Simplib

When you think of an audio streaming service you will probably think of music related platforms like Spotify and Grooveshark. These are awesome freemium platforms where people can discover music, create playlists and interact with the community. Music is something that we are passionate about at Simplib and you will see that previous posts have showcased some amazing start-ups (like the wonderful guys at Dualo). 

Music isn't everything though. What I mean by this is that there are other forms of audio that we love to listen to. Podcasts are an amazing way for people to express themselves and communicate to the world around them. Most music platforms don't feature podcasts and other forms of audio but SoundCloud have nailed it with their audio platform. 

As the Simplib site of the day Soundcloud nail their offering in one simple line: "Hear the world's sounds". Thats right "sounds". These guys have an amazing platform (which I am sure you have used already) and millions of people around the world are using it. It is the world's largest community of artists, bands and podcasters which makes it a serious player in the world of online tech. 

As a website the experience is wonderful. It is dead easy to sign up and the user interface is very clean and simple. As a community it is just amazing. You can of course "follow" and "like" people and their audio clips but what makes Soundcloud unique is that you can focus on one specific part of a track and leave a comment there. This gives creators a much more accurate and informative level of feedback and makes commenting fun for the listener too. Users can repost clips (similar to blogging) and this gives normal users the chance to offer something of quality to the community. 

Soundcloud originally started up in Sweden but was established in Berlin in 2007 by Alex Ljung and Eric Wahlforss. With 190 employees now and over 10 million users it is certainly a large company. The platform is monetized with a premium feature that gives users more space and some additional features which would be handy for serious users and frequent creators. 

It is a great site and it is very popular on Simplib! Check it out here! 

I always like to write about the various obstacles that Start-ups have to overcome but one of my favourite issues (and most hated) is finding the right team. Loads of people out there have great ideas but how many of them actually get them off the ground? You might want to build a web app or produce a film but you are only as good as the people around you. Of course it is possible to have multiple skillsets but there are only so many hours in the day. Collaboration is a wonderful thing and there are lots of skilled people out there looking to work on new things. 

I have personally failed with a couple of ventures in the past and I found that I always lacked a solid team around me. Wearing a lot of hats is part of the start-up lifestyle but it is difficult to do things alone. If you have a load of cash then of course you can hire a developer or go through an agency but this is a temporary solution. You want people in-house who share your vision, take risks with you and are "partners" as a pose to employees or sub-contractors. 

Finding people to join you is tough but CollabFinder is a great solution for this problem. It is an online collaboration platform that helps projects and start-ups to grow by connecting skilled people.

Using the platform you can search for:

Developers

Designers

Artists

Writers

Scientists

Musicians

Film-makers

Product Managers

Engineers 

CollabFinder is a young start-up but the team already has some great case studies and success stories under their belt. The City of New York used CollabFinder for the NYC BigApps 2013 competition which was supported by Mayor Bloomberg. There are 664 people and projects in this group and this is just one example.

  CollabFinder are hosting groups for communities such as Nesta, Flickr, Ebay, UCLA and UC Berkley amongst others. It is free for individuals to sign up, collaborate and create projects whilst companies and universities pay for a group subscription. This premium feature allows organizations of all shapes and sizes to get their physical networks online so that their members can benefit from the platform. It is a great platform for events, meetups and co-working spaces too and is a lot cheaper than building a bespoke platform. 

As a website it is super clean and the user interface is so straightforward that a blind 86 year old tortoise could use it. There are already more than 4000 skilled users on the platform and this number is growing very quickly. There are 497 projects to join so if you are looking to get your hands dirty working on the next big thing then this is your chance. 

CollabFinder is run by Sahadeva Hammari, Gil Hildebrand and Simon Lawrence in NYC and they have all created this platform because they needed it themselves. This goes to show that if you have a big problem it pays off to create your own solution. It gets the "useful" badge from me on Simplib. What do you think it should get? 

I have talked about hackathons, accelerators and incubators in previous posts and have showcased some fantastic companies out there like the team behind Startup Weekend. I did mention that there is a company very close to our hearts at Simplib and that is the wonderful guys at Bemyapp. Youri, Lucie and Alex have all loved their experiences at the Bemyapp events and have even bagged an awesome prize at one of the events. 

