Go Local Listing

March 19th, 2008

admin

We are happy to introduce a new local search marketing firm: http://www.golocallistings.com . They have incredible rates and even better results. The days of paying $159 a month for local listings are gone.

Online Advertising continues to grow

March 19th, 2008

admin

eMarketer predicts that, despite the economic rough patch, US online advertising will continue to grow through 2008. Online ad spending will rise by 23%.

Yet even that reduced rate of growth will continue to top total media ad spending, maintaining online advertising’s position as the fastest-growing media in terms of ad spending.

“Several elements unique to the Internet will support continued US ad spending growth even if other media falter,” said David Hallerman, senior analyst at eMarketer.

“The greater ability to measure ads online will likely encourage marketers with reduced budgets,” Mr. Hallerman said. “Those same marketers are finding that the audiences they need to target are spending more of their media time on the Web.”

Search will account for the largest portion of online ad spending in 2008, at 40%. That percentage will decrease slightly through 2012, when it will account for 37.3% of US online ad spending.

onlinespending.gifConversely, spending on rich media and video advertising is set to grow as a percentage of online ad spending, rising to 18.5% in 2012 from 10.2% in 2008.

eMarketer predicts that total US advertising spending will grow by 3.3% in 2008.

Advertising Age recently reported that other analysts have also predicted total media ad growth.

Speaking at the American Association of Advertising Agencies‘ Media Conference and Trade Show, Bear Stearns analyst Alexia Quadrani said US ad spending would increase 4% in 2008, up from an estimated 3.3% in 2007.

Ms. Quadrani said that, despite fears about the economy, marketers still have reason to spend on advertising.

“Many marketers face an extremely competitive landscape with products that aren’t very different from those of rivals. They also have raised prices and need to advertise to get consumers to continue to buy their goods.”

Happy St. Patricks Day

March 17th, 2008

admin

stpatricksday.jpg

We decided to post this today.

In the details

March 11th, 2008

Matthew

You’re at the table with fellow designers, an art director, and a creative director. The large screen displays designs you’re about to collectively critique. This is the first time you’ll all consider the initial round of concepts. The designs go up, one by one, and the words begin to flow.

It’s a phrase you hear often: design is in the details. With design, paying attention to small details—and in some cases, obsessively focusing on “what isn’t right”—can take a design from “nearly there” to “there” and beyond.

I attend meetings in which designers present their designs—typically the first round of comps—for the first time. Half the time, the presenting designer shows a rough product on the screen, and they usually believe the design is 90-100% done. But to the detail-savvy designer, the work is only 50-70% there. You can see the groundwork, foundation, and feel of the design in front of you, but you know it’s just not finished.

The goal of embracing details is to get you to think critically and present the best possible design you can—right from round one. In essence, you want your design to be ready for a real client presentation. So how do you take a design to 100%? You need to achieve polish, ridding the client’s mind of any doubt that the design is unfinished. It’s all too common for designers to feel rushed: you’re under deadline, you’re under pressure. But if you care about your craft and your ideas, you’ll take the extra time, perhaps working late into the night, as we all have, and add the touches that you know will make your work really shine. You know that feeling you get when you think, “Oh, I knew I should have tried that”? Do it the first time it comes to mind. Don’t let someone in your design review bring up an idea you thought of first.

Tips and techniques fortify any designer’s toolkit, but I must stress that thinking critically about a design is as important as the tools and skills needed to produce it.

Here’s a checklist to guide and inspire you to get the site done, done, done. Leave no stone unturned and no doubts about the design you present—let it shine.

Experiment

It’s not unusual for me to create up to four concurrent comps for just the first round of internal design presentations. I use these to “sketch” out designs. A navigation or logo treatment that doesn’t work in one comp may work in another comp. This allows you to have what I call “The Beautiful Mistake”—placing elements in other environments that create possibilities. Instead of feeling like you have designer’s block, just throw the ideas you have into comps and see where they lead. Getting started is half the battle.

On the same note, don’t be afraid to start over. If something isn’t working, close it up and trash it. If you think the navigation is too precious, remember how you did it, then start from that point in the next design. The goal is to refine, over and over.

Choices

There are many choices to be made when you’re designing—everything from type, to colors, to overall tone of the site. Sometimes, I like to throw a lot of things at a design to see what sticks, and sometimes I start minimally. Strive to make smart, simple choices. If there’s an easier way to design something, do it. The complicated choice will feel complicated to the client and intended audience unless you can make a complex interaction looks simple.

