Erich Stauffer

Category: Technology

  • Introduction to Groupons

    image

    Groupons is a company and a website with a unique business model that is mutually beneficial to vendors, customers, and Groupons itself. Vendors like retail outlets contact Groupons about goods or services they would like to package and promote. Groupon reps work with the vendor to create an ad that runs in a daily email newsletter. Each coupon has a quota and if enough people purchase a package, all packages sell at once. Groupons takes a small percentage of the sale and mails the vendor a check the next day. Customers get the coupon immediately for use.

    Because Groupons only makes money when you, the vendor, makes money you can be sure that the ad reps will help paint your company and products in a good light. There is very little risk and a lot of potential exposure. Even if not enough coupons are sold, your brand will still go out to thousands of potential new clients who may use your business in the future.

    If you want to learn more about how Groupon works, check out their guide site. At Erich Stauffer, we can also assist with helping your company apply to Groupon or setup an email marketing campaign of your own. We prefer Constant Contact, but we are also familiar with Delivra. We recommend email marketing be a core part of your overall marketing strategy and advertising budget.

  • Turning Problems into Solutions: C02 to Gasoline

    In August, 2007 President Bush created a DARPA for Energy (DARPA stands for Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency).  One of it’s goals was to turn carbon dioxide into fuel.  By December, 2007 Sandia National Laboratories, where DARPA is located, announced the Sandia’s “Sunshine to Petrol” project which uses a “Counter Rotating RingReceiver Reactor Recuperator (CR5, for short), to break a carbon-oxygen bond in the carbon dioxide to form carbon monoxide and oxygen in two distinct steps using concentrated solar power. DARPA eventually proved the technology and coupled with sequestered C02 from coal power plants or even your own car, this could be a real industry of C02 to gasoline. Watch this related video on Youtube.

  • Google TV

    Google is now bringing it’s search engine and the Android operating system to televisions.

    In response to this move by Google to TV. Rishi Chandra, one of the product managers at Google, announced at their I/O 2010 conference, Google TV, which will bring the best of the web and TV together, integrating them into one platform. Google touts, “Less time finding, more time watching,” “Control and personalize what you watch,” “Make your TV content more interesting” and “More than just a TV”.

  • Microblogging Social Networks

    A List of the 5 Most Popular Microblogging Social Networks: Jaiku, Plurk, Present.ly, Tumblr, and Twitter.

    This list of microblogging social networks is listed alphabetically and includes their availability, rank, popularity, and features.

    Jaiku

    Jaiku is a social networking, microblogging and lifestreaming service comparable to Twitter. Jaiku was founded in February, 2006 by Jyri Engeström and Petteri Koponen from Finland and opened in July, 2006. Based out of Helsinki, Jaiku was purchased by Google on October 9, 2007.

    The founders of Jaiku chose the name because the posts on Jaiku resemble Japanese haiku. Also, the indigenous Sami people of Finland have traditionally shared stories by singing joiks. On January 14, 2009 Google announced that it would be open-sourcing the product, but would, “No longer actively develop the Jaiku codebase,” leaving development to a, “Passionate volunteer team of Googlers”.
    (more…)

  • Microsoft Updates Hotmail

    Although Hotmail popularized web-based email, it has fallen behind the competitors Yahoo and Google in features

    Down, but not out, Hotmail is still used by millions of people around the world and is still a critical aspect of Microsoft’s online business strategy, especially as Microsoft moves more into the cloud with its more traditional revenue models like Microsoft Office, which is releasing version 2010 this year. Hotmail is particularly useful to non-english speaking users because of its large language support and according to Comscore its still the most used web email with 360 million users compared to Yahoo’s 300 million and Gmail’s 200 million. Still, Hotmail hasn’t changed much since Microsoft bought it in late 1997. This was after starting up in 1996 and garnering over 9 million users.

    So what is changing?

    Microsoft announced that this summer they will begin rolling out new, advanced features that are akin to what Gmail users are used to:

    • The option for viewing emails as conversations (although the default will still be as single emails)
    • Automatic filter buttons to filter emails from people on your contact list, emails from social networks, shopping sites, and others.
    • Larger attachment sizes, up to 10 GB using Microsoft’s SkyDrive

    One thing that remains the same is the huge banner ads running alongside your email, ala 1996, in addition to the text ad tagged onto all of your emails beneath your signature. That is, unless you pay $20 a year to remove the ads.

    Our First Web Email

    Despite all it’s shortcomings, we still have a spot in our heart for Hotmail, which provided me with my first personal email account, which I still have, back in 1997.

  • Students and Commuters: Hooray for eBooks!

    Students and commuters have something to look forward to both in class and on the bus, train, or plane because of the ereader revolution.

