The ACORD 22 Intermodal Interchange Certificate of Insurance form has been revised and released into production as of April 30, 2012. Effective August 1, 2012, the UIIA office will require that agents submitting paper certificates via fax, e-mail or mail utilize the ACORD 22 Certificate of Insurance form. No other certificate forms will be accepted after the August 1st date.

To make sure your agency is prepared to utilize the ACORD 22 (2012/04) form prior to the implementation date of this new requirement view this NOTICE sent to all active insurance agents in the UIIA database advising of the effective date of the new insurance submission requirement.

All Insurance Agents that currently submit insurance on behalf of Motor Carriers to the UIIA: How to use the ACORD 22 form and how to register for online submission of insurance. Representatives from ACORD responded to questions regarding 30-day advance notice of cancellation as it relates to the ACORD 22 and ACORD 25 forms. Take advantage of this opportunity to get a better understanding of UIIA insurance requirements and also how to submit insurance to the UIIA office in the most efficient manner that will benefit both you and your insured.

• Register to Submit Insurance Online
• Download UIIA Acord 22 Certificate of Insurance
• UIIA Insurance Requirements
• Frequently Requested UIIA Insurance Forms
• List of Corporate Addresses for UIIA EPs
• FAQs
• Insurance Packet (detailed instructions)
• UIIA Agreement

In need of a better certificate management solution? Learn more about the ecertsonline? Talk to an ecertsonline specialist 1-206-784-5157 or request a product demonstration.

Booth No. 227 - NetVU’s Conference (formerly The AMS Users’ Group National Conference) represents the largest national gathering of independent insurance agencies industry wide.

NetVU conference attendees (1,500 in 2011) represent some of the largest and fastest growing agencies in the United States.

Preliminary Schedule-at-a-Glance  (Schedule is preliminary and subject to change.)

Wednesday, April 25
7:00 a.m. - 5:00 p.m. Island Booth Set Up & Registration
12:00 Noon - 5:00 p.m. Inline Booth Set Up & Registration

Thursday, April 26
7:00 a.m. - 9:00 a.m. Exhibit Booth Set Up & Registration
10:00 a.m. - 1:45 p.m. Exhibit Area Open
3:30 p.m. - 5:00 p.m. Disney Institute Session
5:00 p.m. - 7:00 p.m. Grand Opening Reception in Exhibit Area - Door Prize Drawings
7:00 p.m. - 9:00 p.m. Company Hospitality Night

Friday, April 27
8:00 a.m. - 9:30 a.m. General Session & Keynote Speaker
9:30 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. “By Appointment Only” Exhibit Hours
12:45 p.m. - 2:00 p.m. CIO Panel & Luncheon
5:00 p.m. - 7:00 p.m. Exhibit Area Reception - Door Prize Drawings

Saturday, April 28
9:00 a.m. - 11:15 a.m. Closing Coffee Bar in Exhibit Area - Grand Prize Drawings
11:00 a.m. - 4:00 p.m. Exhibit Tear Down
12:45 p.m. - 2:00 p.m. Luncheon
6:00 p.m. - 9:00 p.m. Grand Finale Celebration

The full schedule of events and registration information can be found at: www.netvu.org/12NC

CHANGES TO STANDARDS:
What does the change process look like? Standards Release & Maintenance  Processes Outline (PDF). Why and how are changes made to the existing ACORD Standards. They actually come from two sources:

1. REGULATORY CHANGES:
These are required by the regulatory body and do not go through the Working Group or Maintenance Request processes.

2. MAINTENANCE REQUESTS:
These are changes submitted by ACORD members, industry participants, and ACORD Working Groups to enhance the standards. They follow a process outlined by the ACORD Standards Program General Guidelines & Procedures. These are voted on by the membership.

Change is also underway to streamline this process further with the Agile Standards Development Organization initiative. Currently, the focus is on issues management and “draft versions of Standards to make changes readily available to the membership.

DATES TO REMEMBER:

HOW TO SUBMIT:
Any interested party in the industry can submit a maintenance request to enhance the ACORD Standards. Templates and further information are available here: ACORD Maintenance Request Submissions.

After 244 years in print, the 32-volume Encyclopaedia Britannica will be discontinued, but the encyclopedia will live on and grow in the myriad digital forms which have been popular with millions for years. Their product line includes not just reference works but curriculum and learning solutions used in schools around the world.

Website: www.britannica.com

Mark Zuckerberg and his social networking behemoth Facebook, Inc. filed IPO documents with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Wednesday, February 1, 2012.

