Open up your mind and say, ahh...

Nike released its Nike+ FuelBand to the public a year ago this month. If you’re unfamiliar with the product, it fits around a user’s wrist and provides one common tracking metric for any sort of physical activity.

The FuelBand builds on Nike+, a shoe-embedded energy-tracking product the company launched for runners in 2006 and has since expanded to basketball. The FuelBand measures activity in what it calls NikeFuel points using oxygen kinetics, which it says is a better method of measurement than simply counting steps. The device also tracks steps and calories, but fuel points let users compare different sports and activities — a basketball game vs. a dance class vs. a yoga session vs. a long walk, for example.

To mark the FuelBand’s one-year anniversary, Nike shared some data with us to show just how active its users have become. The company would not say how many people use the FuelBand as a whole, but the overall Nike+ community is more than 11 million strong.

Fuel points are a proprietary unit of measurement with plenty of secret sauce involved and this data comes directly from Nike, so take it with a grain of salt. But it’s fun to consider nonetheless, so here’s what the company shared with us.

Since FuelBand was introduced a year ago, users have earned more than 409 billion total fuel points. That translates to enough energy for one person to run 44.1 million marathons. Not all FuelBand users are created equal, however. The most active 1% accounts for just over 21% of total fuel points earned.

Today NikeFuel users earn more than 1 billion points each day. Converted to electricity, all that energy would be enough to power 6,772 houses daily, Nike says.

Forget solar power; imagine the human-powered house. Now there’s a thought.

Have you tried the Nike FuelBand? What do you think of it? Let us know in the comments.

Thumbnail image courtesy Nike

Information visualization firm Periscopic just published a thoughtful interactive piece on gun murders in the United States, in 2010. It starts with the individuals: when they were killed, coupled with the years they potentially lost. Each arc represents a person, with lived years in orange and the difference in potential years in white. A mouseover on each arc shows more details about that person.

You can then select categories and demographics, which provide comparisons between ethnicities, gun type, sex, and others. Roll over the bar in the middle for a density plot representation.

Finally, specific breakouts on the bottom provide notables in the data and what they mean.

There are many routes that you could take with this data. At its core, it’s a multivariate dataset with many observations over an entire year. But Periscopic pays close attention to the context and the sensitivity of the data. They make the data relatable while also providing a view of the big picture—without stripping away what the data means. See it live here.

What if Grammys were given out based on popularity on social media? This infographic examines which nominees are dominating Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube.

Going into Sunday’s 55th Grammy Awards, for example, Carly Rae Jepsen’s viral hit “Call Me Maybe” has the most YouTube views out of fellow Song of the Year contenders: Fun’s “We Are Young,” Ed Sheeran’s “The A Team,” Kelly Clarkson’s “Stronger” and Miguel’s “Adorn.” The Grammy Awards will air Feb. 10 at 8 p.m. ET on CBS.

Meanwhile, Taylor Swift has the most subscribers, beating out every nominee in the Best New Artist, Song of the Year, Record of the Year and Album of the Year categories, according to the data from creative marketing agency Activ8Social. Swift also has the largest Facebook fanbase, by a long shot, versus her competition for Record of the Year.

Inforgraphic courtesy of Activ8Social

Topics: 55th Grammy Awards, Entertainment, Facebook, Full Width, grammys, instagram, Music, Social Media, Television, Twitter, YouTube

Whether traveling for business or pleasure, no one wants to arrive at a hotel to find expensive Wi-Fi access. Hotels could potentially lose business by charging guests high or hidden fees for Internet. But many establishments — especially luxury lodging — still charge a pretty penny to go online, with little guarantee for a fast connection, either.

According to a recent J.D. Power & Associates study, about 55% of all hotel guests access the Internet during their stays — up 20% from 2006. About 87% of that group is using Wi-Fi.

Although most travelers have come to expect connectivity to be cheap or included, it’s not always the case. The good news is there are ways to avoid paying for Wi-Fi at hotels all together.

Here are a few tips to keep in mind for your next trip.

1. Tether Your Mobile Device

It’s possible to tether your 3G or 4G connection from your smartphone to your computer, but many carriers charge fees to do so. Once you have added the service to your data plan, turn on your phone’s personal hotspot option, located in settings. By setting a password, you will be able to prevent other guests in nearby rooms from connecting to your hotspot.

