At the end of this year I had an opportunity to help produce Flash home page features, banner ads and HTML emails for Roxio’s holiday and launch campaigns. I worked with a team led by Digerata in Walnut Creek, California to create several dozen pieces to promote Roxio’s Toast, Creator and Easy VHS to DVD software products.
Back went I was working full time for ShareThis I was introduced to the SCRUM software development methodology and I became really enamored with it. I worked with Fredric Jean on a project for Sun Microsystems last year. His team also uses SCRUM and he shared this entertaining little video by Hamid Shojaee explaining how it works:
Campaign Monitor is one of my favorite tools for managing, testing and sending HTML emails. They have fantastic tools for email list management, handling for unsubscribes and an extensive suite for testing your emails to see how they will look in different email clients and how well the perform against industry standard spam filters.
I’ve been using Campaign Monitor for a few years but last week the rolled out a redesign of the application with a bunch of new features (such as custom branded interfaces and reporting). The new user interface seems to borrow heavily from some of the ideas in Basecamp, making things much more logical and easier to use.
Big companies frequently hire ad agencies to do grassroots marketing. Employees pose as members of online communities and promote products with seemingly spontanious testimonials. If done correctly it can be a really powerful tool but it can also backfire if it isn’t genuine and/or well-done. Here’s an entertaining example with Joel Johnson at the popular blog Boing Boing Gadgets calling out a character named M. Goode for pontificating the wonders of Motorola’s new Krave phone:
Motorola, could you please tell your viral marketer to get out of our comments?
Today we launched a website for Body Ami (an organic, health product company in Napa, California). It’s a beautiful site designed by the folks at Boldium. Boldium did most of the heavy lifting and I came in toward the end to help polish things up. Body Ami’s site uses the Drupal content management system and some custom modules. Watch for more new products and website features on the Body Ami blog.
I recently got to help plan and develop a great project for Accolo’s Ecopartnership program. Accolo is a global recruiting company based in the San Francisco Bay Area that focuses on helping companies in the high-tech, marketing and sustainability industries. The EcoPartnership program offers financial incentives to help Accolo’s clients become “green businesses”. If your company is interested in becoming more environmentally sustainable of if they offer services to help others become sustainable, you should check out the program.
I love creative data visualizations. TwittEarth is a fun way to watch Twitter post from around the world with a 3D globe and cute like characters.
The annual festival of nerdy-ness LinuxWorld will be changing its name and focus next year. Here’s a snip from Eric Brown’s post RIP LinuxWorld:
The largest conference devoted to Linux technology is changing its name to embrace open source software on other operating systems (OSes). Next August, LinuxWorld will relaunch as the OpenSource World Conference & Expo, but will retain existing LinuxWorld features, says show organizer IDG World Expo.
LinuxWorld has been going on for about 10 years and I attended several of the San Francisco ones with my techy cohorts at Clear Ink. It was always a great relax, check out geeky gizmos and pick up tons of free t-shirts. One year we even got to see a great keynote presentation by Lawerence Lessig about “Free Culture”.
Over the last couple of years attendance seemed to be dropping but I’ll miss LinuxWorld, but I’ll always be able to relive it with this touching montage video of my last trip, assembled by Jim Kwak with music by Ric Seaberg.
I recently got to work on a great web site for a new, independent film called Sons of Gun produced by Rivkah Beth Medow and Greg O’Toole. The film is a documentary about the lives of three schizophrenic men and their alcoholic caregiver / “dad” as struggle to find a new place to live.
The site is built using Flash and the Drupal content management system.
A little while back I got to work on a fun project for Cisco. I worked with the folks there and at Clear Ink to create a Flash piece that acts as a video librarian, interviewing visitors with a series of questions and then putting together a set of suggested videos. My role was to help plan the project, then do the Flash coding and production.
Go to the Cisco Solutions for Small and Medium Business page and click on the “Let’s get started” button to see the live piece.
