Two days ago I launched a new Personal Service called Holiday Home Hunters. Its basically a 72 hour manual search for vacation home rentals executed by a real person.

If you have been out on Google searching for your family holiday home you may have stumbled across over the overwhelming results of over 44 million links to holiday home companies, vacation rentals and individuals offering their homes. It isn’t the only downside because many of the same homes are advertised on many different websites Vacation Rental Management companies can have hundreds of affiliate websites where they advertise their inventory.

A few years ago you could go down the local high street travel agent for a catalogue of rentals but only a very few good companies actually print them these days. The web should have pretty much captured the market for vacation homes but instead it looks saturated and ends up not being time saving in any way, in fact it can easily slurp up hours and even days of your time.

So, more choice isn’t necessarily good for the consumer who is time stricken and quality conscious. There are actually a limited number of holiday home management companies and owners who can offer any kind of guaranty your vacation rental is up to the standards you would expect. Getting reviews on individual holiday homes is very good if you trust their opinion and have the time to go through them. Getting someone else to do the search for you who has been in the vacation home rental business for years is probably going to be able to shed the wheat from the chaf.

I was in the holiday business for years and I’ve never sold anything to anybody without having a pretty thorough idea of what I was selling them, therefore getting very few complaints and many returning customers.

I have always been an advocate that there is a growing market for personal services oddly I’d never have thought a manual personal search on the internet would become one of them until very recently. However considering the raving reviews on the launch that does seem to prove the case.

Check it out at http://www.dolcevia.com/hhh/holidayhomehunter.html

or in Dutch at http://www.dolcevia.com/vakantiehuisjager/vakantiehuisjager.html

As soon as I tried to post this article I noticed that Zoho had taken the reference to the new Zoho Mobile Application off their homepage but if you sign up you should be able to find it from one of the other applications.
I haven’t really had the chance to try the Zoho Mobile Application creator yet however I have been using the Zoho Web Application Creator for a few months and I’d recommend to take this for a spin.
Unfortunately I’ve already come across a few technical quirks that need ironing out in the regular Zoho Web Creator but I must add that if something does really go haywire on you the support team are usually quite quick to respond.

Zoho has a short learning curve and will have you creating your applications within a few hours even if you haven’t had any programming experience at all. It opens up a great scope of possibilities for professionals like me who are naturally impatient. Creating really professional looking web forms has never really become so easy. Zoho still seems to be able to keep ahead of Google in the race for providing Desktop Software as a Service and the range of applications manages to fulfill the niche quite well.

Its official, I too am infected by the status disease, affluenza, social status anxiety or whatever you want to call it. The pressure to find a cure has taken me down the path of books on the subject of my ailment and hours spent in session with my therapist in an attempt to control this hostile villainous disease from attacking my intrinsic values. I’ve also spent many hours sifting through the photographic data of my youth to jog my memory into remembering what my intrinsic values and pleasures in life actually are. I’ve been flirting with meditation and yoga which has only caused my wallet to deflate and not much toward inflating my feelings of wellbeing.

Meaner than a midlife crisis which used to easily be cured, there are new methods of treatment necessary to combat this virus.

It has me asking, can I not just put a price on my need for the status of emotional Well Being? Marketers are so incredibly smart that the road to commoditizing this new status symbol is well on its way. Should I be convinced that spending money on peace keeper cosmetics and ELLO mobile (the promise: you pay your bills and we give our money to charities) will do me lots of emotional good. It also has a very nice 70’s ring to it.

If there is one fact I have taken for granted in my life and a logical one at that, it is the statement that all the money in the world cannot buy you happiness. There is certainly something very warm and fuzzy about this assumption which many of us will hold dear. Whoever said it had well in mind to keep us from vile sides of the pursuit of wealth, consumeritus, the purgatory where the wantee’s and havee’s congregate.

I rather do despair at the idea that alongside my personal quest to find the deeper meaning in life I will inevitably be a marketing target and be vulnerable to the lure of a prêt a porter range of values and charities invented by ‘free range social marketers. Imagine that ‘using product xyz will help you feel you are playing your part, help us to create a new society where we will all be happy, fulfilled and conscious members of our friendly planet earth’.

But beyond this I am actually helping the world to be a better place and there are bound to be charities which particularly appeal to what I think are my personal intrinsic values.

In fact, it is a brilliant (mis)interpretation of what psychologists believe, actually will help you find your way to a happy, self-fulfilling life, free from status anxiety and depression. Not particularly easy to achieve as it is basically an exercise of self-motivation which essentially must come from within you.

However social marketing is still brilliant because I don’t think many of my intrinsic values differ quite that much from millions of other consumers so I and many others are basically easy targets.

Unfortunately in my opinion it doesn’t mean we are truly on the road to becoming the increasingly conscious society, it just means that marketers have found a way to influence me into thinking there are indeed less strenuous ways to obtain emotional happiness.

For social entrepreneurs (I love this label for its unprofessed ambiguity, for yet have I to encounter the anti-social entrepreneur, a concept which I would find very frightening indeed however exceedingly more realistic and funny as it reminds me of those hilarious Eristoff Vodka commercials. As Oliver James put it in his last book ‘Affluenza’, social entrepreneurs play a key role in unleashing the unselfish capitalist manifesto.

10 years down the line and consumers, having seemingly happily spent millions and billions of currency on charity endorsed products, they will still wake up feeling as depressed as they were ten years earlier.

I4C held the first of its meetings in Milan on the 8th of November 2007. I am very pleased to say 15 of our members joined us for the traditional Italian aperitivo kindly arranged by Pasquale Monteleone from PR firm Hill & Knowlton. It may be no coincidence that nearly 40% of our members are Italian,  Design and Italy are synonymous in many ways, the natural aptitude for style and passion and respect for their artistic heritage is something which lives on in deeply rooted tradition.

Although its a first for us I think the turn up wasn’t bad at all considering we have less than 200 global members at the moment. It was important to me that I could show members that I4C is dedicated to make its members part of a community which has a clear mission and that we aren’t just another impersonal online network. I4C is growing by the day and it is important to me that members are actively motivated to share and network amongst themselves. However it is my experience that this can only evolve into something real if there is a strong outside driving force and business value.
I4C will dedicate itself to create this value, in the form of business opportunities and the ability to connect and openly communicate with innovators and creative peers.  The meetings will continue to exist along side the website. If you would like to organise a I4C meeting in your city, I would be pleased to help you communicate this to our members.

If you would like to become a member of Innovation for Creativity please contact me for a personal invitation.

I was really pleased to see that my colleague Jerome Bertrand (no relation) from the Dutch company Geo-Games produced a short demo video to show how they have been developing a way to offer geo-browsing support and booking transaction sites right from the start - to the finish. It’s not a bad project for now although I still tend to think that the consumer interface needs a bit of work. Please see the demo at : <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RWd77jBrlO4