    The first digital nomads, students and freelance entrepreneurs have been mobile computing at Starbucks and other WiFi hotspots for years using first laptops, then smartphones like the iPhone, and now tablet computers, slates, and ereaders. Ereaders are primarily for reading books, but can read magazines and newspapers too, some free, some by subscription, and some by one-time purchases. Some ebook readers like Barne’s and Noble’s nook let you share ebooks using a feature called LendMe. Publishers have not been as willing to sign up for LendMe as much as users would hope, but that trend may change in the future. And now ereaders are starting to be able to do more than just read ebooks. For example, the Nook just got an upgrade to allow it to play games and surf the web, but Apple’s iPad is a computer with an ebook reader.

    Student Life

    One can imagine that students going back to school this fall may have a completely different experience, one which may be missing one heavy staple from the past: textbooks. Instead of carrying large books around in a book bag, one could see students carrying nooks wrapped in their nook covers containing their nook ebooks. This would be quite a contrast, but will publishers buy into it and publish their textbooks in ebook form? Will students buy enough ebook readers to support it? Will schools and teachers allow the ebook readers in their classrooms? We won’t know for sure until later on this year.

    Commuting: More Green Benefits

    Not only do commuters help the environment and their wallet by sharing rides or riding public transportation, but they also help reduce the amount of paper and distribution cost of that paper when they choose an ebook over a traditional paper book. Car drivers everywhere, while they can come and go as they please, have higher costs from maintaining an automobile, create more pollution, and don’t get to relax with a newspaper, whether that newspaper be in paper form or as an ebook. Will subway trains be full of ebook readers in the future? What will people hide behind when they don’t want to look at the person across from them on the train, plane, or bus? Maybe they’ll all just get along a little better, and maybe share an ebook too.

  • From AT&T and the iPhone to Sprint and the HTC Hero: The Journey Begins

    As I write this my wife is in the process of switching mobile cell phone carriers from AT&T, who we have both been with since 2001, to Sprint. My wife is switching from Apple’s iPhone 3GS and I am switching from an LG Shine slider. We are both getting the HTC Hero which has wifi, visual voicemail, video, a 5 megapixel camera, GPS, tethering via USB, a touchscreen, and it runs Android. It’s not an iPhone. It’s more than an iPhone. And it’s not AT&T.

    Plan Pricing

    Sprint offered us 2 lines with unlimited mobile-to-mobile minutes (regardless of carrier), unlimited data, and unlimited texts for $130 a month. For both of us to get an iPhone on AT&T’s network it would cost us around $170 a month for the same plan. Sprint’s plan also comes with 1500 landline minutes. Sprint coverage is so much better than AT&T in our area that it was a no brainer.

    Reservations

    We weren’t without our reservations. Sprint, unlike Verizon and AT&T, still charges for roaming, but we wouldn’t have signed up if we didn’t live in an area with plenty of coverage. And my wife and I are avid iPhone users and fans. In fact I’m typing this article on a first generation iPhone I’m using as an iTouch (it has no phone plan). I was a little worried that my wife would hesitate to give up her iPhone, but once she found out that the HTC Hero had similar features and more she was hooked. I’ll have to post a review of the HTC Hero in the near future to let you know what I think, but because it has 3G, direct to Youtube, and WordPress app functionality, this Internet marketing business analyst entrepreneur is happy. Thank you, wife!

  • How to Podcast

    Podcasting is simply distributing audio content using RSS (really simple syndication) and is a 4-step process:

    1. Create an mp3 file which will become your podcast
    2. Upload the mp3 file to the Internet
    3. Assign an RSS feed to the mp3 location using software like feedforall for 39.95
    4. promote your RSS feed of the mp3 file through one of these podcast submission services (iTunes would be the most popular choice).

    But, WordPress contains a built-in RSS feeder so the process is similar (SEE http://codex.wordpress.org/Podcasting), but listeners would have to subscribe to the RSS feed:

    1. Create audio or video that you want to share (usually MP3 or MP4)
    2. Upload the file to a server
    3. Link to the file in a post in your weblog
    4. WordPress automatically Includes a link to the file in your RSS/Atom feed
    5. Listeners “subscribe” with podcast client application to your RSS/Atom feed and download new files automatically.

    There is also a plugin for WordPress called PodPress: which helps you add detailed information about the MP3 which podcast submission sites might want or
    ask for.

    Good Luck!

  • How to Save Adobe ImageReady PSD as Animated GIF When Only JPG Appears

    Adobe ImageReady Optimize MenuIf what is happening to you is like what happened to me, the Optimize menu got switched to JPG instead of GIF and I couldn’t save my Photoshop document (PSD) as an animated GIF.  It simply wasn’t an option.  I had to Google it, searching for terms like “adobe imageready not showing gif” until I found this quote, which saved me:

    To create the GIF from the psd or even the jpg file, you have to have the Optimise palette open in ImageReady, and have GIF selected under the Format tab. You can then tweak the colour table, transparency, dither etc on the same palette. Then save as optimised… 🙂

    I had to figure out where the Optimize menu was in Adobe ImageReady, but once I did that, I changed it to GIF and I was golden!