LETTER FROM MARK ZUCKERBERG

Facebook was not originally created to be a company. It was built to accomplish a social mission — to make the world more open and connected.

We think it’s important that everyone who invests in Facebook understands what this mission means to us, how we make decisions and why we do the things we do. I will try to outline our approach in this letter.

At Facebook, we’re inspired by technologies that have revolutionized how people spread and consume information. We often talk about inventions like the printing press and the television — by simply making communication more efficient, they led to a complete transformation of many important parts of society.

They gave more people a voice. They encouraged progress. They changed the way society was organized. They brought us closer together.

Today, our society has reached another tipping point. We live at a moment when the majority of people in the world have access to the internet or mobile phones — the raw tools necessary to start sharing what they’re thinking, feeling and doing with whomever they want. Facebook aspires to build the services that give people the power to share and help them once again transform many of our core institutions and industries.

There is a huge need and a huge opportunity to get everyone in the world connected, to give everyone a voice and to help transform society for the future. The scale of the technology and infrastructure that must be built is unprecedented, and we believe this is the most important problem we can focus on.

We hope to strengthen how people relate to each other.

Even if our mission sounds big, it starts small — with the relationship between two people.

Personal relationships are the fundamental unit of our society. Relationships are how we discover new ideas, understand our world and ultimately derive long-term happiness.

At Facebook, we build tools to help people connect with the people they want and share what they want, and by doing this we are extending people’s capacity to build and maintain relationships.

People sharing more — even if just with their close friends or families — creates a more open culture and leads to a better understanding of the lives and perspectives of others. We believe that this creates a greater number of stronger relationships between people, and that it helps people get exposed to a greater number of diverse perspectives.

By helping people form these connections, we hope to rewire the way people spread and consume information. We think the world’s information infrastructure should resemble the social graph — a network built from the bottom up or peer-to-peer, rather than the monolithic, top-down structure that has existed to date. We also believe that giving people control over what they share is a fundamental principle of this rewiring.

We have already helped more than 800 million people map out more than 100 billion connections so far, and our goal is to help this rewiring accelerate.

We hope to improve how people connect to businesses and the economy.

We think a more open and connected world will help create a stronger economy with more authentic businesses that build better products and services.

As people share more, they have access to more opinions from the people they trust about the products and services they use. This makes it easier to discover the best products and improve the quality and efficiency of their lives.

One result of making it easier to find better products is that businesses will be rewarded for building better products — ones that are personalized and designed around people. We have found that products that are “social by design” tend to be more engaging than their traditional counterparts, and we look forward to seeing more of the world’s products move in this direction.

Our developer platform has already enabled hundreds of thousands of businesses to build higher-quality and more social products. We have seen disruptive new approaches in industries like games, music and news, and we expect to see similar disruption in more industries by new approaches that are social by design.

In addition to building better products, a more open world will also encourage businesses to engage with their customers directly and authentically. More than four million businesses have Pages on Facebook that they use to have a dialogue with their customers. We expect this trend to grow as well.

We hope to change how people relate to their governments and social institutions.

We believe building tools to help people share can bring a more honest and transparent dialogue around government that could lead to more direct empowerment of people, more accountability for officials and better solutions to some of the biggest problems of our time.

By giving people the power to share, we are starting to see people make their voices heard on a different scale from what has historically been possible. These voices will increase in number and volume. They cannot be ignored. Over time, we expect governments will become more responsive to issues and concerns raised directly by all their people rather than through intermediaries controlled by a select few.

Through this process, we believe that leaders will emerge across all countries who are pro-internet and fight for the rights of their people, including the right to share what they want and the right to access all information that people want to share with them.

Finally, as more of the economy moves towards higher-quality products that are personalized, we also expect to see the emergence of new services that are social by design to address the large worldwide problems we face in job creation, education and health care. We look forward to doing what we can to help this progress.

Our Mission and Our Business

As I said above, Facebook was not originally founded to be a company. We’ve always cared primarily about our social mission, the services we’re building and the people who use them. This is a different approach for a public company to take, so I want to explain why I think it works.

I started off by writing the first version of Facebook myself because it was something I wanted to exist. Since then, most of the ideas and code that have gone into Facebook have come from the great people we’ve attracted to our team.

Most great people care primarily about building and being a part of great things, but they also want to make money. Through the process of building a team — and also building a developer community, advertising market and investor base — I’ve developed a deep appreciation for how building a strong company with a strong economic engine and strong growth can be the best way to align many people to solve important problems.

