Virgin is set to shake up the Big 4 banks with it’s new range of credit cards and high interest online savings account

Virgin Money, the financial services division of Sir Richard Branson’s Virgin group has recently launched a new Virgin credit card the goes by the name of Virgin Flyer Credit Card. As the name suggests, these new Virgin credit cards are ideal for anyone who does a significant amount of travelling because the rewards program is linked to the Virgin Blue loyalty program, offering a host of benefits including free flights, car hire and accommodation as well as significant discounts and offers. The reasonable rates are also nothing to scoff at.

The New Virgin Credit Card Takes Cheap Travel to a New Level

The new Virgin credit card allows customers to earn points through their generous rewards program which can then be redeemed for free flights on Virgin Blue and its international partners to more than four hundred global destinations. The offer includes a free one-way flight to certain destinations for anyone who has become and cardholder and uses one of the new Virgin credit cards before the 15th of October, 2010.

Additionally, the new Virgin credit card allows customers to earn points which can be redeemed for a free one-way ticket for a traveling companion when they fly on Virgin Blue. However, the number of tickets is limited to no more than four per year.

However, before you rush off to apply for a new Virgin credit card you must first evaluate your spending habits because if you end up charging everything to your credit card but not paying it off on time, you may end up paying more for those flights than if you were to purchase the tickets outright. This is especially true for expenses which you would not otherwise charge to your card. However, if you have the discipline to use your credit card wisely then the new Virgin credit card is an excellent choice, even if you aren’t a frequent traveler but would like to take advantage of the loyalty program in one way or another.

The New Virgin Credit Cards: Other Benefits

Besides the excellent flight benefits, cardholders are also entitled to many other advantages including being able to redeem their points for accommodation, car hire and other goods, which are vital for any traveler. Likewise, owners of the new Virgin credit card also receive travel accident insurance and concierge as well as customer support around the clock, which is invaluable if you travel across time zones.

The new Virgin credit card is perfect for anyone who has plans to travel, whether you travel frequently or are simply planning your family holiday this year. This way, even if you don’t travel often enough for the regular airline rewards programs to be of any use to you, you can still get some great travel advantages simply by using your new Virgin credit card.

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• Wave removes the conscious decision that previously you’d have to make when “creating” – removing the need to have to answer this question: “Should what I’m about to do be via a doc, email, chat?”. A wave is fluid in nature, and can evolve to achieve outcomes of 1 or all 3.
• Wave improves the productivity for Instant Messaging and E-mail. eg: If you’re in chat you can easily turn that chat in to an active collaborative task
• Meeting notes on steroids. Can you imagine everyone taking notes during a meeting in a Wave? lol
• Task management tool. The ease in which you can segment parts of a wave to be private, or published etc. will make it pretty awesome for task management.
• Light-weight document storage. Not having to email attachments back and forth would be pretty wicked. Dropping them in to a Wave would bring the relevant documents to where the conversation is occurring, not in separate emails, on your desktop etc.

It’ll be interesting to see the types of extensions that are developed.

I think for me, until all the people I do business activity with on a daily basis use it as their primary communications tool, all of the above isn’t a 100% achievable.

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Don’t forget to register for CeBIT Australia 2009

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I’m always on the look out for productivity hacks. Twitter has become a part of my daily routine and something that if not managed correctly can hog your time and attention. Using some Web 2.0 applications, I’ve come up with a process to help improve your productivity for tweeting links, without having to leave your browser – I like to call it, “inline tweeting”

This system will improve your Twitter productivity:

• A lot of tweets from the people I’m following contain a link. Using this process you will save time in posting your links without having to open twitter.com or your desktop twitter application. Tagging with delicious will automatically grab the page title and the links saving you time in writing your message & shortening the URL
• By using twitter I find that I use my RSS readers a lot less. This process forces me to keep a good library of bookmarks in delicious which I can then read on my iPhone in Google Reader
• You don’t have to have twitter.com or any twitter app open allowing you to tweet whilst browsing without the distraction from other messages on twitter

Want to begin inline tweeting? Here’s the step-by-step process:

Step 1: Sign-up for Del.icio.us

• Create a delicious account – link to sign up page

Step 2: Install the Delicious Firefox add-on

• During the signup process, if you didnt install the del.icio.us Firefox add-on you can download it here

Step 3: Tagging your bookmarks

• When tagging a bookmark create a unique tag that will be used for posting that bookmark to Twitter – I use tweet as my tag.
  
• Log-in to your delicious account at delicious.com
• Click on your unique tag, in my case the tag “tweet”
• Click on “RSS Feed for these bookmarks”. This will open the RSS feed for all bookmarks tagged “tweet”. The URL of this RSS feed is important and will need to be pasted in to twitterfeed in the next step.
  

Step 4: Setup your Twitterfeed

• Visit twitterfeed.com
• Login using your preferred method
• Go to Create new twitter feed
• Type in your twitter username and password
• In the field, RSS Feed URL: paste in the URL of the RSS feed for your “tweet” tag from Step 3
• Change the update frequency to every 30 minutes, and to pust up to 5 new updates each time.
• On the Include… dropdown menu, change it to “title only”

• Once filled in, click “Create” and it will be setup!

