Schools have their own assortment of operating expenditures. However, as seen in this EdSource analysis, student programs are only barely accounted for, and students must raise their own funds for activities such as homecoming, prom, and graduation. Additionally, programs such as music and arts are being neglected, simply because of lack of funding. As seen in this article on The Notebook, “most schools [in Philadelphia's public school system] cannot afford both a music and an art teacher”.  With their budget cuts, schools are forced to choose subjects such as math and science over performing arts.  Schools are still being held accountable for high student progress despite their lack of funding for teachers and the best learning environment.

Are these programs important to students? On a recent visit to a local high school, we learned that students are very aware and affected by this problem. The school newspaper has a front-page article about students who are unhappy over the possible cuts to their music programs because of lack of funding. Sitting in on a Student Council meeting, we hear student council representatives brainstorming methods to raise money for their class activities such as prom. A big take-away from their meeting, we see that despite all the funding problems, the students are passionate about their class activities and very optimistic about exploring other methods of fundraising. The students organize activities such as car washes, movie nights, and local restaurant-sponsored nights to generate the money they need for their student activities.

In an effort to help schools and other community groups in their fundraising efforts, YOUffiliate, working together with local schools and students, has developed a fundraising platform to help student groups earn money. We see first-hand that most of the current fundraising events do not take advantage of the Internet! A fact is that a majority of these students are on social media sites, surfing the Internet daily, and making purchases ONLINE! A study by research firm Harris Interactive has shown that 34% of young consumers are getting ideas for what to buy from social media sites.  In addition, people are buying online in growing numbers. Just in the first quarter of 2010, e-commerce sales grew 14.3%, according to an Internet Retailer study. By leveraging our relationships with big advertisers, school groups and community organizations promote their own page of online deals and products from large advertisers including Walmart, Orbitz, and Apple. They can then promote their own page of exclusive offers to their friends, family, parents, and anyone else in their network. Any purchase made from these advertisers will result in a portion of the sale given to the school organization.

This program is perfect for any group looking for ways to expand their fundraising efforts. For example, any school groups (senior class, junior class, etc. ) sports clubs, teams (baseball team, basketball team), music groups (bands and orchestras), religious groups (church or temple fundraising), etc. are perfect candidates for this type of fundraising program. We are warmly inviting any school groups or community organizations to use our FREE fundraising platform (yes – NO cost!). For more information, demos, or to sign up, please contact us at http://www.youffiliate.com/contact_us. We hope to help make a difference in your fundraising, and keep alive the programs that our important to our community, schools, faculty, parents, and students.

YOUffiliate partnered with AJ Rafael, an increasingly popular singer/song-writer, who started his career by posting covers and originals on the Internet, to support Music Speaks, a charity movement AJ started in 2009 to spread Autism-awareness and encourage action to improve the conditions of the lives and families affected by Autism through the power of music. Proceeds from the concert are donated to the non-profit organization, Autism Speaks. Last year, Music Speaks raised over $8000.

We observed and participated in backstage preparations, rehearsals, prayers, and grabbed a snack with AJ and other popular independent artists. We chatted and learned about their motivations in being a part of Music Speaks, including many who traveled great distance to perform in the show.  We were inspired by the love and commitment these artists displayed. They are not only extremely passionate in their music, but also equally passionate in their desire to give back to the community.

This year, Music Speaks, hosted a talent competition, attracting musicians and dancers from all over the country, including Wisconsin, New York, and Illinois, to compete for a $1,000 price, in which $500 is donated to a charity chosen by the contestants. There were four guest celebrity judges, including recent American Idol contestants: Tori Kelly and Andrew Garcia, America’s Best Dance Crew’s Season 3 Winner, Quest Group member, Victor Kim, and popular YouTube artist, Cathy Nguyen.

There was an impressive lineup of performers including: singer/actress Taylor Parks from Hair Spray, Devotion, JR Aquino, LeeJay, Jeremy Passion, Michael Carreon, Jennifer Chung, and Paper Dolls, a dance group led by AJ Rafael’s sister, Jasmine Rafael. In the backstage, Jennifer told us, “this is the second time she is performing for Music Speaks, and [she] is inspired by AJ and what the concert is about”.

In addition to these artists, there were other TV celebrities; including actor, Michael Copon from One Tree Hill, Kevin Wu from the Amazing Race (also known as KevJumba on YouTube), YouTube celebrity Ryan Higa, and film producer, Philip Wang, from WongFu Productions, all took part in the night’s event as presenters.

AJ performed with his band and the MoVal Concert Chorale, while his mother directed her choir and performed for the audience. The night ended with dancer, Rocelyn (known as “Pomatophear” on YouTube), taking home the $1000 prize, wrapping up a meaningful event filled with music, entertainment, and true emotion.

