1)  Technical problems – there were some changes made by our email newsletter provider that make it more difficult to swap the correct image in for every newsletter.

2)  Employee confusion – we’ve been getting feedback from our client’s employees that they didn’t understand who the newsletter was from.  The ‘From’ address is from Cultivate, but the header image and logo are from their own company.  Huh?

3)  Online reading – Custom branding the newsletter makes it impossible to put them all online.  More and more clients are asking to have the newsletter available as a link so they can include it in their own material.

4)  Mobile formatting – It’s clear that more and more of our newsletters are getting read on smartphones.  We’re working to reformat our newsletter to be more smartphone friendly, and customization makes that much more difficult.

While we understand this is a bit of a change (especially for our long tenured clients) the end result will let us create a much better newsletter and help drive up utilization of the program.  Feel free to contact us  or comment with any feedback.

Chris – Cultivate

The jobcode field is optional – some clients use this field for data they want to report on (job titles, departments, employee codes, etc.)

Users will see the comments below every title description, and can enter their own comments at the bottom.  If you have strong feelings about a title we’d encourage you to write up your thoughts – you’ll help the entire Cultivate community make better decisions about what titles will help them.

This is just an initial implementation – in the future we’ll be adding things like the ability to search comments, to rate them, and to comment/review a title via email.   We hope everyone has a safe and happy holiday season!

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Common Questions:

Do we moderate? Comments are posted immediately, but we do review them and will edit/remove posts that we find either off topic or offensive.  Because we service such a great group of professionals we don’t expect this to happen though!

What if I find a comment that is offensive? Please let us know right away, and what title it was posted under.

Will other people know who I am if I comment? No – all comments are anonymous.  Just put your first name in the ‘name’ field and type your comment.

- You can manage your account and view your active orders

- You can browse the library and check out titles.  You can’t currently download them directly to your phone or stream them.

- You can browse and listen directly to Podcasts.  This works GREAT on the iphone.  Simply browse the podcasts directory and the iphone’s built in RSS reader will automatically format any of the Podcasts so you can view more information and stream them directly to your phone.  Now you have mobile employee development where the content is constantly being updated.

We have a short screencast that shows the features here:  http://screenr.com/YnU

To get started simply visit http://www.cultivateminds.com with your phone’s browser.  Cultivate has always been focused on audio, and that means we’re focused on mobile.  We’ll be working hard in 2010 to improve the mobile access to our program.  If your company currently uses the iPhone as a ‘company phone’ please let us know…we’d love to work with you.

How?  Click on the ‘Manage Account’ link once you’ve logged in.  Check title you want to delete titles, and drag-and-drop to re-arrange your queue priority.  Then just click update at the bottom.  This has been a heavily requested feature, so we hope you like it. If you find something that doesn’t work please let us know at support@cultivateminds.com.

You can view a short (1 minute) overview of how the features work here:

http://screenr.com/60B

Late last week Cultivate went live on the Rackspace Cloud, which brings our site hosting infrastructure up to world class levels.  Rackspace hosts some of the biggest web sites & services in the world, so we’re in good hands.

While you (the users) haven’t seen much of a change (yet!) things have become much easier for us to manage, to test, and to push live.  And that means we’ll have more time to roll out more features and functionality to the program.  We’re excited to have finally made this move!

For anyone who is more interested in exactly what ‘Cloud Computing’ is, check out the links below.

Wikipedia:  Cloud Computing

YouTube: Cloud Computing Plain & Simple

23 New Titles For August 2009

We’ve just added 23 new titles to the library – 20 audiobooks and 3 DVDs.  Some additional titles from authors who are currently popular (Louis Frankel, Jim Collins, Neil Fiore) as well as some new authors.

The Talent Code should be popular – one of the most rented titles in the last few months was Talent Is Overrated.  In today’s “hiring-budgets-are-frozen economy” it is more important than ever to find the right people.

Here’s what has been added – we hope you enjoy them!

DVD’s
Women’s Health: Train for Your Body Type
Dancing With the Stars – Cardio Dance
Total Body Cardio Toning

Audiobooks
The Talent Code: Unlocking the Secret of Skill in Sports, Art, Music, Math, and Just About Anything
Flow: The Psychology Of Optimal Experience
Nice Girls Don’t Get….Box Set
Conquering Procrastination: How to Stop Stalling & Start Achieving!
Throw Out Fifty Things
How the Mighty Fall CD: And Why Some Companies Never Give In
How to Have That Difficult Conversation You’ve Been Avoiding: With Your Spouse, Adult Child, Boss, Coworker, Best Friend, Parent, or Someone You’re Dating
Your Money or Your Life: 9 Steps to Transforming Your Relationship with Money and Achieving Financial Independence
The Little Gold Book of YES! Attitude: How to Find, Build and Keep a YES! Attitude for a Lifetime of Success
The Little Green Book of Getting Your Way: How to Speak, Write, Present, Persuade, Influence, and Sell Your Point of View to Others
The Dip: A Little Book That Teaches You When to Quit (and When to Stick)
Leadership And Self-Deception: Getting Out Of The Box
Developing The Leader Within You
The 60 Second Procrastinator
Preparing, Not Over-Preparing, for Sales
Managing Information Overload
Fearless Speaking
The Power of Self Confidence
Get A Life!
The Slight Edge

We’re finding the title especially interesting because free is part of our business model – the users of Cultivate access it for free – it’s their employer’s who pay.  Chris’ title is certain to make you think about all the free services and products you use every day.

Eiffel Tower Queue - Alexandre Duret-Lutz from Flickr. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike

Yesterday Cultivate added a long awaited feature for our users – queues.  This will allow users to check out multiple titles at a time, and have them sent in sequence.  No more logging on every time you want a title.  It’s been a long requested feature – there must be a lot of Netflix users out there!

Here are the details of how we’ve implemented it so far.  Keep in mind this is version 1.0…we will be rolling out some enhancements to it shortly.

- Users will be allowed to have 5 titles in their queue at a time.

-We’ll ship the titles in sequence, unless we have an inventory problem….then we’ll send the next title on your list.

-Users will receive a shipping confirmation email letting them know a title is on the way

-Users can check the status of their queue by logging on and clicking on the Manage Account link in the nav bar.

This release is the first of many to come.  We’re almost finished with a complete rewrite of our entire codebase into a more flexible and scalable architecture.   In simpler terms it means that very soon we are going to be able to add new features much more quickly!

Thanks to all of our users for your patience, and enjoy the queues!

A list of all the winners can be found here:  http://www.helioshr.com/PR-2009-06-05.php