So lets talk about their website. From the very first second on their site you get the impression that this is a global organization with a huge network. I love the strapline "Developers, there is always a place for you" because this hints at the sea of talent that these guys have as part of their network. If you scroll down you will see that there are loads of events happening around the world in countries like the USA, UK, Spain, Italy, Germany and France which is fantastic. The Bemyapp brand does not just run hackathons and actually runs a load of really cool meetups, online challenges, workshops and much more. If you are looking for an event that promotes or showcases a specific coding language then you are also in luck. With the website you can filter through events by selecting tags such as CSS, Javascript and "googleglass". 

Going back to my previous point about the Simplib teams' involvement with Bemyapp it was awesome for the team to collaborate with other techies and build a wicked app. The guys got together at the Bemyapp NFC event in Paris and build a great team around their app. After a lot of hard work over the weekend it was amazing for the team to be recognised for their efforts and win the event! Out of this weekend a cool app called "Curioucity" was born which basically helps people to discover the city around them using NFC technology. You can physically interact with the area around you using the app and it is a great opportunity for different companies and brands to get involved. The name was changed to NFCity shortly after and is now undergoing some really cool developments and changes. 

Bemyapp are doing lots of different things and the agency arm of the business has proved to be incredibly powerful. Bemyapp have over 15,000 developers as part of their global network and have run over 250 events which is massive! They have an impressive client list with blue chips such as Intel, Samsung, Microsoft, Google, Adobe, RedBull and much more. 

Here at Simplib we love practical tools. Of course we do have a passion for the arts and can spend hours staring at pretty things online but time is a valuable resource. Tools that save you time and effort online are always needed due to the massive amount of content that is growing online at an exponential rate. 

Our site of the day is going to a very humble little website that needs more recognition! Bit.ly is a URL shortening service that shortens a URL by giving it a short and unique alternative that redirects to the original page. It is super simple and might seem very basic but these guys shorten over one BILLION links every month. Bit.ly became very popular on Twitter when it became the default link shortening service in 2009. With the Twitter character limit it was very useful for people to make the most out of their tweets and not have to worry about space. Bit.ly were eventually replaced by Twitter's own "t.co" service but they are still doing well and offering a fantastic service to the online community. 

Bitly, Inc was founded by Peter Stern in 2008 and the company is still based in New York City and is privately held. They seem to have quite a large team with 40+ team members listed on their site which is surprising! They have a nice monetization model which offers Bit.ly enterprise solutions to paying customers. As part of this companies can get advanced branding features and can generate their own short links (for example Pepsi now have "pep.si"). In addition to these offerings Bit.ly enterprise also provides users with more detailed analytics which is pretty cool. 

You don't need to pay to take advantage of their analytics feature however. As part of the free service users can drop a url into the top bar, generate a short link and immediately start monitoring clicks. It only takes a second to create an account and the whole process is very stress-free. It is very useful to use a Bit.ly link when you are trying to track progress and efficiency with an online marketing campaign. Let me give you an example:

You are part of a band and have just released your music video. You want people to watch it on all of your platforms but you really want to find out how useful each platform is for generating clicks on your link. 

You make a different Bit.ly link for Facebook, Twitter, Google + etc and then track each one from your Bit.ly account.

You will be able to see how many clicks you get from each individual network and have more of an understanding as to how useful each one is for you. This allows you to focus your time and effort on the most worthwhile network. 

So you can see that there are many practical uses for Bit.ly and it is not just about shortening links. We use Bit.ly links a lot and it is a great way to find out where our users are coming from. The best things in life are free so check it out on Simplib and start to save time! 

It is awesome when you come across an absolute gem online. It could be a really funny video, an innovative work tool or an interesting article but how do you save this? At Simplib we believe that the traditional bookmarks bar in our browser just isn't good enough to handle all of the content that the internet offers these days. When you calculate how many interesting websites, songs, articles, videos, photos, apps, games, shops and tools there are it seems crazy to think that you have to organize all of these in your bookmarks bar. At Simplib we are trying to solve a huge problem here with websites so that people can easily save and share the websites that they love but you know this already! 