2. Buy a Wireless Router

Although many hotels charge for Wi-Fi, some provide ethernet cables for you to use free. You can then connect your Apple AirPort Express or similar portable Wi-Fi hotspot device to send connectivity to your laptop and mobile devices.

3. Check the Lobby

It might cost you more to access the web in your hotel room, but some places offer free Wi-Fi in the lobby. To prevent guests from using valuable bandwidth to stream media on sites such as Netflix — which also takes money away from in-room pay-per-view — hotels often restrict free Wi-Fi in rooms, but open it up to guests at no extra charge on the main floor.

4. Find Nearby Connectivity

WeFi has a database of more than 132 million Wi-Fi hotspots worldwide, from small towns to urban centers. The company also has apps for both iOS and Android, so it’s easy to locate the closest Wi-Fi on the go.

How do you avoid paying for Wi-Fi at hotels? Let us know in the comments.

BONUS: 15 Travel Twitter Accounts to Follow

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, courtneyk

These days, we’re running fast…sometimes too fast. Our social networks keep us connected, but in some ways they’re also pulling us away from our center. Our social streams feed us information about our friends, family, events and even the latest viral videos or trends, but the currents too can overwhelm us.

In a time when multitasking is just a way of life and communication is always on, I often wonder how distorted our perspective becomes until we realize clarity is paramount to productivity. Think about it for a moment. We expect immediate responses to our texts, emails, and DMs yet we grumble at having too many messages to which we need to read and respond. We may in fact be our own worst enemy not the technology we often blame. For every message you send, it seems that in an electronic game of hot potato, two always return. Connectedness comes at a very real human cost.

As we stray away from our comfort zone, we by default discover comfort by creating a new center. But that center requires consideration now and over time to ensure that we’re not only centered, but also moving along a path that takes us in a desirable direction. Seeking balance is more important than we might realize. Finding it may prove elusive for many, but pursuing balance and tracking toward a chosen destination is essential.

I spent some time with good friend Esteban Contreras where we discussed of course the latest books and my research at Altimeter Group. But, I also took it as a moment to reflect on the balance between professional and personal aspirations. I wanted to share the conversation with you here…

Esteban Contreras: Your book Engage further established you as a thought leader. What’s the story behind that book?

Brian Solis: Believe it or not, Engage has an interesting back story behind it… one that I rarely tell.

In 2007, I published the original Social Media Manifesto online to show exactly how businesses would benefit from strategic social media initiatives. It was huge.

But my first best-selling book was actually Putting the Public Back in Public Relations with Dierdre Breakenridge. We set out to show businesses how important the role of the public would become in marketing, advertising and customer service. I was about to tackle writing the follow up to the book, but noticed something in the process of promoting the last book…brands were embracing social media in a rather anti-social manner. They were using new tools to market in old ways. It was time to show businesses that social media was about meaningful and beneficial engagement on both sides.

I brought the idea to a good friend of mine and was given the green light to immediately begin writing it. However, it was written under a different title and also featured a different cover. The book was originally called The Social Media Manifesto. At the 11th hour, I changed my mind. I wanted the book to be less about social media and more about engagement where social media became the channel for building relationships, gaining insights, and fostering loyalty and advocacy. Of course, I addressed commerce and ROI as well, but I did so in a way that aligned business objectives with customer expectations. This lead to an entirely new name, cover, and also to the inclusion of Ashton Kutcher for the book’s foreword.

Social Media Manifesto: Original cover design

Another side story about the book is that it actually exists in two unique forms. The first edition was big. It’s size and density neared text book status. That was its goal however, to become the reference manual for social strategists. When it came time to publish the book in paperback form, I was asked if I wanted to make any changes. The publisher probably had a few updates in mind, but instead I took the opportunity to completely revise the book. I cut chapters, I cut blocks of text, I rewrote sentences and I added new experiences and lessons learned. The “revised and updated” edition is now commonly referred to as Engage 2 (note, not 2.0).

EC: The End of Business As Usual, has also been a great success. Do you see yourself following up with a fourth book at this point?

