There’s nothing we @ Twelve Horses love more than sun, snow and gadgets! So this was the perfect event for us. Earl and I got out and shot some video, played around with the Nokia n95, Zune, JBL headphones and got a chance to chat with Brian Lam, Editor at Gizmodo.

(click on the pop-ups in the video then select “more info” to see the product demos.)

Bob Starks from Alpine Meadows was stoked to get a hand’s on demo of the Nokia n95. He wants to be able to post up photos to Flickr right from the Summit 6 chair! I almost smashed mine attempting a 360 @ the Kangaroo Park.

Thanks for bringing out the goods Brian! Can’t wait to do it again!

-M

A few weeks back (Video, Video, Video) we spoke about the growing importance of video content on the web. One of the downsides of video though has been the time lock it puts on us. Sometimes it is far easier to read that four minutes of text and follow the pertinent links provided than it is to watch a video and then go and search for more information on topics brought up in the video.

Fear not! For finally, after over a decade of failed attempts, the hyperlinking technology we now take for granted in text is taking off as well in video. Think of a video for a Convention and Visitor Authority with pop-up links at key points which can send the viewer directly to a website to purchase tickets, view schedules or find more info about a particular attraction. Perhaps one for a ski resort with links to other videos about the ski patrol, or to a trail map, Flickr photoset, ticketing info, the food menus, pro shops and any other important or even just interesting bit of information.

Websites like Asterpix, Overlay.tv, QGIA and VideoCLix.tv are providing, or beginning to provide, simple web based services where you can upload footage or link to existing footage online and then create the the hyperlinks to other websites, enter details about items found in the video or any number of options, depending on the site’s formatting.

Similar results can be created with a custom look using Adobe Flash (though it is not the most efficient option for the job) or Riva Producer and other products are in development or even redevelopment in the case of software which was abandoned before the broadband and YouTube explosions.

There is a bit of a downside as the currently favored online video distribution sites (YouTube, Yahoo Video, MySpace…) can not handle hypervideo. The files therefore must be hosted through other means which does make it harder to get the content visible outside of the website it is hosted on. Possibilities could lie in distributing just the basic video in the attempt to garner interest in the actual hyperlinked video on the original site. Regardless of the difficulties, this is currently in it’s infancy and has the potential to change the way we browse and shop the web.

Twelve Horses plans to be on the forefront of this burgeoning technology. Added to our expanding video content creation abilities to write, produce, shoot, edit and distribute video content we are perfectly placed to take advantage of hypervideo and other techniques. Give us a call, and we can help you with your video needs.

-Earl

Well, the interwebs were good to us last week! Here are four cool new (or newish) tools for interacting, finding and presenting images and videos on the web

Diigo made some updates to their Firefox Plugin with some cool tips on how to customize it to save space on the toolbar. I use Diigo because it has some more sophisticated notation, collaboration and tracking tools than del.icio.us. Now, don’t for a nanosecond mistake that as in any way dissing del.icio.us. Del.icio.us is my default bookmark toolbar in Firefox. And the simplicity of it’s interface and organization makes it PERFECT for that. One thing that makes Diigo great is it’s ability to add bookmarks TO del.icio.us as well as Diigo.

Dawson found this cool photo sharing tool that seems to combine the greatness of Flickr and Picnic in one slick platform. Photoshop Express is pretty easy to use and mirrors well the Adobe Bridge interface. Probably similar to Lightroom, but I haven’t upgraded to that yet… Uploads are quick and easy. Photo manipulation is simple with a series of graduated options for changing things like exposure and white balance on your images.

On demand media meets the Family Guy with Hulu.com. Video is the king of the Internet and until now TV wasn’t part of that domain. They have Family Guy, American Dad, House, and (Holy CRAP!) Doogie Houser MD, Airwolf, The A-Team!!! There goes my week… You can even embed your favorite video on your favorite blog! Last night I watched an episode of American Dad and only had a couple 30 second Sudafed commercials to sit through! According to Wired, “Hulu, the $100 million video-streaming venture from News Corp. and NBC, has its headquarters in Hollywood — and engineers in Beijing.”