With Pocket you can surf the web and save the interesting things that you find for later viewing. What I love about this website is that you don't have to use a browser to save items with Pocket and can access it from over 500 apps. They also offer email saving so that you can drag interesting things into your pipeline from there. 

Pocket was previously known as "read it later" and was originally just intended for desktop users. It was created by Nathan Weiner back in 2007 and has been funded with over 7.5 million dollars to date. Some of these investors include Google Ventures, Baseline Ventures and Founder Collective so it really did get a great amount of recognition for it's early success. 

To date the app now has over 11,000,000 users and more then 850,000,000 items have been saved on the app which is amazing. Some notable app integrations include Flipboard, Twitter and Zite but as mentioned previously there are over 500 apps that integrates Pocket. There has been a lot of buzz around this app and Time Magazine listed Pocket in the 50 best Android applications of 2013 which is no easy feat! 

From a user perspective it is really easy to sign up and get started. Their user experience is delightful and there is no time wasted with long sign up forms and burdensome interfaces. What I love is their bookmarklet which makes saving extremely easy! At Simplib we love bookmarklets and our users take advantage of this function to save interesting websites for future reference. 

You should definitely check it out on Simplib here! 

There are so many different incubators and accelerators out there now. It really is a booming market. If you have a great idea these days you can turn up to a venue on a Friday evening and have a fully functional prototype and a team within 3 days! How on earth does this happen? It is fantastic to see these different schemes and events taking place around the world. If you want to fast track an idea and build a team quickly you can sign up to a hackathon like BeMyApp and build amazing products with amazing people. The Simplib team actually won the BeMyApp NFC Hackathon last year which was fantastic. They collaborated with some awesome people to create a NFC optimised mobile app that helps people discover interesting things in the city around them. 

We are also seeing more incubators and accelerators popping up now which is exciting. An accelerator is an intensive program where start-ups can develop their products and receive advice, funding and skilled support from their hosts. Accelerators in the USA like Ycombinator and Techstars have launched some amazing platforms like Reddit, Hipmunk and Sendgrid. For a start-up going into this scheme it would usually involve giving the accelerator between 5-10% equity of their company in return for some cash (usually 10-50k) and a kickass launch platform. Timewise these schemes usually last around 2-3 months and it is amazing what start-ups can achieve in this time. 

So going back to hackathons we can see that products can be formed in an incredibly short time. Our site of the day is going to Startup Weekend because they have created a 54 hour event that has now gone global! Developers, designers, marketers, product managers and enthusiasts can get together and collaborate with the aim of getting a start-up launched by the end of the weekend. 

Startup Weekend is powered by Google for entrepreneurs which gives it a really nice competitive edge over other events. It is very interesting to see how many events they have across the world and if there isn't one close to you then you can run your own event! It is a very straightforward process and with the right team and commitment the Startup Weekend guys will help you to host your event and stimulate entrepreneurial growth in your area. It is cool to see large companies sponsoring this company such as Coca Cola and Amazon and I believe that large companies are taking more of an interest in small start-ups now so that they can acquire young talent.

It is fascinating to see that over 36% of Startup Weekend startups are still going after 3 months and there is a huge network of over 45,000 Startup Weekend alumni around the world. Startup Weekend was founded by Andrew Hyde in 2007 and it has grown massively since then and brought thousands of ideas to life. We need to see more of this in the world and Simplib has greatly benefited from events and schemes like this. It is amazing to get into a room and meet new people who are hungry for success and willing to take the risks to get there.

There is nothing more simple than turning up to a venue on a Friday with an idea and then leaving with a start-up team + prototype. It gets the "Simple" and "Useful" badges from me on Simplib! Check it out here! 

Valentine’s day is coming. Let’s talk about love!

Valentine’s day is a cheesy and also commercial day. It is however, impossible to ignore it.

Even if you say “I don’t care about valentine’s day because I love you every day" I can guarantee that someone will be disappointed! 

The classic 'flowers/card/restaurants' is very cliché. You don’t want to act like everybody and book a romantic restaurant crowded with other couples holding hands and drinking champagne…

What if you try something original? Something “home made”?

