A cost-effective alternative to more traditional alarm systems, SimpliSafe allows you to pay as you go – no long term contracts – and you own the system. Therefore, you can take the system with you when you move. Best of all, it doesn’t even require a landline or internet connection to reach their 24/7 emergency dispatch center. For more information, visit their website or connect with SimpliSafe on Twitter.

When asked why they chose PerkettPR, CEO and co-founder Chad Laurans said, “PerkettPR brings a great combination of traditional media experience and social media savvy that will help us spread the word about SimpliSafe. Word of mouth is already a big factor for us and with PerkettPR’s help, we aim to drive awareness to new levels.”

We’re extremely excited to help SimpliSafe extend their brand awareness and community – stay tuned!

SXSW 2008: Mzinga from Download Squad on Vimeo.

[via downloadsquad.com]

Sermo continues to revolutionize healthcare. The discussions held, and decisions made, within the community positively impact not only physicians, but the patients they care for and the pharmaceutical companies that want to forge a safer and more productive future through a more efficient exchange of knowledge and resources. Sermo is a Web-based community where physicians share observations from daily practice, discuss emerging trends and provide new insights into medications, devices and treatments.

“And since physicians have never before been able to talk with a unified
voice in such impressive numbers, sharing observations and insight
about treatments, drugs, devices and biologics, we expect Sermo to
continue to rock the pharma marketing world for some time to come.”

We couldn’t agree more! We are extremely proud of this award, thankful for such an interesting and savvy client, and excited to share even more interesting developments about Sermo in the year to come. Congratulations to Dr. Daniel Palestrant, Founder & CEO; Gina Ashe, CMO; Greg Shenk, Director of Communications and the entire team at Sermo! What a year!

Nominations are only open through tomorrow, December 12, so log on and list your favorites now. The Crunchies Committee will then choose five finalists from the submissions and voting will start on December 13 and last for approximately one month.

If you are looking for some inspiration on who to vote for, check out some of PerkettPR’s clients nominated for selection this year:

Conduit ; “best international start-up” – community toolbars

Moola.com ; “best time sink site,” “best consumer start up” and “best international start up” – the world’s first Massively Multiplayer Rewards Game (MMRG)

Ezmo ; “best consumer start up” and “best international start-up” – social music sharing

Sosius ; “best business model” – free online collaborative workspaces

Here’s some additional background on the awards from the Crunchies blog:

“Together GigaOm, Read/WriteWeb, VentureBeat and TechCrunch are pleased to announce that nominations for the inaugural 2007 Crunchies Awards are now open.

We created twenty award categories to recognize the year’s most innovative technical, creative and business accomplishments of key companies, products and people. We hope you’ll agree that the award categories are good reasons for celebration and fit for a proper ceremony.

We invite you to submit your favorite companies and products for consideration. Read the official rules. Nominations will be open through midnight pst Wednesday, December 12. Finalist voting will open Thursday, December 13 and run for approximately one month before the awards ceremony on Friday, January 18 in San Francisco.”

Other interesting companies who won or were finalists in their categories include Care.com – a new place to find a baby or pet sitter; SheSpeaks – a national network of women who share their feedback and influence products, services and issues on the world around them; and The Baby Planners – a concierge and consulting service that caters to the needs of expectant parents.

It was great to see a variety of regions represented by the winning companies – from coast to coast, interesting emerging start ups and tenacious executives are profiled. For a full list of winners and finalists, visit The Stevie Awards.

First, we are looking forward to the launch of CollegeWeekLive – the biggest virtual college fair ever with over 10,000 students, parents and guidance counselors attending, including many from Europe, Asia, and Africa.

CollegeWeekLive enables students to “visit” multiple colleges in just two days – they can connect with current college students, guidance counselors, admissions experts and more in a live, interactive environment. The event is geared toward enhancing the process of choosing a college that’s best for the student – all from the their home computer. It will feature many great sessions to help today’s college-bound student make better choices. For more information, check out the agenda.