Stay consistent

Once you make choices, stick with them. If you choose to pad items with 10 pixels in sidebars but use 15 pixels in larger text areas, make sure the comps reflect those decisions. Keep notes while designing—these will form a good basis for a style guide. Consistency displays sophistication and shows that you fully understood and made sound decisions. Consistency should be transparent.

Completeness

Finish the design. Don’t miss a footer or a detail. Don’t say, “That’s to be filled in later—I didn’t have time.” Make the time. Don’t give any reason for others to torpedo the design or allow someone to fixate on a little detail—overshadowing the rest of the work. It’s these little details that deserve your attention. Creative directors, art directors, and especially clients will perseverate on details like this, so make sure the details are there.

Step in, step out, step back: balance

During a design, it’s best to step away from the design occasionally—even just for lunch or a 15-minute break. Look at something else. Come back and look at your design again. Think about your first impressions. Your own gut reaction will likely be similar to the initial impressions of those who see it for the first time. Take note and revise or change your design based on those impressions. Regardless of how “cool” or “neat” a particular element may be, if it doesn’t serve your design in a useful way, get rid of it and try something new. Always step back and re-evaluate.

Be your own critic

If you’re familiar with the team you regularly work with, the client or the client’s needs, look at your design as you get close to done and think about parts that will potentially provoke questions or concerns. Have a solid answer for the decisions you made.

Complexity in simplicity: less is more

When we discuss “less is more”, we mean different things. For example, sometimes the design needs to scale back. It’s got too many elements. Or a design chokes itself with too many colors. When doing detail work, “less is more” is about leaving in only everything that is necessary and making it harmonious. Let the complexity be in the simplicity—a design is not useful when it’s perceived to be complex. A design should be useful, simple, and straightforward—let the complexity shine through via simplicity.

Obsession is healthy

If I don’t feel right about a navigation or a flash widget that displays photos, I will sit and stew and sketch until I find something that fits. Design is a puzzle you create for yourself—you have all the pieces, but it’s up to you to decide how they fit. Perfection is not something to strive for, but close to perfect is—it leaves room for exploration, dialogue, and learning.

I find myself thinking about designs I’m working on at odd periods of the day—in the shower, making dinner, or walking to the corner store. Small, quiet moments are when I have breakthroughs and solve problems. These are the times when the right details will appear. This isn’t often billable time, but it’s a good exercise to think about a design before attempting it. I don’t sketch much using pencil and paper; I like to let a design percolate and grow in my mind before committing it to the screen. I imagine the look, the feel, and the details. I relish the details.

Detail work isn’t easy. It takes time, inspiration, and imagination. It is however, very good practice—it allows you to cultivate a critical eye to help yourself and your fellow designer. Relish the details and your designs will cut the mustard. I found this article from

1988 vs 2008

February 28th, 2008

admin

Think the iPhone is pricey? The cool cell phone of 1988 cost $4,382 in today’s dollars. A 150MB hard drive? $8,755. Take a trip with us down memory lane and you’ll never whine about the price of a gadget again.
Ever wax nostalgic about your first PC or cell phone? It’s easy to forgive your Tandy desktop or your Motorola portable for their limitations — after all, they were technological infants.

What we often forget, though, is how $%#@! expensive that crude neolithic junk was! So join us on a trip two decades back in technology’s history — and we bet that the next time you’re charged $895 for a small square of plastic and transistors, you’ll smile and say, “Wow, what a bargain!”

Home Desktop PCs

Tandy 1000 TL

 1988: Tandy 1000 TL
Price: $1,400 ($2,454 adjusted for inflation)CPU: Intel 80286RAM: 640KBStorage: 3.5-inch floppy

Monitor: 14-inch, 640-by-200 RGB CRT, 16 colors

By 1988, personal computers had found their way into about 15 percent of U.S. households. PCs dominated, but other home systems were popular as well – among them the Apple II, Macintosh, Commodore 64, Atari ST and Amiga 2000.
PCs came with DOS; Windows 2.0 was a $99 option, and one of many competing graphical interfaces. Radio Shack was home PC central, offering the Tandy 1000 TL for $1,400 in a configuration that included a 14-inch, 16-color monitor; 640KB of RAM; and a single 3.5-inch floppy drive.
Tandy’s DeskMate graphical interface provided an office suite, drawing and sound-editing apps and PC-Link online software, a precursor to AOL. The 16-color monitor, graphical OS and multimedia support were cutting-edge in an era still dominated by monochrome monitors and DOS. But the $1,400 price didn’t cover a mouse, a modem, a network card, or a hard drive, each of which was an expensive add-on. And CD-ROM drives were extremely rare. Microsoft had just released the first version of Bookshelf, a collection of reference materials on CD-ROM in September 1987, and it would be another couple years before the CD-ROM format really took off.
The situation in 2008 almost defies comparison with 1988. Instead of conserving RAM and disk space like gold, we store our entire lives on our hard drives and expect our PCs to double as home entertainment centers. For a total price of $1,000, the HP Pavilion Elite m9100z is available with Vista Home Premium, a 750GB hard drive, an HDMI graphics card, Wi-Fi, a CD/DVD recorder, an HDTV tuner, surround sound, and a 17-inch flat-panel monitor.