Good news, we have selected some cool websites that could help you to do the following on your special night : 

1) Plan a romantic night :  

Cook dinner at home!

On Cookangels choose and order recipes. You will receive an “eat bag” with all the ingredients that you need.

Make delicious and aphrodisiac cocktails. 

The bar is an awesome website with lots of cocktails recipes that you can filter by spirits, occasions, ingredients and keywords! 

Choose a romantic playlist. 

The evening can’t be perfect without good music. On 8tracks you can find cool playlists according to your mood: romantic, sexy, love, chill … Make your move ;)

2) Find the perfect gift

Buy something cute.

Notonthehighstreet is a website where you can find original gifts through many categories including price, who the gift is for, occasion…  

All your texts on paper.

Txto.io is the most romantic gift ever! It showcases all of the texts you havesent to each other and includes some cool analytics like "most common words". 

Do it yourself! 

No need to spend a lot to make your love happy. Remember when you were a kid, you made necklaces out of pasta for your mum! Wikihow will help you make anything. 

3) Single ?

Valentine’s day can be horrible for single people. Everyone talks about love which makes you feel alone. Forget about it, being single is awesome, you can do whatever you want!

Find someone near you with your smartphone!

Tinder is the hot app of these days. Don’t know it yet? Tinder finds out who likes you nearby and connects you with them if you’re also interested. It’s the new way to meet people around you. 

  Go to an event to meet people like you! Meetup is a platform that gathers communities sharing the same interests. Every meetup often organizes events for it's members to connect.   

Organize a party with your single friends.

Wepopp is a simple tool that will help you plan parties, holidays and events with your friends! 

Here at Simplib we cannot emphasise enough how many amazing websites there are out there. The only real problem with this is that there are many terrible websites out there too and it can be extremely difficult to sift through all the rubbish. There are so many industries that the internet caters for and we like to break things down so that we can share snippets of every industry with you all. We have talked a lot about Fashion, Music and Travel because those industries are growing exponentially with the internet but what about other industries? 

Today I want to talk about DIY and how a cool start-up in Cyprus has decided to make their mark on the tech world. Firstly lets talk about DIY. For those of you who are not familiar with the term it stands for "Do It Yourself". Ever had to fix a broken door? Ever had to replace a table leg? Ever had to construct a fortress to keep zombies away? Well we all have to do this at some point in our lives and it can be super difficult as well as extremely dangerous! I once worked on a building site for a month and inhaled a lot of fibreglass which really damaged my chest for a long time. I had no idea what I was doing and could have done with some good advice. 

So what about an online platform that helps you to find the right tools and points you in the right direction? Luckily for us Diyful have created just that. This early stage start-up shows a huge amount of promise and recently won the first prize at Startup Weekend Cyprus. 

Using their platform you will be able to find the right materials for a job, accurately calculate the quantities needed and also get suggestions for the most suitable tools. Using a simple drag-and-drop feature you can move materials and tools around to create your virtual product and then start to find the best suppliers around you. Diyful make sure that you find the cheapest deal in your area so that you can save cash, time and effort. 

Diyful was founded by Antonis Poupazis, Christophoros Tzirtzipis and Charis J Anderson last year and you can check out his Simplib profile here. He has plans to change the way that people approach DIY so that everybody gets the cheapest, easiest and safest DIY experience possible. 

You should definitely check out their website on Simplib and sign up for their launch. It is interesting to see a tech start-up that is offering such a practical service that everyone in the world can benefit from. It gets the "useful" badge from me on Simplib but others on the network have given it "Simple". What do you think? Check it out here! 

Everybody these days wants to create a successful tech start-up. We are living in an internet golden age right now where people are making billions of dollars and changing the way that the entire world operates. Lets use a generic example. Facebook is currently valued at $150 billion! 20 years ago it would have been impossible but with the resources available to us now the sky really is the limit. 

It certainly isn't easy to succeed with a start-up and I am sure that you are aware of the fact that 9/10 start-ups fail statistically. If you are going to venture into the world of tech then one thing is certain, you need to understand code. I don't mean that you need to be able to build the quake 3 engine from scratch but you definitely need to understand the basics. Why is this? For a start it would be incredibly foolish to run a tech start-up if you don't even know how it is built and why you have chosen a particular language. 