Solis: You never know.

The End of Business as Usual is an important book and I will support it for years to come. It’s not a book about social media. It’s a book for business executives to see how consumer behavior is changing, how technology impacts decision making, and how the rise of connected consumerism will impact the bottom line. Executives don’t care about Facebook or Twitter or smartphones for that matter. They care about objectives and meeting or exceeding them. To engage the connected customer requires a different approach.

Businesses must become adaptive in order to survive what I call Digital Darwinism, the phenomenon where evolution of society and technology evolve faster than the ability to adapt. Businesses are and will continue to fall because they focus on optimization, efficiencies, profits, and not on innovation and transformation to compete for tomorrow’s customer. This is a message that’s more important than ever before and this book shows executives how to recognize new opportunities and lead new and lucrative business strategies from the top down.

It’s also written for new media and social strategists who are fed up with the fear and skepticism that deflates their ballooning ideas. For everyone that asks them about ROI, the answer should be, “here, read this book.”

EC: Tell us about your experience at Altimeter Group and your particular role as Principal.

Solis: My work at Altimeter Group is both rewarding and eye-opening. I often say that we cannot possibly become “gurus” or experts of any medium that evolves faster than the ability to master it. I work with business executives and social strategists to bridge the gap between business objectives and social media strategies. Once the data is collected and analyzed, once internal conversations are transcribed and dissected, you start to see opportunities to bring people, departments, and thinking together. The work then becomes about recognizing new opportunities, direction, and the change necessary to create alignment toward new directions.

The research that we do helps us capture a state of “what is” and when combined with experience and the vision of the other analysts in the firm, you can start to chart a map to what “should be.”

EC: Beyond your work at Altimeter, you continue to be an avid blogger, content producer, speaker and event organizer. What would you say is the secret to maintaining balance in life?

Solis: The strive for balance is a journey and not a destination. Balance is less like spinning plates and more like running your finger around the rim of partially filled crystal bowls with varying depths of liquids. Each singing bowl makes a unique sound and as a result, music to “one’s” ears. When we think about the spinning plate metaphor, we think about how our quest for balance affects those around us as well as our pursuit to keep everything spinning simultaneously without falling and breaking. When you think about the bowls, you make music, the music you like, by bringing together different sounds. And it’s different every time. The point is, balance is a state of what’s important to you and those around you in the moment.

Credit cards can be a wonderful convenience or an albatross around your neck. Now, in the face of a government edict to stop pressuring unqualified people into opening credit card accounts, those purveyors of plastic are trying to make the credit-card game easier and more cost-effective for social media users, offering specials, perks and rewards for those who use Facebook and Twitter.

The credit card industry is slowly recovering from the big crash of 2008; delinquencies and charge-offs have significantly decreased. At the same time, the U.S. has smacked down the aggressive tactics used by credit card issuers, particularly when it comes to younger customers.

This infographic reveals the latest social media tactics of credit card companies — and what to look out for if you become one of their customers.

The news is not all good — such as the fact that interest rates for student credit have risen 3.1% just in the past three months. On the positive side, the infographic offers advice for improving your credit rating and getting better deals from the credit card companies.

Is this data reliable? The infographic was created by cardhub.com, a credit card-comparison site that’s independent of any of the major players (its CEO learned the tricks of the trade as a top executive at Capital One).

In addition to showing you where to get the best credit card deals, the site conducts studies about how credit cards are used.

The company has finished its second-quarter 2012 study. In this infographic, it’s concentrating on social media, as well as offering lots of hints we found quite useful.

Have you been targeted by credit card companies on social media? Share your experience in the comments.

Infographic courtesy cardhub.com

Some of America’s most compelling brands are harnessing the conversational aspect of social media by setting up “listening command centers” to capture, monitor and utilize social media conversations. In doing so, they are monitoring online conversations about their brands, reacting instantly to viral buzz, and creating companies that consumers feel involved in–and in some cases, even bringing in bigger profits as a direct result.

One of the first to introduce this technology was Gatorade, which launched its mission control center in its Chicago offices in June 2010. The technology allows the company to monitor social media conversations about the company through a range of visualisations and data-streams.