Simply put: we don’t build services to make money; we make money to build better services.

And we think this is a good way to build something. These days I think more and more people want to use services from companies that believe in something beyond simply maximizing profits.

By focusing on our mission and building great services, we believe we will create the most value for our shareholders and partners over the long term — and this in turn will enable us to keep attracting the best people and building more great services. We don’t wake up in the morning with the primary goal of making money, but we understand that the best way to achieve our mission is to build a strong and valuable company.

This is how we think about our IPO as well. We’re going public for our employees and our investors. We made a commitment to them when we gave them equity that we’d work hard to make it worth a lot and make it liquid, and this IPO is fulfilling our commitment. As we become a public company, we’re making a similar commitment to our new investors and we will work just as hard to fulfill it.

The Hacker Way

As part of building a strong company, we work hard at making Facebook the best place for great people to have a big impact on the world and learn from other great people. We have cultivated a unique culture and management approach that we call the Hacker Way.

The word “hacker” has an unfairly negative connotation from being portrayed in the media as people who break into computers. In reality, hacking just means building something quickly or testing the boundaries of what can be done. Like most things, it can be used for good or bad, but the vast majority of hackers I’ve met tend to be idealistic people who want to have a positive impact on the world.

The Hacker Way is an approach to building that involves continuous improvement and iteration. Hackers believe that something can always be better, and that nothing is ever complete. They just have to go fix it — often in the face of people who say it’s impossible or are content with the status quo.

Hackers try to build the best services over the long term by quickly releasing and learning from smaller iterations rather than trying to get everything right all at once. To support this, we have built a testing framework that at any given time can try out thousands of versions of Facebook. We have the words “Done is better than perfect” painted on our walls to remind ourselves to always keep shipping.

Hacking is also an inherently hands-on and active discipline. Instead of debating for days whether a new idea is possible or what the best way to build something is, hackers would rather just prototype something and see what works. There’s a hacker mantra that you’ll hear a lot around Facebook offices: “Code wins arguments.”

Hacker culture is also extremely open and meritocratic. Hackers believe that the best idea and implementation should always win — not the person who is best at lobbying for an idea or the person who manages the most people.

To encourage this approach, every few months we have a hackathon, where everyone builds prototypes for new ideas they have. At the end, the whole team gets together and looks at everything that has been built. Many of our most successful products came out of hackathons, including Timeline, chat, video, our mobile development framework and some of our most important infrastructure like the HipHop compiler.

To make sure all our engineers share this approach, we require all new engineers — even managers whose primary job will not be to write code — to go through a program called Bootcamp where they learn our codebase, our tools and our approach. There are a lot of folks in the industry who manage engineers and don’t want to code themselves, but the type of hands-on people we’re looking for are willing and able to go through Bootcamp.

The examples above all relate to engineering, but we have distilled these principles into five core values for how we run Facebook:

Focus on Impact

If we want to have the biggest impact, the best way to do this is to make sure we always focus on solving the most important problems. It sounds simple, but we think most companies do this poorly and waste a lot of time. We expect everyone at Facebook to be good at finding the biggest problems to work on.

Move Fast

Moving fast enables us to build more things and learn faster. However, as most companies grow, they slow down too much because they’re more afraid of making mistakes than they are of losing opportunities by moving too slowly. We have a saying: “Move fast and break things.” The idea is that if you never break anything, you’re probably not moving fast enough.

Be Bold

Building great things means taking risks. This can be scary and prevents most companies from doing the bold things they should. However, in a world that’s changing so quickly, you’re guaranteed to fail if you don’t take any risks. We have another saying: “The riskiest thing is to take no risks.” We encourage everyone to make bold decisions, even if that means being wrong some of the time.

Be Open

We believe that a more open world is a better world because people with more information can make better decisions and have a greater impact. That goes for running our company as well. We work hard to make sure everyone at Facebook has access to as much information as possible about every part of the company so they can make the best decisions and have the greatest impact.

Build Social Value

Once again, Facebook exists to make the world more open and connected, and not just to build a company. We expect everyone at Facebook to focus every day on how to build real value for the world in everything they do.

Thanks for taking the time to read this letter. We believe that we have an opportunity to have an important impact on the world and build a lasting company in the process. I look forward to building something great together.

A good place to find the answer to this question would be at the Big “I” Virtual University’s Certificate Resource Center; a great online resource for learning more about risk managing your certificates-of-insurance exposure.

