News

Around the Office: Social media not cause for riot, a look at remarketing, more

Around the Office is a weekly group blog that shows what the OnlineFriendly.biz team and Kobayashi Online have found interesting, funny, poignant, or otherwise notable over the past week. We’ve been hearing a lot this week about the riots in London. Daveed found it interesting that the British Prime Minister David Cameron is quick to blame Social Media for the unrest in the UK, but he should really be looking at the root causes of the disorder and chaos. In a Guardian editorial, well-known comedian Russell Brand makes a serious attempt to understand why so many people, especially youths, feel…
Top Ten Checklist for Email Blasts

We’ve been writing about the benefits of email marketing on Online Friendly, and we wanted to share some tips that will help your organization’s email campaign go well. Thinking about sending out an email blast for the first time or want to improve your existing efforts? We put together this checklist to give you a good chance of getting the most out of your email marketing campaign. Tell people about your mailing list — Developing an email list is essential to your email marketing campaign. Place a “subscribe to our newsletter” or “get email updates” link prominently on your website, on…
Around the Office: Android’s patent angst, TechCrunch’s smart design, more

Around the Office is a weekly group blog that shows what the OnlineFriendly.biz team and Kobayashi Online have found interesting, funny, poignant, or otherwise notable over the past week. Daveed has been intrigued by a Google blog post on the apparently “hostile, organized campaign against Android” by a coalition including Microsoft, Oracle, Apple and others. But this battle is not being played out in the market, but rather in the courtroom in the form of “bogus” patent claims. Android competitors have attempted to impose licensing fees on Android devices that make it more expensive for phone manufacturers. Eva was suspicious…
Advantages of using an email marketing service for your campaign

Last week, we wrote about the purposes of email marketing, as well as some of the advantages it has over other forms of marketing such as social media. In this post, we’re going to look at some of the advantages of using online services to managing your email marketing campaign. What you want for your email marketing campaign is a service that lets you build email address databases, launch and track targeted campaigns, and be certain that you email reaches the intended recipient. Services such as MailChimp, Mailigen, iContact, and Constant Contact are able to deliver on all these criteria,…
Around the Office: Google’s Page Speed Service, Microsoft’s “open surface”, more

Around the Office is a weekly group blog that shows what the OnlineFriendly.biz team and Kobayashi Online have found interesting, funny, poignant, or otherwise notable over the past week. On Thursday, Google launched a service that automatically speeds your webpage load times. This new service, known as Page Speed Service, fetches content from your servers, analyzes and rewrites your pages by applying Web performance best practices and serves them to end users using Google’s worldwide servers. Roberto thinks Google’s new service marks a new direction for its Web optimization efforts, going further than simply making recommendations to the development community. But…
Around the Office: the Web’s best design seen on Awwwards, websites go 3D, more

Around the Office is a weekly group blog that shows what the OnlineFriendly.biz team and Kobayashi Online have found interesting, funny, poignant, or otherwise notable over the past week. Eva finds design inspiration all over the Web, but she can always count on the Awwwards website to showcase the world’s top css websites daily. Selected by an international jury, the Awwwards help recognize and promote the talent and effort of the best developers, designers and Web agencies worldwide. The Awwwards community is about designing a more accessible, usable and beautiful Internet, which we can’t help but endorse. This week, Daveed…
Around the Office: Evaluating Google+, On the hunt for chocolate, more

Around the Office is a weekly group blog that shows what the OnlineFriendly.biz team and Kobayashi Online have found interesting, funny, poignant, or otherwise notable over the past week. Daveed has been playing with Google’s latest foray into social networking, Google+. And eventhough the much-hyped social network is very similar to the incumbent Facebook, Daveed thinks he might start spending time on it because in addition to the fact that the new platform has “gee-whiz” appeal, Google already knows a lot about him, after all, so he might as well keep that up and share more. Eva has been scouring…
Around the Office: Twitter town hall, Tilt-shifting the classics, more

Around the Office is a weekly group blog that shows what the OnlineFriendly.biz team and Kobayashi Online have found interesting, funny, poignant, or otherwise notable over the past week. This week, US President Barack Obama answered questions on the economy and jobs in his first Twitter town hall. Obama’s use of contemporary media has been cleverly compared to that of other American presidents, who have used the popular medium of their day such as Franklin D. Roosevelt’s use of radio, John F. Kennedy’s televised news conferences, and Bill Clinton’s taking of questions on MTV and “Larry King Live.” This has had…
Around the Office: Firefox personas, mobile’s effect on design, more

Around the Office is a weekly group blog that shows what the OnlineFriendly.biz team and Kobayashi Online have found interesting, funny, poignant, or otherwise notable over the past week. Brent and Eva have been playing with Firefox personas, which are easy-to-use themes that let you personalize the look of your browser. They’ve creating some excellent Kobayashi Online logowear for Firefox, and have been pleasantly surprised to see one of their seven personas has had more than 60 active users! Eva is hopeful that Apple’s iOS 5 will, indeed, make the iPad magic device after seeing a charming video from Simon…
Around the Office: Free plugins pay off, App shows nearby pics, FTP war, more

Around the Office is a weekly group blog that shows what the OnlineFriendly.biz team and Kobayashi Online have found interesting, funny, poignant, or otherwise notable over the past week. Wayne did some sleuthing this week to find out why someone would create a website widget for free. The reason: inbound links. A great number of the inbound links to Ignite Social Media‘s website, for instance, come from the download page for its “Follow Me” plugin, according to data from Yahoo Site Explorer. The “Follow Me” plugin, in fact, does so well that it generates upwards of 1.15 million inbound links from a broad…
Around the Office: Facebook loses face; airplane cell phone bans are serious

Around the Office is a weekly group blog that shows what the OnlineFriendly.biz team and Kobayashi Online have found interesting, funny, poignant, or otherwise notable over the past week. While he’s still among the site’s 687 million users, Daveed has been thinking about the millions of Facebook users logging off for good, especially in Canada and the US, and among younger users. It’s too soon to tell if the social network is on its way to becoming the next MySpace, but a company spokesperson has defended the company, saying that Facebook is “very pleased” with its growth, and its user…
Around the Office: hands-on with Kohana, picture sharing with DailyBooth, and more

Around the Office is a weekly group blog that shows what the OnlineFriendly.biz team and Kobayashi Online have found interesting, funny, poignant, or otherwise notable over the past week. Roberto had a very good first impression of PHP5 framework Kohana, and actually liked its modules for database interactivity and cookies. With its basic template system, simple installation, and online learning resources, he’d recommend it to developers who want to save lines of code and time, but be warned, it only works with PHP 5. For those new to Kohana, he’d recommend starting with a tutorial on creating an advanced contact form. Brent has been sharing…