Codecademy was founded in 2011 by Zach Sims and Ryan Bubinski and they successfully raised more than 12.5 million dollars in series A+B funding. In 2012 they had half a million users take a course on their platform and they have seen a steady increase in usage which has spurred the development of new features and products as time goes on.

You really don't need a huge amount of expertise but getting to grips with simple languages (like html and CSS) can help you understand your product specifications and get a better idea of how to build it. 

Our site of the day is going to codecademy for one big reason. These guys are teaching the world to code for free! It is a fantastic website that beginners and pros can use to practice their coding skills and interact with other members of the coding community. What I personally love about this website is that you are instantly thrown into your first challenge on the homepage. By this I mean that the page has a step-by-step coding task which draws you into a sign-up. It is beautifully built and you don't need programs like visual studio or Notepad++ to complete their coding tasks. It is all done inside the site! 

Codecademy offers different coding language courses which range from easier ones like Html, CSS and Javascipt to Python and Ruby. With these courses you can gradually built up your coding expertise by completing tasks and short tests which then earns you a reward badge. Their completion badges are really cool and similar to our Simplib badges! Once you have completed a course you can share your achievement with your network via social media so that everyone can see it. 

So instead of hiring a developer and not understanding what he is telling you why not spend a bit of timing understanding coding in more detail? Codecademy is constantly evolving and bringing out new courses all the time. You can now create web apps on their platform and even play around with APIs which is awesome. It is starting to feel like an all in one coding solution for some people so you should definitely check it out on Simplib here! 

March 2013 was a very difficult time for Europe. Banks closed down in Cyprus for almost 2 weeks straight and people lost their livelihoods. Companies started to shut down and it really was a terrible time for people living in Cyprus. For start-ups this was an even bigger kick in the teeth because there was literally nowhere to go and no cash available.

However this is not a sad story. Amongst the chaos in Cyprus a small team decided to give the economy their middle finger and got to work finding a solution. Hector Kolonas, a young entrepreneur and online marketing consultant found that there were empty desks everywhere and that start-ups could be using these spaces to push an economic recovery. Hector and his team got to work and started getting entrepreneurs and freelancers into working spaces with their new company Desk&Co. 

Desk&Co started off as a simple 3 page website but saw explosive growth. They have not only conquered Cyprus but have actually gone international as part of their evolution as a company. They are currently working with some of the best office spaces in the UK, France, Poland and Greece which has been tremendously successful so far. What is awesome is that the company is still in it's infancy and is looking to branch out into other countries. If you can't find somewhere close to you then let them know! They have a button on the top bar which says "I don't see my city". Click on it and they will personally get you into the best office space in your area. 

Not only are these guys sourcing space but they are also launching an exclusive network that connects start-ups and freelancers to other people in their space. This would be an invaluable community to be part of and shows a lot of potential. 

You don't have to be a freelancer or an entrepreneur to get involved because you can also offer up your space on their platform and start filling your empty seats. It is free to register and list your spaces and Desk&Co then take a fee for successful placements. It is a company that initially launched to save an island in crisis but it has now gone worldwide. To become part of this movement check it out on Simplib here! 

I have written articles in the past about the struggles that all entrepreneurs come across on their journey and it is interesting to see how much we all share in common. I can safely say that fundraising is a pain in the backside for anyone regardless of how good their proposition is. It takes time, it is often costly and distracts teams from concentrating on building a great product. A lot of tech start-ups these days can only achieve profitability through long term investments and a solid growth strategy which can be perceived as big risk to investors. Thanks to the economic downturn in 2009 bank lending is a dream so equity based investments are the only option for most budding entrepreneurs.

If you were seeking investment ten years ago then you would most likely have had to pitch to a group of angels or a VC. This is a great route to go down if you have the time to make these connections but it can sometimes feel like jumping through hoops. What if there was a way to get your community to invest in you? 

