Open up your mind and say, ahh...

This post originally appeared on the American Express OPEN Forum, where Mashable regularly contributes articles about leveraging social media and technology in small business.

Small business and startup employees are constantly on the go. They need quick, mobile solutions for scanning, storing, organizing and sharing important documents.

Eager to empty that box full of receipts? Looking for an easy and secure way to send signed documents? We’ve found eight apps and tools that seamlessly scan and file your most important documents and keepsakes. Best of all, most of them integrate with proven file hosts Dropbox and Evernote.

What other tools have proved useful when scanning and integrating your own documents.

One of the most universal apps out there, DocScanner works across iOS, Android and Symbian platforms. Just take a photo of a document, receipt or notebook page and email it as a PDF. Integrate with Mobile.me, Dropbox or Evernote.

Price: $4.99

Similar to DocScanner, this iPhone only app scans and sends documents securely by email and integrates information into Evernote, Dropbox and Google Docs.

Price: $6.99

The iPhone app not only can create PDF documents with multiple scans, but also can digitize and improve handwritten notes.

Price: FREE

Use this app to scan business cards, then add them as contacts in your phone and connect with them on LinkedIn.

Price: FREE

CamScanner allows for post-scan image editing and enhancement. You’re also able to search the text within a PDF image. The app also has fax and AirPrint capabilities.

Price: $4.99

This web/mobile app is named for — you guessed it — all the scrap papers you leave in a shoebox, namely, receipts. Shoeboxed transforms scanned receipts or coupons into organized categories or even expense reports.

Price: FREE

SignNow allows you to securely send scanned documents online for signatures. Sign the documents from a web browser, smartphone or tablet. Great for closing a lease deal or sending freelance contracts.

Price: FREE

For anyone still inclined toward paper scanning, try the Doxie scanner, a super portable single document scanner that integrates with many desktop and mobile apps.

Price: $149

Mozilla has extended its search partnership with Google for at least three additional years, the company has announced.

Under the terms of the agreement, Google will continue to be the default search provider for Mozilla’s web browser, Firefox.

The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

The Google Search deal has been a key source of income for Mozilla, generating 84% of Mozilla’s $121.1 million revenue in 2010.

The original deal between Mozilla and Google expired in November 2011, and in October Mozilla launched Firefox with Bing, sparking speculation that it might switch to Bing as its search provider.

The new multi-year arrangement with Google squashes such rumors and shows that the rivalry between Firefox and Google’s web browser Chrome wasn’t enough of a hurdle for the two companies to strike a deal again.

You want to write a book, and have been wondering about the process. Maybe you’ve started a bunch of times, but something got in the way. Motivation failed you, or you lost track of the time, or you wrote the entire thing but never got it out there in any form or fashion. There are lots of roadblocks and dead ends in the world of writing books.

Finding Time to Write a Book

Most people, when I queried them, said that finding time was the #1 complain/worry/issue they had with being able to write a book. As I’m about to complete my fourth, and my fifth will be finished a few months after that, I can tell you that it most certainly does take time, but that time can be found. Here are a few ways to “find” time.

• Write notes about your book into something like Evernote, which can be accessed from your phone, your desktop, and any web browser (meaning you have no excuses to take down ideas).
• Keep 3×5 index cards in your pocket or bag, and jot notes there, too. A lot of writing is done before you sit down to actually write.
• Build loose-but-useful outlines and seek out 20 minutes here and there to “shade them in.” People facing a blank page waste too much time thinking about the page. Instead, work on bits that need work.
• If you work better speaking, look into a product like Dragon Naturally Speaking to do dictation for you.
• Prone to distractions? Try Ommwriter for Mac (or PC).
• Also, shutting off the Internet helps.

But I Have Kids

So do I. I have two kids. And I run a few companies, and help several others. You can create excuses to fit your issues with finding time, or you can find time. Here’s some ways to do it.

• While they watch TV, you write at the table. If you have time for TV, you have time to write a book. Can’t concentrate? Headphones.
• Wake up 40 minutes earlier. Use 20 to get less groggy. Use 20 to start some writing.
• Stay up 40 minutes later. Use 30 to write and 10 to calm your brain back down.
• Use “idle time” like waiting room time to write. Don’t want to whip out the laptop? Then use something else to capture more work (remember that note cards aren’t a book).
• Quit one “used to be useful” activity. We all have them. Are you still at book club? Unless it’s your life saver, stop. Ditto volunteering. Volunteer to write a book. Then volunteer.