Build critical mass on your website

February 27th, 2008

admin

With so many websites to join, users must decide where to invest significant time in adding their same connections over and over. For developers, this means it is difficult to build successful web applications that hinge upon a critical mass of users for content and interaction. With the Social Graph API, developers can now utilize public connections their users have already created in other web services. It makes information about public connections between people easily available and useful.

Only public data

The API returns web addresses of public pages and publicly declared connections between them. The API cannot access non-public information, such as private profile pages or websites accessible to a limited group of friends.

Based on open standards

We currently index the public Web for XHTML Friends Network (XFN), Friend of a Friend (FOAF) markup and other publicly declared connections. By supporting open Web standards for describing connections between people, web sites can add to the social infrastructure of the web.

Maikai ecommerce cart

February 25th, 2008

admin

Where have we been? Are we alive. Why no posts for almost two weeks???

We have been working on an ecommerce shopping cart solution called maikai cart . This has been a huge undertaking but the website is almost up and running to show off the best damn shopping cart this side of the mississippi..  We have also finalized our partnership with a large yellow page company.  Please check back soon for the latest.

Online Dm Up, Offline Down

February 14th, 2008

admin

Marketers intent on following the money need look no further than their computer screens. According to a new survey from marketing service and software provider Alterian, 45% of DMers spent at least $500,000 in 2007 for online efforts, compared with just over one-third in 2006.

That spending increase has to come from somewhere, and that somewhere is likely from offline efforts. Among DMers, 30% spent less than $100,000 on offline campaigns, up from 23% in 2006 and 18% in 2005.

The move to digital marketing should continue: 84% of those surveyed anticipate their online spend will increase during the next 12 months, with only 1% foreseeing a decline.

Part of this may reflect the relative youth of the online space, but part may also reflect marketers going where the customers are. Only 44% of all marketers said their offline spending would increase, compared with 52% in 2006 who expected it to rise. The number expecting decreases was 11%, identical with 2006.

Aside from boosting their online spending, two-thirds of all marketers said they were allocating additional resources (such as headcount, man-hours or research) to database and analytical functions. Forty-two percent are putting more resources toward digital efforts, and 39% are investing more in process and operational functions.

Survey respondents are also embracing specialists for certain marketing functions. Forty-five percent outsource creative design to agencies, while another 41% rely on vendors for e-mail campaign execution. Nearly four in 10 (37%) turn to list companies to manage their files, and 35% use outside database and analytics firms. Seventeen percent have outsourced their campaign management functions.

But as marketing departments embrace a wider variety of channels, their ability to coordinate all their functions through a single management system has dwindled. Seventy percent of all marketers use at least three marketing applications to accomplish their responsibilities, and 20% rely on seven or more.

Alterian’s survey was conducted during October and November 2007 through online questionnaires and in-person interviews at direct marketing trade shows. The study incorporates responses from 852 marketing professionals.

Microsoft makes unsolicited bid for Yahoo

February 1st, 2008

Matthew

Microsoft has pounced on slumping Internet icon Yahoo with an unsolicited takeover offer of $44.6 billion, seeking to join forces against Google in what would be the biggest Internet deal since the Time Warner-AOL merger in 2001.

The surprise offer of $31 per share, made late Thursday and announced Friday, seizes on Yahoo’s weakness while Microsoft tries to muscle up in a high-stakes battle with Google likely to define the technology landscape for years to come.

I bought some shares this morning after reading the above. I do not see how yahoo could not take the offer and once miscrosoft has control, I believe the stock will rise.

Zamzar.com

January 30th, 2008

Matthew

I came across this website trying to convert a file from one type to another. Zamzar is dedicated to helping you transform your songs, videos, images and documents into different formats. You should check it out when in need Zamzar.com

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