DUBLIN, IRELAND - We've owed our United States users this update for quite some time. We had been using a European date format e.g. '23/04/09', while in the United States it is common to use '04/23/09'. This gets very complicated when you have '04/06/09', is this June 4th, or April 6th?

To solve this, we have now put dates in international format e.g. '23 Apr 2009', easy!



Next up, measurements. Imperial and metric options are now available in your Team Account settings. If you are a team 'Account Owner', visit [Team Account] -> [About Your Team] -> [Measurement Units]. Here you can pick to have all your units converted between miles or kilometers.





All your accounts have been upgraded automatically. Enjoy!

-Robin.

(P.S. We still use International English rather than American English, so we apologise if you see 's' instead of 'z'. e.g. 'Organisation')

DUBLIN, IRELAND - A whole bunch of new releases for you this week. The biggest shift is the Incident, Exercise, and Event pages. Their layouts have changed to reflect a structure that can hold more data for you down the road. The maps are bigger, more prominent, and the attendance list is much tidier.

We've worked down the attendance status levels to 3 traffic lights - red, amber, green. When you create an event, just 'request' the people you need and they may sign-in themselves and confirm or deny their attendance at the activity. Also, now as an editor, you can confirm people's attendance yourself if they can't do it themselves. These small changes will make a huge difference to editors.



Communication is a hugely important factor in team management, and a long requested feature was the ability to message the attendees of an event. Using the new comms icons on the activity page, you can now do just that - send a message to those 'Potential Attendees', 'Confirmed Attendees', 'Unconfirmed Attendees', 'Absent Attendees'. Go try it!



If you are in the UK or Ireland, you'll start to see more SMS icons appearing. These icons let you send an SMS message to either a group or individual. For example, you could send the text message to everyone coming to your training session tomorrow "Bring your technical gear, we're going climbing.". We'll update you live as each message is delivered, so you can see if someone didn't get it. More on our SMS capabilities soon - and hopefully news of this service launching in the United States.



All your accounts have been upgraded automatically! Enjoy.

-Robin.

DUBLIN, IRELAND - Last night, Decisions For Heroes was announced as a finalist for the €10,000 iQ Prize. The prize fund had 249 entries, so it is brilliant news to have made it to the final 8!



Bring on July 8th, when we have to make an elevator pitch Dragons Den style, to the judging panel! The judges include representatives from Facebook, Google, Microsoft, a number of start-ups, and London investor Nic Brisbourne.

More here.

DUBLIN, IRELAND - Decisions For Heroes has been announced as one of the 6 finalists in The Europa Awards as Best Social Innovation from the Europe, Middle East, and Africa region. The Europas - The TechCrunch Europe Awards 2009 recognise and celebrate the most compelling technology startups, Internet and mobile innovations of the year.

The Awards Ceremony will take place in London at the Delfina with an audience of 300 on July 9th.

Winners are determined based on popularity vote and a judging panel, so I would really appreciate your click! Click Here To Vote, it just takes a few seconds!

-Robin.