Time DOES Grow On Trees

Gandhi famously said that we all have the same 24 hours in the day. We just choose how we fill them. I find time all the time. One way I do it is to ignore email for a while. We are a world trained to answer little red 1′s. Shut off the auto-popups that tell you when mail comes. Kill the audible for it. Do everything you can to limit the INTERRUPTIONS of time to just a single channel, like SMS, so that if someone really needs you, they know they can text you. And if they bug you too much then, consider switching to Google Voice and set up rules for each phone number that bugs you. Problem solved.

How you respect your own time and how you show others the value of your own time is the key here. You can’t shut out the world, but very very few authors get that luxury anyway. Every book I’ve written, I’ve written while running more than one company, while managing a busy speaking schedule, while blogging daily (sometimes more than once a day), while being a dad, and while facing all the other complicated interruptions that life throws your way.

Own this. You can do it.

Tomorrow, we’ll talk about discipline. Yes, it’s a series. There are four more posts coming. : )

Photo sharing via Flickr

Google’s Chrome web browser has added 90 million active users in the past year, more than doubling its total user base.

During a keynote Wednesday at the Google I/O developers conference, Sundar Pichai, Google’s SVP of Chrome, revealed that the browser now has 160 million active users. Compare that to last May, when Google said Chome had 70 million users.

Pichai also revealed that Chome is now at version 12, up from version 5 in May 2010. He explained that Google decided to change to a six-week release cycle in order to ensure that users have the most advanced browser technology at their fingertips.

In a recent survey, around half of Verizon smartphone users said they planned to switch to the Verizon iPhone when it becomes available next week.

Market research firm uSamp recorded the responses of more than 700 current smartphone owners on the Verizon network. According to those responses, around 66% of BlackBerry users on Verizon plan to switch, and around 44% of Android smartphone users plan to spring for the iPhone 4 on their current network.

Altogether, 54% of the Verizon-using, smartphone-owning respondents said they planned to switch to the Verizon iPhone.

When asked why they would switch, respondents cited the iOS mobile interface (60%), the device’s memory (43%), the camera (41%), the iPhone media features (51%), and the web browser (58%).

uSamp also said 26% of current AT&T iPhone users would switch to Verizon.

In Mashable‘s own poll, we found that a great many AT&T iPhone users plan to switch to Verizon, too. With a sample size of more than 5,000 respondents, 30% said they would switch as soon as possible, and 15% said they would switch as soon as their current contract was expired. A further 23% said they’d switch when the next version of the iPhone became available on Verizon.

All this phone-hopping and network-switching is great news for Apple and Verizon; however, the new bandwidth requirements on Verizon’s network might put a damper on new Verizon iPhone users’ experience. The company plans to throttle download speeds for the top 5% of its users — many or most of whom are likely to be on the new iPhones.

If you’re a current Android or BlackBerry user on the Verizon network, do you plan to get a Verizon iPhone 4? Tell us why or why not in the comments.

Dave Sloan is CEO of Treehouse Logic, which offers a hosted design tool solution that enables customer co-creation. You can reach Dave at dave@treehouselogic.com and follow him on Twitter.

Do you have good taste? Feeling inspired? Lots of new fashion startups want to tap into your creativity. These new fashion sites are not your grandfather’s fashion brands. Instead, they invite anyone with design aspirations to co-create their own clothing or outfit.

Here are three ways to get started in fashion design from the comfort of your own computer.

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1. Design and Sell Fashion Online

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Garmz’s goal is to activate fashion talent. Based on a crowd-sourcing business model, designers upload their best designs and the community votes on favorites. The most popular designs get produced and put up in the Garmz online store. Profits from sales of the designed garment are shared with the designer.

Fabricly has set out to help you, the designer, launch your own clothing line. If you want to design for Fabricly, you simply submit your sketches via e-mail. The Fabricly team evaluates submissions and selects designers it wants to promote. Fabricly takes care of sourcing, production, PR and shares profits with the designer. “In short, Fabricly takes the pain and financial risk out of growing a fashion label.”

Both Garmz and Fabricly are in the business of democratizing the fashion world by giving creative, up-and-coming designers access to the fashion industry. As Garmz and Fabricly attract more designers and publish more unique content, they will grow the community of designers and shoppers. These sites give designers a platform to design, produce and sell their products online.