Crowdfunding is a recent phenomenon and has led to the creation of lots of fantastic fundraising platforms on the web. Take a look at Kickstarter for example. People can pitch an idea to the world and raise funding from their target audience in a matter of weeks (and in some cases hours). It gives founders a chance to express themselves much more casually and build an invaluable relationship with their early adopters and investors. 

Our site of the day is going to Crowdcube who are based in Exeter, UK. It is a platform for UK entrepreneurs to raise business finance via equity Crowdfunding and has had a great deal of success. They have successfully raise more than £17,000,000 through their platform and have even raised funding through their own platform which is awesome. There are around 60,000 investors registered on the site which is an incredible number when you think about it. Most start-ups have trouble finding one investor so think about the possibilities of pitching to 60,000 in one go! 

It's still a young company so it is remarkable that they have successfully funded 92 companies. Crowdcube is FSA regulated for your own piece of mind and investors can also benefit from up to 50% tax relief on their investments through SEIS. I like the fact that they explicitly state the risk of investing on the site too. The site has a very friendly feel about it but doesn't shove it's proposition down your throat. 

If you are an investor or a start-up it is essential that you check this site out. Even if you don't fall under the above it is really interesting to check out the campaigns! It gets the useful badge from me on Simplib! Check it out here! 

If you work in a start-up or run your own then you will know first-hand that hours can be long and very hard. It is one of the challenges that you will have to overcome in order to get noticed whilst bootstrapping your company on a limited budget. I believe that it is worth every laborious second. However, I don't mean to offend other lines of work because we are all dependent on a vast array of industries in order to live our day-to-day lives. Running your own business isn't for everyone and hey, 9/10 start-ups fail so statistically I could be pretty screwed. 

At the end of a busy week we all share one thing in common. We are bloody tired. This will vary hugely but I think it's fair to say that we all enjoy relaxing after work. 

Luckily for you Londoners DeskBeers are now offering a wicked service that delivers craft beers to your office every Friday. The beers are sourced from local London breweries and are delivered right to your door. What I personally like about DeskBeers is that they don't bring big-name branded stuff but actually offer proper beers, ales, stouts, lagers, bitters and much more. You can discover new beers this way and support your local economy which is very important in this day and age. 

"how much?" will be the first thing to come out of your mouth. It was for me. Well picture it this way. Taking 5 employees out for a beer after work will probably cost you between £3.50 - £5 depending on where you are in London. I have personally paid £5 for a can of Budweiser which is pretty terrible when you think about it. DeskBeers offer multiples of 12 bottles at £2.50 + VAT per bottle. That really isn't bad at all! This is a better deal than you will find in most venues. 

The process that they advertise on their website is dead simple: 

You & your team do awesome stuff during the week (like always).

DeskBeers drop by at some point Friday afternoon with the week’s pick.

You call it a week & sip back on some serious beer. You did good.

DeskBeers get the Simplib site of the day because it offers a great service and simplifies the process of grabbing a beer with your colleagues. DeskBeers lets companies reward their employees with beer and Simplib rewards websites with badges and quality rankings. We are not so different! Check out the website here! 

If you have a great idea for a website but you don't have the skills to build it yet how can you start to build up a pre-launch buzz? This is a problem that lots of early companies face when developing their products. Whilst developing a website you are constantly thinking about how to attract early adopters and build up a following without having a product. This can get frustrating because you don't want to launch and THEN start to look for users if you can help it. It is always a great idea to have people waiting for your product so that you get a load of sign ups the second you launch. This builds traction immediately and makes your product seem credible to investors, future users and the press. 

Launchrock provides users with a "launching soon" standalone page where companies can acquire, engage and grow their audiences. I actually first came across Simplib.com when it was still on a Launchrock page so I can personally vouch for the site. It doesn't matter if you are a small-time website or a large-scale web app you can still use Launchrock to maintain a credible presence online. It is all about pre-launch marketing so that you can get the most out of your "downtime" whilst concentrating on building a fantastic product. 

Setting up a Launchrock page is really simple and straightforward. Once you have made a free account you can either take a Launchrock url or use your own. This can be achieved very easily if you have access to your domain DNS settings. Using the html,css and javascript editor it is dead easy to customize your landing page and tie it in with your branding. 

