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Many people have a large percentage of their business tied up in shipping.  Whether your business is all about shipping products or you part-time on eBay, you’re doing a lot of packaging.  Things that are sent expedited are usually sent through UPS and FedEx and it’s estimated that 10% of those packages are late, but most shipping refunds go unclaimed.  This amounts to something like $2 billion a year in the U.S.

There are a lot of Internet tools available for those who do a lot of shipping, but few of them are focused on those (often) illusive refunds.  That’s changing as the economy pushes small business to find more ways to tighten the belt.  One new startup in this arena is PackageFox, based in Boston.

To compete in this specialized arena, they offer a paid-for-performance service, which means they only get paid when funds are recovered.  In this case, as a percentage of the recovery.  It’s a good example of how the technology surrounding the shipping industry is parsing into niches.

Most would wonder why this sort of service isn’t integrated into the shipping software likely being used by those who do enough package freight to have a need for a refund sleuth.  That’s a good question, but it’s easily answered: a large portion of those who use package services like FedEx and UPS use the shipping software those companies provide free of charge.  Software which, obviously, has little concern with expediting refunds.

The online systems of FedEx and UPS allow third-party applications to access your account if you authorize it, so recovery sites like PackageFox can use your account directly.  This more or less allows automation of the process, which means it’s convenient and costs less for the shipper to use.  All of those can mean bottom line savings.

We live in a world that is continually finding new ways to connect us, no matter how far flung we are on the map.  At the same time, the market keeps finding new ways to create efficiencies in business, whether it’s the corporate conglomerate in the sky rise or the new startup in the basement in the suburbs.

Since September, the online personal hub site About.me has been letting people reserve profile addresses on its service. In return for signing up, they promised to let you have your own personal about.me/ address which they slowly started to activate in batches. Currently, there are now over 400,000 personal sites which have been created and there’s another 20,000 on the waiting list. However, the site is now open to everyone and profile sites are being created immediately.

The About.me service provides one home where all your social networking sites can be tied together along with biographies and other info. So far, About.me has the big networks working with the site including Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and others. The service allows you to customise your landing site giving your page a really personal feel. You’re also allowed to upload high-res photos which can form the background of your site and this is a really great feature and has already been used to amazing effect. Users can also email you via the site but your email is never revealed – a very nifty feature. There are also analytics which let you know how many visitors you’ve had, how long they spent looking at your profile and what percentage where new clicks.

There are already a lot of great profiles where you can get inspiration from and if you choose to make your profile public then it becomes available in the directory. There are a few competitors already in the market such as the flavors.me service but there seems to be more functionality available at the moment with About.me. This might change soon as there could be plans to start charging but nothing formal has been announced.

OneTrueFan, the service that lets users check-in to websites much like on FourSquare, has opened its doors to beta testing. That’s only 3 months after announcing that they were alpha testing! The service lets visitors to websites earn badges in return for interacting and sharing content on the site. As with other check-in services, there is a game element where others can see what social connections shared or read on the site. Also competition is possible where users are encouraged to share and contribute content on other social networking sites.

Any activity via OneTrueFan gets converted into points and badges from websites. There are leader-boards for the site and you can see your competitors’ activities and scores which are all displayed on an interactive player bar at the bottom of the site.

New features for the beta include an overhaul of the UI as well as a redesign of the player bar. Now web publishers can install OneTrueFan directly onto their sites instead of before where visitors had to download and install a browser plugin. There are news feeds which take your Tweets and present a list of suggested links depending on what you and your contacts have shared. The order in which the links are ranked is based on your friends (and strangers) and how many times they’ve visited and shared the URL. This reports back to website owners who get real-time info on what their users are most interested around the web.

There’s more than just checking-in on offer here with interactivity and data mining all going on in the background. However, OneTrueFan needs to get a critical mass user-base before it can be truly useful.

