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Gary Vaynerchuk’s ‘Scaling Caring’ talk delivered at the recent 140Conf in New York.

Other Gary Vee posts on LovelyCompanies.com: Profile, How to react to your website getting hacked, The Future of Communities.

It’s been over a month since our last post mentioning innocent drinks! Sorry about that. Here’s a short film about innocent squeezies:

I’d like you to meet Andrew Warner. You may already recognise the name as back in January we featured an interview of his about Zappos customer service. Incidentally, that post has been one of our most popular in the last few months!

Andrew runs Mixergy.com where he publishes interviews with successful entrepreneurs so that ‘ambitious upstarts’ can learn valuable lessons and be inspired.

He has interviewed all sorts of lovely people including Guy Kawasaki (who we wrote about back in December), Seth Godin and Tara Hunt.

Until recently not much was known about Andrew’s background but last month Neil Patel persuaded him to switch to the other side of the microphone and published an interview with him on his blog Quicksprout.com. The result? An extraordinary story of a bootstrapped startup. Andrew returned his clothes to J Crew and used the refunds to get his company off the ground. He then built it up to a turnover of more than $35m.

Andrew is also a Kiva advocate. A couple of months ago he gave away $25 to eight people (via Twitter) to loan out on Kiva. I was one of the lucky recipients and loaned the funds to 21-year-old Firdavs Kurbonov.

As it happens this is the 100th post on LovelyCompanies.com and to celebrate I’d like to pass on Andrew’s favour on and offer a $25 Kiva gift certificate to the first commenter on this post.

Do check out Andrew’s interviews on Mixergy.com and, if you fancy trying out Kiva, let us know in the comments!

Remember the Fund It Frog that earns money for charity as you shop online? Here’s another service that uses affiliate links to raise money for charity.

Good.ly, produced by the folks at Skimlinks, is a straightforward URL shortener. Simply enter a URL into the box on the homepage and click the ‘Make it Good’ button. If possible, the shortened URL will also act as an affiliate link from which 55% of any revenue earned goes to charity. At the moment they have three charities on board: Dogs Trust, Crisis and ChildVoice International but they are open to new charities signing up. There is also an option to support all available charities.

There is also a nifty bookmarklet so that you can shorten URLs as you browse the internet.

Check out the Miss Good.ly Two Shoes blog and their Twitter feed for updates.

There was a great post on Mashable a couple of days ago about how social media is changing the non-profit world by:

1. Deepening relationships and engagement
2. Allowing individuals & small groups to self-organise
3. Facilitating collaboration and crowdsourcing
4. Being adopted behind the scenes

The optimistic conclusion:

As more and more non-profits adopt social media and their practice improves over time, we will no doubt see a transformation of the non-profit sector.

Click here to read the full article.

Jacqueline Novogratz, founder and CEO of the Acumen Fund and author of The Blue Sweater, shares stories of how “patient capital” can bring sustainable jobs, goods, services - and dignity - to the world’s poorest.

To help us improve LovelyCompanies.com I’d be very grateful if you would take a minute to answer a couple of questions, either in a comment or by email:

1. On a scale of 1-10 (where 10 is most likely), how likely is it that you you would recommend this blog to a friend or colleague?
2. How did you hear about it?
3. What led you to become a subscriber, versus just reading an article and leaving like everybody else? (or, if you’re not a subscriber, what would it take to convince you?)
4. What do you hope to see here in the future?

Thank you!

(Questions originally by Eric Ries)

The Alamo Drafthouse, a cinema in Austin, Texas, know that they’re in the entertainment industry. From time to time they have what they call ‘Signature Events’.

These events include ‘Renegade Karaoke’:

…and a secret world-premiere of the new Star Trek film:

There’s more info over on the Church of the Customer Blog but here’s the bottom line:

Fun is contagious.
Fun spreads.
Fun inspires loyalty.
Fun opens wallets.

Successful entrepreneur Ray Anderson shares his vision for sustainable business at TED:

You can already leave a comment here on LovelyCompanies.com using Facebook. Now you can also become a fan!

New posts will be automatically be imported to our shiny new fan page. You can also leave comments, ‘like’ posts, write on the wall, upload pictures etc.

Need a quick win on your Monday to-do list? Get the ball rolling with another LovelyCompanies.com poll!

This time we’d like to revive the age-old town vs country debate and ask whether it has any bearing on how lovely a company is. What do you think?

Poll closes: Friday 10th April, 2pm.

