As the price of fuel continues to skyrocket worldwide and grocery prices creep ever upwards, Yodlee and Money Dashboard found that consumers are spending an average of 40% more on fuel and 9% more on groceries each month than their budget allocation in these categories.

Money Dashboard Founder and CEO Gavin Littlejohn explained, “Unfortunately the trend of day-to-day essentials increasing in price is set to stay for the foreseeable future, and so consumers need to take this into account when planning their monthly budget. Fortunately we can now provide a secure and hassle free way to help consumers to budget and staying in control more easily.”

As people continue to struggle through difficult economic times, more people are clamouring for easy-to-use online personal financial management tools to help them plan and manage expenditures.

“Yodlee has seen a significant increase in demand for comprehensive PFM services, as is evidenced by Money Dashboard’s rapid adoption,” said Jason O’Shaughnessy, Yodlee’s Managing Director, EMEA. “When people are dealing with increased costs for life necessities like food and energy, the need for accurate budgeting becomes even more pronounced, and we’re pleased to provide robust services that have a marked impact on the day-to-day lives of thousands of people. Yodlee is committed to helping our partners to develop the European market place for PFM.”

Powering (PFM) for more than 27 million individuals across the globe, Yodlee combines traditional PFM and payments with the new Yodlee FinApp Center — a financial services application marketplace—to create a personalized and actionable online and mobile money management experience.

With Yodlee 10 and the Yodlee FinApp Center, European banks and financial services providers have the freedom to innovate and deploy solutions quickly so they can engage customers who might otherwise be overwhelmed by the complexity of monitoring and managing accounts for checking, savings, credit, debit, personal loans, and rewards programs. Yodlee 10 also empowers a personalized online and mobile experience, since nothing is more personal, or individual, than a person’s finances.

For more information, visit www.yodlee.com and www.moneydashboard.com or email Lucy Smith.

CIVIC, a Scottish company headquartered in Edinburgh, has been selected against some fierce competition from major European and International competitors to provide web applications and development for the Scottish Government, Associated Departments and Agencies to the Scottish Government and Non-Departmental Public Bodies (NDPBs) following its appointment to The Scottish Government Multi Supplier Framework for Provision of Applications, Web Development and Associated Services.

This news sees CIVIC taking the initiative and the lead role in bringing together a powerful consortium including leading business and technology service company, Logica, as well as other Scottish businesses User Vision, Rapid Mobile and Company Net. It is this diversity of resource, experience and skills that allows CIVIC to offer value for money and one of the most comprehensive and innovative portfolios of web development services available on the digital landscape today.

Polly Purvis of ScotlandIS, the trade body for software, IT and creative technology businesses in Scotland comments: “We are delighted that a Scottish SME like CIVIC has demonstrated the capability to make it through onto Government frameworks. The SME sector is where real innovation, creativity and ideas lie and it is critical small businesses are given the opportunity to compete for public sector work on the same basis as the industry’s multinationals. This news clearly shows how well respected CIVIC is to have been able to pull together such a powerful consortium and I am really pleased to see this dynamic mix of small businesses working alongside global companies.”

CIVIC is an independent creative digital agency and has been delivering high profile digital and technical projects in the public and private sector since 2001. Few companies in Scotland today have CIVIC’s strength in combining technology and design into a functional solution. This unique ability is also underpinned with the industry standard ISO9001 and ISO27001 accreditations, offering CIVICs’ clients the reassurance they need when delivering complex projects. This unique ability to integrate form and function has helped secure its place on this particular multi supplier framework.

Greig Tosh, CIVIC’s MD explains: “We are a company of creative people; made up of design, usability and technology experts. We understand clearly that websites and web applications not only have to function but have to engage and communicate with an increasingly diverse audience. Our blend of technology and design means we can make great digital ideas work online.”

“To be accepted onto this multi supplier framework alongside much larger companies is an extraordinary achievement and testament to the consistent standard of work the team at CIVIC delivers. I am extremely proud of CIVIC today and excited about what the future holds for us.”