Blinkx.com is a video search and aggregation tool that has the cool embeddable collage function you see below. It searches all the sites, MySpace, Viddler, Veoh, Yahoo Video, YouTube and even Broadband Sports. This is a really good way to showcase your videos, all your friends videos and every other video you find amusing! You just do a search, add videos to your playlist and “wall it.” There’s no login, so you don’t even need to create another social media account!

Awesome!! Check it out. The Web is big, What did we miss last week? What are we going to see this week? If you find something share it with us on del.icio.us or diigo.com.

-Mike

I was recently working with one of our designers from the Creative Services team to produce this ad for the Nevada Business Journal when it occurred to me that I have never blogged about the work we do for the Las Vegas Monorail; therefore, I am taking the opportunity to do so now.

Before starting a relationship with Twelve Horses, the Las Vegas Monorail did not sell tickets online. This was in part because they did not have the technology to take online ticket purchases, as well as the fact that they needed an enhanced web presence. What we helped them uncover was that a lot of opportunity existed to create new relationships, increase awareness, and generate a greater demand for tickets.

If the Las Vegas Monorail was going to sell tickets online they would need an ecommerce solution that was flexible and customizable. For example, Las Vegas receives a plethora of different groups to the city. If the Monorail was going to service these customers they would need to be able to handle large group purchases, as well as offer special incentives to encourage them to do so. Furthermore, non-technical staff would have to be able to manage it whether it was adding groups, defining the ticket price, specifying date ranges, managing the payment options, setting shipping preferences, and much more.

Needless to say we built it for them. Here is a look at some of the features of the Las Vegas Monorail Ticketing Platform.

Managing Channel Partners

The Las Vegas Monorail works with a number of channel partners and groups. The ticketing platform allows them to set-up a revenue share with these partners, as well as implement their own branding and images online, in emails, and print. It is extremely flexible. For example, they can run multiple promotions at once. This was the case for the recent Consumer Electronics Show (CES) where there were two different promotions - discounts for attendees and discounts for exhibitors.

Ticketing

The ticketing features are very diverse and capable of handling a multitude of different scenarios. Additionally, integration of ticket tracking and reporting is providing the Monorail with deeper customer insight, which enables to provide a higher level of customer service. Here are just some examples:

1. Automated postings of ticket blocks and and auto removal of postings by set parameters such as date of expiration.
2. Discount Codes defined and assigned either randomly or branded such as “CES2008.”
3. Overrides conducted either temporarily or permanently to groups, types, or partners.
4. Tiered ticket pricing based on quantity, time purchased, or aggregates.
5. Logic in the ticketing prevents, for example, trying to use standard postal delivery when it is international.

Fulfillment

The ticketing platform is flexible enough to allow the fulfillment of tickets via email, direct shipping, and soon - mobile.

1. Electronic delivery allows the customer to print the voucher at home and redeem onsite.
2. Email confirmations sent automatically with purchase confirmation, canceled order and refund, and tickets shipped. Email templates also include branding based on channel partner and/or promotion.
3. When the Monorail handles the print fulfillment they can download all the contacts and do a mail merge on all their envelopes, mailing labels, and tickets.

Customer Service

1. The customer service module gives the Monorail the ability to look up the customer based on any information they give.
2. Those with set privileges can void and change tickets, which reconciles on the financial side and funnels down to the various communication channels.

Reporting

1. The Dashboard shows financial report summaries and projections, so they know how they are doing.
2. Integration with Salesforce matches opportunity numbers to promotions so they can track real-time ticket sales and the success of a campaign. It also allows them to see important items such as what a particular vendor or channel partners agreement was from the previous year.
3. Redemption tracking not only makes sure the ticket cannot be used again, it also lets the Monorail know where and when the customer scanned the ticket, so they can better understand traffic and know where there major stops are.

All of this may seem like a lot, but this is just a brief overview of everything the Las Vegas Monorail Ticketing Platform can do. Suffice to say, the integration of this ecommerce solution has unlocked another channel of additional revenue for the Monorail, and because it is business automation at its best, it is completely scalable and requires very little additional internal resources to get it done.

tags: online, ticketing, ecommerce, solution, business, automation, las vegas, nevada

So I’m sure everyone knows about this cool social bookmarking tool. Even though most of the people I know don’t actually use it socially. What I mean by that is that we use it to keep track of our own bookmarks across multiple machines and/or locations, but we don’t take advantage of what it can do for sharing those bookmarks. So here are a couple ways I’ve found to do exactly that.

