Portland's Jive Software Takes Aim at Microsoft
May 15, 2008
Alright, so I'm incredibly biased towards local success stories in the Portland software community. I think it's relevant to share an amazing story / article in Forbes on Jive Software's meteoric growth in the web 2.0 collaboration space taking on behomeths Microsoft and Lotus.
Higher Office
by Claire Cain Miller
Upstart Jive Software aims to change the way people work by bringing social networking to the office. It's up against some firm called Microsoft.
Jive Software chief executive David Hersh has a lofty goal: a world where office work is so fulfilling, inspiring and free of trivialities that parodies like Dilbert and The Office cease to exist.
There are loftier goals--ending genocide, famine, cancer--but Hersh's is a good fight, and you can make a lot of money helping companies get themselves out of those endless e-mail chains and pointless meetings of office work. Jive's software uses the Web to do that.
"People live in e-mail and documents no one else can see. We're changing the way companies work," says Hersh.
Read the full article on Forbes.com >>
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| Posted by ryan at 9:41 AM | Permalink
db Clay launches new Wallet site
May 14, 2008
db Clay, known to many of us at Portland's Saturday Market as the groovy collection of wallets made out of duct tape has come a long way with their sophisticated new e-commerce website built primarily using Ruby on Rails technology.
To kickoff the site and 10 year anniversary (founder Garett Stenson started at 19 years old in college - sickeningly talented young entrepreneur) of the company, db Clay is throwing an insane party on Thurs, May 29 at Lizard Lounge and a 2-day sale on May 30-31. Check out the invite and the goods here >>
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| Posted by ryan at 3:52 PM | Permalink
Email Render Rate and Conversions
May 13, 2008
Loren McDonald explains it well. With rapid agreement among email industry insiders, Loren really nailed the answer to the question of the relevancy of the common email metric "open rate."
The MediaPost article begins:
Email Open Rates: What's the Alternative?
by Loren McDonald , Thursday, May 8, 2008
MY PREVIOUS COLUMN, "WHY THE Email Open Rate Must Die" spawned a spirited debate, mainly on these three topics (click here to read the first column and all 17 comments):
Don't kill the open rate, but view it in the proper perspective.
PLEASE let it die!
What can we replace it with? You don't offer any suggestions other than to say we can do better.
I stand guilty as charged of not offering an alternative to the open rate in that first column. I will remedy that in this column.
The Open Rate: Rename, Rethink, Redefine
So, what are the alternatives to the open rate?
1. As I understand it, none exist today or in the near future. Some have suggested using CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) to track opens, but many email clients also block CSS. The major email providers (Yahoo, AOL, Hotmail/Live Mail, Gmail) can more accurately track "open or read rates" because the email client resides on their servers and does not have to hit an external server. But, the chance of these email providers sharing open data is as likely as world peace.
2.So, let's rename it the "Email Render Rate" or something similar that reflects what the tracking images really measure. My proposed "render rate" would more accurately reflect what occurs when images are loaded in a recipient's email client. This includes in preview panes, software clients such as Outlook or Web-based services such as Gmail and Yahoo Mail.
This redefinition (nothing else changes) will benefit retailers and others for whom product images are important to conversion. A render rate of 25% lets the sender know that their email rendered with images in 25% of the messages seen by recipients' inboxes or smart phones.
Analyzing the subscriber base by render rate over time would help the marketer better optimize creative for subscribers who normally view images and for those who don't. As smart marketers and the industry make this shift, I'm sure dozens of other creative uses of the render rate would also emerge.
3.Next, let's de-emphasize the open rate and focus the email scorecard on output and business metrics. I'm not devaluing email process metrics. In fact, I find tremendous value in spam-complaint and unsubscribe rates, for example.
But ultimately, the only metrics your CEO and CFO care about are those that measure how the email program supports business goals such as growing revenues, increasing margins, improving customer retention and lowering communications costs.
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| Posted by ryan at 3:43 PM | Permalink
Mahalo "I'm Gonna Git You, Spamma!" Video is Brilliant
May 12, 2008
Mahalo is on a role. First, the controversial TechCrunch review of Mahalo's founder blog entry on expecting employees to work 16 hours a day every day because he does (which I wholeheartedly disagree with). Now, their YouTube retro video is truly good stuff and relevant to the email marketing world. Mahalo, the human search company, is trying to show how pull technology like search doesn't have the flaw of spam, but the creative is strong enough to get a chuckle out of it.
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| Posted by ryan at 3:38 PM | Permalink
Twitter offers Get out of Jail Free with its Service
May 3, 2008
An employee sent me an email with this link - fascinating!
Freedom, A Twitter Away For UC Berkeley Student Arrested In Egypt
"As surreal as it may sound, Twitter can get you out of jail! The catch...send the right message to as many people as possible as fast as you can and voila!
UC Berkeley journalism graduate student James Karl Buck (29), former Oakland Tribune multimedia intern, was arrested during a demonstration in Mahalla El-Kobra, an industrial city in the Nile Delta.
What the Egyptian authorities didn't probably expect was the prompt reaction of a large circle of friends in the United States and the anti-government bloggers in Egypt, who were sent an instant text message from his cellular phone: "ARRESTED," the San Jose Mercury News reports.
The micro-blogging service allows users to send text messages up to 140 characters long, and the message Buck sent had the desired outcome: his friends called the University, the American Embassy, as well as the Associated Press, the International Herald Tribune and other media.
The result: he was released the next day, although according to his affirmations, the Egyptian authorities told him just hours after his arrest, in the middle of the night, that he was a free man."
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| Posted by ryan at 2:34 PM | Permalink
Heading Back to Costa Rica
Not sure there is much biz there, but that's really the point. My wife and I are going to a pretty remote area of the country and we're looking forward to some good outdoor adventure there.
I'll share some appropriate pics and video upon my return and try to make it somewhat relevant to the online marketing world, but for now, I'm going to enjoy a well-deserved week off blog posts, among others. Did a little research on YouTube, and thought I'd share this one:
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| Posted by ryan at 2:15 PM | Permalink
PDC Old Town / Chinatown Video Features eROI
May 2, 2008
The PDC (Portland Development Commission) worked with the Portland Classical Chinese Garden to create this video to show in several cities throughout China with the intent of recruiting more Chinese businesses to move into Old Town/Chinatown.
eROI has been in Old Town / Chinatown for the past 6 months and we've seen a dozen other software companies and creative agencies move into the neighborhood. We're big fans.
ENGLISH VERSION
MANDARIN VERSION
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| Posted by ryan at 6:37 AM | Permalink
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