Here’s a quick selection of yesterday’s April Fools banter from various lovely companies:

• The Guardian will be published exclusively on Twitter
• MOO announce the SUPER ECO FRIENDLY Business Card. Simply paint a business card you’ve been given by someone else then stick new letters on!
• President Obama visits Fruit Towers
• Google’s latest product - CADIE - will create the perfect webpage and help you with your email
• Firebox launched a couple of new products: SatNav shoes and the iREMember dream video recorder

What was your favourite April Fool this year?

Also: check out our list from last year and the huge list over on TechCrunch!

Social websites run by lovely companies often have lovely communities. One of the earlier social websites with a lovely community that was kind, friendly and helpful, was Flickr.

Last week Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake announced her latest project - Hunch.com - with a delightful blog post.

Hunch is a decision-making site, customized for you. Which means Hunch gets to know you, then asks you 10 questions about a topic (usually fewer!), and provides a result — a Hunch, if you will. It gives you results it wouldn’t give other people.

You can also teach Hunch about yourself by answering a never-ending series of questions many of which are witty and bizarre. Your answers help build a “taste profile” which the system uses to choose just the right Hunch for you.

I’ve been playing around with the service for a few days now and I love it! Unfortunately Hunch isn’t launched to the public yet but we’ve got two invites to give away to the first two readers to comment on this post!

Here’s an amazing opportunity for a LovelyCompanies.com reader! We’ve got a ticket to next week’s PSFK Conference in New York to give away, worth $300!

A little while ago my friend Jonny Philp, founder of OW! Health, won the ticket on Twitter. Unfortunately he can’t make the conference so he donated the ticket to be given away on LovelyCompanies.com - thanks Jonny!

With speakers from Diageo, Fast Company, Hello Health, Treehugger, ideo, BBH Labs and boxee, the day promises to be hugely inspirational. It’s also an unmissable networking opportunity!

If you can get to New York on April 2nd then all you have to do to win is let us know in the comments why you really need to be at the PSFK Conference and we’ll pick a winner over the weekend!

The lovely folk at Firebox.com are popping a Mint Aero bar in every parcel they send out (while stocks last)! If there’s something that you’ve been meaning to buy from them then now would be a great time to do it!

SuperJam, a company we covered last month, is today celebrating the second anniversary of launching their products in Waitrose!

In the last couple of years they have launched in more than 1,000 stores, been named one of Scotland’s top innovations and set up a project running hundreds of tea parties for thousands of lonely elderly people all over the UK.

Congratulations to Fraser and everyone who has worked with SuperJam!

Email marketing is now quite a crowded market with hundreds of companies touting their various solutions. However one company that has consistently floated to the top of the pack for the last few years is Campaign Monitor.

They describe themselves as “email marketing software for designers” and count many lovely companies, such as MOO and Carsonified, among their clients. Not only do they have an excellent product and plenty of happy customers but they also make a splendid effort to look after their community.

If you organise an event for web designers or developers then you can get free credits for Campaign Monitor to give out. They can also provide sponsorship for events in the form of pizza, beer and prizes! They have already supported BarCamp and Refresh events amongst many others. Check out their Giving Back page to find out more.

The guys at Campaign Monitor also started the Email Standards Project - a much needed effort to advocate better standards support in HTML emails!

Hat tip: Chris Stainthorpe

I’ve been meaning to write about Graze for some time now and today there are some discount codes floating about on Twitter so, if you’re quick, you can read about the product and try it for free!

The idea behind Graze is simple. Delicious, healthy food, delivered straight to your desk at work. You can choose from a variety of different fruits, nuts and seeds and they deliver nationwide in the UK from just £2.99.

The service has been started by some of the the people who started LoveFilm so they already have experience in subscription services that come in the post. They also seem to be very switched on about packaging and food miles.

To see the product in more detail check out Dan Light’s unboxing video which is embedded below.

Now for some discount codes! The code QBH7WQWA will get you one free box and another half price (expires 22 March, thanks Utku) or try 8HR63CXA which should get you a free box (expires 19 March, thanks Tom)!

If you do try a Graze box then we’d love to hear what you think of it!

You can also follow Graze on Twitter - they’re @grazedotcom.

My friend Jonny Philp (founder of OW! Health) recently sent me a link to a video of one of the Method cofounders talking about his company. We’ve written about Method before here. See what you think of this:

Last week I had lunch with Fabio De Benardi who is behind a delightful little website called ilikeucoz.

Billed as the world’s first appreciation engine, ilikeucoz is a free service that lets you send little messages of appreciation to your friends and loved ones. There is a nifty appreciation feed on the site’s homepage (they call it the ‘Cozmos’) which reminds me of another beatiful website: Twistori.

Fabio and a small team launched the site in just 48 hours at the Launch48 event last month.

Why not try out ilikeucoz now and brighten up someone’s day?