Archive for Friday, June 26th, 2009 04:36 pm GMT -5

Email Marketing

// Friday, June 26th, 2009 04:36 pm GMT -5 // No Comments » // Design

When you send an email campaign, it isn’t just a simple note that’s launched into the ether. You want the message to be clear, and you want a guarantee that it’s received. You want to make sure your words are read, and you need to see that your dispatch was effective. Gone are the days of cold calling. No more cold shoulder. With Email Campaigns, your company goes beyond signed, sealed, and delivered.

Email campaigns are cost-effective and powerful, they’re the bulwark of tangible results. People click, people question, your site gets hits, your business gets business. It’s simple, but that doesn’t mean it’s without risk. By following the industry’s trusted practices, including email client testing, SPAM filters, and white-list email servers, you need to make sure your missives aren’t dismissed. Custom designs marry your existing site design with clear, concise, visually compelling communication. Self-publishing is a cinch with web-based, intuitive WYSIWYG software platform, meaning that this first love note won’t be your last. And once your campaign is sent, you can track your results in real time with your password-protected account. Email campaigns certify that your company will be a special delivery.

Services include: Custom design, HTML and Plain Text emails, web statistics, easy web-based publishing, spam filtering and mailing list segmentation.

Feel free to download my Email Marketing Presentation (pdf).

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Outlook´s broken, Let´s fix it

// Wednesday, June 24th, 2009 10:24 am GMT -5 // No Comments » // CSS, Design

Microsoft have confirmed they plan on using the Word rendering engine to display HTML emails in Outlook 2010.

This means for the next 5 years your email designs will need tables for layout, have no support for CSS like float and position, no background images and lots more. Want proof? Here´s the same email in Outlook 2000 & 2010.

Outlook 2010 is still in beta and Microsoft wants your feedback. It´s time to rally together and encourage Microsoft to embrace web standards before it´s too late.

Let´s use Twitter to send a clear message to Microsoft.

Join 12,965 others asking Microsoft to improve standards support and make sure you include fixoutlook.org in your tweet. We´ll pull together every tweet that includes the link here to give Microsoft a unified message from the community.

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Facebook URL Madness

// Tuesday, June 16th, 2009 10:41 am GMT -5 // No Comments » // Social Media

As you no doubt heard last weekend, the whole Facebook vanity URL grab thing was big. Within seven minutes of the service being available last night, 345,000 users grabbed one. Within 15 minutes, over a half million had, Facebook spokesperson Larry Yu told Bloomberg. Within one hour, over 1 million Facebook usernames had been snapped up.

Facebook was worried that traffic would be so high that Facebook could overload. What numbers am I talking about?

- It took 3 minutes to reach 200,000 usernames registered. That’s an astounding 1111+ registered per second during the first minutes of the feature release.

- After 15 minutes, the number of usernames jumped to 500,000. The pace slowed down, but there is no laughing at 555.5 usernames or so taken per second. How many other websites could handle that type of load?

- By 10:01 PM PT, a full hour after release, around one million custom URLs had been claimed. That’s an average of 278 usernames per second or so.

- Where do Facebook usernames stand now? Well, as of 2:00 PM ET, over 3 million usernames have been taken. That’s 3,000,000 custom URLs during a Friday night.

And of course, not everyone was happy with the results of the landgrab (see pic below). Not surprisingly, people are already trying to sell their Facebook vanity URLs as well. The service Assetize, already has 4 accounts for sale. The accounts listed are: cotman, pokerbook, sexybook and shekhar. The listing amount for each is “best offer” — none have any bids.

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“Deadline” A Post-It Stop Motion

// Tuesday, June 16th, 2009 10:09 am GMT -5 // No Comments » // Videos

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Bang-yao Liu’s senior project at Savannah College of Art and Design. Bang manipulates the post-it notes to do pixel-like stop motion and there are some interactions between real actor and post-its. Here is the making of : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ArJYva…

25 Stylish Examples of Web Forms

// Tuesday, June 9th, 2009 10:30 am GMT -5 // No Comments » // CSS, Design

In this showcase, you’ll be able to set your eyes on a few remarkable and well-constructed web form designs. Go Visit

Flash and AIR usage in Feature Films

// Wednesday, June 3rd, 2009 12:07 pm GMT -5 // No Comments » // Design

Check out The Flash Blog for an interesting interview with a company called OOOii that basically specializes in using Flash and AIR for feature films such as Minority Report and Star Trek.

Interesting to see what they do for movies, their workflow, etc… Another example of a company succeeding using technology for a nice market.