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2. Design and Inspire

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Instead of asking designers to sketch out free-form designs, Polyvore provides a web-based scrapbooking tool that accesses a broad library of fashion pieces. “Polyvore is the web’s largest community of tastemakers where people can discover their style and set trends around the world.” Polyvore encourages users to create sets, follow other users and inspire each other with fashion finds. The site also inspires creativity among its members by hosting design contests. These contests are often judged by celebrity icons like Kate Moss.

Fashiolista takes on the difficulty of finding fashion across a crowded InternetInternet, i.e. “the shopping jungle,” by having members find and rate fashion finds. Users install a web browser extension to get started. As they browse through the Internet’s vast selection of garments and accessories, they can hit the “love it!” button from their browser tool bar. Loved items are added to a user’s Fashiolista profile and to the Fashiolista database of browseable items. Users customize their profile and follow fashion-forward members that inspire them, creating a fashion social network.

GoogleGoogle’s Boutiques.com invites members to create and follow online boutiques. Members can love, hate and share individual fashion items. To find items that may interest you, take the trademarked “stylyzer” quiz to be shown personalized recommendations. Like Pandora or Netflix, the algorithm learns more as people interact with the site, constantly improving the quality of recommendations. “Ultimately, Boutiques.com will provide shoppers with a much richer and interactive shopping experience and help drive traffic to retailers’ websites.”

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3. Design and Buy

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FashionPlaytes is a site where girls are their own fashion designers. Shoppers use a visual product configurator, i.e. “sketchbook,” to make selections including garment type, size, color, trim and accessories. FashionPlaytes offers tween girls an opportunity to design clothing and have it produced to wear at a reasonable price. The design experience is fun and playful, reminiscent of a video game.

Blank-Label is a build-a-shirt site that allows men to design their own dress shirt by selecting a fabric, style, collar and buttons. As users make selections they see a realistic graphical representation of the shirt they are creating. Users can submit their measurements along with their creation and should expect the custom shirt to take a few weeks to be sewn and shipped. “Designed by you. Stitched by us,” is the company’s slogan. Other custom shirt sites include World of Alfa, Shirtsmyway, and Propercloth.

These cool design-it-yourself startups are including you, the creative designer, in the shopping process. Some are marketplaces for up-and-coming designers, some are social fashion sites that encourage creative interaction and sharing, and others simply add visual product design to the online shopping experience. In any case, the Internet is becoming a hotbed of interactive design experiences. Get to it!

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Image courtesy of iStockphotoiStockphoto, vm

Amazon has rolled out its long-awaited lending feature for its Kindle ecosystem of devices and apps. Users can loan out supported titles once for a period of 14 days.

Very similar in execution to the LendMe feature built in to the competing Barnes & Noble Nook platform, borrowers can access books from the Kindle apps for Mac, PC, iOS, AndroidAndroid, BlackBerry, Windows Phone 7 and of course, the Kindle itself.

Amazon has a pretty comprehensive page set up explaining the Kindle loan process, but we’ve put together our own guide to help users get started.

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Loans Are Initiated on the Web

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The first thing to understand about the Kindle loan process is that all of the management aspects take place in the web browser. While we imagine that Amazon will release future software updates for its devices and various apps to make it possible to lend out a book from within a device, users need to use the web browser as of right now.

Fortunately, Amazon has made this process pretty simple. Not every Kindle book supports the lending feature; it is up to publishers and rights holders to determine what books can be loaned out or not. To find out if a Kindle book is lendable, just look at the product details section of any Kindle book page.

Underneath the ASIN code is a label titled “Lending.” Lendable books are marked “Enabled” and that means users can safely lend away their e-books.

For Kindle books users have already purchased, a yellow indicator will appear at the top of the product page with the words “Loan this book to anyone you choose.” As long as a user is logged in to his or her Amazon.com account, this heading should appear on every eligible Kindle book already in the user’s collection. Clicking the “Loan this book” link will initiate the lending process.

For users who have lots of Kindle books, the easiest option is probably to go to the Manage Your Kindle page and scroll down to the bottom where it says “Your Orders.” Clicking on the plus sign next to a title will show you order details and also, if the book is eligible, a “Loan this book” sign.

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Loans Are Sent via E-mail

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Clicking on the “Loan this book” button or hyperlink will take users to a page that completes the loan process.