It also enables fans to participate in the company on a new level. During the Super Bowl, Gatorade enabled fans to interact with NFL starts through Ustream, and they’re now running regular live social media events, such as having sports stars answer questions using Twitter and Ustream.

And this command center technology isn’t just for big companies–it can benefit public services and charities as well. The American Red Cross believes social media will play an increasing role in disaster response, as it can provide real-time information and give relief workers a direct line to affected individuals. Its new digital command center launched in March, just in time to respond to the thousands affected by dozens of tornadoes that ripped through 10 states.

Dell played a major part in helping the Red Cross launch its command center, modelling it after its own social media listening center and providing equipment and funding. Dell’s center launched in 2010 and has since been at the forefront of its marketing and customer response strategies. Said Dell’s VP of social media and community, Manish Mehta, “Ground Control is about tracking the largest number of possible conversations across the web and making sure we ‘internalize’ that feedback, good or bad … It’s also about tracking what you might call the ‘long tail’–those smaller matters that might not bubble to the surface today, but are out there, and deserve to be heard.”

Dell’s ground control center tracks around 22,000 daily posts about the company across a wide range of social media, and enables Dell to participate in online dialogue about their brand and use social media insights to improve their products and marketing.

The technologies that makes this listening possible come from multiple different monitoring platforms like Salesforce Radian6, Sysomos, Nielson BuzzMetrics, and others–the platforms capture millions of social media conversations from sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, and blogs, and presents them in a graphic display showing trend information, sentiment, geographical data, and share of voice.

Clemson University has also built a listening center with support from Dell and Radian6. Chief officer Jim Bottum believes Clemson may be the first academic environment to adapt listening command center technology. Students monitor the six large display screens and conduct research projects based on the data, including a recent project aimed at conversations about emergencies to help law enforcement agencies deliver better service in their communities.

Brands are not the only ones that realize the amazing benefits of command centers. Progressive agencies also get on board with the concept.

David Armano, executive VP of global innovation and integration at Edelman Digital, and his team just launched their first social intelligence command center (SICC) in its Chicago office. It combines four listening and engagement stations, a briefing workspace with cable television newsfeed, Polycom, and a content production section. The room is self contained and designed for real time monitoring, analytics, engagement and ultimately content production informed by the data coming in. It also has a full whiteboard wall where teams can actively work and plan.

“It’s essentially ground zero for real time communications,” says Armano. “Social intelligence or the insights we can gain from real time data is nothing without the ability to act upon it. Our SICC initiative is designed to not only master real time data, but act intelligently upon it.”

Taulbee Jackson, president and CEO of Radius and a member of the Super Bowl XLVI host committee, talked to me about the Super Bowl’s first-ever social media command center and his experience in managing the host committee’s interactive communications hub. “We had staff of about 50 people who worked two shifts for two weeks for fifteen hours a day. Our team was comprised of senior level social media managers, content developers, analysts, strategists and tech-savvy volunteers.”

Working out of a 2,800-square-foot space in downtown Indianapolis just blocks from the event, team’s objectives were clear. One: hospitality. “We are known for our friendliness, we wanted to make sure everyone had great experience at the Super Bowl coming from different parts of the country (whether it was on the aiplane, airport, street, cab, online)”, said Jackson. Two: safety. The team not only moderated conversations, it also was connected to other command centers in town that housed logistics and public safety teams so that in the event of the emergency their combined response would be instant. Three: create content and capture the experience to share with those who weren’t able to attend in person. Four: amplification. The team’s role was to amplify the positive experience fans had at the event.

The response rate of the command center staff was less than 3 minutes. Jackson says the event received over 64 million social impressions in one month from organic social amplification, which he estimates are worth $3.2 million. The main metric was the sentiment analysis, though. Real-time response and conversations moved the sentiment measure from 3.2 before the start of the event to 3.6 at the kick off (for every time someone said something negative online, 3.6 people said something positive).

Benefits of Listening Command Centers

So what benefits could a social media command center bring to a company or organization? The command centers enable brands to respond rapidly to trending topics in social media. For example, after Gatorade launched the “Gatorade has Evolved” campaign–which featured a song by rap artist David Banner–it was heavily talked up in social media, Gatorade was able to work with Banner to have a full-length version of the song ready to distribute to its Facebook and Twitter followers within 24 hours.