Now that it’s setup, do some tagging in Firefox with the tag “tweet” and confirm they post to your Twitter account (Note: It takes about 1 hour for the first tweet to appear on your twitter profile)

Tips:

• You can automatically post to multiple twitter accounts by having a tag used specifically for each Twitter account. eg: tweetaccount1 & tweetaccount2 both producing their own unique RSS feed which can then be setup in twitterfeed.
• You can have Twitterfeed automatically shorten your URL’s using bit.ly (my preferred URL shortening service) by changing it to “Shorten link through bit.ly”.

Lastly, the guys at twitterfeed deserve a donation for providing such an awesome service – donate via PayPal.

Follow me on Twitter

I’d love to hear your feedback in the comments below. Cheers!

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Laurel Papworth (@silkcharm), an Australian social media expert; brings us the following interesting statistics on access to Social Networking websites in the workplace.

“Despite Australia’s laid back reputation, its workers are among the world’s most deprived of access to social networking sites according to 3 mobile’s INQ poll. in terrible traffic this morning

In the Australian survey, 55% of staff said their employers banned social networking websites such as Facebook and MySpace in the workplace, compared to 20% of workers in the UK, 12% in France, 11% in Spain, 10% in Germany and 6% in Italy.

Australian workers have therefore had to resort to subterfuge to continue networking on-the-job, such as:

• Almost 1 in 3 (28%) hide their screen from their boss so they can social network undetected

• 27% transfer personal messages into a work email to surreptitiously read social network posts

• 17% skip lunch breaks to justify time spent on social networks during the working day”

News Source

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I was driving home today and it occurred to me that there aren’t really a huge amount of iPhone plans dedicated to small business.

First of all, why does an iPhone even suit small business use? I’m just going to rattle off a few reasons (there are many more!):

• Easy access to mail (without requiring Microsoft Exchange)
• Great productivity apps! (Remember the Milk & Evernote to name a couple)
• Skype from your iPhone with Fring
• Plenty of fun apps that are sure to provide good stress relief
• Employees can pimp out their iPhones without being charged to the company phone bill, with apps being bought using their own personal iTunes accounts.
• Super easy sync with a Mac computer inc. calendars, contacts, photos
• In-built GPS to help find your way to your next appointment
• Google Reader to make it easy to catch up on industry-related news on the go
• Anywhere  internet access (within 3G coverage). This has proved to be super handy for me
• They’re the coolest phone out – your employees will _LOVE_ receiving one!

What would the ideal iPhone plan be for small business consist of?

• 3-10 mobile user plan
• Unlimited callling and SMS (for all phone numbers)
• Handset credit to at least offset the cost of the iPhone per user
• A shared download cap (6-10gb between the fleet?). This would be cool as heavy-users could use up more of the cap
• an App made available by your telco so you could easily monitor your plan usage, stats. etc.

So come on Aussie telco’s – I’m talking to you Vodafone, Telstra, Optus & Three – what have you got to show us? I’m awaiting patiently to see what sort of plans 2009 will bring us.

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I just spotted a tweet from James Tuckerman about the Smart 100.

“The ‘SMART 100’ Index has been developed in association with global market research agency Colmar Brunton to identify and rank Australia’s 100 most innovative products, promising to be one of the largest surveys of its kind in Australia.”

By nominating your innovative idea, you can gain a lot of PR and attention. The winners will be announce in late March 2009 and featured in the April/May edition of Anthill Magazine.

Good luck!

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The current economic crisis affecting the US and global economies is a very serious situation.

Here’s a funny comic on Google Docs that I’m sure you’ll find very amusing and a much lighter approach to the topic when compared to most of the media you’ve been seeing.

Subprime Loans Google Docs comic

(WARNING: Comic contains colourful language!)

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So I’ve made the big step in my personal career… I’ve decided to move on from the promotional products industry. What are promotional products? Promotional products are merchandise/gift items that can be branded with your company logo and given out to help in marketing your business. 

I worked in a role where I worked in every aspect of the business – sales, management, marketing, web development etc. and got to know the industry inside out. I still have a strong passion for promotional products but I want to explore the online web marketing realm and see what opportunities exist for me to further my skills and build on my hobbies and interests.

Entrepreneurism.net.au is my stomping ground; where my endless thoughts will hopefully find a home. Time permitting, I will be keeping this space up to date with the latest news and developments across a number of areas:

Business

I love challenges and the business world gives me an opportunity to push my abilities to their limits in developing solutions for clients. Expect to see the latest business news accompanied by some commentary and opinion that will hopefully make you stop and think.

Marketing

My marketing strategies are built on Return on Investment (ROI). I will be keeping grounded within the latest happenings and trends and providing some advice for businesses as to what’s hot and what’s not for marketing their business.

Online Marketing

I thoroughly enjoy Search Engine Marketing (SEM). My new job will give me the opportunity to take this hobby to the next level in being able to provide consultation to clients in this area – divising strategies for their Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), Pay-Per-Click (PPC) campaigns and Social Media online marketing campaigns. Expect to see some good tips and insight in to this field.

Productivity

I am a productivity junkie. Being time poor (aren’t we all?) I’m always looking for a way to do things smarter and more quickly. I will be sharing some reviews and tips on productivity tools that I use to make my day easier.

Technology

I love gadgets, gizmos and cool tech. I will cover off the latest desktop and mobile technology with product reviews and technology developments.

The above categories encompass the main reasons why I wanted to create this blog – but do expect the odd random funny or off-beat post here and then!

So there – my intro post finished.. Now to work on some content that is actually worth reading! haha..

I hope you enjoy what this blog has to offer

Cheers!

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