Stephanie Liu

Start Planning Valentine’s Day in Six Steps

date_night_planner

Nervous about planning Valentine’s Day this year? Don’t worry. You can plan your romantic evening in six easy steps with Springpad’s Date Night Planner.

To get started, simply enter the date and city of where you’d like to have your date. Springpad will then present the following five categories to help you organize your date:

1. Go Out to Eat.
Type in what type of food you’d like to have at dinner and Springpad will locate nearby restaurants. Springpad even displays the restaurant’s ratings and reviews made by Yelp members.  Once you’ve decided which restaurant you’d like to dine at, simply click the “Add to Date” button. If you’re lucky, the restaurant you choose will use OpenTable and you can easily make your dinner reservations online at no extra cost. If they don’t, not a problem. Springpad also provides the number and address of the restaurant so you can contact them.

2. Dine In.
If you’re looking forward to showing off your culinary skills or need help finding recipes, Springpad can help you there as well. You can create a menu or choose from Springpad’s recipe ideas.

3. See a Show or Concert.
After dinner, check out what shows or concerts are nearby.

4. See a Movie.
Find a movie, check out movie reviews, listings, show times and buy tickets online.

5. Give a Gift.
Springpad also helps you find a gift online and as a bonus, you can store the tracking code or confirmation number in your planner.

6. Do Something Else.
And last but not least, if you want to do something more creative than dinner and a movie, you can create a new activity and store the address to save the details in your plans.

Springpad Date PlannerWhether you’re planning a romantic evening for Valentine’s Day or a get together with your friend, Springpad’s Date Night Planner makes planning a lot easier. However, there is one caveat — since the Date Night Planner is relatively new, some show times for movies don’t show up. If that happens to you, don’t forget there’s always MovieTickets.com. 😉

Have a great Valentine’s Day!

(Video Credit: Springpad)

Stephanie Liu

Misfortune at Ma.gnolia

Today I logged onto Ma.gnolia to bookmark websites for my assignment that I could later share with my classmates only to find that the service was no longer available. It turned out that Ma.gnolia was going through a nightmare due to “data corruption and loss.”

The founder of Ma.gnolia, Larry Halff, posted this note on the homepage:

Dear Ma.gnolia Community Member or Visitor,

Early on the West-coast morning of Friday, January 30th, Ma.gnolia experienced every web service’s worst nightmare: data corruption and loss. For Ma.gnolia, this means that the service is offline and members’ bookmarks are unavailable, both through the website itself and the API. As I evaluate recovery options, I can’t provide a certain timeline or prognosis as to to when or to what degree Ma.gnolia or your bookmarks will return; only that this process will take days, not hours.

I will of course keep you appraised here and in our Twitter account.

Most importantly, I apologize to all of you who have made Ma.gnolia a home for your bookmarks and community. I know that many of you rely on Ma.gnolia in your day to day work and play to safely host you bookmarks, keeping them available around the clock, and that this is a difficult disruption.

Sincerely,
Larry

As a Ma.gnolia member, I’m at a loss. Despite the fact that I have a Del.icious account,  Ma.gnolia was always my go to social bookmarking site.

I hope they figure out what went wrong and are able to come back online.

In the meantime, what social bookmarking site do you recommend?

February 17, 2009 Update
The database file recovery has been unsuccessful; as a result, members should use the the public bookmark recovery tools for recovering their bookmark collections that were once stored on the Ma.gnolia database. For more updates, go to Ma.gnolia.com.

Stephanie Liu

Splitweet Is Perfect For Twitter Power Users

Earlier this year, I wrote about Matt, a web application built by the Carsonified team, to solve the problem of posting to multiple Twitter accounts. Matt was useful in that I didn’t have to log into each of my accounts separately. However, if I wanted to view tweets from individuals I was following via both accounts, I would still have to log into each account individually. The same rule applies if I wanted to see who replied to my tweets.

Wouldn’t it be great if you could view all of your friend’s tweets and replies on multiple accounts on just one application?

Will was thinking the same thing as well and asked me earlier this year…

“Out of all the twitter clients I’ve been browsing through, a lot of the same features of being able to post to multiple places at once for example. Nothing that I’ve seen so far does this in combination with being able to see the tweets from multiple accounts; have you come across anything like this yet?”