Listening command centers also allow consumers to participate in brand activities and shape their own experiences with the company. Thanks to its listening command center, Dell is able to provide almost instantaneous assistance to customers, and thanks to conversations and insights gained from social media, they’ve launched the (RED) line of products and FastTrack PC shipment, and redesigned the keyboard on their highest selling laptop after feedback that the apostrophe was positioned awkwardly.

The technology is being used for the more mundane day-to-day tasks of optimising landing pages and sending followers to the most high performing pages of the company’s website. Gatorade says it has been able to reduce exit rates from 25% to 9%, and has increased views of its product videos and other education material by 250%.

At Edelman, Armano says the company has used its SICC to train and act as a model to help several clients plan, design, and staff their own. “Not only that; internally for Edelman, the SICC initiative helps to break down traditional silos,” Armano says. “When analysts, strategists, content developers and media relations teams all see real time data in action–the silos melt away.”

Talking about companies and brands on social media is increasingly a two-way conversation, with listening command centers at the heart of marketing and customer interaction strategies. With application across a variety of industries, from Fortune 500 companies to the public service to education, it won’t be long before listening command centers are standard practice for engaging and monitoring customers.

Image: Flickr user Ludovic Bertron

Photo: NASA

The SpaceX Dragon spacecraft successfully berthed with the International Space Station this morning after a long overnight approach including several unplanned maneuvers. The crew at SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, California, concluded a long night of flight demonstrations and troubleshooting by watching astronaut Don Pettit control the station’s robotic arm and grapple the Dragon at 6:56 a.m. PDT.

“Looks like we’ve got a Dragon by the tail,” Pettit said from the station’s Cupola module once the capture was made.

Pettit’s successful capture of the Dragon was greeted by cheers at both SpaceX’s Hawthorne headquarters and NASA’s mission control in Houston. For both SpaceX and NASA the capture moment marks the beginning of a shift in how cargo will be delivered to and from the space station, with the eventual goal of changing how manned flight itself is done to low Earth orbit.

But Dragon’s overnight approach was not without hiccups, demonstrating the true test-flight nature of the mission. A problem with the devices used to guide the Dragon as it approached the station forced an initial retreat. In the end there were a handful of changes made to the initial flight plan, but at 6:49 a.m. PDT, the Dragon sat just 10 meters (32 feet) from the ISS when NASA flight director Holly Ridings gave the command SpaceX had been waiting years to hear: “go for capture.”

Early Friday morning the SpaceX team in Hawthorne completed the approach initiation burn of the Dragon’s Draco thrusters to move the spacecraft roughly 1,000 meters to a point where it could change its alignment relative to the station before performing the first series of demonstration maneuvers close to the ISS. The Dragon spacecraft could be seen on Earth by its flashing strobe light against the night sky.

Once in place at 350 meters, Dragon completed a 180-degree yaw rotation to align itself, and then another short burn was performed to move to the 250-meter point where the demonstrations would begin.

At 2:29 a.m. PDT, the SpaceX team confirmed Dragon was holding at 250 meters (820 feet), but Andre Kuipers, the Dutch astronaut on board the station, noticed the spacecraft was slightly forward of where it was expected to be. NASA engineers in Houston said the position was acceptable.

Sketch of the demonstration maneuvers planned for Dragon near the ISS. Image: NASA

As the ISS and Dragon passed in and out of sunlight orbiting the Earth every 90 minutes, the teams in Houston and Hawthorne prepared for what has long been considered the most challenging and critical part of the mission, demonstrating Dragon can make several different maneuvers in close range to the ISS, with commands being sent from both the ground and from the astronauts on the station.

Just before 3:00 a.m. PDT, with a short burst of the thrusters, Dragon again began approaching the ISS. Minutes later, with the Dragon 220 meters from the station, astronaut Kuipers sent a command via the UHF communications link and Dragon aborted its approach as expected and returned to the 250 meter hold position. Test one was complete.

