Welcome to the Feb 19th Edition of the Carnival of the Capitalists! Let me first thank Jay for allowing me to host the carnival this week, even as the carnival begins to undergo some changes. Jay has been pretty outspoken about wanting to bring the carnival content back to it’s quality roots, and I’ve done my best this week to ensure that the content is as solid as possible, having included less than half of the entries submitted due to relevancy, lack of original content, etc. Hopefully I haven’t offended anyone, but please understand that our goal is to make the carnival highly desirable and packed with quality content.

Before I present the carnival, I hope you’ll allow me a minute to introduce myself. My name is Sanjay Kumar, co-founder of Simplifythis.com. Simplifythis.com is a new online web application for small companies to easily invoice and receive payments electronically. Talk about enabling capitalism!

Ok, so with that short introduction, and without further delay, I present this week’s carnival:

Jack Yoest presents Exxon and Global Warming and Capitalism posted at Reasoned Audacity.

Bob Vineyard of InsureBlog fame chimes in with a post about what happens when your insurance company has to pay claims that aren’t even covered. Bob reports that, sometimes it means they stop selling insurance in your state, reducing your choice and (potentially) increasing your costs.

John Ingrisano presents Mid-winter Reading for the SBO posted at The Freestyle Entrepreneur.

Charles H. Green presents Seductive Statistics posted at Trust Matters, where he posits that the problem with Edelman’s annual Trust Barometer is that the data and conclusions only represent second-order indicators — and most companies, in trying to measure trust, will systematically destroy it.

Leon Gettler presents Is 2007 the year to prick the CEO pay balloon? posted at Sox First.

Kevin Hillstrom presents 6 In 10 E-Mail Campaigns Compete On Price? posted at The MineThatData Blog

Joe Kristan presents It’s Not Always a Tax Problem posted at Roth & Company Tax Update.

James Hamilton presents The market reads Bernanke’s lips posted at Econbrowser.

Michael K. Dawson presents Profiting From Companies That Sell What China Wants posted at Breaking the Shackles of the 9 to 5 by The Time & Money Group.

David E. presents Debt – A Personal Finance Crisis Emerges posted at Worldwide Success.

Carmine Coyote presents Start Practicing “Conscious Incompetence”, posted at Slow Leadership

Jordan J. Ballor presents Managing Manure posted at Acton Institute PowerBlog.

David Foster presents The Railroad Renaissance Continues posted at Photon Courier

Dan Melson presents Real Estate: General Education versus Specific Expertise posted at Searchlight Crusade.

Asif presents Special Dividends posted at SINLetter.

Wenchypoo presents War on the War on the Middle Class posted at Wisdom From Wenchypoo’s Mental Wastebasket.

Michelle Cramer presents Is Your Business Online Yet? posted at The Small Business Buzz.

David Maister presents A Case Study in Professional Ethics posted at Passion, People and Principles.

Rich presents WWYD: Helping the Less Fortunate posted at Queercents.

Rob May presents the thought provoking Business and Bullshit, posted at Business Pundit

Wayne Hurlbert presents Entrepreneurship: Overcoming your Fears, posted at Blog Business World

McKee Stewart presents When Do Good Firms Go Bad, posted at The Boring Made Dull.

With that, we conclude this week’s carnival. Again, if your post did not make it in this week, feel free to submit something again next week, but please be sure that it is on-topic. Ask yourself how your post fits into the broad category of capitalism. Next week, Jay will be hosting the carnival himself. Check the COTC site for more information.

Labels: Carnivals

As a reminder, the Simplifythis.com blog will be hosting the Carnival of the Capitalists on Feb 19. Please be sure to submit your qualified posts by 3pm on Feb 18th. Also, be sure to check out this week’s edition of the Carnival, posted at TamsPalm.

Ok, it’s time for an update. A lot of time has passed since my last post and I wanted to let you in on some of our progress and some changes that have happened over the past two months.

First, we have had some changes in staff at Simplifythis.com. Regrettably, Mauro Lombarda has decided to pursue other passions outside of Simplifythis.com. We very much appreciate his significant contributions in helping to bootstrap Simplifythis.com and wish him the best of luck in his new endeavors. Mauro’s sense of humor, spirited debates and of course, his Italian cooking skills will be missed to no end. Good luck Mauro!

To help fill the void, we’ve had a number of new folks come on board since his departure and I’m sure you will hear me talking more about them over time. The bottom line is that the Simplifythis.com team continues to be strong and is more passionate than ever about delivering a world-class application in the online invoicing and payment area.

Second, we have received a lot of very valuable feedback on the beta application and have been working very hard to address it. One of the most important pieces of feedback we’ve received is that our application needs to run in a wider variety of browsers (feedback that we knew about, but received none-the-less). To that end, we’ve spent a considerable amount of time ensuring that our application works in most of the popular browsers being used today. We still have some testing and verification to do on some browsers, but we should be able to publish a broader list of compatible browsers than ever before.

Finally, I know that many of you are chomping at the bit for us to extend the private beta beyond it’s current scope. Please be patient with us as we incorporate the feedback and move the private beta forward. I guess this is my polite way of saying: “It’ll be ready when it’s ready.”

Thanks to everyone who has been rooting for us and supporting us over the past few months.

Sign up for our beta at SimplifyThis.com

Labels: SimplifyThis.com