTrainer/>

iPersonalTrainer prompts users to create a workout and select which muscle groups they want to work by pointing to them on a (very buff) illustrated man. The app then takes you to a page with instructional videos for each exercise along with tips for good technique. The app also includes a Body Mass Index (BMI) calculator, weight tracker and progress log so you can keep track of your workouts while you get that hard body.

Cost: $.99

Organizing Finances/>

Pay Off Debt/>

Pay Off Debt provides a good template for users to track and manage all current balances and debts. Using an intuitive interface and the debt snowball method, this app lets you prioritize debts and see estimated times left to pay off each one. You can plan monthly payments for each and view progress bars as you begin chipping away at what’s owed. Based on your payment schedule, the app will also provide you with a date for when you are completely debt-free.

Cost: $3.99

Mintclass="blippr-nobr">Mint/>

Mint is a free app that automatically syncs all of your financial information directly from your online banking accounts, eliminating the need to manually enter all information. You can set up budgets and categories with spending limits on each; track your incoming and outgoing income; track investment accounts and more. The app also alerts you to things like large purchases, when a check clears, or if you go over budget. In addition, security measures are in place to lock iPhoneclass="blippr-nobr">iPhone access if lost or stolen.

Cost: FREE

Quitting Smoking/>

MyQuit Coach/>

MyQuit Coach is a highly-personalizable plan to help smokers quit. Users can set the parameters for the plan and upload personal photos and inspirational motivators to stay on track, and the app awards users with achievement badges when quitting goals have been reached. The app also connects to Facebookclass="blippr-nobr">Facebook, Twitterclass="blippr-nobr">Twitter and LIVESTRONG for additional moral support and information for users.

Cost: $.99

Quitter/>

Quitter is an app that takes a slightly different approach. This lets users track progress by reminding them how long they’ve been smoke-free and how much money they have saved thus far. Users can refer to the app on a daily basis and keep track of how long they’ve gone without smoking and what they would have spent if they had continued.

Cost: FREE

Getting a Better Job/>

Monster.com Jobs/>

As one of the largest job search sites available, the Monster.com app is a great complement for anyone with a Monster account (which is free to register) and gives users access to the same listings they’d find online. The app automatically syncs with your web-based account and enables you to access saved job listings, resumes, saved searches and more from your iPhone. You can also use the iPhone’s built-in GPS system to locate jobs near you.

Cost: FREE

What Color is Your Parachute?/>

You’ve found the job you want, but the next step is the interview. The expression, “You never get a second chance to make a first impression,” couldn’t be truer when it comes to this opportunity, which is likely the only time you have to sell yourself and demonstrate why you are a fit for the job. The What Color is Your Parachute? app is a complement to the eponymous job-seekers’ “bible” and walks users through the job interview process and how to nail it. Tips on interview questions and questions to ask are featured, as well as top 10 mistakes to avoid. It’s a good read for anyone who is preparing for a big interview.

Cost: FREE

Finding Love/>

Dating DNA/>

Unlike other dating apps that require you to have an existing subscription to its web-based site, or are sketchier and only use GPS-navigation to track “singles near you,” Dating DNA is a free app and service that matches people based on compatibility scores. When you are deemed compatible by the app, based on both your ratings, you are then able to view each other’s profiles and connect. The app also provides “at-a-glance” compatibility scoring and dating potential indicators to help you determine if your potential mate is worth pursuing.

Cost: FREE

Love Survival Kit/>

If you need help in the love department and are looking for advice on what to do in certain situations, wikiHow’s Love Survival Kit is a good resource to have. There is plenty of information and dating advice for categories like “Awkward Situations” (ex. Escape Cuddling in Bed); “Breaking Up” (ex. Keep a Friendship After a Breakup) or “Relationship Skills” (ex. Stop Being Needy). Some of articles can be more funny than useful, but then again, sometimes with dating, people need all the help they can get.