Kuipers planned to send a command for Dragon to hold at 235 meters, but problems with Dragon’s on-board thermal camera used for the rendezvous with the ISS kept it at the 250 meter point. After a few minutes the test resumed and Kuipers issued Dragon a hold command at 235 meters, but it happened a bit earlier than planned.

Over the next half hour or so, the teams in Hawthorne and Houston were busy evaluating the data from the on-board sensors to make sure both the station and Dragon agreed on their relative positions before moving any closer, particularly inside the simply named “Keep Out Sphere” that surrounds the ISS at 200 meters.

As time progressed, some questions were raised from the data being analyzed from Dragon’s thermal image sensors and the on-board LIDAR (light detection and ranging) sensors. The two different devices are used to independently measure the distance between the two spacecraft. This information is then used by Dragon’s guidance system as it approaches the ISS. The data provided by the thermal cameras was causing the engineers to further evaluate the sensor.

Dragon was sent to an unplanned hold position at 200 meters in hopes of giving the thermal sensors a chance to obtain better data on the position of Dragon relative to the ISS.

Dragon at 30 meters from the station. Photo: NASA

By 4:20 a.m. PDT Dragon was once again on the move, this time to a position 150 meters from the station. After checking the sensors again, Dragon was cleared to fly to the next hold point at 30 meters. But less than 20 minutes later Dragon was held at 78 meters as SpaceX made some changes to the spacecraft’s LIDAR equipment. At 5:21 a.m. PDT the approach was resumed but just four minutes later SpaceX issued a retreat command, moving Dragon away from the ISS.

Dragon returned to 78 meters while a problem with the LIDAR was analyzed. It turns out the laser used by the LIDAR was receiving stray reflections from the Japanese Kibo laboratory on the station. Over the course of the next half hour, SpaceX engineers analyzed how to resolve the problem with the stray LIDAR signals, eventually deciding to narrow the view of the LIDAR. Essentially they put blinders on the sensors so they could only see straight ahead, where the Dragon was set to be berthed with the station.

Eventually Dragon was given the go-ahead to proceed to the 30-meter point, and then to the 10-meter location where it would be captured by the station’s robotic arm. After rescheduling the planed grapple a few times during the morning, the go-ahead was given for a capture at 7:02 a.m., which would take place in the dark as the two spacecraft passed over Australia. Dragon took roughly 20 minutes to fly the final 20 meters to its final hold position.

The station’s robotic Canada arm approaches Dragon. Photo: NASA

With Dragon in place at 10 meters, NASA’s Holly Ridings sat at her flight director desk in Houston with a purple stuffed dragon toy on the console above her. She anxiously twirled her pen in her hand as she told astronaut Pettit that Dragon was operating on a single LIDAR and should that one fail, the spacecraft would abort.

But in the final minutes, everything went well as Pettit maneuvered the arm towards Dragon. As the end of the arm inched towards the capsule, lights from the ISS bathed Dragon in an orange glow. A few minutes ahead of schedule at 6:56 a.m. PDT, capture was confirmed by NASA, marking the first time a private spacecraft was attached to the International Space Station.

The capture occurred 3 days, 6 hours, 11 minutes and 23 seconds after the Falcon 9 had lifted off from Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Tuesday morning. After another hour and a few reconfigurations of Dragon the robotic arm slowly pulled the capsule towards the station and at 8:52 a.m. PDT NASA confirmed Dragon was firmly attached to the station itself and the robotic arm was no longer holding it in place. After tightening the 16 bolts attaching Dragon to the station’s Harmony module, the ISS officially had its first private spacecraft visitor.

Dragon berthed to the Harmony module on the ISS. Photo: NASA

There are several more steps before the hatch between the ISS and Dragon will be opened early Saturday. Once opened, the crew on board the station will spend several days unpacking the 1,014 pounds (460 kilograms) of cargo on board Dragon. Once empty, the crew will load up Dragon with 1,367 (620 kilograms) of cargo before the spacecraft is released from the station and returns to earth with a splashdown in the Pacific Ocean on May 31.

A Danish startup has created a fairly straightforward Web-based application that lets organizations invoice each other online. But humble though it may sound, in the long run, this Nordic venture could well end up disrupting not just the business software industry but the banking industry as well.

That’s because the invoicing application is just the tip of a much larger iceberg that the company, Tradeshift, is envisioning–one that leverages big data to reinvent how credit ratings are set for small and medium-sized businesses.

Its most potentially disruptive idea is Instant Payments, a service which allows suppliers to get paid immediately once a customer accepts an invoice on the Tradeshift system, instead of having to wait the usual 30, 60, or 90 days.

The money still comes with an interest rate, but the size of that rate gets determined based on the buyer‘s credit rating, not the supplier‘s. Which is good news for small- and medium-sized suppliers, which often get hit with higher rates because they are perceived to be riskier bets.

Large companies, however, often have better credit ratings. And when you combine that with the fact that Tradeshift can see that a buyer has accepted an invoice (thereby declaring that they do intend to pay the bill), the risk for Tradeshift (and its financing partners) plummets.

“We can do real-time credit assessments,” CEO and cofounder Christian Lanng tells Fast Company.

Lanng says that Fortune 500s are sending “millions” of invoices through the system annually, and that the overall volume of transactions has tripled since January.

Instant Payments is currently being beta tested in England and Denmark and is slated to be available in the U.S. in the fall. The long-term implications of the real-time visibility Tradeshift now has are powerful. ”You cannot even begin to imagine what big data will do to finance,” Lanng says. “As we get more data on transactions, that changes the whole credit picture.”

Lanng and his cofounders, Mikkel Hippe Brun and Gert Sylvest, came up with the idea for the e-invoicing service while building a similar system system for the Danish government. The initial goal was simply to help businesses around the world become more productive. Invoices are still largely delivered in paper or pdf format, which means parties on the receiving end have to spend time re-typing the details into their own systems. (The Danish government estimated that this cost 15 minutes of worker time per invoice.)

Since businesses of all size and shape share the same challenge, Lanng, Brun, and Sylvest decided to tackle the problem on a global scale. Tradeshift launched in 2010, with Morten Lund, one of Skype’s early investors, helping to arrange seed funding. (Lund is now chairman of Tradeshift’s board.)

The company initially launched just in Scandinavia, Germany, and the UK. But since companies frequently do business trans-nationally, the system rapidly swept across the globe.

Today 100,000 businesses in 190 countries use Tradeshift, including the UK’s National Health Service, the French government, and Kuehne+Nagel, one of the largest transportation and logistics companies in the world. About 2,000 new companies join every week, up from 1,000-1,500 a week six months ago.

With 20,000 companies on the system, the United States has the largest number of users (including Dell and Accenture). India and Malaysia are the fast growing countries, though, and CEO Lanng tells Fast Company India could soon overtake the U.S.

The company won’t disclose the exact number of transactions processed, but Lanng says that Fortune 500s are sending “millions” of invoices through the system annually, and that the overall volume of transactions in the system has tripled since January.

The service is free to use. Tradeshift makes its money off its developer ecosystem. The company quickly saw that the main value they were creating wasn’t solely in productivity. All of a sudden, its databases contained massive amount of real-time data about economic activity that businesses would want to access and put to use beyond simply checking the status of invoices.

About 30 third-party apps have been built on top of Tradeshift so far (with 20 more on the way), Lanng says, including ones that create heat maps of your suppliers and customers and others that integrate with Google Docs and PayPal. In addition to public apps that anyone can use, individual companies can build proprietary apps to use just with their own supply chain.

“This is what happens when you take the Facebook model and apply it to business,” Lanng says. “You get some very powerful business possibilities.”

Privacy is not an issue, Lanng says, because the apps don’t give users access to all the data in the system, only to data relating to their own businesses. “A lot of this data is data they share with their business partners anyway,” he explains. But instead of delivering it manually and partners having to re-key it into their own systems, they can now access it in real-time through the centralized system.

Tradeshift takes a percentage of the fees charged by paid public apps (30 percent, on average) and negotiates independent deals with companies that build proprietary apps.

If the developer ecosystem expands, the Tradeshift model could one day steal market sharefrom business software stalwarts like Intuit’s QuickBooks, as small and medium-sized businesses choose to work on Tradeshift and use its app ecosystem because of the convenience of connecting real-time with their business partners elsewhere.

Image: Flickr user KrissZPhotography