Archive for the ‘origin’ tag
Following injunction, Caterina Fake’s Pinwheel changes name to Findery
Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake’s travel-note app, Pinwheel, has changed its name to Findery, following a legal battle with similarly named startup Pinweel (no “h”).
The tussle between the two startups began just after Fake launched Pinwheel in February. Pinweel argued in court that Pinwheel had engaged in “trademark infringement, false designation of origin, unfair competition, and dilution.”
Pinweel, a photo-sharing app for the iOS, was launched in the Apple App Store on Feb. 14, 2012, but it filed for the Pinweel trademark in March 2011. The company made its first notable appearance at TechCrunch Disrupt NYC conference back in May 2011, and its goal is to help people create photo albums and share them with friends and family.
Pinwheel, now Findery, is still in beta and has been described by Fake a way to “leave notes all over the world.” Notes left on top of locations can be public, private, or shared, and available to one person or to an entire group. Users can organize their notes into sets, making travelogues or journal entries. The company is backed by $2 million in funding led by Redpoint Ventures.
Fake addressed the name change on the Findery blog. She writes:
Because of a name conflict in the United States, today we are changing our name to Findery! We will be serving the site at http://findery.com and beside our name change, the service will remain the same — finding and leaving notes around the world.
Where did the name “Findery” come from?
We had been planning on calling our ‘Explore’-type page “Findery” and last year I’d registered some domains with that name. It’s descriptive of what our service does — Finding and discovering things about the world around you. We love the name!
Hopefully the two companies will soon be done with the legal drama and be able to focus on improving their products. Personally, I like the Findery name better than Pinwheel because it helps better convey what the service is about.
Filed under: social 
Choosing the Right Email Service Provider
Although it looks old school, Email marketing can still become a helpful tool when it comes to Internet marketing. It’s important that you have an email service provider because it can help you manage your contact, especially when your customer base is starting to grow. Having an ESP also means that you’re in for some serious marketing.
On the other hand, selecting which ESP would fit your business needs can be daunting. That’s because there are tons of services to choose from.
Private IP Address
An IP address defines your email’s origin. If you know that sharing your home address to a stranger is a no-no, you wouldn’t want to share your IP address to your subscribers to prevent being blacklisted. That’s why it’s important that your ESP provides a private IP Address.
Reliable Infrastructure and Customer Support
Having a high-speed and multiple connection is also important when choosing what ESP is right for you. This will secure that even their servers won’t go down even if one of their Internet connections fail. Thus, allowing your subscribers to click through. But when worse comes to worst, your ESP should offer both online and phone customer support.
A/B Testing and Reports
The same with any online marketing elements, you have to test multiple versions of your email. This is in order to see which message works for your audience. In relation to this, your ESP should offer a wide array of user-friendly reports such as deliverability success, open rates, and click-through rates. That way, you’ll know where your email marketing is leading you.
CAN SPAM Compliance
Requiring your subscribers to comply with the CAN SPAM Act is important with your email marketing campaign. However, you cannot encourage them to do so if you won’t make it sweet and simple for them.
List Segmenting
You should also consider whether your ESP allows list segmentation based on various criteria like demographic. Being able to target subsets of your list will help you deliver relevant content that makes your email marketing campaign more successful.
Terms and Pricing
Whatever your email marketing needs is, it’s also important that your ESP allows you to cancel and switch any services at will—especially when you think that you’re no longer happy with the service. Most of all, you have to look for a provider that has a flexible payment terms based on your needs.
The post Choosing the Right Email Service Provider appeared first on About Social Media.
Choosing the Right Email Service Provider
Email marketing may sound old school, but it can still serve as an effective tool when it comes to online promotion. It’s important that you have an email service provider because it can help you manage your contact, especially when your customer base is starting to grow. Having an ESP also means that you’re in for some serious marketing.
On the flip side, choosing which ESP is right for you can be daunting. That’s because there are tons of services to choose from.
Private IP Address
An IP address indicates the origin of your email. Just like you wouldn’t share your home address to large number of strangers, you wouldn’t want to share your IP address to your subscribers to prevent being blacklisted. That’s why it’s important that your ESP provides a private IP Address.
Reliable Infrastructure and Customer Support
It’s also important that your ESP has multiple, high-speed connections. This will secure that even their servers won’t go down even if one of their Internet connections fail. Thus, allowing your subscribers to click through. But when worse comes to worst, your ESP should offer both online and phone customer support.