YOUffiliate is proud to sponsor Music Speaks this year and is already excited about next year – to contribute to a cause that is greater than us, for a purpose that is more than just donating money. We want to be a part of Music Speaks, to remind ourselves to cherish lives with our loved ones, to celebrate lives with music, and to give back to our community when possible.

According to Wikipedia, “OpenID is an open, decentralized standard for authenticating users which can be used for access control, allowing users to log on to different services with the same digital identity where these services trust the authentication body.”

This technology has caught on in the past couple years with web applications as an alternative to creating application-specific login accounts and passwords. Some of the popular websites to offer similar OpenID implementations include MySpace, Google, Yahoo, and Twitter.

When designing the YOUffiliate login/authentication system, we toyed with the idea of implementing OpenID support, thus allowing our members to login with their Twitter, Facebook, etc. accounts. (In fact, our first implementation required Twitter logins, and our second implementation allowed optional use of Twitter logins). However, for a few reasons I will mention below, we finally decided against this OpenID login system for now, and developed our own login system. For now, this gives us the flexibility we need and better fits our overall business model. The following outlines some of our concerns and important considerations for and against using an OpenID system:

Pros for using an OpenID authentication system with YOUffiliate:

• Users are more likely to sign in to try an application when they can simply use an existing (Twitter, Facebook, etc.) account. They don’t need to sign up for another service and keep track of another password. (Speculation, only!)
• Once logged in (let’s say they are logged in via Twitter’s Oauth already), the YOUffiliate platform can already have access to the user’s Twitter API for posting Tweets. This eliminates an extra step of the user authenticating Twitter again. Same goes for other social applications.
• Logging in via an OpenID will potentially give us access to some of the user’s publicly available information – such as public Twitter profile, number of followers, Facebook public profile information, etc.

Cons for using an OpenID authentication system (Pros for using our own!):

• Reduces the complexity of allowing many different auth systems. We only need to keep track of 1 account for authentication – our own.
• OpenID’s rely on that third party being available. Even though these are big sites (Yahoo, Google, Twitter), they all experience unexpected down-time now and then. Being tied to a third party site for authentication is somewhat a liability in this sense.
• A more likely situation where being tied to a 3^rd party would be a problem is if we ever decided to stop working with a certain 3^rd party. Let’s say down the road we decide that we no longer want to integrate with Twitter. What happens now to all the users that are using Twitter Oauth to sign in to their YOUffiliate account?
• OpenID security weaknesses. Some people just get straight up confused when presented with a OpenID sign in box. Others are wary and think something fishy is going on when they are prompted for their Google password to access a 3^rd party site. Read more about OpenID’s security vulnerabilities with regard to phishing and TLS.
• Control over accounts. Using our own authentication system, we have full control over users, usernames, passwords, change of passwords, etc. Some may argue that this is a pro of using OpenID.
• Multiple users using one login. This was a pretty strong reason for us to implement our own authentication system. Our advertisers and affiliates are not always individuals. In many cases there are teams of people who need access to a single YOUffiliate account.Here’s an example: Lets say ABC Shoes is a YOUffiliate advertiser. Joe and Jane work together as administrators for ABC Shoe Company’s YOUffiliate advertiser account. When Joe signed up, he was prompted for his Google account and password, so not knowing any better, he signed up with joe@gmail.com. Now, when Jane wants to access ABC Shoe Company’s YOUffiliate account, she asks Joe for the login. Joe shudders – he either has to tell Jane his personal account info, or sign up for a new account.

Of course, every situation is different, and in fact, there are many cases where OpenID is a perfect solution to use. If security is extremely important for you (I haven’t yet seen a bank that supports OpenID), you may want to think twice before using OpenID. If you want an authentication system for your blog/personal website, OpenID is great! The important thing is to do your own research, analyze your own business model, and determine for yourself whether OpenID is the best choice for you.

A few years ago, Google stepped its foot into the document / word-processing arena with its own Google Docs. I’m not sure if this was necessarily the first, but it was the first that I had seen. The collaboration features of Google Docs are pretty good. I have used it extensively to do real-time collaboration – you can see the other editor’s changes in real-time! This feature is pretty cool and works well if you are only collaborating with another person. I don’t know how well it works when you have more than 2 editors. Another great feature of Google Docs is that it is already integrated into Gmail. This makes it a breeze to invite a Gmail user to be an editor. My only gripe with Google Docs is that, just like OpenOffice, it sometimes interprets MS Word .doc files a little differently than Microsoft products would. This makes it difficult to use Google Docs in a situation where the final product must look perfect. But, for a free product, it’s pretty amazing what Google Docs offers. I’m sure the Google team is working hard to improve the compatibility of their service with the Microsoft suite of products.