At the time, I didn’t know of any application that did just that until now. Thanks to Problogger’s tweet this afternoon, I found out about Splitweet. It’s the perfect multi-account Twitter management and brand monitor for Twitter power users.

All your accounts, one place.

All you have to do is create an account then add your Twitter accounts. In a matter of seconds you’ll start to see tweets from the people that you’re following.

Follow your contacts’ tweets easily.

Each tweet is color coded to reflect which account you’re following them under.

Monitorize your brand & reply.

You can even monitor your brand with Splitweet. Simply enter the brand name on your profile settings and hit save, and you’ll start to see mentions of your brand pop up and you can reply directly from the UI.

Overall, it’s a great application for individuals that manage multiple accounts and want more features. It’d be even better if it tracked how many people clicked on a link you twittered like Tweetburner. I wonder how long that will take to develop.

In the meantime, have fun Twittering and don’t forget to add me as a friend if you haven’t done so already.

Stephanie Liu

Avoiding a Business Card Hiccup

Last week I met up with my old colleagues at a Happy Hour 2.0 in La Jolla. It was the perfect opportunity to catch up with them since I recently started a new job and to mingle with other marketers, developers, and other web people. The only drawback was that I didn’t have my new business cards or any moo cards to hand out. Fortunately, HeyStephanie.com was easy for my new friends to remember and I was able to get by with giving my email address.

Meanwhile, I still don’t have any new business cards so in the interim, I had to find a solution to my business card dilemma. Luckily, I stumbled across MyDropcard.com which lets you easily share your contact info with your phone—for free!

Once you’ve registered and entered all of your contact information at the site, you’re good to go. As if that wasn’t cool enough, you can create two separate profiles; one for business and the other for personal contacts.

When you meet someone new, simply text “drop” and their email address to “41411” and Dropcard will deliver your contact info directly to their email. You can even add your social network profiles on your dropcard (i.e. LinkedIn) or your blog.

Dropcard also has convenient text messaging shortcuts so you don’t have to waste so much time texting. For example, you can replace the “@” symbol when typing your friend’s email address with a space and Dropcard will know what you mean. And if your friend’s email is on Gmail, even better! Text “drop” and their email address without “@gmail.com” and you’re done. For more ways to cut your text time, check out more Dropcard shortcuts here.

Not only is this handy, it sure beats carrying 100+ business cards to hand out at a conference. On top of that, soon they’ll be offering users more features (i.e. personal logo, attachments, statistics, etc.) for $4.99 a month. That might be helpful for the hardcore networkers.

So what about you? Is there a different service that you use to send contact info to colleagues through your phone? What would you do in this type of situation?

Stephanie Liu

Survive an Email Avalanche

Companies encourage their hard working employees to reap the benefits of work-life balance, to go on vacation, and take a break from the office every now and then to recharge.

For some of us, getting out of the office isn’t difficult but for the 15% of workers that forfeited their vacation days last year— it is. What makes leaving the office so difficult? One answer that comes to mind is the avalanche of emails that you receive when you get back to the office. Opening your Outlook to find 50+ or even 100+ unread emails waiting for your response can be overwhelming.

Fortunately there’s HitMeLater.com, a cool website created by Philip Kaplan, that lets you hit the snooze button on your emails. Simply forward an email from your inbox to 24@hitmelater.com and they’ll resend the email to you 24 hours later.

Even more helpful, you can swap out the number 24 to any other number or day. For example, if I want an email to be sent back to me two hours later, I just forward the email to 2@hitmelater.com. How easy is that?

So the next time you feel like your drowning in a sea of emails, try HitMeLater to see if it lightens up your workload. I know I will.

(Photo Credit: Philip Kaplan)

Stephanie Liu

Brickfish has been SuperTagged

Special thanks to our friends at BatchBlue for creating BatchBook, an easy-to-use CRM software, that has literally saved us hours organizing our contacts and managing our communications with partners. Not only do they have a remarkable product, excellent customer service, but they have cool t-shirts too!

Brickfish has been supertagged

Your happy customers,

Ashley, Stephanie, and Rachel (aka R3K2)

Stephanie Liu

Why I Love Post-It Notes

Editor’s Note: I wanted to share with you the guest post I did for Maxie at IHateSoMuch for the 20SB Big Blog Swap. Maxie’s a blogoholic from Chicago and a featured blogger in Alltop’s Twenty Something. If you haven’t checked her out yet, please do – you won’t regret it.