A/B Testing and Reports
Just like in any online advertising elements, you have to test multiple versions of your email to see which message works. In relation to this, your ESP should offer a wide array of user-friendly reports such as deliverability success, open rates, and click-through rates. That way, you’ll know where your email marketing is leading you.
CAN SPAM Compliance
It’s important that you’ll require your subscribers to comply with the CAN SPAM Act. However, you cannot encourage them to do so if you won’t make it sweet and simple for them.
List Segmenting
Your ESP should also allow you to segment your list based on various criteria like demographic. Being able to target subsets of your list will help you deliver relevant content that makes your email marketing campaign more successful.
Terms and Pricing
Depending on your email marketing needs, it’s also important that your ESP lets you cancel and switch any services at will whenever you think that you’re not happy with the service. Most of all, you have to look for a provider that has a flexible payment terms based on your needs.
There are a handful of ESPs that you can choose from. However, the bottom line in choosing your provider is the one that suits your marketing needs.
Source: MailChimp Homepage/ MailChimp
The post Choosing the Right Email Service Provider appeared first on About Social Media.
Superman, Batman and worldviews
Everyone sees the world differently, but our worldviews vary in clumps. Some people are focused on today, some on tomorrow. Some people see an innovation as an opportunity, others see a risk. Some people want strength while others seek obedience. Some want facts, others prefer fables.
Smart marketers understand that these biases and expectations are shared across particular groups (sometimes connected groups–tribes). When speaking to the market, you will always do better if your story resonates with the worldview of the collective you’re trying to reach. Yes, this grouping is a gross generalization, perhaps one that will lead to errors. On the other hand, it’s far more effective than assuming that everyone sees and hears the same (or different).
Consider two common worldviews: Superman’s and Batman’s.
Batman comes to the world angry. His origin story is filled with vengeance and revenge, and in his iconic (non Adam West) backstory, he is the merciless enforcer of right and wrong. Batman-types see the world as a zero sum game, and battles are either won or lost.
Superman, on the other hand, comes to our world with his gifts and sees his life as an opportunity and an obligation, one that he embraces. Superman could easily kill all the bad guys in a heartbeat, but he never does. For him, every challenge is an opportunity for healing. He believes in redemption and finds pleasure in using his gifts to help others.
Imagine giving a talk to a conference full of Batman types. It’s going to be very different than one filled with people who share Superman’s privileged and generous worldview, no?
There are dozens of other worldview-types out there. Consider the nerd (who prides himself on knowing the details), the jester (who seeks to cause mischief) and the too-busy monkey, who just wants to know what to do next (and his cousin, the parrot, who wants to do what he’s told).
It’s virtually impossible to sell a product or an idea or a vote to all of these groups at once. One story just isn’t going to do it, which is why there are many kinds of cars, political persuasions and vacation spots. Instead of trying to delight everyone in Gotham City, it pays to find people who already resonate with the story you want to tell.
To Speed Up The Web, EdgeCast Has Added Google PageSpeed Technology To Its CDN
EdgeCast Networks has quietly emerged as a major competitor in the content delivery network (CDN) market, signing up big ISPs as partners and giving industry heavyweights Akamai and Limelight a run for their money. Well now, EdgeCast is working to make its customers’ page loading times faster than ever, by integrating Google’s PageSpeed front-end optimization technology into its CDN.
PageSpeed works by taking a look at static web pages and implementing a number of different optimizations to ensure the best possible performance when they’re sent over the web. According to Edgecast president James Segil, that includes stuff like HTML optimization, autocompressing media that was sent uncompressed, combining JavaScripts, and domain sharding, all of which is used to speed up load times in the browser.
Usually all this happens at the origin server, but EdgeCast has integrated its PageSpeed technology at the edge. For its customers, that means optimizations will happen dynamically on the server closest to the end user. It also means improvements in performance: EdgeCast claims that its architecture has shown a 77 percent improvement in site performance compared to delivery from the customer origin without the service.
EdgeCast took a look at a number of front-end optimization technologies, but ended up going with Google’s PageSpeed due to its openness and extensibility. And it’s the first CDN to do so, integrating PageSpeed with its own Edge Optimizer application delivery network (ADN). With its CDN for delivery, ADN for dynamic site acceleration, and now PageSpeed static website acceleration, Segil says EdgeCast offers the “full monty” of services to ensure every element of a website is delivered as quickly as possible.