Lenders will need to provide the recipient’s e-mail address and name and if they want, they can also include a personal message.

Recipients will then get an e-mail from Amazon.com offering a link to accept the lended title. If the user already has a Kindle device, he or she can even choose where to send the title via Whispernet.

Borrowers have seven days from the date of the first e-mail to choose to accept a loan. Once accepted, the book is readable for 14 days.

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While on Loan, Books Are Not Accessible to the Owner

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Amazon issues the same restriction as Barnes & Noble when it comes to book lending: Once a book is on loan, it is not accessible to the owner. Trying to read a book will show a “This title can not be downloaded because it is on loan” message.

We’ll be honest, we find this practice sort of annoying. After all, the copy is digital, so what does it matter if the owner and borrower can access the title at the same time? Still, from a digital rights perspective, this probably makes copyright holders feel more secure — and truthfully, it isn’t like we can still read our physical books when we loan copies to our friends.

Amazon does have a nice feature in its “Manage My Kindle” section that allows borrowers to remove a lent title from their collection. If this is done before the 14 day loan period, reading rights return to the owner. Borrowers can still pull up the lended title in their archives, but will be alerted when the loan period has ended and given a link to purchase the book.

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Notes for International Users

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Right now, only users in the United States can lend books to other users. However, if the intended recipient is in another country, as long as the book is accessible in their region, those users can still receive the book.

Much like the music industry, the world of e-books still has different rules and agreements with regard to international availability. Some companies, like Kobo, focus on making all titles accessible in all regions, but the biggest publishers generally have different agreements in different areas.

We hope Amazon will work on bringing the lending feature to international users in the near future.

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You Can Only Lend Once

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Yet another feature Amazon has borrowed from Barnes & Noble is the fact that once a book has been loaned out once, it cannot be loaned again. To us, this is much more annoying than not being able to read a book while it is on loan.

While I could understand placing a limit on the number of times a title could be lent out (off the top of my head, five seems acceptable), I really don’t see how limiting the number of times a title can be loaned out does anything to deter piracy (if that is the aim). It’s not like there aren’t programs that can break Amazon’s DRM scheme and convert e-books into ePub or PDF.

Still, the ability to lend titles — even with its current implementation — is a great boost to the Amazon ecosystem. Amazon’s strategy of getting its apps on as many devices as possible is one of the most compelling parts of its platform. Yes, the other e-book sellers have by and large followed suit, but Amazon’s ubiquity in the e-commerce space gives it the sort of power that few other services can counter.

As someone who has already become addicted to the ability to gift Kindle books to my friends and colleagues, I can see myself embracing this new feature in full force.

What do you think about the new Kindle lending feature?

In February 2011, I have the privilege to speak at the lift conference in Geneva. But this isn’t about the conference as much as it is about an important subject that I’ve been asked to address. While this idea is nothing new to economists, theorists, futurists and other intellectuals around the world, my focus is on those who are unfamiliar with the role they play in an underground, but vital economy.

I’m going to explore the undercurrent of social economics, namely social currency and social capital. And, I promise you won’t find it boring…

As we’re seeing with services such as Klout and PeerIndex, our stature in the social web is based on our actions and words.  Essentially, your “balance sheet” is available for anyone with a web browser to review, assess, and analyze. While this may seem trivial, progressive businesses are already factoring your stature into their customer index and your experiences may vary based on your social credit score. In addition, some credit agencies in the U.S. are also reportedly reviewing social graphs to explore associated credit risks based on who we know.

You are a bank. What works against us also works for us. Choose your investments wisely…but it starts with thinking about your interaction as investments.

I recently discussed the topic with Laurent Haug, the organizer of lift, and I’d like to share the conversation with you…

Laurent Haug: In what context is social currency emerging?

Brian Solis: We, from the mainstream to the earliest of adopters and greatest of innovators, may have missed an early opportunity to steer things in a more proactive direction. Instead, we are now playing catchup to what’s playing out as we speak… what we do and say in social networks equates to “social capital” and that one day it would be used for and against us.

The time has come to be mindful of the value we create in networks such as Facebook, Twitter, for ourselves. What we share, what we say, the smallest of actions from “likes” to Retweets to the simplest of updates form a digital representation of what we are. This persona can be leveraged when used effectively.