Cost: FREE

Which apps did you find most useful? How do you plan to jumpstart your New Year’s resolutions? Let us know in the comments below.

More iPhone Resources from Mashable:

- 10 iPhone Apps for the Global Foodie/> - 10 Useful iPhone Keyboard Shortcuts, Tips and Tricks/> - 10 Incredible iPhone Portrait Photographs/> - 10 Incredible iPhone Photographs/> - 10 Ridiculous iPhone Accessories [PICS]

Image courtesy of spapax

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I’ve spent hours of my life toiling over virtual cities in Maxis’ Sim City series, and it must have rubbed off after all these years. I still enjoy meticulously planning infrastructure, zoning and carefully tweaking finances to this day.

The other day whilst trying to work, I accidentally (oops) went looking for some online heirs to the Sim City throne. Despite simple Flash games lacking the depth of even the original Sim City, I guessed there had to be a few decent, free city building games out there.

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ElectroCity

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A simple turn-based Flash game created by New Zealand energy company Genesis Energy to give players young and old a shot at managing a town or city’s growth and impact. Players must pay close attention to the levels of energy used, sustainability and environmental factors.

Players are given 151 turns to alter tax rates, build things, destroy things and generally oversee the planning of a city from an environmental point of view. It is up to you to keep your citizens happy, maintain finances and get the highest score possible out of 100 available points.

If you’re seeking inspiration then there’s plenty of completed cities to gawp at, and you can even save your progress and come back to it at a later point. Remember – it’s all about balance.

IBM CityOne

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A very in-depth city management game that allows you to choose one of four aspects of city life to manage – energy, water, retail and banking. This game also uses a turn-based system which scores you after each turn made.

There’s a fairly chunky registration form to fill out before you can play (which asks for all sorts of intrusive data) but the game itself functions well, especially if you’re a business-minded individual.

Your city starts off sketchy and greyscale, with colour gradually introduced as you implement much-needed change. At times it plays like a big advert for IBM, but remains enjoyable and looks pretty good to boot. Probably not great on slower PCs, especially those with an aversion to resource-heavy Flash.

City Creator

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Not necessarily a simulation or a management game, City Creator simply allows you to do just that – create a sprawling landscape from a set of pre-fabricated buildings and features.

The game features charming pixel art from and an isometric viewpoint, which complements the laid back style of play. Simply drag items from the left hand side of the screen to your city on the right and see what you come up with.

There are 3 building sets to choose from, each with their own unique style. If you register on the site you can save your creations and share them with your friends. If you just want to build a city then City Creator should entertain for a while at least. Be sure to check out their other project Castleford.

Zanpo Virtual Cities

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Lovers of Minecraft and pixel art rejoice in this Flash block-based city building game. Instead of building preset structures and features Zanpo Virtual Cities allows you to build fairly detailed city blocks using individual building pieces.

Users then vote on the best ones, and they get added to the virtual city. This one strikes me a bit like online Lego, and the emphasis is very much on building and not management.

You’ll need to register to build, or you can simply choose a city from the drop down list and click City View and see what everybody else has been building.

CityVille

style="text-align: center;">

I know, I know. You’re sick of FarmVille, so why on earth do you want to hear about CityVille? Well considering there’s already more than 20 million people playing it I figured it would be an injustice to not include it on the list.

If you’re fine with yet another application accessing all your personal data and posting whatever it feels like to your wall then CityVille might appeal. The game is a casual Sim City-esque sim in which you take a humble town and turn it into a sprawling metropolis.

Graphically the game looks awesome, and there’s the added social interactions provided by the Facebook platform. If only it didn’t clog up your feeds, eh?

There are a few more Facebook games, that I’ve left out (it’s quite a saturated market, and Facebook isn’t for everyone). If you’re interested, they were:

Social City
Millionaire City
Hollywood City

Have you found any other cool city building games? Do you prefer building or managing? Let us know in the comments!

Image Credit : Shutterstock

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