• Links for You: This is where you’ll find links that people in your network, or who have YOU in their network, have tagged for you. When you use the add bookmark dialog, add your tags as normal, but also select from the list of your network contacts and select those that might also like the link.
  
  Then when you view your del.icio.us page you’ll see the “links For You (15)” notice…
• To really use this tool to its fullest you need the del.icio.us Firefox plugin. There’s a plugin for I.E. but it’s not as functional. I suggest using the bundles view if you’ve gone through the OCD nightmare of trying to categorize your hundreds of bookmarks.
  
• If you’re like us, you have more than one profile that you manage on any one social media platform. That’s a headache no matter how you slice it. You can get around some of that by using Firefox AND I.E. for different accounts, but that gets annoying (especially if you use Firefox, I.E., Opera AND Netscape). Cookie Swap is the solution. Use it with del.icio.us or any other web platform to manage multiple profiles/personalities/clients. Once installed you just right click on the icon in the bottom right corner of the browser window and select the next profile.
  
  Then you can transfer links from profile to profile using the “For:”tag and minimize the amount of times you have to swap cookies.
• Let me take a minute to pipe dream a bit about these two things and a couple of features that I would use A LOT if they existed. 1) Export bookmarks by bundle for del.icio.us. It would be cool to be able to email an unordered list to a friend based on a bundle or a tag. 2) site specific cookie swapping. I want a plugin that will ask me which cookie set I want to use every time a login page loads. Perhaps not that many people manage as many profiles as I do, but I suspect there are plenty. 3) Support for more profiles from Cookieswap.
• Last: Postalicious lets you post your bookmarks with a short message to your wordpress blog. It’s a good way to post actual content to your blog quickly and easily.

We’re always searching for, and tinkering with new ways to communicate, interact and stay informed here. del.icio.us and cookie swap are pretty indispensable once you get used to them. Please add us to your network and send along some links!

Next up on my bookmarking radar: www.diigo.com. Bookmarking, auto importing/exporting, slideshows, notes and annotations…

-Mike

Inspired by the tumblr.com’s bookmarklet which allows users to quickly and easily post to their Tumblr blog, I have created a plugin that will allow you to quickly post text, images, photos, quotes, and videos to your Wordpress implementation.

NOTE: This project is now maintained and distributed here - However, feel free to comment with any issues, ideas or questions below.

Last semester, I took a Managerial Information Systems class, in which I was exposed to almost every three-letter acronym you could think of, including systems for Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Customer Relationship Management (CRM). I did well in the class but I left the final exam feeling like I had just finished “History of Business Technology” rather than a modern information systems class.

In the few weeks I have been working here, I have already learned more than I ever have in the classroom. I’m no longer learning outdated systems and have jumped onto the bleeding edge of information technology.

Most of my work has been centered around Salesforce, an online-based Customer Relationship Management (CRM) application.

Businesses are a lot like people because no two businesses are exactly the same. Each company has their own unique needs and specialized business processes that they must follow to be successful. I’ve been learning how to implement and customize Salesforce to fit those needs for companies in various industries.

Once we customize Salesforce for a company, they can use it to see a detailed overview of their entire business. This allows them to efficiently streamline their sales cycle from lead generation to close.

Given my technical background, Salesforce was fairly easy for me to learn and the flexibility of the customization process allows me to do what I want so I can work to meet the needs of the client.

Considering one has yet asked me to fetch a cup of coffee for them, I’m really enjoying my work and I’ll keep you posted on my upcoming projects.

When our clients want to blog, we put them on Wordpress. Wordpress is awesome blogging software that we love and support. The creators of wordpress also have developed a plugin that blocks comment spam called Akismet. This help keeps the blog clean and professional.

So here’s a quick tip for any of our clients or any readers who use Wordpress with the Akismet Spam plugin. Periodically, go into the Comments section under your Admin login. There will be a link in the dark blue bar labeled “Akisment Spam”. Click on that link and click the Delete All button (shown below).

The reason you need to do this is fairly technical, so read on if you are interested.