Is that the main reason behind users involvement in social networks?

No, of course not. Right now, the social web is a vibrant “egosystem“. When we were introduced to blogs, Facebook or Twitter, as human beings, we were simply excited at having an audience for our words and our experiences. With every reactions and friend requests, we were rewarded to share more of ourselves. Now we realize something new: that what someone says can represent varying levels of value, whether it is an opinion or expertise. Who you are connected to is also important. We are judged by the company we keep. When combined, actions and relationships create a foundation for social capital.

With the emerging array of search and analysis tools, simple processes of data mining encourages advanced profiling that we, as users, are not, but should be, aware of.

For example, banks are looking at an individual’s social graph to determine their credit risk. In the blink of an eye, what could be considered trivial information becomes an influential element that will contribute to changing the direction your life will take. I believe we should make users more aware of this unfolding reality. This is about consciousness. How they engage online and who they connect with serves as social currency in every transaction.

Can you define social currency?

Social currency is represented in the resulting value and sentiment that stems from the exchange of social objects: words, videos, reactions, links. What I publish is social currency. We can measure the value of this currency in each exchange by its reach, resonance, and ultimately influence. However, it’s sum is greater than its parts. If I’m looking to weigh “who your are,” what appears in search as well as the presentation of your profiles, tells me more than you know. It defines who I am and how much I am “worth”. So social currency is a combination of actions and words.

Do you have a concrete example in mind?

While it’s difficult to call out individuals, we can take a look at how brands are establishing goodwill and investing in social capital through online engagement. I do appreciate what American Express is doing around Open Forum. For a brand, it is earning social capital through the investment of meaningful and valuable social currency. Its intention is to build a social community through value-added content, insight, advice, and community. The team is building a network and ecosystem, a complete engagement strategy built on social currency. They enlisted the brightest minds in the field of small business and placed them in a community where these people share content, expertise, and experience with everyone – without cost. It is a form of information commerce, with creation and curation of content. They also launched a mobile app to bring that experience to anyone anywhere. Their idea is to earn social capital by making a contribution to the wider community of small business owners.

What they want is not only immediate returns, but indirect and long term returns. American Express invests in priceless commodities: information and insights. They create a unique bond with the people they want to reach, and build social capital, something even stronger than goodwill. While intent counts, we are measured by what we do, not what we want to do.

RELATED: Stanford Law’s Ryan Calo on privacy harm and design as one solution…

Image Credit: Shutterstock

While the phrase “founding fathers” is often used in conjunction with men like Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and George Washington, we wanted the think about the phrase on the global level. And what is more global than the world wide web? Thus, this holiday, we’re taking a look at 10 individuals who have been instrumental in helping to shape the world wide web and the culture of the Internet as we know it today.

Check out our round up below to learn about some of the most influential people in the creation and development of the ideas and technologies that have led to today’s web experience. Let us know in the comments if you think we’ve missed anyone!

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1. Tim Berners-Lee

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Why He Matters: Tim Berners-Lee is credited as the inventor of the World Wide Web. A physicist, Berners-Lee and his team built the world’s very first web browser, WorldWideWeb, the first web server and the HyperText-based markup language HTML.

Berners-Lee founded and is the current director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), a standards body that oversees the development of the web as a whole. While the Internet itself dates back 1969, it was Berners-Lee who was able to bring together the concept of the Internet and hypertext, which set the foundation for the Internet as we know it today.

Because CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research) didn’t make the World Wide Web proprietary and never charged for dues, its protocols were widely adopted.

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2. Marc Andreessen

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Why He Matters: Marc Andreessen co-authored Mosaic, the first widely-used web browser and he founded Netscape Communications.

While Mosaic wasn’t the first graphical web browser, it was the first to garner significant attention. It was also the first browser to display images inline with text.

After designing and programing Mosaic, Andreessen went on to co-found Netscape Communications. Netscape’s flagship product, Netscape Navigator, had an enormous impact, by helping to bring the web to mainstream users. In 1998, Netscape released the code base for Netscape Communicator under an open source license. That project, known as Mozilla, became the basis of what we now know as Firefox .

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3. Brian Behlendorf

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Why He Matters: Brian Behlendorf was the primary developer of the Apache Web Server and one of the founding members of the Apache Group. While working as the webmaster for Wired Magazines’s HotWired web site, Behlendorf found himself making changes and patches to the HTTP server first developed at NCSA at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. After realizing that others were also adding their own patches, he put together an electronic mailing list to help coordinate the work.