A rigorous process of selection was conducted by the CGCoPE over a number of months to ensure that all the companies appointed to the multi supplier framework have the skills and experience as well as the resources to be able to deliver value for money projects during this time of budgetary constraints in the public sector.

Aiden Honley, Head of Logica’s Scottish Public Sector says: “Scotland has a proud history of innovation and it is widely recognised that the appropriate use of technology is one of the surest ways of increasing productivity, across all sectors of our economy. Much of Scotland’s most innovative thinking about the application of technology takes place within the SME market and we wanted to use our experience to help innovators deliver real benefits to Scotland. Logica is delighted to have been selected by CIVIC to work with them to deliver services to the Scottish Government through this multi supplier framework.”

www.civicuk.com

Powered by Flexiant’s flagship technology “Extility”, FlexiScale’s pay-as-you-go virtual servers can be up and running, or taken down in less than 60 seconds, ensuring businesses can rapidly shape their IT resources in response to dynamic market conditions. With no long-term commitment or capital expenditure, FlexiScale facilitates clear focus on core business activities by reducing time, energy and effort spent on IT provisioning and investment.

Key new features in the 2.1 software release include:

• Ten additional configurations of virtual servers, bringing the total to sixteen;
• Up to 8 virtual CPUs per virtual server;
• A metadata service allowing customers and image vendors to pass a hierarchy of data to virtual servers for dynamic runtime configuration;
• Support for Cohesive-FT’s VPN-Cubed virtual server images, allowing customer controlled networking across multiple clouds, and between private infrastructure and the clouds.

The release also includes a number of minor features and usability improvements, as well as over a hundred minor bug fixes.

Tony Lucas, Founder of Flexiant, explains: “This release is the first of many incremental enhancements to our FlexiScale products. We know our customers will in particular appreciate the far wider range of RAM and CPU configurations and the metadata service will open up a wide range of new possibilities for image providers and those using our platform for automatic virtual server instantiation.”

www.flexiant.com

Hot tin Roof is launching Hot Tin Wire, a spin off internet division, creating and delivering online PR strategies primarily for the SME sector.

The agency has spent the last 12 months developing the infrastructure and perfecting the skills that will allow it to offer one of the hardest hitting online PR services in Scotland today.

Online consumer and corporate campaigns have already been delivered by the agency for all of its clients including Ryvita Limbos, Spencerfield Spirit and User Vision.

The unprecedented growth of social media over the last two years has changed the media landscape forever. It’s no longer a question of should a company develop an online PR strategy, but how quickly it can start and how it maintains visibility.

Hot Tin Roof has worked in digital marketing since launch, having delivered Ambergreen’s campaign for seven years, positioning the company as one of the UK’s leading digital marketing agencies, pioneering search marketing in Europe.

Sarah Lee, Hot Tin Roof MD explains: “Online PR is fresh, new and exciting. It has matured over the past five years and today UK business is ready for the concept and eager to engage.”

Many companies are now looking to online PR as a more accessible and affordable entry point to public relations. Traditional offline PR that builds reputation and positions a brand has to be sustained over the long term. Online PR can be instant, rapidly raise awareness and deliver results immediately.

There are plenty of stories of bad online PR like the forum discussions that destroyed the Kryptonite bike lock reputation because its brand managers did not monitor what was being said about the brand online.

Lee continues: “And thank you Ryanair for such a monumentally bad response to a blogger last week. Communication like this shows that we all need to become PRs now. Good communication is absolutely essential to the success of businesses online and to the security of brand reputation.”

The key to Hot Tin Wire’s success is taking the traditional PR skills and using them online. Knowing how to communicate a message and what makes a good story is combined with a broad and deep knowledge of the internet.

Hot Tin Wire offers a full online PR service including media monitoring, market research, key message creation, copy writing and online press release distribution. It designs, writes and publishes websites, blogs, Facebook and Twitter profiles, newsletters and podcasts.