Yahoo’s “all hands” meeting from last week created a huge stir when someone inside the meeting, likely a disgruntled laid-off employee, snapped photos of the “Sunset Slide” (below).  The meeting was about the company’s plans moving forward and included several current acquisitions and spinoffs that are slated for “sunset” (corp. speak for “dumped”) and others that will be merged and “featured.”

Yahoo owns several properties that are both popular and unprofitable and has acquired a lot of Web real estate that is definitely not within the company’s focus.  Assuming it has one, which many would doubt.

Yahoo has been fighting for market share (and losing) on just about every front.  They aren’t the Internet’s most popular search engine, Web analyzer, advertising venue, or anything else.  Nevertheless, they have a lot of popular sites and properties that own their categories and need only be monetized – Delicious (the social bookmarking site) is one of those.

That doesn’t seem to be interesting Yahoo, however, who has all but confirmed that they’ll be dumping Delicious and several other brands to “streamline” their offerings.  Yet again, their strategy makes no sense.

According to Alexa, of the half a dozen or so services to be killed, Delicious is by far the most popular.  Yet of the services to be merged (including Foxytunes and Sideline), none of them are anywhere close to the traffic snaggers that Delicious and AltaVista are.

Further, the “Make Feature” column of the list of things to be added are, well, ripoffs.  Replace “Yahoo!” with “Google” on that list and you have the current swatch of Google add-ons for various services like Gmail and Docs with only a couple of exceptions.

It appears, by this list, that Yahoo’s big plan is to compete with the Google Giant.  A competition that, frankly, they’ve tried and lost already.  Yahoo appears to still e desperately searching for its life’s quest and flounders in the attempt.

Gawker has urged users to change passwords after a major security hole was discovered.  The flaw was found and brought to Gawker’s attention.  Gawker hosts about 1.5 million user accounts used for commenting on the site.  The way that the pop culture site found out about the security hole was, ironically, when a hacker logged in as reporter Adrian Chen and posted about the vulnerability in a false story.  That has been removed, but management has warned users on another post (linked above) and Chen tweeted that he was not the story’s originator.

The hackers behind this, Gnosis (who’ve taken credit), communicated with Colby Hall of Mediaite about the hack.  They say that the management and staff of Gawker have been arrogant towards the 4chan group (an anonymous network service popular amongst hackers).  So they decided to bring the “Gawkmedia empire down a peg or two.”

The hackers reportedly gained access to not only usernames and passwords, but to the site’s internet content management system (CMS) as well as core data such as the media site’s core database, which includes emails.  They’ve promised a press release detailing the Gawker attack today or tomorrow.  They plan to release not only source code for the site, but also over a million emails, most between staffers at Gawker.

Other interesting tidbits were given as well.  Such as the fact that 2,650 users had the passwords “password” or “qwerty” and a large chunk of those were registered to government email addresses (.gov, .mil, .edu).

These sorts of attacks are never fun for those embarrassed by the compromise and go to show that nothing out there is truly safe.  Keeps you on your toes, that’s for sure.  We should all be reminded to be mindful of our online presence at all times.

Dell has officially launched its brand new Social Media Listening Command Centre. The new Command Centre has been tasked to track the torrent of thoughts about Dell that is generated by social media and to make sure that they “internalize” the feedback. The launch comes two months after its announcement in October at the Altimeter Rise of Social Commerce Conference and it’s now arrived.

Dell has gone on to say that it’s also about making sure that information flows to the right people across the Dell Empire. Dell is also keen about smaller issues that bubble away under the surface and generate undercurrents of dissatisfaction and ultimate damage to the brand. Dell wants to get away from the “squeaky wheels getting grease” scenarios!

The Command Centre is based in Austin at the Dell HQ, and will be tightly integrated with the @Delcares customer care as well as the tech support functions. Dell is already a big player in the social media field and it’s only set to get bigger with support being added for 11 languages by the end of this year! The Radian6 software will handle the data collection which is no trivial task. Estimates put the number of posts about Dell at about 22,000 per day on average and that doesn’t include Twitter. Once harvested, the data can be aggregated by topic or subject, sentiment, geography or even more touchy feely ways including tone of voice.