Another great feature with Launchrock is their analytics function. You can get a complete breakdown of your page visitors and start to understand your audience without having to implement Google Analytics manually. With their "Connect" feature you can set an auto-responder email for new sign-ups with something like Mailchimp. This really does create an all in one solution for launch pages and they boast over 8,000,000 signups on their platform.

So rather than build a custom page manually check out Launchrock and find out how you can concentrate on building a kick-ass product whilst leaving the pre-launch to them. It gets the "useful" badge from me on Simplib. What do you think it deserves?

Social media management can get messy. If you are using Social Media to promote a brand, product or service then you will most likely be on at least 3 networks. Having personally worked on Social Media campaigns for over 45 companies I can tell you that it is a nightmare trying to keep Facebook. Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest, Google+ and LinkedIn updated. Not only do you have to separately log-in to each profile but you also have to monitor messages and posts from your community. 

Hootsuite was created by Ryan Holmes in 2008 and it is basically a Social Media management system for brands. What started as a small tech start-up now boasts over 8 million users and a workforce of over 300 employees. Thanks to it's freemium model Hootsuite has attracted users from over 175 countries and continues to grow. I use it a lot especially for brands that only have 3-4 social networks. With Hootsuite this is free should definitely be taken advantage of. If you really find yourself needing additional services and extra networks then Hootsuite also offer a nicely tiered subscription service (which is very affordable).

The website itself is very powerful and only takes a couple of minutes to sign up. You don't even have to verify your email to get started so it really is dead simple. There is a clear tutorial for newbies once you have logged in and from there you can start to add your networks. Once you have your networks added you can start to monitor the boards (similar to tweetdeck) and get a complete overview of everything going on in your social media empire. To post an update to all of your networks at the same time all you have to do is click on the top left bar and toggle the networks that you want to include. 

It gets the "simple" and "useful" badges from me on Simplib because it saves a huge amount of time for brands around the world. By automating posts with the "scheduling" feature users don't even have to hang around! The choice is yours. You can either update your networks manually or do it all from one place in 1/5 of the time. Check it out on Simplib here! 

Since the financial crisis of 2009 we have seen a sporadic and worrying amount of redundancies/cuts across a huge range of industries. Sure, we hit our inflation target this year in the UK and some people are hopeful of growth but I remain sceptical. It's awfully depressing to see skilled people out of work and job centres are being swarmed by job hunters. When you are hit with a redundancy it must be tough. I got laid off once which really hit my bank balance as I was given the news when I had just returned from an expensive holiday. What next? I had some design and marketing skills and really needed a quick income so I looked into freelancing.

Two years later I am proud to say that I am funding my entire university degree, house rent and the odd holiday through freelancing work. How did I get to this stage? 

Peopleperhour.com - This site rocks guys. What first attracted me to the site was the fact that it wasn't saturated with cut-throat sellers trying to make a quick buck. It is awfully difficult to start out as a freelancer if you don't have a few good clients under your belt but on Peopleperhour I used 3 of my 12 monthly free credits to pitch for projects and was surprised to win 2 of them! After some fantastic reviews I found it a lot easier to carve out a niche for myself on the site and have now worked for over 44 clients on PPH. I run a tech start-up which has also benefited greatly from PPH thanks to my ongoing relationships with several clients and it has opened so many doors for me.

So lets talk about the site itself. It's always have a slick design. The user interface is really clean and presented in a way that makes it really easy to find what you are looking for. If you are a seller then it only takes a few minutes to get your profile up and running and buyers are presented with dead simple search page where you can filter freelancers by location, rating, skillset etc. They have recently changed their rating feature to something called "Cert" which had a few bugs at first but it seems pretty solid now and has encouraged sellers to offer a more consistent level of service. 

I think that times of hardship have a positive side to them. When people are out of luck they start to think outside of the box and if someone makes you redundant think about what skills you can offer as a freelancer. It truly is a beautiful thing when people start up from scratch and create an income out of thin air. Peopleperhour was founded by Xenios Thrasyvoulou and Simos Kitiris in 2007 and the site now has more than 450,000 registered users. It is growing quickly and I am receiving more and more requests from clients to the point that I am now speaking to at least 3 new clients every single day. 