More recently, I have heard many good things about the collaboration tools in Box.net. According to their website, “Box not only lets you store files in a single location, it also makes it a snap to organize, share, and archive all your documents and media. Now it’s easy to keep all your documents relevant, up-to-date, and easily accessible from anywhere.” Besides tracking and versioning of single documents, Box.net offers the tracking of entire folders of files. This is very helpful for project collaboration, and Box.net’s tools are especially attractive from a project management prospective. For example, you can set up notifications so that you will be notified every time someone edits a file. You can also set access rights, to control which users can view and edit files. Unfortunately, I have not used Box.net myself, so I don’t know how well it opens Microsoft files. Lastly, an important consideration when choosing Box.net is the price! While Box.net has a free version, this version has very limited storage and features. Business accounts start at $15 per month per user.

Enter – Docs.com

Docs.com is the Microsoft FUSE project with Facebook integration, and was the main reason that I wanted to write this article! It is still in BETA, and although I have not used it much and already gotten many 404 ERRORS, I am pretty excited to see how it will develop. Right off the bat, because it is built off of Microsoft Office 2010, it should be fully compatible with all MS Office files! This is a huge head start, because of the dominance of Microsoft Office. In addition, the Facebook integration should allow effortless adoption by the new generation of Facebookers, (more than 400 million at the time of this article)!

It will definitely be interesting to see how Google Docs responds to Docs.com, and which service users prefer to use. With this new wave of “social collaboration”, is there still a need for expensive suits of products like MS Office? Or, is that fading out as well? I guess we’ll have to wait and see!

According to CNET, in about 2002, one of the first URL shorteners, TinyURL came about. At the time, I would guess that most people could not see the point in having a short URL. It’s not exactly common knowledge that email line-length is an actual specification by RFC 2822 or RFC 5322 that says “There are two limits that this standard places on the number of characters in a line. Each line of characters MUST be no more than 998 characters, and SHOULD be no more than 78 characters, excluding the CRLF.” (check out Dan’s Mail Format Site if you don’t believe me ). However, as the social web came about, and Internet users started using short messages such as Tweets and Facebook status updates, users quickly discovered that the 200 character URLs were just not working anymore. Twitter saw this, and hooked up with bit.ly as a URL shortener, and an array of different URL shortening services sprouted up.

Take a look at this article on CNET, that lists a number of the different options for URL shortening. With all these options available, what’s the difference between all of them, and what do should you look at when deciding which to use? Here at YOUffiliate, we are currently evaluating the best option to use for URL shortening. Here’s some of the considerations we are looking at to make our decision.

• Length of the URL – Because our ads must fit in a Twitter 140 character message, we need to ensure our links are as short as possible. Thus, URL length is extremely important to us. For example, URL shortener is.gd (http://is.gd) advertises itself as “The Shortest URLs Around”, and at 5 characters, it pretty much is as short as you can get… until you find j.mp (http://j.mp), and realize that you can save 1 additional character! Services such as MooURL (http://moourl.com) are not options for us, as the domain itself already chomps 10 characters of our 140 character limit.
• API Versatility – As YOUffiliate’s URL shortening happens automatically behind the scenes, API access for creating short URLs is important. Do some research on the API accessibility of your link shortener, if this is important to you.
• Statistics – Some link shortening services offer real-time tracking statistics. Be wary about using these statistics as fact. I’ve read many cases where the tracking numbers appear very skewed from the actual number of clicks actually received.
• Stability / Reliability – If you are running a service that relies on links being up at all times, you had better choose a link-shortening service that is reliable. Read the reviews before choosing, and don’t be the first big site to use a brand new link-shortening service…unless you really believe in them.
• Usage Terms of Service – Some URL shortening services such as Bit.ly (http://bit.ly) list in their fine print that “you may only use the Site for your own personal and non-commercial purposes”. Commercial usage for these sites may require an additional agreement, and some can be quite expensive. (bit.ly PRO Enterprise is $995 /month!)

Other options:

• White-labeled services – Check out bit.ly PRO, which offers “’end-to-end branding,’ which replaces the bit.ly domain with a custom domain name (like nyti.ms).” This may be more costly, but it is definitely an attractive option for those that need it and can afford it.
• Roll your own – How hard can link shortening really be?? If you’ve got the guts, go for it! Depending on what your needs are, and how short of a URL you really need, this may be a viable option for you. Unfortunately, domain names with short names (ie. 4-5 characters long) are extremely rare to come by now-days. If you have a reasonably short domain name, you can probably crank out your own link-shortener fairly easily!