Courses.ie leading the way....again :-)

They say imitation is the greatest form of flattery.

It is both a compliment and interesting to see sites older than ours recognise that we have raised the benchmark and are now incorporating features that we, Courses.ie, introduced and felt should be taken as standard.

Watch out for more as we start to introduce some of the changes and new features you have told us that you want to see.

Email and its Place

Courtesy of Annette over at Interactions, I came upon Matt Moores slideshow about email. As Annette say it is simple yet very sophisticated presentation. It shows how far we have come with our cyber forms of communication.

| View | Upload your own

This presentation uses another handy programme called SlideShare that allows you to share your presentations with the world letting your ideas reach a broad audience. You can share publicly or privately.

More and more people turning to web based programmes. Most are free, and offer a freedom of not always being tied to your own laptop or computer.

The main contender in free web based programmes is Google. The Labs section lists all the programmes that are available, some are still in beta but are worth exploring and having fun with.

A site I found Zoho.com also offers a superb range of mostly free programmes from the main office suite; wordprocessor spreadsheets, presentation and database programmes to email, organisers, invoices, CRM and project management programmes to name but a few.

Bob Geldof is at it again...this time not for charity..

Did you know that Bob Geldof could have been the owner of Buy & Sell? He had this idea way back when, only the banks would not loan him the money to set it up. So he got huffy instead and went on to form the Boomtown Rats and well we all know what happened then.

But you have to hand it to your man Bob, he not only has a social conscience but he is a dab hand at the 'ol entrepreneurial skills too. He founded Planet 24 the tv company responsible for taking Zig and Zag away from us to foreign climes...Channel 4's Big Breakfast. (Bring back Zig and Zag, they were a gas pair - they could represent us in the Eurovision too. Anyway, he sold that for a cool few million and went on to form a travel dotcom company, deckchair.com, I think. He went on to sell that too...(again for zillions)and now he is back to the dotcom business again.

This time for groups and bands. Youbloom.com is according to his site;

Welcome to YouBloom, designed to help Artists promote their music and meet new fans. Use Blogs, Polls and the Calendar to post concert dates upcoming events and promotions. Friends and music lovers are encouraged to explore the site to find new talent and to build and share Play Lists with their friends.

Artists Upload your music and collectables to make it available for the YouBloom community. In the coming weeks, YouBloom is launching an online store and a sophisticated Email system to help you manage your media and fans.

Friends: Explore YouBloom and find new artists. Build and share your own playlists, keep a blog journal about your favorite bands or anything else you'd like to share with your friends. Personalize your profile pages with our polls, or customize your Profile page with your own widgets.

No better man to give MySpace a run for its money. Should be interesting to watch how it grows.

For those of you with the entrepreneurial touch Courses.ie have a number of providers running Start your own business courses. Find the one that suits you and you never know you may be the next Bob Geldof!