Over 75 colleges from over 35 states are signed up to-date, including Air Force Academy, Bentley, Central Connecticut State, Northeastern University, Tufts University, University of Buffalo, University of Texas and more.

Secondly, on Friday we will be at TechCrunch Boston MeetUp at Estate in Boston. We will be helping clients Moola and Mzinga launch – please stop by and see what they are all about. They will both be providing demos and some interactive fun as well.

If you are a reporter, blogger or analyst covering social networking, online gaming, advergaming, online collaboration or community, and would like a pre-launch briefing to learn more, please email me at chris[at]perkettpr.com.

If you are attending the party, please stop by the PerkettPR Martini Lounge and find out what all the buzz is about. More details coming later this week. See you there!

Follow us – @PerkettPR – on Twitter – for live updates and interviews from the party!

With the average student-to-counselor ratio in US high schools at 315:1, students could use some additional guidance around which colleges to visit, what questions to ask and even what current students have to say about their experience. But touring campuses takes a good deal of time and money – both the student’s and their parents. Enter CollegeWeekLive, a one-of-a-kind virtual event produced next month by our client PlatformQ that provides an opportunity to visit more colleges in two days than many students would have the opportunity to before graduation.

CollegeWeekLive is free for students and will be an interactive two day conference held online. Students can visit interactive booths, talk to guidance counselors and even follow along as current students provide a peek into campus life. Sessions include topics such as “Key Factors in College Admissions Today” and “How to Win a Sports Scholarship,” as well as lively student panels from students around the nation. To-date, participating universities include notables such as Massachusetts Institute of Technology as well as the University of Virginia, University of Mississippi – Ole Miss, University of California – Irvine, University of Connecticut, UMass Boston, Northeastern University, Tufts University, Air Force Academy and many others. Stay tuned as the list grows daily.

Take a virtual tour to learn more – CollegeWeekLive will be held November 13th and 14th from 3:00 p.m. EST to 11:00 p.m. EST.

We all know that social networking is changing the way people communicate. This simple proposition is now on the radar of many businesses – how can we harness such information, how do we monetize it and how can it help us to become a better business? Many still don’t “get it” and too many still dismiss its potential to truly change business. (As even Forrester analyst Josh Bernoff indicated in his comment to our October 9 post). As today’s Sermo news indicates, the powerful impact of the transparent and efficient exchange of knowledge – doctors on Sermo openly discuss issues, trends, treatments and more – can be applied to real issues.

Sharing such information on Sermo, physicians have access to the most topical medical data available – enabling them to make better fact-based decisions, faster – in a way never before made possible. Ultimately, patients will benefit from the positive impact of such important collaboration.

Read more on the partnership at The Wall Street Journal, Reuters, Financial Times, Bloomberg.com and Sermo.

Constant Contact has met success by keeping a laser focus on a few simple guiding principles: outstanding customer support and easy one-to-many communications. The company’s email marketing and online surveys are not only easy-to-use and customize, affordable and effective, but the customer service is outstanding. The company’s support personnel is readily available in various ways – via phone, email or chat and it also provides a comprehensive online Learning Center that covers tips and tricks and announces schedules for webinars, regional training events and more.

Today’s future-thinking Web 2.0 community could learn a lot from Constant Contact – simplicity, easy access (try the product free for 60 days, no strings attached) and customer service still rule, even in an era of “do it yourself” technologies. Just ask the company’s more than 130,000 small business customers.

Congratulations!

Sunday’s Boston Globe had an interesting article on the tech industry and its future among the recession fears. One interesting note was how some of the “survivors” have been the what-some-might-consider “less sexy” cousins of all the Internet darlings, “Indeed, the infrastructure and enterprise products scorned by Internet highfliers early in the decade – from data storage equipment to accounting software – have become platforms of growth and stability in today’s technology economy.”

Several of our clients echo that sentiment as they continue to move forward with innovative, useful technologies that are key drivers to the growing tech sector. While not quite the “media darlings” as many yet-unproven Web 2.0 companies, they are solid, growing companies with innovative products and services, real customers – and revenue.

