For most folks, 2009 was a tough and stressful year. Ours was no different – with some of the highest highs and lowest lows a startup business could imagine.

As we take stock of the past year – one thing is certain: We are just as grateful for the tough times as we are for the good times. It was during the toughest times were where we learned the most about our business an about our character as a company.

Our first blog post details the trials and tribulations of the 1st half of the year: An operator that we worked with for 2 years went out of business, we had to fire an incompetent software development team and essentially start from scratch, major challenges to the business plan, etc…

All of these have made us better, stronger and well positioned for growth in 2010 and beyond. We found a phenomenal partner in New Vectors Aviation and learned a lot in the process. We developed many additional features in our software suite that go far beyond booking and reservations to very sophisticated CRM and Flight Resource Management. And we finally launched the online system we have been working on for the past 4 years on November 6th 2009!

Moving forward, we have adapted our business model and technology (version 1.1 to be released in Q2 2009) to support almost any type of aircraft available for charter, most trip profiles, over 19,000 airports and heliports in the US and even more sophisticated CRM, resource management and optimization features.

It has been an amazing journey since we started out 4 years ago and we are very excited to move into 2010 for the next chapter of our story.

We hope you enjoyed your holidays and wish you all a very happy and prosperous new year!

Your friends at FlyMiwok

Folks, here’s a pretty good catalog of what can happen if you do not understand Facebook’s privacy settings. You have been warned…

And, of course, there are much more extreme examples…

I was reminded of this when I logged into Facebook and saw a popup altering me to the new privacy settings they have implemented and I immediately set all to “Only Friends” – the most restrictive generic option.

[for the anti-social social networkers among you, you can also customize to even limit access to certain information just to yourself…]

If the examples above convinced you to manage your information on Facebook closely, please log in and review it. One of these days you’ll be happy you did.

The unsettling thing was that with the new privacy settings, the default option was “everybody”.. This is an option that will undoubtedly create many more fails on Facebook. 

It is also very irresponsible. Facebook should know better.

Jason Calacanis – CEO of Mahalo and a blogger I like to follow – dissects the problem correctly and points to the fact that this is a very sneaky way to monetize your information.

At FlyMiwok, your privacy settings are set automatically to “no-one”. I.e. no other member can see your personal information. Period. It is up to you to decide what information you want to share with others. Just log in and go to “My Profile/Settings” and check it out!

Gad Barnea – CEO – FlyMiwok, Inc.

Whenever a new service is launched, people have questions. Where can I find a list of flights? How much is it to go from A to B on Monday? How do I get a refund? These are just some of the questions that we received over the last weeks…

To help you answer these questions, we posted an FAQ on the new flymiwok.com site. So please grab it and if your questions are not answered, simply contact us!

In addition, we have begun work on a series of tutorials that will focus on the most common tasks that users perform on the site. Stay tuned as we start releasing them soon!

Veit Irtenkauf – Chief Product Officer – FlyMiwok, Inc.