By February 1995, the project had been given a name – Apache – and the entire codebase from the original NCSA server was rewritten and re-optimized. The real genius with Apache, other than its free and open source nature, was that it was built to be extensible. That meant that ISPs could easily add their own extensions or plugins to better optimize the server, allowing hundreds of sites to be hosted from just one computer server. Apache remains the most popular web server on the Internet.

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4, 5, 6. Rasmus Lerdorf, Andi Gutmans and Zeev Suraski

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Why They Matter: Lerdorf, Gutmans and Suraski are all responsible for what we know as PHP , the scripting language that remains one of the most used web languages for creating dynamic web pages. Rasmus Lerdorf first created PHP in 1995 and he was the main developer of the project for its first two versions.

In 1997, Gutmans and Suraski decided to extend PHP, rewriting the parser and creating what became known as PHP 3. The two then went on to rewrite the core of PHP, naming it the Zend Engine, and using that to power PHP 4. Gutmans and Suraski further went on to found Zend Technologies, which continues to do much of the development of PHP.

While Larry Wall’s Perl was one of the first general-purpose scripting languages to really take off on the web, the ease of use and embedability of PHP is what has made it take over as the defacto “P” in the LAMP stack (LAMP being a default set of components on which many web applications are based).

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7. Brad Fitzpatrick

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Why He Matters: Creator of LiveJournal, in many ways the proto-social network, the original author of memecached and the original authentication protocol for OpenID.

Fitzpatrick created LiveJournal in college, as a way for he and his friends to keep one another up to date with what they were doing. It evolved into a larger blogging community and implemented many features, like Friends Lists, the ability to create user polls, support for blog clients, the ability to send text messages to users, the ability to post by phone, post by e-mail, create group blogs and more that have become a standard part of communities like Facebook , Tumblr, MySpace , WordPress .com and Posterous today.

As LiveJournal grew and started to use more and more resources, Fitzpatrick started the memecahced project as a way to speed up dynamic web applications and alleviate database load. It does this by pooling together the free memory from across your web servers and then allocate it out as needed. This makes it easy for large projects to scale. Memecached is in use by Wikipedia , Flickr , Facebook, WordPress, Twitter, Craigslist and more.

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8. Brendan Eich

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Why He Matters: He created JavaScript and now serves as the CTO of the Mozilla Corporation. Eich created JavaScript while at Netscape, first under the name Mocha, then under the name LiveScript, and finally as JavaScript. JavaScript made its official debut in December of 1995.

JavaScript quickly became one of the most popular web programming languages, even if its use cases in the early days were often visual abominations. However, as time has progressed, the advent of JavaScript libraries and frameworks, coupled with the power of Ajax has made JavaScript an integral part of the standards-based web.

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9. John Resig

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Why He Matters: John Resig is the creator and lead developer of jQuery, the most popular JavaScript library on the web. While other JavaScript libraries, such as Sam Stephenson’s Protoype, preceded jQuery, jQuery’s goal of being compatible across web browsers is what really sets it apart.

In the last two years especially, the momentum around jQuery has exploded and it is now reportedly in use by 31% of the top 10,000 most visited websites. It’s extensibility and the jQuery UI toolkit has also made it a popular adoption target in enterprise application development. Any JavaScript library that can make the leap from web developers to enterprise app builders is the real deal.

JavaScript continues to be one of the big forces within the standards-based web and jQuery is helping to lead the charge.

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10. Jonathan Gay

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Why He Matters: He co-founded FutureWave Software and for more than a decade was the main programmer and visionary behind Flash.

While not everyone is a fan of Adobe Flash, it’s important to remember how influential and instrumental the technology has been over the course of the last 15 years. Gay wrote a vector drawing program called SmartSketch back in 1993 for the PenPoint operating system, and after PenPoint was discontinued, the technology in SmartSketch was repurposed as a tool that could create animation that could be played back on web pages.

This product, FutureSplash Animator, was acquired by Macromedia in 1996 and renamed Flash. After the acquisition, Gay became Vice President of Engineering at Macromedia and he led the Flash engineering team. Over the years, his team implemented new elements to Flash, like Actionscript .