While EdgeCast is making PageSpeed optimization available directly to its customers, it’ll also be available through a number of CDN partners and resellers. That means the software will be available through distributors such as Motorola Mobility and Dell, as well as the operators that they serve. Reselling and CDN federation are a big part of EdgeCast’s business, so we can expect a number of other ISPs to take advantage of the offering.
EdgeCast is based in Santa Monica, Calif., and has about 200 employees. It carries approximately 5 percent of global Internet traffic for more than 4,000 customers worldwide. The company has raised $20 million since being founded in 2007, with investors that include Menlo Ventures, Steamboat Ventures, Mark Amin, and Jon Feltheimer.
A Coffee Morning Interlude this Friday
When we first started regularly holding our coffee mornings in Sydney, we didn’t know what would happen. We didn’t know what it would be like to actually meet this amorphous collection of “online connections”. But within minutes, we knew we were onto a winning formula – interesting people, good coffee and a sense of curiosity all round.
One of my favourite wildcards in the whole coffee morning experience was Gavin, the guy behind the Single Origin cafe where we hung out. A passionate and energetic coffee lover, he ensured there was always an element of surprise in every roast and every cup.
Now, after a break, Gavin’s back roasting coffee in Sydney. And this week he is letting his first batch loose on the world. So this week – rather than the usual Single Origin destination – I’ll be heading down to Shop 6, 81 Macleay St, Potts Point to sample his latest labour of love. I’d love for you to join me.
And in case you are wondering what coffee mornings are really about … take a quick flip through this presentation. It tries to capture just a little of what makes it all so special. See you from 8am!
Volkswagen Reimagines the Origin of Classic Movie Scenes
DDB London's latest iteration of Volkswagen's "See Film Differently" series posits that "some of the most famous moments in cinema were never scripted." I can believe it. Lazy Hollywood screenwriters, cashing huge paychecks and pecking away on solid-gold iPads in their platinum hot tubs, not even doing their jobs, while I toil in obscurity, grinding out AdFreak items for peanuts! Sorry. I have some issues. Anyway, three new spots, directed by Ivan Zacharias and supporting independent cinema, amusingly reveal the unlikely origins of key scenes in Jaws, Taxi Driver and The Silence of the Lambs. They're basically one-joke wonders, but the attention to detail rewards repeat viewings. The look and feel of each film is faithfully reproduced, and period touches add to the fun. Note the shaggy haircut and T-shirt/gym-shorts ensemble that dude sports in the Jaws spot. We all looked like that in '75. I still do. Two more spots after the jump.
villains and superheroes in vintage photos
If Batman, Spiderman, or Darth Vadar had awkward family photos these would be it. The Marvellini brothers are artists in Milan who have been making these collages and creating their own geeky origin stories with the help of old family photos.
How an Obscure War Poster Lost for 60 Years Became a Modern-Day Sensation
The origin of the phrase "Keep calm and carry on" and its place in popular culture is traced in Temujin Doran's short film below, which has garnered almost a million YouTube views in less than a month. The text was originally commissioned for British propaganda posters during World War II, though relatively few copies were produced. The slogan was all but forgotten until one of the posters turned up about a dozen years ago in a box of volumes bought by Barter Books, a large antiquarian bookshop in northern England. That discovery inspired a campaign of considerable commercial innovation, with the decades-old "tagline" (less popular in its day than "Freedom is in peril. Defend it with all your might") resonating with a new generation. Poster reprints proved popular, followed by mugs, T-shirts, postcards, tea towels (fussy Brits!) and other paraphernalia. There's even an iPhone app. Kudos to Barter, a purveyor of old media—and secondhand wares at that; we're talking old old media—for taking those five words to heart and thinking outside the book to turn "Carry on" into a cottage industry. (The new video is a pretty great ad for the bookstore, too.) Such perseverance is true to the spirit of the line's creators. Ultimately, the words have transcended their original purpose by resonating with harried modern-day folks, providing a simple, soothing mantra for the skirmishes on the battlefield of daily life. As for folks who deride it as a cliché—quit carrying on, OK?
The Origin of Brands 1 – Absolut Vodka
In a new series we will uncover how brands started – first is Absolut Vodka. This is a pretty cool story. In 1979, a swedish vodka called ABSOLUT appeared in the US – a big moment for a brand whose story goes back over four hundred years. Check it out.
Check it out here…