I have a blog that receives a fair amount of traffic. Recently, I had to switch hosting providers for this blog - it’s a personal hobby blog, so I don’t host it at Twelve Horses. When I requested a backup of the database from the previous hosting provider, the SQL file was 22 megabytes. Of this 22 MBs of database space, 19 MBs of it were the comments. And of the 19 MBs of comments, only about 70 kilobytes were real comments (not spam). Due to the size, I had a very difficult time trying to get this database backup into my new hosting provider’s database. Since I didn’t delete all my Akismet spam on a regular basis, I had to try and work with a 19 MB text file to get rid of the spam comments before I could import the real comments. If you’ve ever worked with large text files, you can understand how difficult it was.

So keep your database small and nimble. Delete your spam comments on a regular basis.

Getting folks to sign up for events can sometimes be a challenge. How do I drive prospects to my site to sign up without an email list? How do I extend my event marketing reach without a budget? Google has just added a new tool that helps alleviate these concerns and makes it easy to share your event details with the greater Google community, and more specifically, those in your immediate local region.

Recently released and easily accessed when you log into your Google Calendar, is the new ability to “Search Public Events”. Simply add an event to your Google calendar, as well as the “public” calendars, and your event instantly becomes searchable to the Google community looking for an event with your search term, in your area, for a specific date.

To promote your events using Google, you simply add them as part of Google’s public events search to help people find them. If you’ve already got a calendar or event on your site, or in your schedule, you can import directly into Google calendar and mark it “public”. Just like with search engine optimization, content is key. Make sure your title and text are clear and concise and describe your event in as much detail as possible, along with a complete address (including city/state) for your event.

I found searching for events in my area was a breeze. All I did was select my location and date/time range and Google gave me a list of relevant events, based on my defined search. I could preview each event’s details, and then copy a selected event directly to my Google calendar. And I could share it with others - colleagues, friends, family.

This just might be the ticket for those who want to extend their reach, without lots of dollars to put behind their event marketing. Or at the very least, drive traffic to your site for “Googlers” to learn more about your offerings, and maybe even gain an event attendee!

Who ever said there’s no such thing as “free marketing”! Check it out…

UPDATE: Thank you nekoniku for pointing out what a math wizard I am. You are right, it would only be $2,000 for 40 people per year. This means that it would take about 12 and a half years to equal the cost of the Microsoft solution. That makes it much more attractive if you are just starting your business.

Google has been cobbling together a bunch of apps that it was referring to as Google Apps for your Domain. These apps included:

• Email (Gmail)
• Calendar (Google Calendar)
• IM (Google Talk)
• Page Creator (Google Pages)
• Start Page (Google Personalized Homepage)

Now they’ve bundled Google Docs and Spreadsheets with some enterprise level features and charged for it. For $50 per year per users, you can have 99.9% guaranteed uptime, increased email storage (2GB to 10GB), shared resource calendaring, API access to integrate with your current network, 24/7 assistance, and 3rd party applications (data sheet).

With shared calendaring and Gmail, a small to medium size business could forgo the cost of Microsoft Exchange. This browser based environment would mean freedom from operating system constraints and could conceivable allow more users on Ubuntu (Linux). For a small business this could mean tremendous cost saving. Eliminate MS Office from the mix and save even more money.

And with the recent announcement of Firefox 3 supporting offline modes, you could use many of these applications while disconnected from the Internet.

I love Gmail. I hate Outlook Email. Google Calendar is cool. Outlook Calendaring not so cool.

However, Twelve Horses has about 40 people who would need to be on this premier edition. That would be $2,000 a month or an annual cost of $24,000. That is significant. That would be $2,000 per year for the whole company.

According to Microsoft, Exchange Server for 50 accounts is $3,999. Lets say you put that on a beefy server costing $10,000. Now add in $279 for each instance of MS Office (upgrade price, full version is $449) for a total of $11,160 ($17,960 for full). Your looking at $25,159 (I used upgrade pricing since we all have full versions of Office). While that is a grand more than Google’s offering, it’s also one time as opposed to annually. Additionally, you get PowerPoint (and some other more janky software) with Office. You are tied to Windows or OS X, so you could compare the OS costs to Ubuntu, but that drags it farther out then I want to go.

My point, Google Apps Premier Edition rocks. It just costs too much for business with more than a few users.

Technorati Tags: Enterrprise, Exchange, Gmail, Google, Google Apps, Microsoft, OS X