However, perhaps Gay’s pinnacle achievement with Flash was in the team he spearheaded to create what was then known as the Flash Communication Server (it’s now the Flash Media Server) which let Flash Player use the RTMP protocol to stream audio and video over the web. In essence, this technology is what allowed YouTube to be, well, YouTube.

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[img credits: European Parliament, Marc Andreessen, Ilya Schurov, chrys/Sebastian Bergmann, crucially, jsconf, badubadu]

The convention for creating financial opportunities is evolving and changing the way we seed prospects, promote our expertise and prowess, and connect with those who can help us learn and advance through the facilitation of strategic and mutually beneficial alliances.

Digital capitalization is laying a foundation for expanding the need to cultivate and participate, not only in the real world, but also in the online networks and communities that can benefit us personally and professionally.

In an era of democratized publishing and equalized influence, it can be said that engagement and participation are a new, powerful and effective form of “un” marketing. At the very least, this is an epoch of empathy.

Social capital is a strong ally, an elite catalyst for lucrative relationships, and now a metric for qualification, consideration and ultimately success (however you define it). This is a state of human economics that is thoroughly discussed in Tara Hunt’s book, The Whuffie Factor. Our “Whuffie” or social capital and intellectual assets are defined by both online and real world conduct and its “balance sheet” is available for anyone with a web browser to review, assess, and analyze.

Reputation, trust, and relationships, are each earned at varying levels, through our action and words. Our interaction reinforces impressions and engenders experiences. As such, our personal and professional brands are essentially reflections of our contributions. In the end, we get out of it, what we invest in it.

By participating in relevant online communities and publishing content that promotes our expertise as it empathizes with those seeking information and direction in a way that literally speaks to them, we begin the process of building and shaping our online reputation, brand, and persona that traverses virtual, augmented, and actual realities. The ideas and wisdom we share and the relationships we forge only fuel its proliferation and stature.

Like any form of capital, Social capital rises and falls with the market and the individual to which it’s governed by the state of the industry and affected by the state of corresponding affairs. As it escalates, however, it unlocks opportunities that are commensurate with the community’s assessment of its value. In the same regard, the community will not support or reward lackluster, opportunistic, also-ran, or hollow engagement in the long term.

Again, social capital is measured by individual value and collective perception.

The Human Algorithm

But trust and reputation are only as valuable as their ability to represent you in your absence. And as in anything online, perception and presence are the focus of proactive programs that enhance the discovery process and steer recognition and stature in your favor.

As search plays an increasingly important role in the investigation process of surfacing qualified candidates and social objects around relevant topics, we quickly become brand managers for our intellectual and personal assets. Our livelihood now pivots on our ability to connect dots between who were are, what we stand for, and the value we offer.

You will be Googled.

You will also be Twittered, Flickrd, YouTubed, Facebooked, and LinkedIn’ed.

While Google is the standard by which all search is measured, those active in defining their presence in traditional search will do so through organic as well as through optimized techniques such as SEO. However, as search becomes social, the role of queries disseminates beyond Google with content sought and channeled directly within Social Networks as well as new breeds of real-time search platforms. As such, prominence is then ascertained by the digital shadows we cast across the traditional and social Web (yes, there is a difference) and also through our investment in driving strategic visibility. Essentially, our brand as defined by our views, opinions, thoughts, observations, and actions, becomes a social object that requires dynamic cultivation and placement.

The Human Algorithm becomes our lifeline to regulated exposure while also providing a foundation for constructing and enhancing our presence directly within the channels where prospects are seeking information.

Social Customer Hierarchy

As social media becomes ubiquitous, businesses will no longer possess the means to effectively scale and sustain participation across all conversations on Twitter, Facebook, blogs, and other online communities. Whether you agree with this or not, brands will face the need to prioritize who they engage based on what I refer to as the Social Customer Hierarchy. The level of influence and authority a customer or prospect holds determines their placement in the chain of preeminence.

Yes, we earn prominence and amass social capital through productive contributions to online societies. In the process, we increase our stature and amplify our voices and it will escalate consumer matters when other traditional means are exhausted. Brandishing this distinction however, erodes value, and over time, ranking and credibility are diminished.

Our online reputation and the activity that contribute to its definition are investments in our social capital. The return on these investments is evident in the opportunities and relationships that ensue and proliferate. Our social graph, the connections we forge and actively nurture, represents a very public testimony. If you’re not actively investing in its significance, you may actually take away from its net worth.

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