Judging from today’s news alone – coming from such clients as Lightstorm Networks, Sycamore Networks, Gotuit and more – solid, continued growth continues to sustain the economy – with companies solving real problems for real, paying customers. We are proud to work with this generation of tech leaders – although we do kind of miss all those fun dot com names such as pets.com, furniture.com, vote.com and more. Maybe there was something about such simple, obvious names that contributed to the downfall… simple names = too simple of an idea backed by too much money, perhaps?

Check out today’s news and let us know what you think. Is there a tech bust looming?

• Gotuit – video navigation and search leader signs Fox Reality Channel, the only all-reality, all-the-time network; check out The Fox Reality Channel Really Awards 2007 now to watch last year’s awards ceremony and vote for the Most Memorable Reality TV Star for 2007
• Lightstorm Networks – new Carrier Ethernet Silicon player emerges
• Q1 Labs – network security management company sponsors a SANS Network Security Lunch & Learn
• Sycamore Networks - (NASDAQ: SCMR) – a new Intelligent Multiservice Switch from one of the market’s longstanding leaders in intelligent networking solutions for fixed line and mobile network operators worldwide

Sosius is great not only because it’s free and delivers 1.0GB of storage space but because it lets you keep your information, social networking and collaboration all in one place – collaboration for “Life 2.0″ as Founder Andrew Cameron-Webb calls it. He has a good point – our lives don’t begin and end at the office (although sometimes it feels that way!) so why should our collaboration technology? Sosius lets you create Career and Life “Workspaces” so you can easily invite appropriate contacts to the best workspace and manage all the intersections of your life from one application. From scheduling family activities to managing that big work project, Sosius brings powerful, easy online collaboration and sharing to the everyday user.

What else makes Sosius unique? Experienced veterans. Cameron-Webb is the creator of Collaborative Workspaces, a successful enterprise-grade web collaboration service and Chairman Steve Crummey is the founder of Intranets.com, acquired by WebEx (now Cisco).

Sign up here and let us know what you think!

Think about your neighborhood and how you find who to use for items such as a pediatrician, a hairdresser, a great accountant, a good dog walker. You ask your friends or neighbors. You get their opinions, ask about their experience with different vendors and listen to recommendations. Social networking allows this exchange to go beyond your physical location and even your initial network for even greater insight. It also allows us to pool our collecitve intelligence and experiences for greater insights, such as the 25,000 doctors sharing information on Sermo. Social networking for business just makes sense.

The advent of social networking for business professionals, such as LinkedIn, is not that far from a very general, basic idea. Years ago, before “Web 2.0” or “social networking” or even “MySpace” were media darlings, the Internet was used for listings provided by local area businesses. Patrons of such businesses would leave comments or recommendations based on their experiences on the site’s forums or message boards. It was a bit clumsy and not very interactive but it worked. Social networking for business simply elevates and expands upon this very basic idea. Not only can you promote your thoughts, opinions and recommendations (including your own company’s products or services) but you can easily view and connect with 2nd and 3rd tier contacts – friends of friends, if you will – for business exchanges such as recruiting, choosing a service vendor, trying a product, etc. Social networking enables you to quickly and easily expand your network, which can be utilized in many ways – not the least of which is marketing and PR purposes. PR is influence by word of mouth, essentially, so social networking is a must for any promotional campaign today.

Social networking in general started as a form of self expression. Teenagers and college students flocked to it as a way to connect with others like them outside of the usually small social circle in the “real” world. Today, it is helping to shape businesses of all types and is still based on that basic premise of expression. If I have a bad – or good – experience at a retail store, online shopping or at a restaurant, my complaints go well beyond my intimate social circle and have much greater power than a letter to the Better Business Bureau. A few posts on a Facebook wall, a blog comment or a Q/A on LinkedIn ensures the word spreads like wildfire to people who matter. And, as the WSJ article today states, social networking is “moving more into the mainstream” – ensuring anyone’s “self expression” today has a very meaningful – and profound – impact. Now, it’s a matter of how to ensure that expression is a positive reflection of your company or products and services.