Employee leave management is a complex task with potentially high stakes: companies lose millions or even billions of dollars in revenue each year without even knowing it because of unaccounted employee time off, says Atlanta-based Matter (which is not to be confused with the London company that goes by the same name). Enter Perq, a web application that’s designed to let companies easily create an online version of their employee leave policies, view a shared calendar, and manage leave requests, accrued time off and multiple benefit levels. Personalized dashboards and automated tracking make it easy to keep up with accrual and rollover, while a simple leave request process keeps staff and managers connected and informed. Perq is free for up to three users; beyond that, pricing starts at USD 9 per month for up to 10 users. The service is also available for licensing and deployment as a white label product for enterprises with special brand or security requirements.

Despite the best efforts of companies like Disney to reward those who donate their time to charity, the fact remains that volunteerism in the US has declined by 27 percent since 2001, according to app developer Catalista. Hoping to combat that trend, the San Francisco company has created mobile apps for Android and iPhone that make it easy for potential volunteers to find opportunities across the country. Users begin by downloading the free Catalista application onto their mobile phone. The application uses All for Good’s open API to connect users with more than 200,000 real-time, local opportunities across the US, offering them numerous chances to give back that day, weekend or month in an effort taking place nearby. Catalista also lets users invite their friends on Facebook to join them in a volunteer effort; in addition, it provides a way for users to track their cumulative impact and rate their volunteering experience once they’ve done a good deed. Even beyond the mobile access to volunteer opportunity listings, what seems especially compelling about Catalista is the possibility that it could facilitate spontaneous, ad-hoc volunteering, whereby people with a few hours of unscheduled time on their hands can find and participate in local opportunities that they might not have been able to plan for otherwise. One to partner with or emulate for would-be volunteers in the rest of the world…?

Newsmap is a real-time consolidated news feed: It’s objective is to simply demonstrate visually the relationships between data and the unseen patterns in news media. the size of each cell is determined by the amount of related articles that exist inside each news cluster that the Google News Aggregator presents. In that way users can quickly identify which news stories have been given the most coverage, viewing the map by region, topic or time. Newsmap also allows to compare the news landscape among several countries, making it possible to differentiate which countries give more coverage to, for example, more national news than international or sports rather than business

100 years of inspiration. Not to be confused with Cien Anos De Solidud, of the Gabriel Garcia Marquez. This is a collection of clips and making-of footage from notable visual effects films of the past century. The leap in blue screening and animation that you see towards the end is a very powerful outline of just what we can achieve nowadays…

Ataque de Panico. I think this is a trailer for a film. Or is a short film in itself (I’m not sure of the exact translation of cortometraje, am pretty certain that it refers to a short film). Anyway, it’s an engaging way to spend 5 minutes.

So, this week’s mail contains a couple of charitable examples and then something that I saw earlier this week which quite literally stopped me in my tracks. OK, the latter isn’t anything to do with charity, but it is about Social Media. Honest.

Oh, and many thanks to Stuart and Anthony for their poster ‘ambush’…

A

A waterfall starts with a drop of rain. http://www.justgiving.com/

Justgiving was founded in 1999 with a simple mission: to enable any charity, no matter how small, to use the web to raise money at no (or little) cost. With over 6.5 million users and £370 million raised for more than 6,000 charities, I think I would say that they have achieved this, no? And for those of you who want to see Just Giving in action, our indomitable Oscar could always use a few more pennies to support his Marathon fund-raising efforts (http://my.artezglobal.com/personalPage.aspx?SID=242480).

Proctor & Gamble raises money for charity be embracing social media http://adage.com/digital/article?article_id=134879

On Wednesday night, Proctor & Gamble paired 40 digital media and agency executives with 100 of its North American directors in a contest to sell Tide T-shirts for charity, as its much vaunted ‘Digital Hack Night’ became a four hour reality show aired largely in social media. For an upfront spend of $4,000, P&G managed to sell 2,000 T-shirts at $20 a pop for charity, while exploring the top ten trending topics on Twitter in the process. That’s a tenfold ROI. I love this approach to educating clients about social media, by capitalising on natural competitiveness and making a significant return at the same time. Why didn’t we think of it?

Jaws. The atonement. http://www.churaumi-hakken.jp/p3/

Jaws was a groundbreaking film. Not only was it a box-office smash, but it also created a generation of people who were unable to swim in deep water without encountering a spine numbing fear about what lay in wait below. Anyway, this site, which promotes an aquarium in Okinawa, uses user-generated videos from You-Tube in a way that is quite frankly one of the best uses of Flash I have seen in ages. It takes a while to load up, but the effect is worth the wait.