It deserves the Simplib site of the day and I would seriously recommend it! check it out here! 

There is a HUGE buzz around Snapchat at the moment. For the dinosaurs out there Snapchat is a photo messaging app that was created by Evan Spiegel and Robert Murphy in September 2011. Using the app users can take photos, videos and also create doodles and add captions. What really sets this app apart from similar products like Whatsapp, BBM and Viber is that content is deleted after a pre-set timer. This means that posts are not saved which emphasises the short and snappy experience that Snapchat is trying to create for their users. 

So why are people using it? For a start it's very quick. Instead of having to upload a photo to Facebook with a caption you can blast out a picture to your Snapchat friends without having to worry about quality. It is a casual experience where people can exchange short snippets of their lives and create a more dynamic and interesting conversation. 

Young people are now using Snapchat more and more as a substitute for traditional communication methods such as SMS and Facebook messaging. Why is this? Is it more convenient? Maybe it is just another trend and change of consumer demand. Whatever it is Snapchat have quickly established themselves as a big player in the Social Networking world. You never know, Facebook could become the next Myspace. In fact, Facebook's own app "Poke" was blown out of the water by Snapchat despite Facebook's wealth of resources. People were just not attracted to Facebook's almost identical proposition which certainly worried the tech Giant. 

Snapchat has grown exponentially since their launch in 2011 and they currently host over 400 million snaps per day which is huge! They have yet to make a dollar in revenue though despite their huge user base. Snapchat raised 13.5 million dollars through Benchmark Capital as part of their series A round and the company has recently been valued at over 850 million dollars. What I find staggering is that Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel turned down a turned down a 3 billion dollar bid from Facebook in November 2013. This is crazy! To further emphasise his point he then turned down a 4 billion dollar offer from Google not long after. For something that has made no money yet 4 billions dollars is NOT a bad deal but he seems to know something that we don't. 

It's a fun app to use and really handy if you want to pull a stupid face whilst you are sat on the bus. I have no idea how they are going to earn enough revenue to justify their valuation but for the time being their hype alone has made them extremely successful. Snapchat gets the "funny" badge from me on Simplib today and the other users on Simplib seem to think the same! Check it out here!

There are countless uses for the internet. We can use it to talk to friends, book a holiday, buy a car, sell a service and so much more. Hell, you can even buy a WIFE on the internet which isn't recommended but there seems to be a market for that.. Anyway it seems that we often think of the internet as a marketing tool that can stimulate productivity, profit and reach.

We sometimes forget that we sometimes like to share things for the love of sharing them. Photographers upload their shots for their fans to admire and musicians upload their music for people to enjoy it not just buy it. I think that one of the key benefits of the internet is the ability to express yourself in so many different ways. There are a huge amount of ways that we can do this that don't just involve blasting out long Facebook statuses or relentless tweets. 

I wrote an article for you all in the past about my hatred for the "like" culture that has killed expression and conversation on Facebook. When you want to express yourself you should do it in a way that makes you different and not just a sheep. Clicking on "like" doesn't express your thoughts and feelings with the community and if anything, comes across as lazy. For more of this rant click here for the full article. 

So back to my main point. To express yourself with more than words why not think of ways to make your words stand out? Websites like Wordle offer a quirky little service that transforms a bunch of words into a much more dynamic and aesthetically pleasing alternative. 

As you can see here I have created a nice collage of the things that we are passionate about at Simplib. It literally took me 2 minutes to type it in on the website and then generate this. Sure, it's simple but aren't the best things simple? 

As our site of the day Wordle is a really straightforward tool that has one purpose: To make words look nicer. It makes a nice change to start displaying text in different ways and by doing this you can also highlight more important words by making them larger or more brightly coloured. 

So next time you are really trying to explain how happy you are think about doing it in a way that makes it interesting for your audience. For example I have had a great product launch for my company and want to showcase the event. Instead of writing a press release put a video in there. In addition to the video make sure that your content is dynamically presented and that you keep everything visually stimulating. Wordly is a great way to help that and I hope you enjoy playing with it! It gets the "funny" badge from me on Simplib and you can check it out here!