Bill Wilson Director, IIABA’s Virtual University in PropertyCasualty360 a national underwriter website provides us with a bit of insight regarding this cost analysis question. He writes that one of the most daunting—and often reviled—tasks facing agencies today involves the processing of certificates of insurance. This is an activity that typically generates no revenue for the agency but creates significant operational costs and dramatically heightens the agency’s E&O exposure.

One consultant estimates the cost to issue a plain-vanilla ACORD 25 document at $7; and if some customization is required, it could be as much as $15-18. This figure could go even higher when responding to requests that insist upon the completion of some sort of “compliance checklist” that consists of dozens of broad, vague, generalized questions about policy coverages.

Another agent estimates that 3 percent of the firm’s commercial-lines revenue went to pay for certificate operations last year. That’s a big chunk of agency profit being invested in an activity being provided to third parties virtually free of charge. The agent estimates the cost of issuing certificates is double the cost just three years ago due to the increase in, and complexity of, requests.

Wilson concludes by saying costs associated with certificates of insurance are not trivial, whether you’re considering operational expenses or potential E&O claims. Read the entire story: Opinion: The Real Cost of Certificates of Insurance by Bill Wilson PropertyCasualty360.

This article appears in the August 15, 2011 edition of National Underwriter P&C.

In some cases, you may not even be looking at an accurate representation of what the web publisher intended for you to see. Without a current version of the browser you may not experience all the functionality that the site has to offer.

Browser Spell Check: However, if you refuse to move beyond IE then you might consider an IE spell check extension (download located at the very bottom of this post). Before we get into all that let’s first take a look at what a browser is and some of your alternative options.

What is a browser?: The web browser is arguably the most important piece of software on your computer. You spend much of your time online inside a browser: When you work within web-based applications, search, chat, email, shop, bank, read the news, and watch videos online, you often do all this using a browser.

Apple - Safari w/ built-in spell check (Free for Mac + PC): Safari isn’t just the world’s most innovative web browser. It changes the way you interact with the web. With great new features that take advantage of OS X Lion, you’ll become completely immersed in everything you see, touch, read, and watch. Oh, and browse.

Safari offers a built-in spell checker. The Safari spell check feature is like the spell checker in many word processing applications, it highlights errors as you type and reviews your text word by word, offering new spelling suggestions. Safari can spell-check in 15 different languages. Download Safari

 Mozilla - Firefox w/ built-in spell check (Free for Mac + PC): Get an overview of what makes Firefox awesome, learn about the Mozilla Firefox mission and explore popular features like spell check.

The Firefox built-in spell checker works directly in web pages, like blog posts and email. Save yourself a step and stop worrying about typos. Download Firefox

 Google - Chrome w/ built-in spell check (Free for Mac + PC): Do you type too fast? Google Chrome’s spell-check can automatically check your spelling in web forms and text fields. Chrome is designed to be fast in every possible way: It’s quick to start up from your desktop, loads web pages in a snap, and runs complex web applications fast.

Chrome’s browser window is streamlined, clean and simple. Chrome also includes features that are designed for efficiency and ease of use. Download Chrome

Opera Software - Opera w/ built-in spell check (Free for Mac + PC): Opera Software has always strived to develop the fastest and technologically most advanced browsers. As a result, the Opera browser is the choice of some of the world’s most demanding and knowledgeable users.

The Opera spell checker shows a red line under misspelled words anywhere you can enter text on a webpage. Corrections can be chosen by right-clicking the misspelled word. Download Opera

Microsoft Internet Explorer Extension - IE7Pro Spell Check: IE7Pro Spell Check is an Internet Explorer extension that can perform spelling checks on all text inside Internet Explorer (IE) user-input forms. IE7Pro Spell Check will check any text you enter and alert you to possible errors by adding a red underline to any potentially misspelled words.

By default, spell check is not enabled and when enabled, it only automatically spell checks textareas (text boxes with multiple lines) and not text inputs (single line).  By right-clicking on a text-input, you can select “spell check this field”. You can go to IE7Pro “preferences” - “Spell Checker module” to enable and disable spell check.

Closing Suggestions: If you manage your own desktop give a few of these a test drive and see and experience the difference for yourself. It’s only after you have tried them will you realize there is in fact a difference.

If you have an IT department that manages your network you might request that they provide you with at least one alternative browser. An alternative browser can streamline your business activities.

Lastly, spell check is not the absolute answer as even with spell check, grammar and “like” words can often get overlooked. The dictionary is still a very good idea.