A former teacher from South Georgia is among those members of Helium that are making record earnings. In just six months, recently retired high school teacher Holle Abee has earned over $5,000 by writing for Helium an average of one hour each day.

A grandmother of six, Holle found Helium a little over a year ago by accident one night while surfing the internet. Since then, she has become a full-fledged Helium addict, publishing articles on everything from bass fishing to anniversary gifts, hidden gems in Florida and vegetarian recipes on a budget.

Although Helium has compensated writers for their participation since its inception, last fall it became the first writing website to offer upfront payments for all new articles being written by starred writers. This change to Helium’s Terms of Service increased member earnings significantly, as well as further elevating the quality of content on the site.

Helium writers have the ability to win journalism awards for the Pulitzer Center, the Knight Center for International Media, OneWorld, Sunshine Week, and several other organizations. Additionally, The National Press Club extends application offers to all of Helium’s 5 star writers.

Originally posted on February 3, 2009 @ 12:22 pm

Social media utility company FriendlyFavor, a social media utility company dedicated to providing consumers a more effective way than email of managing everyday favors and requests online, has launched its flagship site and platform. An all-purpose request tool developed to complement rapidly growing social networks such as Facebook, MySpace, and LinkedIn, the FriendlyFavor platform enables Internet users to more efficiently leverage their trusted networks of friends, family, and colleagues for help with referrals, recommendations, advice and other favors or requests.

Whether asking for job referrals, recruiting friends to help move furniture, seeking personal recommendations on Web site developers, accountants or reliable babysitters, or requesting opinions on anything ranging from Hybrid vehicles to great places on the West Coast to hold family reunions, there are countless common favors and requests that develop in consumers’ lives every day. FriendlyFavor was engineered to eliminate the wasted time, hassle and confusion that can accompany sorting through cumbersome email strings by providing a one-stop site where users can easily manage everything associated with a favor or request, from the initial ask to a thank-you.

In addition to powering the www.friendlyfavor.com site, the FriendlyFavor platform is being optimized for use with Facebook Connect (enabling Facebook users to “connect” their Facebook identity, friends and privacy to offerings like FriendlyFavor), and other white-label uses, as its technology can be easily licensed and applied to corporate networking (and Intranet uses), online communities, alumni and non-profit groups, and numerous other applications.

In addition to enabling users to easily ask for, offer, and manage favors, the platform allows users to thank each other for fulfilling favors, through retail gifts, charitable contributions, and more.

The venture is funded by individual investors affiliated with many of the technology sector’s most successful companies, including Amazon.com, Microsoft, Google and others.

Originally posted on January 30, 2009 @ 9:03 am