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Ever since college, Post-It notes have been a must have in my arsenal of tools to stay organized. I could easily write myself a reminder and stick it to my monitor, mark important chapters for easy reference, and my favorite – write a quick love note to my husband and stick it to the door before he leaves for work.

Recently, I discovered Sheer Color Post-It notes which has literally taken my reading experience to the next level. My friend and I share marketing books with each other all the time but when I come across an important quote, I’m tempted to highlight it but can’t because it’s not my book. Now with sheer color post-it notes, I can highlight, circle, and make notes without getting reprimanded.

My dependence on

these sticky square pads isn’t rare. In fact, if you run a Google search on “how to use Post-It notes,” you’ll receive thousands of results including Leon Ho’s list of Twenty Uses for a Post-It Note. How do you use your Post-It notes?

What I love most about Post-It notes is that they can be used for other activities besides reminders, planning, and brainstorming. To prove my point, you can check out the entries in the “Post-it® Notes: One Million Uses & Counting…” contest on YouTube.

Here’s my favorite entry:

(Video Credit: Emaz88)


Stephanie Liu

BatchBook: Answer to my Blues

Organizing my emails in Outlook is simple. Every client has a separate folder and I use the Outlook wizard to create rules so important emails don’t get caught in a spam filter or get neglected. This helps to keep my inbox free from clutter and more manageable.

What isn’t simple, is trying to organize my contacts. In fact, I’ve been searching for a contact management software that would enable me to do these three things:

  1. Utilize tags to organize contacts
  2. Create targeted email lists
  3. Track conversations easily

Friends and colleagues suggested that I create an excel database or create groups in my Gmail account. Unfortunately, both suggestions wouldn’t allow me to use tags to group contacts together. Plus, tracking conversations in excel is tedious.

Fortunately, I came across Chris Brogan’s post on BatchBook.com and was floored with his review. The BatchBook features met all of my needs. I could organize contacts with tags, generate instant email lists, and track conversations instantly. My favorite features were the ability to add photos and create custom contact fields. Their plans were affordable too. In fact, I signed up for the Baby Blue account to test the waters. If I decide that I need to increase the amount of storage, users, contacts, or SuperTags – I can always upgrade later.

In the end, BatchBook was the solution to my problem. If you’re looking for a robust contact management application, I suggest you take a look at BatchBook. Below is a full breakout of features that they have to offer.

(Photo Credit: BatchBlue.com)

Stephanie Liu

Work Smarter with Web 2.0 Tools

I was excited when I saw the question above on LinkedIn because I’m always interested to find out what other people are using to make their life easier at work. I’m glad I checked in on this otherwise I wouldn’t have found out about JingProject.com.

Jing allows you to capture any image on your desktop (includes adding text and arrows) and gives you the option of creating videos. Jing then gives you a link that you can share with your co-workers so they can see exactly what you see.

Now you can avoid lengthy and drawn out text tutorials with Jing. This is absolutely what I needed in the office.

Here’s a video about Jing:


So what about you? What Web 2.0 tools do you find most useful for businesses?

(Photo Credit: JasterArts)

Stephanie Liu

Highlighters Are Now Digital

“i-Lighter is a cool way to highlight, grab, and save text and graphics from virtually any Web site and store it for future use.” – PC WORLD

The majority of my reading material is online and if you’re like me, the materials usually covered are articles, blogs, forums, reviews, RSS feeds and more. With all this information, I was notorious for printing pages and depleting the printer ink at home.

Now I can help the environment and my budget with i-Lighter. It’s useful and it’s free. I don’t have to print articles to highlight and I don’t waste any ink. I love it because i-Lighter gets over two hurdles with one leap. I can highlight text, tables, and images from any web page, have it organized in my account by subject, and share it with my colleagues.

In fact, earlier this month they released twitterlights. If you come across an interesting article online, use the i-Lighter to right-click and twitter it to your friends. The URL of the web page will automatically be sent as a TinyURL and your i-Light will be stored in your i-Lighter account for you to organize later.

See how i-Lighter works: